Moose are big and powerful wild animals. Every child in Canada grows up being told never to approach a moose, especially during the autumn rutting season. So what do you do when a moose approaches people for assistance? A moose wandered into a neighborhood in Fort St. John, British Columbia, with Halloween decorations tangled in his antlers. It was a length of black webbing with a skull and parts of a skeleton. The moose was drawing a crowd, but no one wanted to get near enough to grab the fabric away. One fellow used a piece of tubing to reach the moose while keeping his distance, but it wasn't working.

Shaydon Soucy and his wife Sydney came by and saw what was going on. Soucy joined Andrew Raw behind a chain link fence, and the moose approached the men. With the fence offering some protection, Soucy was able to pull the fabric and bones off the moose's antlers. But that's not the best part. The moose, now freed, came closer to the fence to lick Soucy's hand! Soucy petted the moose, and later said,

It's definitely the most Canadian thing I've done. 

We believe it, because the incident was caught on video, which you can see at CBC. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Sydney Soucy)

You never know what you'll find when exploring an old abandoned house. This one has mice who are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. See, while Cinderella got her prince and lived happily ever after, the mice were the collateral damage of the fairy godmother's magic, and they were left with lifelong scars. You get the idea this talking mouse has waited a long time to spill his guts to someone who would listen. Yeah, it's funny, and beautifully animated, but it also gives us a minute to step outside our normal perspective and consider the psychological damage left behind in the fairy godmother's victims.

The sequence is also different from the usual in that it doesn't have a setup or exposition, or even a conclusion, leaving the impression that it could have been clipped from the middle of a longer story. But then you realize all that isn't totally necessary. We don't really need to know who these people are or why they are there. Why make a two-minute story into a ten-minute story when you don't have to?

Thanks to the movies, we think of alien life as intelligent, civilized creatures, mainly because they traveled here to visit us. But even though we haven't mastered travel to other planets yet, we can see exoplanets better than ever. And there are plenty of astronomers who have their eyes out for signs of life. But how can you detect life on planets so far away? It's easier when you think of that life as plants.

In 1990, scientists conducted an experiment dreamed up by Carl Sagan. When the the Galileo spacecraft flew by earth, it took measurements and observations to determine if there was life on this planet. The point was to determine how life could be detected on newly discovered planets. And the markers were there, indicating that earth held plant life. There was enough oxygen present that it had to be generated from something on the planet. And there was the way the surface reflected infrared light, but absorbed red light, just the way plants do. This gives us some ideas of what to look for in exoplanets. Read about the signs and signals that may indicate vegetation elsewhere in our galaxy at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting 

We have tales of humans turning into wolves that go back 4,000 years. They may go back further, but we don't have written accounts. Originally, it was all the fault of a woman, because just a woman's presence can turn a man into a beast. Over time, those stories got a bit fancier, and the werewolf legend became associated with cannibalism and murderous rampages as a way to make some kind of sense of horrific crimes, whether they were committed by a man or an actual wolf. In the 20th century, the pop culture concept of a werewolf gradually added new details, each of which can be associated with some real life concern of its time period. We know all about werewolves, because we've seen the movies. But when you dig deeper into the mythology, the steps along the way tell us surprising things about the evolution of society in general.

The following story illustrates how no question is so dumb as to prevent us from finding the answer, for entertainment if nothing else. In fact, we often take these kinds of things as a challenge. High school freshmen Elodie Yerich baked bread during a YMCA camping trip near a lake last summer. Her musings turned into a question submitted to the Minneapolis Star Tribune during the state fair. How much flour would be required to turn Lake Superior into a loaf of bread?

To find the answer, the paper turned to the bakers at Duluth's Best Bread. The bakery is owned by Michael Lillegard, a baker who has a graduate degree in math, and his brother Robert Lillegard. The math was the easy part, although the amount of flour required is exponentially more than the earth provides. The actual baking of the hypothetical loaf of bread would be even more difficult. One way to bake it would be to dig five miles into the earth to use heat emanating from its core. But that comes with its own problems. Read about the theoretical lake-sized loaf of bread at the Star Tribune. And then read the thread at Metafilter, where amusingly overthinking a hypothetical situation is a time-honored tradition.

(Altered bread image credit: Dmitry Makeev, lake image: NASA)

Back in 2015, a video of a New York City rat carrying a slice of pizza back to his family became the biggest meme of the year. People in the flyover states were horrified, and New Yorkers were charmed to see two city icons come together (pizza and rats). But there may be a replacement hitting the internet.  

