Suddenly coming into money is a dream come true for folks who struggle financially. It happens in a variety of ways: inheriting, an insurance payout, a lawsuit settled, a gift, a sudden business success, or winning an award, a game show, or gambling games. People who have experienced this tell their stories: how they came into money, how they felt about it, and what they did with it. The amounts vary, and some may not even be impressive to you. But the money changed the lives of the people who got it, in ways that don't make the papers. Some started businesses, some bought houses, and some traveled. But mainly they saw how money brought them peace of mind. Bill Wasik was surprised when small investments he made years earlier started paying off big.  

I mostly put the money in the bank. I don't know that I would use the word “save” in that it wasn't in a savings account. I probably was able to pay more in rent than I would have otherwise. I did keep my car, which I had needed in Boston but didn't need in New York, and which was totally a luxury. I wasn't really at a point in my life when I was looking to spend money on anything. Because it was about just being there and working, and I was involved in the stand-up comedy world, and I was trying to write. It gave me the freedom to do all of that. I feel like the main thing the money did for me was it freed me from the kind of anxiety that can be so tricky for people at that time of their lives, when they’re trying to be creative.

Read all fifteen stories at Topic. -via Digg

(Image credit: Pete Gamlen)

Take a video thrill ride as a guy with a helmet cam books it down a river of ice! He never would have gotten started if it weren't topped with snow, but we eventually see crystal clear ice. Every inch of this course is slick, and we go zipping up and down the river with him at terrifying speeds. We don't know where this is, but the language is Russian, so it's likely pretty darn cold. Toward the end, he gets a little crazy spinning around -maybe just trying to stop, but more likely he's showing off. Whee! -via Kottke 

Megalodon was the largest shark that ever lived. And despite what you've seen during Shark Week, it lived up until a few million years ago, and is no more. During its heyday, a nearly 60-foot-long Megalodon could swallow small whales. So what caused Megalodon to go extinct? New research gives some clues, by first adjusting the date the big shark went extinct. Once thought to be 2.6 million years, it appears that Megalodon died out at least 3.6 million years ago, which precedes the mass ocean extinction once blamed for its disappearance. Paleontologist Robert Boessenecker worked for more than ten years to pin down the date.    

And based on the new study, Boessenecker thinks something else may have wiped out the megalodon. Intriguingly, the new dates coincide with the global spread of the the creature's smaller but still fierce relative, the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, which made its global debut by some four million years ago. Though there were other changes during this window that could have affected the megalodon, they were largely local shakeups.

“Nothing else is that cosmopolitan,” Boessenecker says.

Read about the research, and possible reasons for Megalodon's demise at National Geographic.  -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: Hermanus Backpackers)

This cat watching travelers scan their train passes could be an undercover security officer! Dan Kashani recorded a stray calico cat dutifully manning her post at the entrance of a train station in Tel Aviv. Maybe she was looking for gate crashers, but it's more likely she just wanted human contact. Which makes it all the more a shame that only one person in this whole video petted her. -via Laughing Squid   

We were once taught that the universe meant everything there is. Then we learned that the universe is expanding. Expanding into what? If there's room for it to expand, what's in that room now? Gizmodo asked various scientists what is at the edge of the universe. Most of the experts started out by explaining that over the distances we'd need to find out, we can only see into the past because of the time it takes for light to reach us. That's the "observable universe." Caltech physics professor Sean Carroll goes on to explain,

Because we can only see so far, we’re not sure what things are like beyond our observable universe. The universe we do see is fairly uniform on large scales, and maybe that continues literally forever. Alternatively, the universe could wrap around like a (three-dimensional version of a) sphere or torus. If that were true, the universe would be finite in total size, but still wouldn’t have an edge, just like a circle doesn’t have a beginning or ending.

It’s also possible that the universe isn’t uniform past what we can see, and conditions are wildly different from place to place. That possibility is the cosmological multiverse. We don’t know if there is a multiverse in this sense, but since we can’t actually see one way or another, it’s wise to keep an open mind.

Cosmic. The answers provided by other physicists, astronomers, and astrophysicists will blow your mind as well. Read the roundup at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Giuseppe Donatiello)

While the other emperor penguins wear the required tuxedo, this penguin dresses in all black. Like the black leopard in Kenya, this is a rare mutation called melanism. It's even more rare that a penguin with such coloring would survive to adulthood, since the standard color scheme evolved for reasons of survival. BBC America gives us this clip from the series Dynasties. -via Digg

Some species of spider have a type of eye called a tapetum that reflects light, which helps them to see prey at night. The structures that make this kind of eye must be pretty tough, because one fossil has preserved the reflective properties of a spider's eyes for 110 million years! The fossil was found in South Korea. A spider fossil even without the eye thing is pretty rare. Paul Selden of the University of Kansas, who co-wrote a paper on the discovery, explains why.  

“This is so rare because they’re very soft — they don’t have hard shells so they very easily decay,” Selden said. “It has to be a very special situation where they were washed into a body of water. Normally, they’d float. But here, they sunk, and that kept them away from decaying bacteria — it may have been a low-oxygen condition. These rocks also are covered in little crustaceans and fish, so there maybe was some catastrophic event like an algal bloom that trapped them in a mucus mat and sunk them — but that’s conjecture. We don’t really know what caused this, but something killed off a lot of animals around the lake at one time or on an annual basis.”

Read more about the fossilized spider at The University of Kansas. -via Mashable

(Image credit: Paul A. Selden/University of Kansas)

How often do you get a personal letter in the mail? This one not just a thank you, it's a glimpse into how an everyday act of commerce can affect someone else's life. You can enlarge the letter at reddit if you need to. This letter of appreciation from a stranger had to have brightened this Ebay seller's day, and it can brighten everyone else's day now. It has also inspired me to write some personal letters -if I ever get around to it.

