I'm not really sure what the name of this French game is, but the opening window says Play For Good. The rest of the instructions are in French, but you really don't need them. The goal is to jump a ball from one column to the next. To do that, hold your mouse button down for the right length of time, and then release to jump. The audio cues will help you know how long to hold it when you get used to the game. The game is over the first time you miss, but it's easy to restart. My guess is that it gets harder as you progress, but I haven't progressed much ...yet. -via Boing Boing  

Roan Mountain, along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, rises to 6,285 feet long its five cloud-capped peaks. There are numerous legends of the supernatural associated with the mountain, the most prevalent being the ghost choir. Since the early 1800s, people have heard etherial singing in the higher elevations, sometimes described as heavenly music and sometimes as demonic shrieking. People who live in mountainous areas know that a combination of strong wind, rocks, trees, and open spaces can produce natural music, and with a dose of imagination, it can sound like a ghost choir. But that's far from the only ghostly legend about Roan Mountain.  

If the choir really is ghosts, then they would apparently not be alone on Roan Mountain, as there are other tales of spectral residents as well. One of these stories revolves around a decrepit cemetery along a place called Dark Hollow Road, right up against Roan Mountain. The cemetery is small and unkempt, the majority of its graves overgrown, unmarked, and occupied by the unknown bodies of the forgotten, but one that is known is the grave of a man named Jankins. The story goes that sometime in around the turn of the century Jankins was having a rather torrid affair with a local woman named Delinda, who was known for sleeping around with pretty much anything that moved.

According to the legend, Jankins was killed one day after being shot, some say by his jealous wife who had uncovered the affair, and right after he was buried at the cemetery Delinda disappeared without a trace. Rumors spread that she had actually been in love with Jankins and had crawled into his coffin to be with him, allowing herself to be buried alive in order to stay with her lover even in death. Whether this is true or not, it has been reported ever since that cars that drive by or park here will be rocked or bumped by an unseen force, said to be the restless spirit of Delinda.

Oh, but there's more. Read about the zombie sighting, the ghost bull, and the dancing orbs, among other stories of Roan Mountain. -via Strange Company

This is what happens when artificial intelligence tries to write a country song. Botnik Studios fed country music lyrics into a neural network to train it, and the algorithm came up with "You Can't Take My Door." This reminds us of something Bad Lip Reading would produce, but it has a catchy tune and is just silly enough to become a hit. I can tell you from experience, that it would be very possible to memorize the lyrics if you heard this enough. -via the Awesomer

The Awkward Yeti has a new and different series of webcomics called Medical Tales Retold. These are true stories submitted by readers. The first one begins above, and you can read the rest of it here. Also check out Episode 2: The Scar and Episode 3: The Needle. They might make you cringe a bit. If you have a medical story that would make a good webcomic, you can submit it here.

Fort Montgomery sits on an island in New York, a the conjunction of Lake Champlain and the Richlieu River, withion spittin' distance of Canada. The three-story stone building, built over several decades including the Civil War era. It was decommissioned gradually around the turn of the 20th century, and was sold to a private owner in 1926. What was the purpose of Fort Momntgomery? To defend the US from Canada, of course.

The fort has the kind of wacky pedigree that might tantalize a history buff buyer. A previous fort built in 1816 on the same site was enough to launch a thousand face-palms: Because the engineers were a little murky on exactly where the border fell, a precursor meant to fortify the U.S. against northern invasion accidentally went up on the Canadian side. As James Millard, a historian who literally wrote the book on the moldering remains, has noted, that structure earned the nickname Fort Blunder. The highly visible, expensive mistake was eventually abandoned and plundered. Then, when the international border was redrawn in the 1840s, positioning the island in U.S. waters, Fort Montgomery went up in the footprint of the folly.  

Fort Montgomery has been on the market since the 1980s, and the price has dropped from nine million in 2006 to one million dollars today. The building is in poor shape, but it's on the historical register. Read more about this unique real estate opportunity at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Mfwills)

These days, it's pretty easy to imagine what a city looks like from above, because we are used to aerial photography and satellite imagery. How could you accurately visualize a city from above without them? Leonardo da Vinci did so in 1502, in an age when most city maps were angled to show what they looked like to the artist. Vox takes a look at the tools da Vinci may have used to translate his 16th century "street view" to an accurate overhead city map. Just one more thing da Vinci squeezed into his prolific life. -via Laughing Squid

The news is out. The final episode of the Star Wars saga will be titled The Rise of Skywalker.

The teaser (and the title!) for Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker debuted this afternoon at Star Wars Celebration Chicago, giving fans our first look at the conclusion of the Skywalker saga, and our first glimpse was a thing of beauty. From Rey igniting her mended lightsaber to face off against a TIE fighter chasing her in the desert to Lando Calrissian back at the helm of the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, the short teaser had us cheering, gasping, and will keep us talking.

What that title means to the story is up to our imaginations (and will be the subject of endless speculation on the internet) until the movie hits theaters in December.

George Joseph Smith was not a wholesome character. Born in England in 1872, he did his first stint in a reformatory when he was nine years old, and never managed to straighten his act out.

He showed a knack for convincing weak minded women to do things they shouldn’t have. He had them steal for him, lie for him, and he was able to bribe them for money.

He had married a total of six women (some sources claim he had seven wives). Three of his wives turned up dead. He had also seduced a married woman, eloped with her, and when he was through with the adventure, he tied her down to the floor and kept her there for several days.