A couple of days ago, Carly Hittner posted a video of a rat finding a donut under the tracks of the New York City subway. That TikTok clip has gone viral, and may be the next big thing. Too bad it's a little late to be a Halloween costume this year -or is it? You could easily repurpose the Pizza Rat costume you bought a few years ago and carry around a donut instead of pizza. Better make it a dozen donuts, since people will expect you to share, just like the original rat. If you want to argue that this is not a donut but a bagel, go ahead and have fun with that. -via Boing Boing

Military specifications always make sense on paper, and there's a reason for every request. But even when you adhere to those specifications exactly, unexpected roadblocks or even human nature can throw a wrench into the works. In 1935, the US Army wanted a new kind of food for its soldiers that could be easily transported into battle and sustain them when nothing else was available. Captain Paul Logan worked with Hershey to create a chocolate bar that would be nutritious without taking up space. It had to withstand hot temperatures and last a long time. It couldn't taste all that good, either, so soldiers wouldn't eat them before they were needed.

What they came up with was called Ration D. It was so dense that it could break your teeth if you were to bite into it. It could be dissolved in hot water, or you could could hold it in your mouth for a long time as it dissolved. It was awful. The only fan Ration D had was a lieutenant whose plane crashed in the sea and he was adrift for 47 days. Not that he ever wanted more of it after he came home. Read the story behind Hershey's Ration D at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: U.S. Army Center Of Military History)

In an attempt to teach you about peer pressure, your mother probably asked you, "If your friends all jumped of a cliff, would you do it, too?" Personally, no, but in this case, yes, they all did. Nick Coulter and company went to Vermont to a defunct granite quarry where the cliff sides are straight and tall and we hope the water is deep. I guess they knew, because this is not the first time they've been there. In such a sheltered area, the water is so still that they threw rocks before jumping to keep the landing from being painfully flat. While you and I would be most concerned about surviving or conversely getting up the nerve to actually do it, these cliff jumpers are going for style points! This video also features the longest selfie stick you've ever seen. A good time was had by all. -via Kottke

In colonial America, those convicted of crimes were often hanged for offenses like theft or witchcraft. Jails held murderers and debtors together in common rooms. Sentences were often open-ended, and could drag on indefinitely. And incarcerated work crews could be seen in public, under guard and wearing prison stripes, making the law-abiding public nervous. Something had to change.

One of our Founding Fathers, Benjamin Rush, worked on a system to reform and standardize America's prison system, applying his Quaker principles to punishment for criminals. He advocated for specific sentences to give convicts hope. His idea of confining convicts away from the prying eyes of the public was meant to lower their shame. His idea of solitary confinement was to give a prisoner a quiet, contemplative period to calm his soul and ponder his deeds.   

Today, we know that solitary confinement can do horrible things to a person's psyche, and many consider it cruel and unusual punishment. Between the time that Rush proposed his ideas for effective rehabilitation for criminals and the opening of America's first penitentiary, Eastern State in Philadelphia, 50 years later, his ideals and the real world system diverged considerably. Read about Rush's original ideas for the justice system and incarceration in America at the Public Domain Review.  -via Damn Interesting

ba ba baaa ba da da bee be bop bop da doot doot doo pic.twitter.com/KWIdjLiIi5

— weird medieval guys (@WeirdMedieval) October 20, 2023

If you follow the Twitter feed Weird Medieval Guys, it might be because we profiled them last year. It has a delightful collection of odd and often nonsensical medieval art with added captions that make them even funnier. It's heavy on marginalia, the doodles made in manuscripts by bored monks, but is not limited to it. It turns out that the "guys" do not refer to the team behind the account. It's run by one woman, data scientist Olivia M. Swarthout, as a hobby. But it has become so popular that she's written a book, titled Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times.

In discussing her book with The Guardian, Swarthout compares weird recurring motifs in medieval marginalia with internet memes.

“People ask about certain motifs in medieval art – for example, there are a lot of images of rabbits committing acts of violence. And you can really only explain the persistence of something like that by assuming that it was something that started off funny but was repeated so much that it became interesting. And that’s often the basis of a meme – it’s something that is stripped of its original context.”

