Some of our favorite photos from the ceremonial Iditarod start in Anchorage today https://t.co/YJIrL0A68W

— ADN Iditarod (@ADNIditarod) March 3, 2019

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome began Saturday and is expected to continue until around March 15. Thousands of people (and dogs) are involved in the race, some that you don't know about.  

Musher: Drives the sled. There are 52 participating this year.

Athlete: The dogs.   

Iditarod Air Force: Pilots who move veterinarians and race staff, dog food, and other supplies along the 1,000 miles of the race. They also evacuate injured and exhausted dogs.

IditaRider: A person who gets to ride on an Iditarod sled for a portion of the race. Slots are auctioned to raise funds for the race.

Trail Team: Trail Comms do communications from the wilderness for up to two weeks, and must be experienced with both computers and heavy manual labor. Veterinarians, veterinary assistants, and dog handlers are stationed on the trail as well. Trail Guards protect racers from traffic, keep pedestrians off the trail, and help to re-groom snow when needed.

Other volunteers work continuously coordinating, cooking, loading and unloading, reporting, set up and tear down, parking, security, answering phones, and running errands for two weeks during the Iditarod and in planning and preparing year-round.  

Jeff Schultz, the official Iditarod photographer, has a gallery of some of the people and dogs of the Iditarod called Faces of the Iditarod. Each portrait tells about the subject, their role in the race, and contains audio clips. You can see the mushers in a gallery here.

The German Ruhe family ran a large animal trading business in the 19th century. Louis Ruhe moved to New York around 1868 to open an American branch, and by 1904 established the Ruhe Wild Animal Farm in Queens as an import and distribution center for exotic animals. They supplied critters to zoos, circuses, movie production companies, and wealthy private owners, which included monkeys, zebras, big cats, birds, elephants, and more. The residents of the Woodside neighborhood were terrified of the lions, tigers, and "other public enemies." That fear came to a head one night in 1905 when ten elephants escaped into the city streets.

Woodside has been uncomfortable ever since the wild animal farm, as it is known locally, was opened about a year ago. Every woman in the place has predicted that the animals would escape some dark, cold night and wipe out the town, devouring buildings and inhabitants. These predictions came near becoming true on Monday night… Every one trembled as word was passed from house to house, ‘The Ruhe wild animal farm has broken loose and we shall all be eaten alive.’–Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 23, 1905

No one was eaten alive, and the Ruhe Wild Animal Farm stayed in business until 1955. Read about the peculiar Queens menagerie, including the elephant escape, the war years, an elephant as a wedding gift, and the devastating fire that destroyed the farm, at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

The Denver International Airport has a lot of weird things going on, most notably that horse and the conspiracy theories. But now the airport has a gargoyle that talks to passers-by! It's a sign that the airport has embraced the mysteries of its reputation. -via Laughing Squid

A warrant has been issued for James Justice II of Nitro, West Virginia, accusing him of forging the governor's signature on a fake letter pardoning him of all felonies. The letter is notable for its numerous grammar and spelling errors.

The fake letter also included a motion to dismiss Justice II's upcoming probation hearing regarding a past burglary conviction.

The Governor's office says Governor Justice did not grant a pardon to Justice II.

Justice II is being charged with forgery of public record and forgery of official seals.

In case the news article seems confusing, you will be forgiven. The accused is named James Justice II (he must've thought James Justice Jr. was overkill), and the name of the governor of West Virginia is also James Justice. They are not known to be related to each other. -Thanks, WTM!  

Join us in welcoming Carol Orzel to the Museum! Carol lived with Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (#FOP), a rare genetic condition that slowly immobilized her body, but not her spirit. To learn more about FOP: https://t.co/n9z51qckgC #RareDiseaseDay
Photo: @SkullsUnlimited pic.twitter.com/QmUmgKhmuc

— Mütter Museum (@MutterMuseum) February 28, 2019

We've posted a couple of items concerning fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), a rare disease in which one's body tissues turn to bone. Carol Orzel of Philadelphia suffered from FOP, and had visited the city's Mutter Museum, where the only preserved skeleton of an FOP victim, that of Harry Eastlack, is on display. Orzel wished that when her time came, her skeleton could join him in the exhibit. Orzel died a year ago at age 58, and her skeleton went on display this week at the museum.  

