Some people were just born for war. Adrian Carton de Wiart was one of those who couldn't stay away from battle, no matter how many times fate told him to go home and retire. Wiart signed up for the British Army in 1899 for the Boer War when he was still underage, by lying about his identity. He retired in 1947 in his sixties. Wiart survived a plane crash and a stint in a POW camp in Italy (from which he escaped). He recovered from gunshot wounds in most of the wars he fought, in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, although he was left with only one eye in Somaliland, and lost two fingers, then later his hand and part of his arm in World War I.

Yet each time Wiart was wounded, he convinced his superiors to put him back into action. Oh yeah, after retiring, he broke his back and recovered from that, too. Read the thrilling and confounding story of Adrian Carton de Wiart, the most battle-scarred soldier, at Amusing Planet.  

(Image credit: Cecil Beaton)

The 1950s and '60s were the peak of the Cold War, and they were also the peak of the suburban housewife phenomena. A family that had their own backyard fallout shelter in the suburbs was a step ahead of the Communists, and were assured they could stay underground for two weeks and return to the world unscathed. Therefore, these shelters were stocked with a supply of emergency food, mostly canned goods, that would sustain a family during a nuclear disaster.

But the responsibility of caring for the family would "naturally" fall to the woman of the house, as in everyday life. The women's magazines of the period had plenty of tips and recipes for making creative meals out of fallout shelter supplies. These magazines didn't expect women to ponder the implications of nuclear annihilation, but instead gave them instructions on the more mundane details they dealt with in everyday life, from making something appetizing out of deviled ham to giving birth in a fallout shelter. Read about the advice housewives received for keeping up appearance during nuclear war at Atlas Obscura. Yes, there's a recipe included.

Do you want to drive a scientist completely insane? Then give him/her a Nobel Prize! It's not a sure thing, and most Nobel Laureates are just fine, but a surprising number of scientists who won a Nobel have gone on to going off the deep end, or at least some weird places, in the years afterward. This phenomena even has a name, although it's tongue-in-cheek: Nobel Disease.

Sometimes a Nobel Laureate is considered a genius, and is drawn into discussions of subjects outside their field, where they may not be so knowledgable. In that position, it's easy to say dumb things that get a lot of publicity. Sometimes a Nobel Laureate becomes stuck in the position of being considered the world's best in their research, which makes continuing the same work difficult. They may feel they now have to either do something better or nothing at all. That's a particular problem for someone who wins a Nobel with decades left in their career, something like "peaking too early" syndrome.

An article on Nobel Disease at Big Think has examples from history, but it doesn't mean to imply anything about this year's winners, since it was written before they were announced. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Adam Baker)

In the US, and most places, you can buy land, but you can't buy air. What about water? Different nations treat water, water purity, and water rights, differently, but Australia is, so far, the only country that ever monetized their fresh water through private companies. In other words, it's up for sale through the free market. What could possibly go wrong? What happened was that water shifted from a shared public resource to an investment. When big finance is involved, it matters less that everyone has the water they need, and more that a profit can be made.

Well, that was bad enough, but Australian farmers who were doing without water learned a clever workaround that the investors couldn't monetize. And that just caused more problems. It's a really complicated subject, but Half as Interesting explains the mess better than anyone else can. This videois only 5:30 long; the rest is an ad.  -via Digg

The beautifully animated short film Chasse Galerite is a 17th-century folk tale of a talented hunter trying to win a fair maiden's hand in marriage. It's a charming and fantastical story involving flying geese, a peach pit, and a literal version of treebeard. The award-winning video by Brian Hawkins was made with water color on cut paper.

You'll have to read the subtitles, because the narration is in Missouri French Creole, a variation of French that few speak anymore. The audio was recorded almost a half-century ago by Pierre Aloysius Boyer, a French Missouri storyteller who was born in 1910. Since Chasse Galerite cannot be embedded, watch it at Vimeo.  -via Metafilter

Remember when you made faces as a kid and your mother warned that your face might freeze like that? For some, it can pay off. Jovante Carter is a TikTok star under the name HolyGxd. He is also now the world record holder for gurning.