Among other crimes, he was present when three of his wives died, each one drowning in a bathtub, each death coming soon after they had signed life insurance policies. You have to wonder why it took three murders before Smith drew suspicion, but his life was more complicated than that. The women that drowned were wives number three, five, and six. At least three other women escaped his clutches, possibly because of a lack of money or insurance ...or maybe he really loved them. Read an account of the Brides' Bath Murders at Strange Ago. -via Strange Company

This picture shows Dr. Katie Bouman's glee as she saw the first image of a black hole rendered. She, more than anyone else, is responsible for it. As a grad student in 2016, Bouman gave a TED Talk about the possibility of photographing a black hole. She created the algorithm that enabled a network of eight telescopes to work together to take the image.

She started making the algorithm three years ago while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory.

What's next for Bouman? She has a job lined up at the California Institute of Technology as an assistant professor. Read more about Bouman at BBC News.  -via The Daily Dot 

(Image: Katie Bouman)

It wasn't long after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space that the Soviets began considering women as cosmonauts. To be precise, it was Nikolai Kamanin, the manager of the Star City space squad, who pushed the idea in 1961. Soviet bigwigs were enthusiastic, as it was another opportunity to be "first," ahead of the US. America already had a squad of women ready to become astronauts, called the Mercury 13. But that was a privately-funded experiment, and NASA never seriously considered sending them into space.

When the idea of sending a female cosmonaut to space was officially approved by Soviet leadership, more than 800 women applied for the job. Fifty-eight were formally considered but only 23 candidates were selected for advanced medical screening in Moscow.

The ideal female cosmonaut candidate was younger than thirty, shorter than 5.5 feet, and no heavier than 154 pounds. A degree was a plus, but still optional. Much more attention was paid to the specific skills needed to perform her duties. But this was tricky.

Male candidates were selected from a pool of test pilots, but this career path was unavailable for Soviet women. Some, however, did have related qualifications. In the post-war years, it was not too difficult to find female aviators who had not only served during WWII, but also participated in aerial battles. However, all these veterans were older than the desired age.

Because of the small pool of qualified candidates, Soviet leadership decided to look for female cosmonauts at local skydiving clubs which had proliferated across the nation since the 1930s.

Ultimately, five women cosmonauts were selected for an all-female space unit at Star City. Only one of them, Valentina Tereshkova, would be launched into space. Once the Soviets claimed another "first," the powers-that-be lost enthusiasm for the women's program. The Soviets would not launch another woman until 1982, still a year ahead of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. Meet the first women of the Soviet space program at Supercluster. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: RIA Novosti archive, image #15491/Alexander Mokletsov/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The first reported sighting of a flying saucer was in 1947. The Air Force invited the public to contact them about sightings, and between 1952 and 1969, there were over 12,000 reports. Were they alien invaders, or could this be new Russian technology for spying on us? The Air Force sometimes tried to reassure frightened people that those saucers were classified military technology, but they were cagey about the details. There was some media coverage now and then about the Air Force's new Avrocar, which was a real flying saucer project. It was definitely top secret, since even the man behind it had an obviously made up name.    

It’s mastermind, Jack Frost, was bit of a legend. The British engineer had pioneered many supersonic aircraft designs, specifically what are called “vertical take-off and landing” (VTOL) vehicles that can hover, take off, and land vertically.. Most notably, he worked on fighter jets whose speed and agility earned nicknames like, “the Hornet” and “the Vampire”. So if anyone was going to cook up the next ferocious fighter aircraft, it was Frost…

Read about the Avrocar flying saucer project at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: u/OliverCarrol)

For an extra fee, you can pick your own letter/number combination for your license plate. People pony up to express themselves in odd ways. These plates can tell a joke about the car, or maybe a pun connected with the car's make and model.

(Image credit: u/SelectAll_Delete)

And some are just ominous.

(Image credit: u/blargsnarg)

See a voter-ranked gallery of 30 clever car plates at Bored Panda.

People sure say "it" a lot. We hear supercuts of different people saying the same things over and over, but when Eclectic Method does it, the result is a catchy song. There's a list of the people who appear in it, and the lyrics, at the YouTube page.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

Scientists who study astronauts and the effect of space flight on their bodies had found some odds things over the years. NASA had a unique opportunity to study long-term effects a few years ago when they used identical twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly to compare an astronaut's (Scott's) physical condition during and after a year on the International Space Station with his twin (Mark, who had retired) on earth. The comprehensive results of that study have been published in the magazine Science. The results are not pretty.

Scott’s immune system was generally turbulent during his year in space: Many of his immune-related cellular pathways were disrupted, including the adaptive immune system, innate immune response, and the natural killer-cells that protect the body from cancers like leukemia and viruses. (The result confirms a shocking study published in January that compared the immune systems of eight astronauts who completed spaceflights longer than six months with healthy adults on Earth: Just 90 days into their flights, the astronauts’ natural-killer cells were 50 percent less capable of fighting leukemia cells.) Scott’s cognitive function was also whacked: He got dumber on the ISS.

The human body is wonderfully adaptive, and almost all of these changes were transient: Scott returned to normal within six months of returning to Earth. He became his old self, except for the ordinary depredations of age. But some of the effects of spaceflight left their mark. Scott got dumber on the ISS, but he stayed dumber, too. The decline in the speed and accuracy of his mental functions persisted six months after his mission.  

The study has implications for possible long-term space journeys to places like Mars. Read highlights of the results of the twin study at Wired.  -via Metafilter

The Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon posted a 911 call and body cam footage of the Beaverton Police responding to a burglary call. Two men were housesitting, and when they came back from walking the dog, they heard noises in the bathroom, but the door was locked.

Just seven minutes later, law enforcement surrounded the callers' house. They waited outside the bathroom with a trained K-9 and heard banging from inside the room. Police told the Washington Post that the suspect might have forced a window open as a last ditch effort to escape.

Officers brought a dog in to take down the intruder, which turned out to be a diligent Roomba banging against the shower. The house sitters did not know the home had a programmable Roomba. A good laugh was had by all.