The Orzel installation comes at a crucial time for the ultra-rare disorder, known to afflict a few thousand people worldwide. When Eastlack died at age 39 in 1973, FOP research was nonexistent. Now, it has spawned an industry. Several potential therapies are in clinical trials, and dozens of companies are racing to exploit new insights that could transform the treatment not only of FOP, but of head trauma, fractures, bone malformations, osteoporosis, joint replacements, and much more.

The turning point came in 2006, when a University of Pennsylvania team discovered the genetic mutation that causes FOP. The team was led by Frederick Kaplan, 67, a Penn professor of orthopedic molecular medicine.

His rise to become a preeminent FOP researcher began with Orzel.

“Although I had read about FOP, I had never seen anyone with it until I met Carol in 1984,” Kaplan said Thursday at the unveiling. “From the moment I met her, she was unforgettable – witty, charming, and in charge.

Read about Orzel's life and her contributions to Kaplan's breakthrough at the Philadelphia Inquirer. See more pictures from the exhibit at National Geographic.

Recording tape ran continuously during the Beatles' recording sessions, in order to capture the best take. The archives therefore include all the mistakes, asides, and nonsense waiting to be enjoyed fifty years later. A second video contains more video silliness and some NSFW language.



-via Boing Boing

Every once in a while, we all witness a dinner table argument over whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, and you just have to roll your eyes. It's true that an 1893 legal cases established that a tomato is a fruit, but that was a battle over tariffs. A wise person once said that "Education means knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting one in a fruit salad." The truth is that fruit and vegetable are not mutually exclusive categories, and that if you try to classify other vegetables botanically, you'll find that there are no vegetables.

Botanically speaking, it’s still clear: eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, and squash are all fruits. It’s equally clear that mushrooms and truffles are fungi, more closely related to humans than they are to plants. But these are all, also, in common usage, “vegetables.” Yet when an authority like the Oxford English Dictionary should provide clarity on what a vegetable actually is, it instead defines vegetables as a specific set of certain cultivated plant parts, “such as a cabbage, potato, turnip, or bean.” And since carrots and turnips are roots, potatoes are tubers, broccoli is a flower, cabbage is a leaf, and celery is a stem, we find that “vegetable” rarely applies to the entire plant (or to the same parts of the plant), while it also has a way of applying to things that aren’t actually vegetables. It is a category both broader and more specific that the thing it’s supposed to describe.

So what is the meaning of the word "vegetable"? Lynne Peskoe-Yang looks through the history of the word to find out, and finds answers ranging from "plant that you eat" to "things the French put in a salad." Read about the evolution of language as it pertains to that one word at Popula. -via Kottke

(Image credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture)

Tex is a longhorn that lives at Ima Survivor Donkey and Farm Animal Sanctuary. He really enjoyed playing with his big inflatable ball, until it met a barbed wire fence and utter destruction set in. Poor Tex! The post at Metafilter was introduced with a poem.

my name is Bull
and my ball red
i bump it with
my pointy head
but now my ball
I cannot whack
i am so sad
plz bring it back?

Long time Neatorama followers will recognize the poetic form.

During the Cold War, the CIA had an awesome idea: since cats could wander around even the most secure areas with impunity, why not wire them up for surveillance? The project named Acoustic Kitty began in earnest in 1961.

A grey and white cat was chosen as the test subject. A microphone was surgically implanted in the cat’s ear canal and a radio transmitter was placed at the base of the cat’s skull. Thin wire was wound into the fur along the back and down the tail. This served as an antenna. A small battery pack was implanted in the chest. This equipment would record the voices of those around the cat. The cat just needed to be sent in the right direction.

The first round of tests were disastrous. The cat would wander around and was easily distracted, especially by food. The scientists tried to direct the cat using ultrasonic sounds with a small measure of success.

The cat was taken in for a second surgery. CIA documents released in 2001 stated that this surgery involved implanting a wire to tame the cat’s hunger response. Much of the document is redacted and no description of this procedure is available.  