More people feel lonely today than ever before. Kurzgesagt tackles this subject in a sympathetic and non-judgmental way. They go into the science and history of loneliness, and more importantly, what you can do about it. -via reddit

In February, our thoughts -and holidays- turn to love and presidents, so it makes sense to peek in on love letters written by presidents, some of which are pretty strange. The wives of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson burned their love letters after the presidents' deaths for privacy reasons, so instead we read love letters they wrote to other women. James Madison communicated with Dolley Payne Todd (before they married) through her cousin's letters.

“He told me I might say what I pleased to you about him to begin. He thinks so much of you in the day that he has lost his tongue. At night he dreams of you and starts in his sleep a calling on you to relieve his flame for he burns to such an excess that he will be shortly consumed and he hopes that your heart will be callous to every other swain but himself. He has consented to everything that I have wrote about him with sparkling eyes.”  

Read love letters by six other presidents at Plodding Through the Presidents. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: George G Milford)

Helle's toilet: 12th-century three-person loo seat goes on display https://t.co/U7V5zMazLp

— The Guardian (@guardian) February 13, 2019

Cities as old as London get renovated many times, and often it's easier to build on top of old buildings, streets, and rivers than to remove them. That means history can be excavated hundreds of years later. A new exhibition called Secret Rivers at the Museum of London Docklands explores findings from a time before most of the city's waterways were channeled underground. One outstanding exhibit is a 12th-century toilet seat, an oak plank from an outhouse that could accommodate three users at once!

The strikingly well preserved seat, still showing the axe marks where its three rough holes were cut, once sat behind a mixed commercial and residential tenement building on what is now Ludgate Hill, near St Paul’s Cathedral, on land that in the mid-1100s would have been a small island in the river Fleet.

Remarkably, archaeologists have even been able to identify the owners of the building, which was known at the time as Helle: a capmaker called John de Flete and his wife, Cassandra. “So what I love about this is that we know the names of the people whose bottoms probably sat on it,” said Kate Sumnall, the curator of archaeology for the exhibition.

They would probably have shared the facilities with shopkeepers and potentially other families who lived and worked in the modest tenement block, she said. “This is a really rare survival. We don’t have many of these in existence at all.”

Yeah, there's a reason London doesn't have three-hole loos anymore. Life was certainly different in the 1100s. Read more about the toilet and the exhibit at The Guardian. -via Nag on the Lake

Everyone has a dream at least once in their lives about inheriting money from a long lost uncle, or someone they met once on a train, or from someone famous who wanted to spread it around. It happened in the movies Brewster's Millions and Melvin and Howard. In real life, it doesn't happen often, but it has happened often enough over time to make a list.

In yet another case from the early 20th century, we have the rather odd story of Archibald McArthur- a man who deserves an article of his own. But to sum up his life story for now, as a young man he moved to Dodgeville, Wisconsin, arriving with almost literally nothing but the clothes on his back and a degree from Lawrence college. On his first day in town, he worked sawing logs in exchange for a bed to sleep in that night and a hot meal.

He subsequently spent the next couple decades making a fortune, living lavishly and then, for reasons known only to him, very suddenly liquidated all his assets, became a vegetarian, grew a rather Dumbledore-esk beard, and took a vow of poverty. He lived in a shack from then on and mostly just hung out in a nearby cemetery reading philosophy books and poetry. According to a January 31, 1926 article from the Milwaukee Journal, he  told people who asked that he preferred hanging out with the dead more than the living.

After a few decades living like this, at the age of 78 he seems to have felt the call all elderly feel at some point, and decided to move to Florida. He thus bought a car, drove to Florida, sold the car, and died a few years later. Beyond a few other bequests, including randomly leaving $15,000 (about $216,000 today) to the son of a woman, Mrs. Jane Joyce, whose family he’d been friends with when he was young, he left the bulk of his estate, $300,000 (about $4 million today) to a young clerk by the name of George Rafferty he once met on a park bench in Jacksonville, Florida.

There was even one couple that inherited six billion dollars from a grandmother they'd never met. They had heard she was wealthy, but they didn't know she was that wealthy. You can read those stories, plus instructions for finding out if you might be able to tap into some unclaimed estate money in the UK and the US, at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Flickr user Ken Mayer)

We've learned an awful lot about Tyrannosaurus rex since the first fossils were found. Strangely, we've never seen a fossil of a baby T. rex. So for the new exhibit T. rex: The Ultimate Predator opening March 11 at the American Museum of Natural History, paleontologists had to do a bit of educated guessing when constructing models of a T. rex hatchling and a juvenile dinosaur. -via Laughing Squid

Since the Academy Awards were first bestowed in 1929, there have been 90 films that took home the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year. Some deserved the award, some didn't. And now we have a ranked list pf all 90 movies to argue over. To be frank, we weren't around to experience many of those years in film, and a movie that was the cream of the crop for that particular year can easily be horrible compared to the top movies of another year. And in some years, the moviegoing audience was horrified by which film the Academy selected. Be that as it may, Vulture has ranked all 90 movies against each other in a list that is sure to provoke disagreement, if not downright hatred. Isn't that what ranked internet lists are all about? -via Digg

(Image credit: Maya Robinson/Vulture)

This year's Academy Awards will be announced on Sunday, February 24.

Goldfish should live around 15 years with proper care. The problem is that people who keep fish in their homes don't know how to provide the optimum conditions for a pet fish. Science Insider has some tips on how to care for goldfish so that they will live a long and healthy life. It won't be easy, but it will make a world of difference for one (or more) fish.