Extreme pressure is not just what you get from your job. We already knew a few things about pressure, like atmospheric pressure feels pretty normal for us at sea level. At higher altitudes, it get harder for us to breath, and that's why we have to keep airplanes pressurized. Deep sea creatures have evolved to withstand higher pressure that would kill humans. Extreme pressure, the kind that exists at the center of the earth is something we rarely think about.

Under this kind of extreme pressure, solids turn liquid and liquids turn solid, and gas pretty much just disappears. Imagine water turning into a solid. Well, that happens in winter, but at the center of the earth it solidifies under high heat, because of the immense pressure. Adam Cole explains the weird ways extreme pressure warps the way we think about the states of matter when you get outside our normal pressure range. And he makes it both understandable and fascinating. -via Kottke

The way the human immune system works is pretty well known. It only goes into activation when a foreign invader is present, then it rushes antibodies and other chemicals in to destroy a virus, bacteria, fungus, or parasite. A virus invades our cells, so the immune system destroys those infected cells. That can be pretty destructive, which is why our immune system stays dormant until we need it.

However, in a pregnant mother's placenta, the immune system works differently. It switches on even when there is no infectious agent present. To do this, it manufactures its own "fake virus" from its DNA! This causes the placenta to produce interferon lambda and activates a low-level, gentle immune response that does not attack cells the way a normal immune response would. This system keeps the fetus' responses always on, ready to fight any possible infection that the mother may contract. That's important, since the mothers' immune response is weakened during pregnancy to keep her body from rejecting the fetus as an invader.

Read up on this new discovery and how it was found at Quanta magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine)

The Haggis Wildlife Foundation understands that people outside Scotland are not all that familiar with haggis, so they have made a video to help the first-time haggis hunter. The cute little creature is native to Scotland, and not endangered, but they want to make sure they never become endangered. Nevertheless, tourists are often offered the opportunity to go haggis hunting on their first trip to the highlands. The foundation offers valuable tips and tricks, with emphasis on safety and the proper respect for the environment. For a hunting video, this has some wonderful landscape photography. And now I have to go watch all their other videos. -via Boing Boing

Of course, most longtime Neatorama readers are well familiar with the wild haggis (Haggis scoticus) from our previous posts about the animal. As you might guess, John Farrier is a haggis connoseur and chef. He'll eat anything, even if it's cute.  

We can't be sure how many Ukrainians will be putting up Christmas trees this year, but in peacetime, many of those trees would be adorned with spiders and spider webs. Not real spiders, but ornaments of silver or gold or tinsel of some sort. The tradition of hanging spider ornaments on a tree isn't all that old. It started in the late 19th or early 20th century, and it can be traced to a much older Ukrainian folk tale about a Christmas spider. Without giving away the plot, I can assure you that it ends better than Charlotte's Web.

Spiders are now considered to be a lucky symbol in Ukraine, and it is traditional to leave any real spiderwebs alone during the holidays, to ensure good luck in the new year ahead. After all, you don't know if the one that spun a web under your stairs might be the Christmas spider! Read about the connection between spiders and Christmas trees at Mental floss.

(Image credit: Erika Smith)

Tom Scott announced some time ago that he will stop making weekly videos at the end of the year. That doesn't mean he will stop making videos; it's just that trying to keep the quality up on such a tight schedule is too much. While all those videos have been enjoyable, they aren't perfect. It's embarrassing to have an error pointed out after all the editing is done and the video is posted, but it's inevitable that someone in the audience will know exactly what you did wrong. Tom regularly owns up to those errors and adds corrections to the YouTube page. Today, however, he is going back through them, or at least ten years of them, and telling us about the times he screwed up. You have to applaud his transparency, but then you realize it's also a restrospective of his videos on a wide range of subjects you haven't seen. If one catches your fancy, you might be able to search for it, or find it at his YouTube channel. The last minute of this video is an ad.

If you want to really see how much Tom has aged, check out the first of his videos that we posted here at Neatorama.

Warner Bros. made a movie called Coyote vs. Acme. It's a combination of animation and live action surrounding a lawsuit that Wile E. Coyote brings against Acme Corporation when one of their mail order products almost kills him. It stars John Cena, Will Forte, and Lana Condor, among others. The movie was filmed in 2022, and completed early this year. Test audiences loved it. It was supposed be released on July 21st, but was bumped in order to release Barbie that weekend.