Swarthout goes on to give her impression of five weird medieval artworks from the book, which will be released November 2. -via Digg

If you are young, you probably feel that the internet has always been with us. If you're not so young, you might be surprised at how long ago many of the milestones of the web have been around. The longest running webcam on the internet has been live for 29 years now. The first set of emojis was released in 1997. The first band to livestream a concert was all the way back in 1993!

I learned these things from Internet Artifacts, a sort of museum exhibit from Neal Agarwal (previously at Neatorama). It begins with a 1977 map of ARPANET that shows 111 computers connected to each other. We have more than that now. It has delicious tidbits like how the White House launched its website in 1994, but it was delayed because they needed more photographs of Socks the cat. The first person to purchase a book from Amazon was dismayed that he was charged money for it. And you might remember that Y2K was a big nothingburger, but that was only due to a lot of work by programmers to head off the disaster. The exhibit ends in 2007, when the iPhone was released and everything changed. -via Metafilter

Around the turn of the 20th century, Halloween was steadily gaining popularity in the US. Picture postcards were at the height of their popularity, and Halloween gave people another excuse to send one. In the estimated 3,000 Halloween designs, we see familiar icons like witches, black cats, and pumpkins, but we also get a glimpse into some mostly bygone traditions, like petty vandalism, bobbing for apples, and trying to divine one's future spouse.

Despite its appearance, I don't think they meant to show a cat being strangled. He's just drawn that way. These vintage Halloween postcards depict children being frightened in a comical way, but the very weirdness of the images can make any modern person feel a bit ...uncomfortable. So many of them feature grim grinning pumpkinheads with uncanny and unnatural pupils that seem to be leering.

See a gallery of 60 Halloween postcards dated between 1900 and 1920 at The Public Domain Review. And since they are in the public domain, they can be shared with anyone. -via Metafilter

Gremlins were a type of fairy, or "little folk" in European legends. Although seldom seen, gremlins were known to be mischievous. If something in your home was broken or out of place with no explanation, the culprit was obviously a gremlin. This idea took on a whole new meaning when airplanes were developed, particularly in the military. When something went inexplicably haywire on a plane during World War I, the Royal Air Force blamed it on sabotage by gremlins. The idea spread to more countries by World War II, when planes were more numerous, more complicated, and under battle conditions were more likely to malfunction.

The civilian world took up the idea, too, and gremlins were used as shorthand for any kind of industrial accident or malfunction. It may have been used in early computer technology a bit, but those folks settled on blaming "bugs" instead. Gremlins went on to star in a book by Roald Dahl and a hit 1984 movie. Read about the rise of gremlins at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: National Archives)

Of all the ways to lose an expensive drone camera, this is possibly the most wholesome -and it was caught on video! Adam Culbertson was flying his DJI Avata drone over some beautiful terrain near Capitol Reef National Park in Utah when a golden eagle snatched it up. Instead of dropping the drone, we see the eagle fly until the video signal was out of range. The feed was saved up to that point, but there's no indication of how far the eagle flew with it afterward. The drone is most likely not recoverable, even if the eagle would be inclined to surrender it.

The fallout from the incident is not as dire as you might imagine. The drone is made to shut down its propellers when it detects an impact, so the eagle wouldn't have been hurt. Culbertson was able to get a replacement drone from the manufacturer because the theft was classified as a flyaway, or "something outside of your control [that] causes your drone to fly away never to be seen again." -via Laughing Squid

In 1971, a toddler named Melissa Highsmith was kidnapped from her home in Texas by a new babysitter. The police investigation went nowhere, and years passed. The Highsmiths thought they would never see their daughter again. Then in 2022, her father Jeff Highsmith sent a DNA sample to 23andMe, along with other family members, to trace their genealogy. The results came back identifying a relative that was Jeff's granddaughter -one he never knew about! That could only be Melissa's daughter. Soon, the family was reunited with Melissa, who grew up with the name Melanie and never knew she had been kidnapped more than 50 years earlier.

Since home DNA tests were developed, this kind of thing happens more and more often, as cold cases are cracked by DNA from relatives that are matched with both victims and perpetrators. Sometimes the DNA confirms police suspicions in cases where the evidence against them was insufficient, and sometimes an identification comes out of the blue, decades later. Buzzfeed has a roundup of eleven cold cases, mostly murders, that were solved many years later thanks to DNA tests.

(Unrelated image credit: Tim Wightman/US Navy)