Star City, Russia, is home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. Under Soviet rule, the existence of the town was a state secret. It is still a closed city, with unauthorized visitors prohibited, but people come and go in support of the country’s space program. In April, the coronavirus found its way into the city, and into the space center. Dr. Natalya Lebedeva headed the ambulance service for Star City’s medical clinic. The paramedics she supervised were among the first known victims of the virus, which is understandable as they come into close contact with sick people, but the authorities were looking for someone to blame for the outbreak. Lebedeva herself fell ill, and was hospitalized.  

Her illness wasn’t severe. “Her temperature was a little over 37 degrees,” or 98.6 Fahrenheit, and “her lungs were affected only to a small degree,” her friend Antropova said.

During several calls from the ward, Lebedeva repeatedly said that she was being blamed for being the source of the outbreak, a friend said. “She called me and said … ‘I am going to be jailed. It’s the end for me.’”

“I said … ‘How were you supposed to have prevented this, how? How? Come on. What are you, God?’” the friend recalled.

But Lebedeva was in tears. She said she had been contacted by investigators from the police.

Lebedava did not survive the outbreak, but she didn’t die of COVID. Read the account of Star City’s ambulance service director in a special report at Reuters.   -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flicker user Samantha Cristoforetti)

Catherine Prowse made the animated short Nobody is Normal for the charity Childline. It emphasizes that no matter how weird you feel, you aren't the only one. We adults know that, but we aren't always good at relaying the concept to young people. Beside all that, the animation is adorably goofy. -via Laughing Squid

You don't really have to be a picky eater to fall into the trap of eating the same meals more often than you should. I can tell you from experience that working at a desk job, living alone, and generally being too busy to think about your diet can lead to easy but monotonous meals. The simplest form of nutrition is to eat a variety of different foods, but how bad can a monotonous series of meals really be? That depends on what's in the things you eat every day. Lifehacker offers a short guide to judging the nutritional value of what you eat, and tips for breaking out of the habit of eating the same thing every day.

You turn to your partner and ask "What are you thinking?" and they say, "Nothing." It's the set up for many a joke, but sometimes it's true, and people who cannot ever stop thinking can't wrap their heads around it. Sadly, there are people who suffer from Auto-Activation Deficit (AAD) who not only go through blank periods, but cannot restart the process of thinking on their own.

One day, a lively and successful businessman was bitten by a wasp, triggering an unexpected encephalopathy of the brain. Afterwards, he was a changed man, doing almost nothing all day and expressing little interest in anyone else. But this apathy could be swiftly reversed with even the tiniest stimulation from another human being – offering a newspaper or challenging him to a game of bridge, for example. It's as if the man could react, but not act.

Cases similar to this one have been documented in the medical literature. There was a patient who at one point laid on his bed for thirty minutes with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. When asked what he was doing, he matter-of-factly responded, "I am waiting for a light". Another person spent 45 minutes standing with his hands on a lawn mower, frozen and unable to move. But when prompted by his son to cut the grass, he immediately sprang into action. A man referred to as Mr. M in a case report required external prodding for all of his daily activities, even eating. On one occasion he almost got burned by staying too long in the shower until he was told to turn the water off.

Read about Auto-Activation Deficit at Real Clear Science. -via Damn Interesting

(Image source: Pixabay)

Science fiction stretches our minds and imaginations by presenting the possibility of new worlds full of very different beings and fantastic technology. Some stories are wondrous and hopeful, while others are terrifying and make us glad to be where we are instead. What kinds of these stories do you like best? We often see plots, twists, and tropes used over and over, mainly because they thrill us and make us want to revisit these worlds. Sure, they often require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but we've become accustomed to that in order to be entertained.

Here are the sci-fi tropes that have stuck around because they work, whether it’s making first contact with an alien species, using a food replicator, or hearing a spaceship go “kaboom!” We’ve also included a few tired, often bigoted tropes that should be jettisoned into the farthest reaches of space.

Check out the list at io9 and see if you agree. There are plenty of video examples to keep you entertained.

It's hard for British department store John Lewis to top their previous Christmas ads for grabbing at your heartstrings, but this year's entry is sweet. Eight different artists contributed their varying styles for an ad that benefits two UK charities. -via Mashable

It took Disney until 2009 to make a movie about a Black princess, but history is full of notable women of royal African ancestry or marriage who left a mark on society. They just aren't as well-known as they should be. Take Nigerian princess Omo-Oba Adenrele Ademola of Abeokuta.   