So when will we see Coyote vs. Acme? Possibly not at all. The completed film was cancelled last Thursday in order for the studio to take a $30 million tax write off (on a $70 million budget), and to avoid millions in marketing costs. Warner bros. has previously canceled two other films, Batgirl and Scoob Holiday Haunt!, but those movies were not completed. The cancelation of Coyote vs. Acme came as a surprise to the producers, cast, and crew who made it, and they are not happy at all.

Following the backlash to its decision, Warner Bros. has now "un-cancelled" the movie. But that doesn't mean they will release Coyote vs. Acme. For now, the studio is allowing the producers to offer the movie to other distributors. So we might see Coyote vs. Acme, but we don't know if, when, or where it will happen. -via Kottke

If you were to walk along the Fitzroy neighborhood of Melbourne, Australia, you might run into the Carrot Man. His name is Nathan, and he's been carrying a giant homemade carrot around for about ten years now. He moved to Melbourne from Brisbane and found that carrying around a giant vegetable was a great way to meet people and make friends. Everywhere he goes, folks want to have their picture made with the Carrot Man.

When the Guardian tried to get an interview with him, he said he prefers to let the carrot do the talking. Nathan is well-known for his friendliness and generosity. He gives gifts to the neighborhood residents, often plants. And he's said that his motivation for carrying the carrot is just to make people smile. Carrot Man's fame is spreading globally. He's even been the subject of street art in Paris! Nathan's fans have a dedicated Instagram gallery to share pictures of Carrot Man sightings. -via Fark

(Image credit: Humans In Melbourne)

It's likely that you only think about cranberries in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, although thankfully for the industry, cranberry juice is sold year-round for the possible benefit of reducing the risk of UTIs. The Pilgrims ate cranberries in some manner at the first Thanksgiving because they were in New England, where cranberries grew wild and ripened at the right time. They were great at preventing scurvy. But cranberries as a crop are relatively new. They weren't cultivated until 1816!

Cranberry plants reproduce by exchanging pollen with other plants, or by fertilizing itself, or by cloning. Each ripe cranberry has four air pockets inside it that allows it to float on water, which makes harvesting them by flooding cranberry bogs a relatively simple matter. It also makes them bounce when you throw them, which is another way to tell if they are fresh. Those are just some of the things that make cranberries unique, but you can learn quite a bit more about this Thanksgiving staple at The Conversation.  

(Image credit: The Agricultural Research Service)

Redditor Grizz1371, a former Marine, posted this photo of his also-former-Marine buddy's new tattoo. Commenters from the USMC jumped in to share their favorite crayon, while others wanted to know what this was all about. The joke is that Marines eat crayons, indicating they are not all that smart. But far from taking offense, most Marines just run with the idea, making it funnier and funnier. Several ex-Marines have even started businesses selling edible crayons. The "dumb Marine" trope goes way back, but when did the joke about eating crayons begin?

A deep dive into the meme by Task & Purpose finds the first mention of Marines eating crayons only as far back as 2010. That explains why my ex-Marine husband never heard of it, while his Marine son was quite familiar with the idea. But it only took off into the wider world of social media in 2016, possibly with this comic.

(Image source: U.S. Army W.T.F! Moments at Facebook)

Marines will tell you to this day that crayons are the best MRE. Grizz1371 said the tattoo was in honor of Veteran's Day yesterday, but it could also be for the USMC's birthday on November 10. The military branch is now 248 years old!  

Between 1854 and 1929, around 250,000 homeless, orphaned, or abandoned children in New York City were shipped to the Midwest to find foster homes. There are many horror stories about the program, of children separated from siblings, taken in as servants, or abused, while their ties with family back in New York were erased. This program came to be known as the Orphan Trains.

The program was launched with the best of intentions, and not merely to relieve the city of a burden. The city did nothing for these children in the first place. It was the brainchild of Charles Loring Brace, a young minister who founded the Children's Aid Society. He attended seminary near the Five Points neighborhood in the mid-19th century (portrayed in Gangs of New York) and witnessed the misery of what was estimated to be 40,000 children fending for themselves in the streets of New York. What he dubbed the Emigration Plan first placed children in foster homes in New York State, then expanded further west when more homes were needed. The massive numbers of children and their far-flung travels led to lax oversight and local officials who did not vet foster homes properly in many cases.

Despite the many horror stories, the vast majority of the children relocated had good outcomes. But the Orphan Trains were not the only way that Brace worked to help the children of New York. Sending children away from the city was pretty much the last resort. Read the story of Charles Loring Brace and his efforts to get children off the streets at The Saturday Evening Post.  

