#Tens of #cats #mummies were unearthed in #Saqqara #necropolis along with 100 wooden #gilded #statues of #cats and a bronze one dedicated to the cat #goddess #bastet. pic.twitter.com/g0oSQPBhL8

— Ministry of Antiquities-Arab Republic of Egypt (@AntiquitiesOf) November 10, 2018

The tomb of a 4,500-year-old cat fancier has been unearthed in Egypt. The tomb near Cairo contained dozens of mummified cats, 100 gilded wooden cat statues, and a bronze statue of the cat goddess Bastet. The tomb also held two large mummified scarabs in good condition, which is much more rare than cat mummies.  

The discoveries were made at a newly discovered tomb in Saqqara, the site of a necropolis used by the ancient city of Memphis. The tomb dates from the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, and archaeologists have found another one nearby with its door still sealed — raising the possibility that its contents are untouched.

The Ministry of Antiquities was clear about its goals in announcing the discoveries: attracting visitors back to Egypt's heritage sites, as the country has experienced a significant drop in tourists since the 2011 mass protests that overthrew dictatorial President Hosni Mubarak.

You have to wonder about the original owner of such a tomb. Was he/she particularly devoted to cats, or just interested in art and mummification? Read more about the new discovery at NPR. There are more pictures of the artifacts at the Ministry of Antiquities-Arab Republic of Egypt Twitter feed.

There are jigsaw puzzles of all kinds, with a variety of subjects. But there are only so many machines that cut them into pieces. It's possible to combine two or more puzzles that are cut on the same grid to make a completely new picture that interlinks perfectly. Art professor Mel Andringa was the first to do this, and he taught the technique to Tim Klein.

...By selecting pieces from two or more compatible puzzles, I assemble a single "puzzle mashup" with surreal imagery that the publisher never imagined.

Sometimes the results are merely chuckle-making, such as my combination of King Tut's burial mask with the front of a truck, which I call "King of the Road". But my favorite montages are ones in which the whimsical is tinged with something a bit deeper, such as "The Mercy-Go-Round (Sunshine and Shadow)", in which a fairground carousel whirls riders around a church from the light to the dark and back again -- or "Surrogate", in which a strange hybrid of beer can and teddy bear opens its fuzzy arms and tells you to "consider yourself hugged".

Read more about the technique at Boing Boing, and see a gallery of Klein's work at his website.

The Armistice of Compiègne went into effect on November 11, 1918 at 11AM Paris time, to end hostilities in World War I. It effectively ended the war, giving a win to the Allies without Germany having to surrender. Hurried negotiations led to the Armistice order being signed only 6 hours earlier. We mark that point on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month as the end of the Great War, 100 years ago today. But 11,000 men died on November 11th as the moments ticked down. Some died afterward, too, either by soldiers who hadn't received the news of the Armistice, from rare units that refused to quit fighting, or from wounds they received earlier.

Canadian soldier George Lawrence Price, from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, was serving with the 28th Infantry Battalion on November 11. The 26-year-old was part of a five-man patrol that was checking buildings beside the canal at Ville-sur-Haine, in Mons, for signs of the enemy.

Unfortunately, they found them – a group of German soldiers in the process of setting up machine guns on a wall overlooking the canal. There was an exchange of fire; both sides took cover and the Germans retreated.

The Canadians began to follow, but just as George stepped out onto the street he was shot in the chest by a German sniper. Dragged into a nearby house, he was treated by a local nurse, but there was little she could do.

George Price died soon after, at 10.58am… just two minutes before the armistice.

Read the stories of the last men to die in World War I at historywithatwist. -via Strange Company

When you hear the term "guitar-playing astrophysicist," you naturally think of Brian May of Queen. Google does, too. But there's also Matt Russo, who worked on a project to translate the data from the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system into music, called Trappist Sounds. In this Ted Talk, he explains how the fundamentals of music are in tune with the nature of the stars. And other planetary bodies. -via Laughing Squid

This fence in London looks nice, but not altogether unusual. However, it has quite a history behind it. The railings were once stretchers, used to transport the wounded during World War II.

These stretchers were originally made so that Air Raid Protection officers could carry injured people during bombing attacks in the Blitz. Over 600,000 stretchers were built from steel to enable them to be easily disinfected in highly-feared gas attacks. When the war ended there was a large surplus of stretchers and many of London's housing estates had had their original railings removed to serve the war effort. The LCC set about replacing them through clever re-use of the ARP stretchers.

The Stetcher Railing Society is dedicated to preserving London's stretcher railings. They have pictures and a handy map for finding them. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Flickr user Sarflondondunc)

Alex Mazza hooked up with game system to a TV that hadn't been used in a couple of months. The light showed that a colony of ants had set up household inside! What to do? Advice from the reddit thread was all over the map.  Leave the TV on. Turn the TV off. Stop eating Doritos while playing video games. Make them a better nest. Get an anteater. Train them to be pixels for your entertainment. Mazza ended up taking the TV apart.



He then used a vacuum cleaner, compressed air, and Windex to clean the ants out. He hasn't said anything about whether the TV still works, so we assume it is okay.

If you followed election news around the US for the past few weeks, you probably knew that Dennis Hof ran for a seat in the Nevada Assembly. You might also know Hof from his notorious legal brothels around the Reno area, including his flagship Moonlight Bunny Ranch. Or his reality TV show Cat House. Hof died on October 16, too late to be removed from the official ballot. Three weeks later, Hof won his election race. But he was not the first politician to win an election after death. Read the stories of five other dead candidates who won their elections at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user Joseph Conrad)

I once saw Wikipedia's list of people who lived in airports, and while there are quite a few cases listed, none match that of Mehran Karimi Nasseri. He was Iranian, but his citizenship was revoked, and the refugee papers he was issued were lost, stolen, or maybe the dog ate them. As a result, he was stuck at Charles de Gaulle Airport, where he ended up living for 18 years. If that sounds familiar, you should know that one of the ways "Sir Alfred" (as Nasseri came to be known) supported himself was by writing a book that (loosely) inspired the movie The Terminal.   

