Strange, mysterious, spherical UFOs have invaded earth's atmosphere. The powers that be tell us they are weather balloons, or spy balloons, or just balloons launched from earth by hobbyists. But what if they were launched by an alien civilization? Maybe from a station on the moon? If the first ones were just spying on us, what happens when the real weapons are launched? A new short from Fabrice Mathieu (previously at Neatorama) leaves a lot to the imagination, so my theory is that the lunar aliens are chewing bubble gum, and they are far from being out of bubble gum! -Thanks, Fabrice!

In the hit HBO series The Last of Us, the world is devastated by the parasitic Cordyceps fungus, which infected flour and has mutated to turn humans into zombies. The genus Cordyceps really does turn its host into zombies, but only attacks insects. Does that means we are safe from fungus in our pancakes? Well, yes and no.  

There are many funguses (or fungi for Latin readers) that will infect crops of wheat or other grains. Some can make people very sick, either from the fungus itself or from the toxins that the fungus produces. The most familiar of these is ergot, which infects rye and may have produced hallucinations that contributed to a outbreak of "witchcraft" in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

Wheat producers go to great lengths to fight fungus in our food, but there is always a chance that dry flour contains some fungus. The good news is that it is destroyed when that flour is cooked. The bad news is that fungus can still infect food after it is cooked. Read the real story of fungal infections in flour at The Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

An ancient city at the mouth of a mighty river was the recipient of untold wealth due to the shipping trade, but changing conditions along the coastline left it sunken under water. This is the story of the lost Egyptian city of Thonis, also called Heracleion. Once thought to be a myth, it was found exactly where it always was, except underwater in the Mediterranean Sea. The stories of Heracleion involve both real people (Cleopatra) and mythological characters (Helen of Troy), but no trace of the city was seen for a thousand years. Heracleion's ruins are filled with expensive artifacts, leading experts to believe the disappearance of the city was relatively sudden, or else those treasures would have been moved. The upshot is that you can build flimsy structures or sturdy stone structures, but if your foundation is on the sandy coastline, you're at the mercy of the sea. New Orleans, are you taking notes? -via Digg

PS: Don't let the video title "Filthy Secrets" deter you from watching. There's nothing filthy in the video.

To people who have never eaten fermented meat, the traditional Inughuit dish kiviaq may seem disgusting and possibly dangerous. But the people of northern Greenland have perfected the process of making kiviaq over thousands of years, and enjoy the flavorful fermented bird meat. The fact that kiviaq has been publicized as a disgusting food is a sore spot for the Inughuit, and the tendency for younger generations to prefer imported food supplies means that traditional preparation methods are in danger of dying out. Kiviaq is made by

 ...packing 300 to 500 whole dovekies—beaks, feathers, and all—into the hollowed-out carcass of a seal, snitching it up and sealing it with fat, then burying it under rocks for a few months to ferment. Once it’s dug up and opened, people skin and eat the birds one at a time.

This method of fermenting came about because dovekies (also known as little auks) are seasonal. In late spring, millions of birds come to Greenland to nest. They are so thick you can catch them by swinging a net through the air. This bounty of edible game had to be preserved for leaner times, so kiviaq was developed to meet that need. Read about the traditional art of making kiviaq and the people who want to preserve the dish at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: AWeith)

There are ten movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards this Sunday. But you have probably seen two or maybe three of them at most. It's possible you haven't even heard of most of them! Screen Junkies knows that, and so every year they compile an Honest Trailer to let us in on  what all the fuss is about for the ten nominated films. They haven't done Honest Trailers for any of these movies except for Elvis, because, uh, no one requested them (they tell us Avatar 2 is being edited now). Best Picture nominees are expensive art films that are "good," by most metrics, but we, the audience, mainly watch movies so we can escape the real world and feel good for a couple of hours. But you might get to know at least one film in this video that you'd like to see in its entirety.

This Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present its 95th annual awards to the movies of the previous year. While Hollywood is excited, the nationwide ratings for the Oscar awards show have been declining for years now. The show is too long, scheduled for four hours but often running five, so even avid movie fans tend to skip watching it live.  