Writer and comedian Tessa Coates went shopping for a wedding dress, and this picture was taken during a fitting. When she looked at the image, she got a big case of the willies. When Coates posted it to Instagram, her fans were at first shocked that she was engaged (she hadn't announced that before), and then shocked at the picture itself. If you can't see it, her arms are in different positions in the two mirrors and on her body. The picture was not Photoshopped, nor was it a Live Photo, nor a panorama. It spooked Coates so badly she almost threw up.  

As Bored Panda tells the story, Coates waited in line for two hours at the Apple Store to ask what happened. The explanation she got was that as the phone scanned from left to right, she raised her hands and artificial intelligence decided to stitch the two images together.  

Digital cameras take images by scanning from one side to another, but artificial intelligence doesn't necessarily factor into it. This kind of glitch has been happening for much longer than AI has been used in digital cameras. As pretty as this dress is, the spooky experience made Coates reject it, and she doesn't ever want to be near it again.  

(Image credit: wheatpraylove)

When doctors transplanted a new eyeball into a human for the first time, they did not expect the patient to be able to see with the eye. But there were other reasons for doing it, and the data gained will help future patients that may actually be able to see.

Aaron James was a high-voltage lineman who was electrocuted in Mississippi in 2021. He suffered multi-organ failure and wasn't expected to survive. But James survived, although he lost his left arm and most of his face. Doctors also removed his left eye because it gave him so much pain. James was left using a breathing tube and feeding tube due to the loss of his nose and mouth.
In two years, James recovered enough to be a candidate for a face transplant. Researchers approached him about transplanting an eyeball as well. While that surgery had never been done and probably couldn't restore his sight, the eye would help support his new face and make him look more normal. James agreed, for those reasons and also because they could learn how to do it.

“I said, ‘Even if it don’t work, I’ll have an eye, and it will be at least normal-looking, and then you all could learn something off of this,’” James tells CNN’s Jacqueline Howard. “You have to have a patient zero.”

The surgery was performed in May. Five months later, James is recovering well, and scientists are studying the signals sent through his optic nerve to his brain. It isn't sight, but it is something. Read about this groundbreaking surgery at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: NYU Langone Health)

In 1865, plantation owner Colonel P. H. Anderson was short on workers after the Civil War. He wrote a letter to the formerly-enslaved Jordon Anderson of Dayton, Ohio, asking him to return to Tennessee to help bring in the harvest and save the farm. Anderson responded with a very polite letter that is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive truth. Anderson's boss, attorney Valentine Winters, who had written the letter Anderson dictated, had the letter published in the local paper, where it became a sensation.

For the Letters Live program from Letters of Note, Laurence Fishburne reads Anderson's letter in the deadpan manner he must have intended. It is both funny and deeply cutting. The first time we posted about the letter, most of the commenters doubted its authenticity. But as the Wikipedia article on Jordan Anderson tells us, every person mentioned in the letter is documented. Winters may have helped construct the letter, but the story was very much real. You can also read what happened to Colonel Anderson afterward. -via Laughing Squid

The internet makes it easy to learn about things you weren't taught in school, and things you don't want to ask your family about. Before the World Wide Web, it wasn't so simple. In the 1980s, people were eager to learn about sex from a 4' 7" Jewish grandmother named Ruth Westheimer. Dr. Ruth was a highly educated sex therapist who made talking about sex both acceptable and entertaining with her positive attitude and no-nonsense, non-judgmental advice.  

Westheimer started out with a radio show that aired after midnight on Sunday so that children weren't listening, as part of a public service commitment required at the time by the FCC. But she became so popular that an expansion to TV was inevitable. Explicit sexual terms didn't seem so prurient when spoken in her high-pitched grandmotherly German accent, often with a laugh. Her fans were even more impressed when they found out that after she lost her parents in the Holocaust, she moved to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine at age 16 and joined the Haganah at 17, where she was trained as a sniper. Westheimer, now 95, is still writing books and making occasional public appearances. Read about Dr. Ruth's meteoric rise as America's sex education teacher in the 1980s at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Rhododendrites)

The British department store John Lewis has a tradition of well-produced tear-jerking Christmas ads every year. We've posted them for more than ten years now. They always manage to revolve around children, love, family or friends, and a magic twist. This year's ad titled Snapper: The Perfect Tree has all that, but served up with a huge dose of weird. A little boy wants to grow his own Christmas tree, but what he gets is nothing like a Christmas tree. You have to wonder if the writers are not-so-subtly mocking the syrupy-sweet ads of past years, or whether they were taking drugs. No, I'm not going to tell you what happens, because you need to watch the video. Even after you figure out what's going on, this will require some suspension of disbelief. You've been warned. -via Fark