Princess of Nigeria! Princess of nursing! There’s so much to love about Ademola, but her achievements as a healthcare worker especially resonate in 2020. She was the daughter of Alake of Abeokuta, a king of southern Nigeria, which meant that she had to juggle her role as princess abroad –and nursing school student – when she moved to London at 22-years-old.

She became a significant figure in nursing at at St Saviour’s ward at Guy’s Hospital in London and “a glowing role model for the empire”. The British government commissioned a documentary film on her entitled ‘Nurse Ademola’ in the 1940s, but the footage is now considered as a lost film. Throughout their research, The National Archives notes that “five variations of her name have been encountered, even on official records, confusing her presence in the archives, possibly even with others who shared her surname. Such challenges are rife when examining black populations and represent a larger issue: the failure to consider black people/black histories a priority. Contemporarily, the lives of black people were considered ‘second-class’ and therefore detail and accuracy in records were deemed unnecessary”. The research continues.

Messy Messy Chic introduces us to eight Black princesses with fascinating stories, including an American who lived the story of Coming to America.

Writers for long-running comedy shows know that ideas fly so fast and thick that it's hard to keep up with them. Some ideas are a go, while others are rejected, but may come up again much later. These ideas are often modified, leading to many contributors being credited. And you never know which jokes will resonate with the audience or be remembered years later. And so it is with "stupid sexy Flanders," a Simpsons scene in which Flanders wears a form-fitting ski suit that emphasizes the roundness of his butt, a sight that Homer can't get out of his head. "Feels like I’m wearing nothing at all!” Flanders says. Viewers couldn't get it out of their heads, either.   

The scene is from The Simpsons episode “Little Big Mom,” from the show’s 11th season in the year 2000, which is typically considered to be toward the tail end of The Simpsons’ “Golden Age.” While the joke was enormously funny at the time, in the years since it’s enjoyed a healthy afterlife at comedy conventions as well as online, where it’s become one of the most enduring of Simpsons memes of all time. But to get to the bottom of Flanders’ sexy bottom, the story doesn’t start with “Little Big Mom.” Rather, the seeds for Flanders’ sexy ass were planted all the way back in the show’s fourth season.

Read how the groundwork for stupid sexy Flanders was laid over the years, and about the afterlife of that particular scene as it became an internet meme, at Mel magazine.

The graves of three infants were unearthed at the Gravettian site of Krems-Wachtberg, Austria, in 2005. Infant burials are a rare find, as their delicate remains tend not to preserve as well as those of adults. New DNA analysis of the 30,000-year-old remains have determined that two are identical twins, making them the oldest known twins on earth (the third infant was their cousin).  

The research team who made the discovery wrote in Nature that the infants were found “embedded in red ochre and they were placed next to each other in flexed positions facing east and with their skulls pointing north.” It is believed that the red ochre earth helped to preserve the remains. The Daily Mail reports that “the grave was not backfilled, but instead was covered with a mammoth’s shoulder blade that was molded to fit the opening.”

Both of them had been buried with grave goods . The youngest had 53 exquisite beads made from Mammoth ivory, placed on his pelvis, that once formed part of a necklace. The older infant was found with shells and a fox’s tooth and these were part of some ornament. These grave goods could have been deposited with the dead for use in the afterlife or they were offerings to the gods. The presence of these artifacts may suggest some form of early religion or a belief in the supernatural.

The reference to the "older twin" means that one died at birth, and the other lived a couple of months and then was added to the first twin's grave. Read the research paper at Nature, or the simpler version here. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Natural History Museum Vienna)

Phil Heckels draws portraits of pets that will make you laugh. He calls them "rubbish" portraits, but if you look closely, you realize that he is a caricaturist. And who wouldn't want a caricature of their beloved pets? It will cost you, but the funds go to Turning Tides, a charity benefiting homeless people in the UK. Heckels has already raised $35,000 for them!  

According to CNN, Heckels was making thank-you cards with his 6-year-old son Sam to send to his family when the idea came to mind. Though he had never drawn before in his life, Heckels, who goes by the pseudonym Hercule Van Wolfwinkle, crudely drew the family dog and then uploaded a photo of the drawing — alongside a facetious asking price of £299 (approximately $390) — to Facebook. All of a sudden, a surge of requests came in from friends asking him to draw their pets.

"I had absolutely no idea this would all pan out as it has," Heckels told Digg in an email. "The first pictures were just posted on my own Facebook page as a joke to my 90 or so friends. It's just gradually built momentum, and it's been so overwhelming!"

