Longtime Neatorama reader know Tristan Da Cunha is the most remote place on earth where people actually live. That island seems downright civilized when compared to the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, known as Point Nemo, which has no people and no land. Point Nemo is the spot in the Pacific Ocean that is further from land than anywhere else on earth. It's cold and stormy and sees no one except for during the occasional round-the-world boat races. The nearest dry land is 1,670 miles away. Most of the time, the closest people are in the ISS, passing 258 miles overhead.

But Point Nemo has a lot of human artifacts, because space programs try to steer old satellites, including space stations, in the area near Point Nemo to keep it from falling somewhere it could do us harm. That's been the case since Skylab fell to the earth in 1979 and Australia issued NASA a fine for littering. How much space junk could be around Point Nemo? We don't know, because it's inaccessible. Read about Point Nemo and its treasure trove of space debris at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Timwi)

If you recall the state of the world around 20-30 years ago, we were worried about giant pandas. They wouldn't mate in captivity, and on the off chance a panda got pregnant, she didn't take care of her baby. Scientists figured that either we didn't know enough about pandas to manage them properly, or pandas are just stupid and might be doomed to extinction no matter what we do. How things have changed! Panda research at the Chengdu research center led to changes in panda management, and a great leap in the captive panda population. Pandas have developed their natural maternal instinct along the way. It was once difficult to get panda mothers to pay attention to their babies at all, and now it's hard to distract them long enough to take the panda cub for his veterinary examination. It's heartwarming to see a mama and baby having this much fun together, no matter how clumsy they are. But luckily, pandas aren't the brightest creatures on earth, so the temptation of a treat finally gets mama to loosen up just enough to whisk the cub away for his exam. -via Born in Space

Some houses are said to be haunted because they look scary, some because they are abandoned, and some just because people like a good story. A fine brick home with lavish woodwork and a wrought iron fence could have been a landmark, but it got a reputation as haunted, for an understandable reason.

Dr. Creed T. and Sophia Douglas Wilson had this house built in Jackson County, Indiana, in 1848. In 1861, their son Aesop wanted to heed President Lincoln's call for men to serve in the Union Army. Sophia objected, as Aesop was only 17 years old. But he ran away and joined the army, serving as a drummer boy. Aesop wrote to his parents, so it was a shock when they heard of his death. They had his body disinterred and sent home, where Sophia insisted on keeping his casket in the house, in front of an upstairs window, where she could talk to him. For twelve years. Aesop was only buried when he himself finally told his mother that's what he wanted. It's no wonder that the house was considered haunted by his spirit. Read the full story of Aesop's body at Fishwrap. -via Strange Company  

Imagine you wanted to be play the full orchestral version of a movie theme, but you didn't have any musical instruments. I have a sneaking suspicion that Matthew Van Ness probably has some musical instruments, most likely quite a few, but he doesn't need them because he has his voice. And he uses his one voice to recreate the entire Indiana Jones theme, instrument by instrument, by himself. He's a one-manorchestra!

Oh, it's easy. Just take the full score, separate every instrumental part, sing each one at the precise tempo, and then mix them all together on a computer. Nothing to it. Of course, it helps if you can consistently carry a tune, which excludes me from even trying. Van Ness has been doing this for some time, and his YouTube channel might contain a particular favorite of yours.

It's not easy being a member of the French nobility these days. The titles given out by royalty have lost their moneymaking power since France moved away from government by monarchy. Consider this: France has more than 30,000 castles, but many of them are in rundown shape because proper maintenance is so expensive. You can buy one for a song and a promise to restore it, but that doesn't help the poor aristocratic scion who inherited it.

By now you are playing music on the world's tiniest violin for these impoverished aristocrats. But they don't need your help. There is a club for aristocrats to support other aristocrats, called the Association for the Mutual Assistance of the French Nobility (ANF) to save the downtrodden elite from having to live within their incomes. The ANF has helped thousands of people, but those people have to prove they deserve it by documenting their lineage and titles, through their father's side only, and proof that lineage all comes through legal Christian marriages. If you jump through those hoops, you might get support, and even an informal dating service so you don't have to marry into the unwashed masses. Read about the ANF and their serious quest to preserve the French nobility at Messy Nessy Chic.