On Sunday, the world will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the "war to end all wars." World War I ended on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and ever since, November 11 has been commemorated as Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, or Veteran's Day, depending on which country you live in. England has especially embraced the poppy flower as a symbol of the end of the war, due to its peculiar biology.

The common poppy, Papaver rhoeas, is an annual plant in the Papaveraceae family. It produces seeds that can remain dormant in the soil for as long as 100 years. Since the seeds need light to grow, they only germinate in disturbed soils. Trench digging, bombs, and mass cemeteries decimated Europe’s landscape during World War I, causing millions of poppies to bloom on the disrupted soil. Imagine the contrast between the horrors of war and the beauty of red poppies blanketing the European countryside.

But it took more than the sight of flowers to turn the poppy into an international symbol. Read how it happened at Smithsonian.

Kolja Kugler is an artist in Berlin who went from making sculptures out of scrap materials to making robots. Three of his robots make up the One Love Machine Band. There's a bass guitarist (Afreakin Bassplayer), a drummer (Rubble), and a flute player (Sir Elton Junk), all with personality. -via Laughing Squid

Imagine you lived in the era between the rise of paper correspondence (13th century) and the invention of the paper envelope (16th century). If you needed to send an important letter, how would you ensure that no one else besides the intended recipient read it along the way? With a system of various folds, slits, and wax seals. MIT conservator Jana Dambrogio studies the methods she dubbed "letterlocking."

To seal a modern-day envelope (on the off chance you’re sealing an envelope at all), it takes a lick or two, at most. Not so for Mary or for Machiavelli. In those days, letters were folded in such a way that they served as their own envelope. Depending on your desired level of security, you might opt for the simple, triangular fold and tuck; if you were particularly ambitious, you might attempt the dagger-trap, a heavily booby-trapped technique disguised as another, less secure, type of lock.

While the letters could be opened, such interference would always leave behind evidence of tampering. Dambrogio teamed up with Daniel Starza Smith of King's College to form the Unlocking History research team, in which they reverse-engineer historic letters to study how the letterlocks were made and the cultural history behind those methods. Read about letterlocking at Atlas Obscura.

(Image courtesy of Unlocking History Materials Collection, U.S.A. & U.K.)

People love tablets, because they have bigger screens than phones, and they are more portable than desktop computers. But you still can't put a tablet in your pocket ...or can you? Samsung has unveiled a foldable phone called the Infinity Flex Display, which should be available some time in 2019.

Samsung is actually using two separate displays to create its foldable phone — one on the inside, and a smaller display on the outside — unlike Royole’s FlexPai, which uses a single folding display on the outside of the device. Samsung’s internal display is 7.3 inches with a 1536 x 2152 resolution (4.2:3). It folds in half to reveal a second display on the front of the device. This second “cover display,” as Samsung calls it, functions as a 4.58-inch phone interface with a resolution of 840 x 1960 (21:9). It’s also flanked by much larger bezels at the top and bottom compared to the internal display. Although it looks very stocky, Samsung says the device hiding inside the disguise is actually “stunning.”

Samsung is not the only company working on foldable screens. From the looks of it, you might want to invest in some large pockets, but since smartphones have been growing bigger for years, young people have developed the habit of always carrying a phone in their hands already. And to stress that everything old is new again, I've had a foldable phone for about 15 years now. Back in the day, we called them flip phones. Read more about the new foldable phones at the Verge.

Can’t turn away for a second. from r/funny

Redditor 431MM posted what looks to be security camera footage of his family. One parent supervising two young children is difficult, as disaster always seems to be just around the corner. What do you think will happen when Mom takes her eyes off one child for just a moment? Not what you expect. -via reddit

Edward Otto had a better idea. As a safer alternative to the penny-farthings of his day, he improved on the bicycle by inventing the dicycle. The dicycle had two huge wheels, but instead of front and back, they were parallel to each other with the cyclist sitting between them. Otto built almost a thousand dicycles between 1880 and 1883.  

For balance, the rider used a slender trailing arm with a rubber roller on the end to stop himself (or, more unusually for the period, herself) from toppling over backward.

The rider sat between the wheels, above the axle, and pedaled using a treadle-style system fixed to the axle by long rods. The treadles turned pulleys at each end, which drove the road wheels via rubber belts.

Within reach of the rider were two levers with which either of the pulleys could be disengaged. This basic form of steering was achieved by stopping the drive to one of the wheels while the other continued to turn. There was a simple hand brake lever for each hand too, each connected to a different wheel.

They were safer than bikes of the day, but you can imagine they'd be more difficult to steer and more difficult to park than a regular bicycle. There are still a few dicycles around. See one up close at vintage.es. -via Everlasting Blort

Banana Surprise is a gadget you can use to add chocolate, strawberry syrup, honey, peanut butter, or any other liquid flavoring to a banana. You insert a tool into the banana and pull out the "core," which forms a channel into which you inject your liquid of choice. Like this:

Get yours at Amazon for $27 plus shipping. I have a few thoughts about this.

1. Bananas are one of the few fruits that kids will eat without coaxing. They are already soft and sweet and if you need to add sugary flavor to them, we've lost the battle.

2. Bananas are simple. They come in their own natural container that even children can handle. The Banana Surprise is very complicated and turns a quick snack into a 5-step process that involves extensive dish washing. And $27.

3. Bananas are phallic. Even the instructions for this can turn anyone into a giggling 12-year-old.

-via Boing Boing