The word "gurning" is simply the art of making funny faces, and there are even competitions for it. For the Guinness Book of World Records, gurning is specifically the act of pulling your lower lip up over your nostrils. You can't breathe while gurning, so the record is for the longest one can hold a gurn. Carter recently held that face for 62 seconds in Milan, Italy, breaking the previous record set in 2012 at 53 seconds.  

Jovante first realized he could contort his face when he was in the third grade. “I was eating lunch and my classmate told me that when I eat, my whole face disappears,” he recalled.

-via Boing Boing

Remember back in the day when you could grow a pumpkin weighing several hundred pounds and become a local, or even worldwide, hero? It seems like only yesterday when a pumpkin weighing more than a ton was unthinkable, but that line was crossed in 2014. This year, the world record has been broken by a pumpkin weighing 2,749 pounds, entered into the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California.

Travis Gienger of Anoka County, Minnesota, grew the pumpkin, but who knows what he went through to transport it to California. Gienger is a rockstar pumpkin-grower, having won three of the last four championships. He named this pumpkin Michael Jordan, because it was perfectly round, like a basketball. As you can see, that didn't last. The previous world record was held by an Italian who grew a 2,703-pound pumpkin in 2021. Read about Michael Jordan the pumpkin and how Gienger brought the record back to the US at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Miramar Events)

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2023 is Laurent Ballesta, who won for the above image titled The Golden Horseshoe. The photograph, along with others on the same subject submitted for the Portfolio Award, was taken in the Philippines. This is the second time Ballesta has taken the top prize in the competition, after he was awarded the title in 2021. Golden horseshoe crabs are an endangered species, one of only four horseshoe crab species left in the world, even though horseshoe crabs have survived for hundreds of millions of years.

The title of Young Photographer of the Year was awarded to Israeli photographer Carmel Bechler, for this image titled Owls' Road House. You have to look closely to see the owls who have taken up residence in an abandoned building. The winning images from the competition will go on exhibit at the Natural History museum this Friday. See more photographs from the competition at the exhibit page. Be aware that some images may be disturbing.  

An archaeological dig at Gough’s Cave in southeastern England revealed human bones that are 15,000 or so years old. They showed evidence that they had been gnawed on, and skulls were turned into cups. For some time, archaeologists thought the scene was unique, but more and more sites along northern Europe have revealed that the practice of eating humans was quite widespread among the Magdalenian culture of the Upper Paleolithic era. These people were homo sapiens, and it appears that this cannibalism was a funerary practice, and not war tactic or a defense against starvation. To them, it was just what you did when someone died. At the same time, the Epigravettian culture, mostly in southern Europe, burned or buried their dead.

Genetic studies show that the Magdalenian culture didn't just switch to burying their dead, but were actually replaced by people of the Epigravettian culture. We don't yet know what kind of beliefs led to funerary cannibalism, and it's possible we may never know. Read about the ritual cannibalism of Stone Age Europe at the Natural History Museum.  -via ScienceAlert 

(Image credit: Ethan Doyle White)

The way this video begins will make you think it's about Lucretia Borgia, but that's just setting the scene for the real story. Even if Borgia were guilty of all the crimes she's been accused of, she still wouldn't hold a candle to Giulia Tofana. Tofana made a good living manufacturing cosmetics, but her real talent went into her signature product, Aqua Tofana. It's a perfect product name that will stick with you because it's fun to say. Aqua. Tofana. While the concoction was officially a cosmetic, those in the know could use it to obtain an old-fashioned divorce... if you know what I mean. And if you don't, you should read the many posts we've shared about arsenic. In other words, Giulia Tofana was a 17th-century professional poisoner, and a prolific one, too. Weird History tells her story with a bit of snark, since that's the only way to make it palatable.