The problem is that the producers are working with obsolete concepts of drawing a television audience: keep them tuned in, and keep them waiting. In the 20th century, the audience had no choice. If you wanted to see how many awards your favorite movie won, you had to sit through production numbers, technical awards, and stand-up routines. With the internet, you can get notifications for the parts you really care for. Yet movie fans all have different parts they care about.

The Ringer proposes a plan to bring viewers back to the Oscar ceremony by breaking the telecast into three parts aimed at different kinds of movie fans. It sounds ingenious. On its face, the plan appears to be sacrificing a captive four-hour audience, but those viewers are already gone. It could bring back many of those viewers, albeit for shorter segments. The reasoning behind each part of the new plan is explained in detail, and it might just work. The sad part is that this plan is not only too late for the ceremony coming up March 12, but also that it was not proposed by the Academy itself. -via Digg

You can often tell where someone is from by the way they pronounce the letter "r." Bostonians and the British don't pronounce it at all when it's in a word, but sometimes tack one on the end of a word when you least expect it. But some linguists say that under some circumstances, "r" can be a vowel. That theory won't change our spelling, and probably won't change any pronunciation. We won't soon be seeing bird spelled "brd," even though we do see it spelled "birb" quite a bit these days. The series Storied from PBS explains the different ways different languages and cultures use "r" and how it could be considered a vowel, under the strange standards of linguistics. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Illness and disease were once inescapable parts of life before germ theory, antibiotics, and vaccines. People did what they could to avoid diseases, but sometimes just had to work around them. That affected clothing and fashion styles. When just enough men discovered that wearing a codpiece protected their junk while undergoing the useless syphilis treatments of the 16th century, the look caught on with the general public. But their hair still fell out, which led to powdered wigs, which had an upside in that they attracted lice away from the rest of their bodies. Are you keeping up?

Tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox were not easy subjects to talk about, but they were all too common once upon a time. Read about five bygone fashion trends that were instigated by people either trying to prevent these diseases or trying to live with them, whether their fashion followers knew it or not, at Cracked.

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

When you drape a big city over a group of mountains, you end up with a lot of stairs, hairpin streets, and workarounds. Wellington, New Zealand, is such a city. Public transport is offered by cable cars, which lift people uphill and then downhill like in San Francisco. But there are also around 100 private cable cars that people install just to reach their house! While that may seem extravagant, it will come in handy when you buy a new table, or break your leg, or come home drunk, or want to invite Grandma to visit, or when you're just too tired to climb many flights of stairs to get home. And if you want to stay in your Wellington hillside home through your advanced years, a private cable car, or "inclinator," makes a lot of sense. Tom Scott shows us how these private cable cars work in Wellington.

Where I live, there are a lot of houses that cling to the sides of mountains, too, but they are spread out enough that we can build access roads and bridges to reach them. I can tell you from experience that some of those roads out in the middle of nowhere are terrifying.

The 1939 film Gone With the Wind was a sweeping epic soap opera about one Georgia woman's life during the Civil War, based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Mitchell. The finished product featured big Hollywood stars and beautiful cinematography, won eight Academy Awards, and was the top movie of all time for 30 years. But putting that story in its historical backdrop was a struggle behind the scenes. Director David O. Selznick went through a dozen script writers, and working scripts were changed constantly.

The script writers were divided into two camps: The "Romantics" who wanted to depict the South as a genteel and honorable place where enslaved people were happy, and the "Realists" who were keen to show an accurate depiction of the brutality and dehumanization of slavery. The Romantics won out, and the movie projected a whitewashed version of the Confederacy that pleased white audiences in Atlanta but gave generations of viewers a distorted idea of the Civil War era South. The movie was shaped by many scenes that were written and some even filmed, but were then discarded. Evidence of the battle between the Romantics and the Realists remain in surviving working copies of the script, with notes from Selznick and others, that the director had ordered destroyed.