See a roundup of Heckels' best portraits so far at Digg. See more and keep up with his work at Facebook.

This really really looks like a ridiculous parody ad, but it's real. It was originally scheduled to run during last week's Saturday Night Live but ultimately did not. Arby's really produced a pillow that fits over your head and resembles a deep-fried turkey. Too bad it's already sold out. If you still crave this pillow, you can enter a sweepstakes to win one. Happy napping! -Thanks, WTM!

The name California was given to the west coast of the New World by Hernán Cortés’s conquistadors as they charged through, destroying the Aztec Empire and claiming territory. The name was taken from a Spanish novel, Las sergas de Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, written sometime around the year 1500. The story tells of the fictional island of California and its queen Calafia.  

At least initially, Queen Calafia seems like she could have sprung from the pages of a modern fantasy novel, ruling a kingdom that wouldn’t have been out of place in Westeros or Middle Earth. Her island, located “on the right side of the Indies, very close to … the Terrestrial Paradise,” is filled with gold and inhabited only by Black women, who tame wild griffins to ride into battle (fed with the flesh of any unfortunate men who show up). Calafia herself is described as beautiful, strong, and courageous. The book portrays her in an unfailingly positive light, though it ultimately places her under the control of medieval European patriarchy.

The novel is an example of a "crusade romance" in which the Gospel is proclaimed to the faraway and exotic people of the world. A closer look at the book as well as its context and influence tell us a lot about medieval attitudes about race and religion as the Age of Exploration dawned.

(Image credit: Cheryl Thuesday for Atlas Obscura)

In the 1980s, Leta Powell Drake interviewed plenty of celebrities for KOLN/KGIN in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was also the station's program director, morning host, and a character on a children's show. As you can tell from these clips, she never held back in her probing the minds of those who were simply trying to promote their latest projects. If you'd like to see more, there's an archive of many of Drake's interviews from History Nebraska.  -via Kottke

ESTO #NoEsRestauración. Es una intervención NO profesional.
👎

Polémica en Palencia por una restauración que deja hecho un «cristo» el relieve de una fachada https://t.co/18pEBXjKH4

— ACRE (@A_CR_E) November 9, 2020

Spain is full of wonderful art that spans hundreds, if not thousands of years. Why are so many art restorations in the country entrusted to people who aren't art restoration experts? First we had Ecce Homo, then St. George, and even the Virgin Mary. Now a statue in the town of Palencia has gone viral for its new face that resembles a potato or something.

The Palencia statue, which formerly was of a smiling lady placed within a country scene, adorns part of the facade of a bank in this city of some 78,000 in the country's north. The Art Newspaper reports that the statue was originally unveiled in 1923.

In Spain, professional art restorers and conservationists are once again calling for stricter oversight. On Twitter, the Madrid-based organization of professional restorers and conservators, ACRE, deplored the work in Palencia, writing that the rehab was not professional.

Read about the incident, and see what the statue is supposed to look like at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting

In the movie Armageddon, NASA enlisted a team of deep-sea oil drillers to destroy an asteroid that was threatening Earth, turning them into astronauts in the process. The real story of earth-moving engineers who helped NASA is much more plausible. See, the space program built these huge Saturn rockets that weighed 3000 tons (that's six million pounds), and had to somehow get them from the assembly plant to the launch pad. They were not only heavy, but relatively fragile and very expensive. The rocket scientists consulted transportation engineers, but they should have gone straight to the ones who were already doing this kind of work because it's profitable.  

On January 1962, the American Machine & Foundry Company, one of America’s largest recreational equipment manufacturer who produced everything from garden equipment, to atomic reactors, to yachts, presented a plan that involved using a rail-barge combination where the weight of the rocket was supported by barges but propulsion was achieved by rails. The details were still being worked out when the Deputy Chief of the Future Launch Systems Study Office received a phone call from Barry Schlenk, a representative of the Bucyrus-Erie Company, a mining equipment manufacturer. Schlenk had heard about NASA’s transport problems, and offering to help, he sent the Deputy Chief photographs of Bucyrus-Erie's steamshovel crawler used in the Kentucky coal fields. The vehicle seemed suited to NASA’s needs, especially its capability to level and balance a load on uneven terrain.

NASA sent their engineers to the coal town of Paradise, Kentucky, to observe the steam shovel crawler in action, and we're impressed. Read how strip mining technology was drafted to haul Saturn rockets at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: NASA)