For nearly 100 years, archaeologists knew how North and South America were populated by humans. They crossed over from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge about 13,000 years ago, when sea levels were lower. From there, they slowly sent their descendants southward through the two continents. But more recent archaeological discoveries, paired with genome studies, have sent the question back into the realm of "we don't know."

One of the most intriguing artifacts is a collection of human footprints at White Sands National Park, once thought to be around 10,000 years old, then maybe up to 13,000 years old, but have recently been dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. Other sites have artifacts that date prior to the previously-accepted Beringia crossing, although the oldest ones are questionable. Could humans have arrived in boats? After all, humans reached Australia in boats 50,000 years ago. Read about the oldest human artifacts in the Americas and what they mean to the story of human migration at LiveScience. -via Digg

(Image credit: National Park Service)

It took a few hundred years for science to go from wishful thinking to rigorous experimentation. During that time, the most renowned scientists who made great breakthroughs still spent time on alchemy. But each generation considered itself more enlightened than the one before. During the 19th century, there was an explosion of belief in spiritualism, communication with the dead, ghost sightings, and seances. So naturally, scientists of the day wanted to study the phenomena. Some went in looking for logical explanations for eerie events in new scientific fields, such as electrical activity and magnetism, or possibly psychology.

These scientists included Pierre and Marie Curie, Michael Faraday, and others you may be familiar with. While some discovered intriguing reasons for tables to move and Ouija boards to spell out messages, others revealed the spiritualist's tricks. And a some became sucked into the wishful thinking aspect of communication with the dead, often for personal reasons. Read the accounts of eight well-regarded Victorian era scientists who studied ghosts and other spiritual phenomena at Mental Floss.

Go back a few billion years to the beginning of life on earth, and we run into many possible ideas for how it could have happened. The truth is we just don't know, but we've got a lot of different hypotheses that may or may not explain our weird world. Kurzgesagt explores one idea, a concept that could explain how the earliest life forms on earth were already so evolved that they could live and thrive and evolve here. There is some math involved, but nothing you have to calculate yourself. Along the way, we learn about the conditions of the early universe, and the possibility that life elsewhere might not really be so alien to us. It might not be the right answer, but it does give us a lot to think about, mainly what a miracle our world -and universe- really is. The last couple of minutes of this video is an ad.  

(Image credit: u/Bubbly_Hat)

There are two types of car owners. One is just happy to have a reliable vehicle that gets you around, and it doesn't matter that it only comes in black, white, red, or gray (and you may have to wait for a black one). The second type says LOOK AT ME! This type is a minority, but you will notice them. You might even take a picture of their vehicle and post it on the internet.

(Image credit: u/Mantiseyeballs)

This truck wouldn't have seemed so outrageous of they'd stopped after the lavender paint job. Or the lifted height. Or the pink neon lights. But when you put them all together, it makes clear that this truck has no use other than to be noticed. Bored Panda has a collection of 50 outrageous cars of all kinds. Some are obviously art projects, some may be company advertising, and some that are funny workarounds for missing parts. But quite a few are just too strange to assign a motivation.

Once upon a time, you could just go to the store and get a bottle Sudafed when you had a cold, and hope that it would unclog your sinuses long enough so that you could get some sleep. Whatever kind of cold relief you took, you had to wonder whether it worked. No cold medicine is perfect, but maybe you would have felt worse if you didn't take it. Or maybe you were starting to recover. It didn't much matter; there are too many cold relief medicines on the market to try them all out and compare when you're sick. The main ingredient in Sudafed, which seemed to be a miracle, was pseudoephedrine. But it was discovered to be an ingredient in meth, so it became restricted, and you might not be able to get it when you need it. There was also phenylpropanolamine, which was eventually ruled unsafe. That left us with phenylephrine, which has been in the news lately because it was discovered to be ineffective. Yeah, they all sound the same to us, but what are we supposed to take for a head cold now? The real kicker is that phenylephrine was known to be ineffective years ago! The reason we are only now hearing about is comes down to funding. Phil Edwards of Vox explains what happened to our cold medicines. -via Geeks Are Sexy