Read about the script decisions that shaped Gone With the Wind and the scenes that never made it into the film at The Ankler. Then imagine the same film with the deleted scenes retained. It would have been six hours long, but it would have told a more complete story. -via Mental Floss 

It's been almost seven years since we first saw the amazing puppet designing skills of Barnaby Dixon. With more videos over the years, we've also come to appreciate his ability to operate them in such a way as to trick our minds into seeing them as real characters separate from the puppeteer. This is because Dixon spent years studying anatomy and movement in order to make stop-motion animated films. The puppets came later because he was looking for a way to save time! And since he had no background in puppetry, he was free to think outside the box. In this video, we learn what goes into Dixon's puppets, in designing them, building them, and bringing them to life. -via Digg

The idea that alien beings come to earth in flying saucers has been a thing in the US since 1947. The saucer shape of our pop culture UFOs is due to a misinterpretation of that 1947 sighting. Or is it? Documentation of a UFO in Japan in 1803 involved a saucer-shaped vessel. In this case, UFO stand for unidentified floating object. It has become known as the utsurobune legend, although there are contemporary accounts that describe the event.

During the Edo period, Japan was officially closed off to foreigners, and any "invasion" should have drawn officials and caused a diplomatic incident. But this incident is a simple tale. A strange, saucer-shaped vessel floated to shore, and when it opened, people could see it was hollow. A woman emerged, speaking an unknown language and carrying a box. The vessel had writing on it no one could read. Unable to communicate, the Japanese witnesses sent her back to the ocean, never to be seen again.

While later accounts varied as to the date and place of the incident, there are several from 1803, placing it in the city of Hitachi. That lead researchers to believe that something really happened, but what it was is a mystery. -via Nag on the Lake

Build in the 11th century, Colditz Castle is an imposing fortress overlooking the town of Colditz, Germany. Rebuilt in the 16th century with 700 rooms, it was used as a political prison by the Nazis and during World War II it became a POW camp called Oflag IV-C. Since the fortress was considered impossible to escape from, it was a destination for Allied troublemakers and those who had attempted to escape from other prisons. However, these prisoners considered that a challenge.

The POWs at Colditz collaborated with each other on escape plans. They built trap doors, tunnels, shafts through the buildings, and even set up a telephone system to communicate warnings. Over five years, there were 300 escape attempts, 30 of which were successful. One prisoner was catapulted over the wall by his fellow inmates. Two men managed to tunnel to a guard house, where they donned German uniforms and then walked out as if they were going home from work. The most audacious escape plan was when prisoners worked together to build a glider on the roof! Read about the World War II prison at Colditz Castle and the many escape attempts at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Jörg Blobelt)

Jon Townsend (previously at Neatorama) is an expert in the lifestyles of colonial America, particularly the food of the era. The food was good if you had it, but there were no grocery stores, no refrigeration, and no canned food. If you wanted to preserve fresh food for later, you had to have salt. That wasn't always easy, especially during wartime. The tensions leading up to the Revolutionary War and the war itself caused disruptions in the salt supply lines that threatened to ruin the food cycle the colonists had established. The story of salt in colonial America is like many that Townsend tells: the struggles of everyday people in a new land just trying to get by. You'd never learn these things in high school history class, so we are glad we now get the chance.

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. It certainly was windy in Kentucky on Friday. Redditor ThirstGoblin was driving from Huntsville, Alabama, to Toledo, Ohio, with his fiancée and stopped at Bowling Green, Kentucky, to get something to eat. Oddly, Bowling Green is one of those rare towns that has both Kystal and White Castle outlets. He first went to Krystal, but found it closed. So he went to White Castle. About 15 seconds after getting out of the car, this happened.

ThirstGoblin bought $7.99 in food (no free lunch) and was so rattled, he ordered fries instead of onion rings. And he posted a picture to reddit. We assume that somewhere in all that activity, there was some notification of insurance companies. There were plenty of pictures taken, Twitter was on it immediately, and eventually the newspapers.

White Castle sign fell on top of a parked car in Bowling Green, KY. https://t.co/Ehc2zAKoXl pic.twitter.com/ze3R82vYCm

— Justin Hicks (@Hicks_JustinM) March 3, 2023

We hope that the couple will eventually get to their destination in Ohio.

(Image credit: ThirstGoblin)