The winner of the 2023 Nikon Small World in Motion competition is Alexandre Dumoulin of the Department of Molecular Life Sciences at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The first sequence in this video is his winning entry, which depicts 48 hours in the development of neurons in a chick embryo as it develops its central nervous system.

...the footage shows the elongation of axons - projections from nerve cells - between the two hemispheres of the central nervous system. In neurological disorders, axons can be impaired. “By studying these, organisms I aim to enhance our comprehension of how the nervous system functions and identify potential factors contributing to neurodevelopmental disorders,” says Dumoulin.

It's important to understand normal neuron development, as deviations may lead to disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. For complete descriptions of the other prize-winning microscopy videos, you'll have to go to the Nikon Small World in Motion contest site. The Honorable Mentions are pretty amazing, too. -via Nag on the Lake   

Government officials and business owners pay close attention to how many cars are on the roads. High traffic areas need more maintenance, and low traffic areas need to justify their existence. That's where the  AADT comes in- the annual average daily traffic. Geotab gathered and crunched the numbers for both federal and state routes that are at least ten miles long to determine the least busy roads in the country.

You won't be surprised to find the route with the lowest AADT in the US is in Alaska. State route 11 (the Dalton Highway) covers 414 miles from Fairbanks to Deadhorse, and has an AADT of only 196. There are relatively few communities along the route, and people who need to travel from one city to another find it much simpler to fly. Yet the road is crucial for trucks carrying groceries and other supplies to mines, oil rigs, and small northern communities. Alaska, as usual, is an outlier.

Some of the other least-traveled routes are long and lonely, but quite scenic. When someone considers opening a gas station, they take AADT into account. You'll need to start with a full tank of gas, drinking water, and a fully charged phone. You might not have cell service, but you'll want to take pictures. However, lonely routes in the eastern part of the country are shorter and are more likely to provide services. Check your state to see if there's a road less traveled that you might want to check out to take advantage of cooler weather and see colorful leaves at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura  

(Image credit: Karen Deatherage/Bureau of Land Management Alaska)

The first time I ever went to a comedy club, I had a good time, but also an epiphany. The greatest laughter comes from people in groups who've had a few drinks. If a comic bombs in front of people who are already primed to overreact, they've really bombed. Such a club would be the best place to record a laugh track. You may hate that TV shows use laugh tracks, but if they didn't, would you really know where the funny parts are? Watching a sitcom without the laughter is an eye-opener, when you realize it's really not all that funny. Laugh tracks evolved from live shows, where an audience will react not only to what's happening on stage, but also to the laughter around them. Recreating that ambience was easy for TV, all you needed was an audience. But recorded laughter was even easier, so it got to the point where you didn't need feedback to tell you if a joke was funny. Who cares if it's funny or not? The laughter will be there when you push a button.

Take a good look at this picture. If you walked by this tree in the forest, would you even notice something weird about it? An astonishing number of people walked by, completely oblivious to the tree shaped like a woman. The photograph is not altered. This tree is in southern Newfoundland, near the Conne River in the forest of the Miawpukek First Nation community. The tree is right on the walking path, but it still took a Facebook post to get anyone to notice it. The crucial person who saw that post was Colleen Lambert, Miawpukek First Nation’s tourism, culture, and recreation director. She came up with the idea of harnessing this "Lady in the Tree" to get more people out in the woods. A Facebook group was launched, along with a contest for Halloween 2022, and soon hundreds of folks were hiking through the woods to find the lady and take a picture with her.

But what you really want to know is how a tree root looks so much like a woman. Her body is all tree. Her head, on the other hand, has its own story. Her head wasn't there, then it was, then it wasn't again, but it has returned for Halloween. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Roberta Buffett Collier)

Tom BetGeorge has unveiled his Halloween light show for 2023! This year, BetGeorge (previously at Neatorama) decided to go what he calls "old school" and concentrated on computerized moving lights. I don't know how "old school" that really is, and we see some short sequence of projection lights in his shows. But there are no drones like last Halloween, probably because that's an awful lot of work to do every night for a month. The sequence above uses the song "GrimGrinning Ghosts" from the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disney parks. But there are other shows with other songs this year, some that use a flamethrower. Continue reading to see them.

Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Rankin flew his F-8 Crusader on a trip from from the Naval Air Station in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, to the Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort, South Carolina in July of 1959. His plane never made it. Cascading malfunctions happened one after another, including the lever that would turn on auxiliary power coming off in his hand. There was nothing to do but eject.

On the lucky side, the ejection seat worked. On the downside, he was at 47,000 feet, where temperatures can bring instant frostbite and the air pressure is so low that Rankin's body immediately began swelling up painfully. He started bleeding from his ears, nose, and eye sockets. At least he was going down. Rankin's descent seemed too slow, but his parachute automatically deployed -at the wrong altitude. Then he fell into a raging storm cloud, with lightning, thunder, rain, and hail- but worst of all was the wind that kept him bouncing around in the air for 40 minutes!  

Against all odds, Rankin survived to tell the tale, and you can read all the horrific details at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: GerritR)

History classes in the US only have time to skip across the highlights of history, which is too bad. Later on we found that history is way more interesting, and we would have enjoyed those classes more if we had wider subject matter instead of repeating stories of wars every year. And if our text books had added in some really weird and obscure trivia, we would have paid attention.

No matter what era you study, there are small facts that you've never heard before, mainly because they are too small to make an entire article of, so Cracked put them together in a list of 30 Eyebrow-Arching Historical Facts. You, being a Neatorama reader, will encounter some you know well, like the Demon Core and the St. Louis. But many will be new to you.

And I just realized that two of the three examples I selected to show you are things that wouldn't have been in my history classes at all. That's the thing about history; there's always more of it being made.

This opening sequence for the Star Wars TV series Ahsoka seems familiar. A real Gen X TV viewer will instantly recognize it as The A-Team, with some elements of other action show openings mixed in. Explaining the cast of characters used to be a thing for TV show intros, which helped set people up for the show, even if they'd never seen it before. If you recall, The Six Million Dollar Man had a three-minute origin story before every episode! That time now goes to ads. Some commenters say this video from Craven Moorhaus and Zak Koonce of Auralnauts makes it clear what is happening in Ahsoka for the first time to them, and the show has already completed its eight-episode first season. Even if you didn't watch Ahsoka, nor plan to, this opening scene will set you up for nostalgia, even though the only thing nostalgic about it is the style. -via Laughing Squid

This video from Weird History is titled "Major Medical Discoveries That Happened By Mistake." That's really a misnomer, as most of these breakthroughs are anything but mistakes. It would be more accurate to say they were made by accident. Medicine and devices that were developed for one reason ended up being very successful for a different application. There's no real "mistake" in that! These ten stories cover some things you read about before, and a few you probably haven't. I was tickled to learn where vaseline actually came from, although that story really has no mistakes or accidents involved in it. I'd never heard the false story about Fleming's sandwich leading to penicillin, because we had the real story here years ago. The story about Edward Jenner doesn't appear to be an accident at all, but we all need to know it anyway. Overall, if you take this as just a list of medical breakthroughs alone, it's both edifying and enjoyable.

The culture of beekeeping in Slovenia is serious business, and neighborhood beekeepers have developed systems for making honey production easier, more efficient, and even beautiful. Most use a type of beehive known as the AŽ hive. This involves a particular design for each hive that allows them to be stacked together. The bees come and go from the front, and the beekeeper takes the honey from the back. Stacking those hives builds walls, which become a building, sort of a bee shed, which shelters the hives (and the keeper) from the weather and allows them to stay warm.

The particular Slovenian innovation that really draws our attention is the custom of painting the front of each hive. This began so that the bees will recognize their own hive among the dozens stacked together. We now know this is not necessary, but it has become tradition. These painted front panels, called panjske končnice, sport bold primary colors with folk art added. They are quite unique, and are often sold as souvenirs. Some are hundreds of years old. See more of these beehives and read their story at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: strudelt)