That's a lot of surgery for one cat. Even state-of-the-art spy electronics in the 1960s were huge compared to what we have today. The cat was sent on its first mission in 1966, and that's where things took a sharp left turn. Read how the Acoustic Kitty experiment turned out at I Can't Believe It's Nonfiction. -via Strange Company

Items in a series should always be separated by a comma, including the final items that have a conjunction between them. Otherwise, your meaning might not be clear. The Oxford comma became very important in a Maine labor law when truck drivers sued for overtime pay. Their company assumed they were exempt. Exempt workers included those who worked in the "canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of..." Okay, would you interpret the word "distribution" as a modifier of the packers, or a category unto itself? The entire case sat on that interpretation. It's not the only instance where proper punctuation made a big difference, as you'll see in this video from Half as Interesting. -via Laughing Squid

Rats and mice are considered vermin when they live in their natural habitats and compete with humans for resources. Our urge to kill them gave us domesticated cats, and we are grateful for that. However, those vermin also help us test scientific ideas, including drugs and other medical breakthroughs. The very traits that cause them to plague humanity are the traits that make them good experimental subjects.

“They reproduce quickly, they are social, they are adaptable, and they are omnivores, so they’ll eat pretty much anything,” says Manuel Berdoy, a zoologist from Oxford University. Additionally, the rodents’ diminutive size allows relatively easy storage in labs, and their shared evolutionary roots with humans mean the species’ genomes overlap overwhelmingly.

As a result, rodents have all but taken over our labs, making up nearly 95 percent of all laboratory animals. Over the past four decades, the number of studies using mice and rats more than quadrupled, while the number of published papers about dogs, cats and rabbits has remained fairly constant. By 2009, mice alone were responsible for three times as many research papers as zebra fish, fruit flies and roundworms combined.

Studies with rodents address everything from neurology and psychology to drugs and disease. Researchers have implanted electronics into mice brains to control their movements, repeatedly tested the addictive properties of cocaine on mice, administered electric shocks to rodents as a negative stimulus, implanted human brains in mice skulls, and sent mice and rats scurrying through endless labyrinths of tests. NASA even keeps lab mice aboard the International Space Station for experiments in microgravity.

The US Animal Welfare Act covers most laboratory animals, but excludes rats and mice. Still, there are guidelines in place that attempt to reduce unnecessary stress and pain in lab rats. Read about the history of laboratory rats at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Anna Marchenkova)

That stands for trouble, with a capital T that rhymes with P, and that stands for... pinball? Early pinball machines required no skill, and they were a form of gambling, sort of like Plinko. But while the pinball machines changed, their reputation was stuck in a bad place. With the original concerns gone, we were stuck with the "newfangled games are bad for kids" idea that later translated to video games. -via Digg

Carnival season is in full swing through this coming Tuesday, which is Mardi Gras. While the world is watching the gaudy, sexy samba dancers in Brazil strut their stuff under towering costumes in Rio de Janiero, there are lesser-known traditional Carnival parades happening in the outer suburbs of the city, known as bate-bola, featuring colorful but scary demons and clowns.  

Metal warehouse doors fling open and everyone dashes to the safety of the sidewalk. The street is quickly taken over by a surge of shouting, swirling clowns, garishly dressed head to toe and topped with eerie masks and plume-like wigs. Delight and terror ensue as they crash down the street, brandishing flags and thrashing balls mounted on sticks against the ground. A few stumble and fall in the confusion. This is the saida, or “exit,” of the groups of bate-bola (“ball-hitters”), Brazil’s secret, seductive, alternative Carnival.

The spectacle of the bate-bola is a dazzling fusion of art, music, and raw energy that puts even Rio’s famously flamboyant samba school parades to shame. Involving thousands, the bate-bola parades are largely ignored by the Brazilian media, and treated with suspicion by Rio’s middle and upper classes. The rainhas da samba (“samba queens”) gyrating a few miles away are replaced by outlandishly beautiful monsters—kings of a Carnival that puts exuberance and violence on equal footing.

The groups that participate in bate-bola (turmas) take their performances very seriously, and spend all year preparing to out-impress the other turmas. Read about bate-bola traditions at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Vincent Rosenblatt)

College students know that they should learn and study each morsel of information from class as they get it, but that's pretty hard when you have five classes and projects with deadlines and a part-time job besides. Then an exam date emerges on your calendar and it's time to get serious and cram as much studying into the night before as possible. AsapSCIENCE has some tips on getting the most out of the exhausting experience.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

What's the worst way to hold your drink pic.twitter.com/0twhqu2aCm

— Daniel Inman (@D1nman) January 24, 2019

Daniel Inman posed the question, "What's the worst way to hold your drink?" and gave a few examples. Twitter users took that as a challenge.

How am I related to you

— sabrina (@SabsG35) January 30, 2019

The Twitter thread turned into a gallery of drinking problems. Bored Panda took 41 of the images and made a ranked list of them that you can vote on or just enjoy.