In the Middle Ages, artists would travel from town to town, making a living by using stencils to decorate homes and other buildings. In the Victorian era, this architectural art reached its height in the lavishly painted ceilings and crown moldings that accentuated the intricate wallpaper of fine homes. Larry Boyce revived both the art of Victorian decorative painting and the lifestyle of the itinerant artist. In the 1970s and '80s, he traveled from town to town, more than 200,000 miles on his bicycle, decorating classic homes and making friends.

Charismatic, passionate, and uncontrollably self-absorbed, Boyce was the foremost decorative-stencil artist of his day, widely covered in the home-design press, which was always looking for colorful characters to cover. Because of his early success in the late 1970s and big personality, Boyce inspired equal parts love, admiration, frustration, and exhaustion among friends, clients, and competitors alike. Some got to know him only after he had knocked on their doors as a stranger and proceeded to talk them into letting him paint the ceiling of their foyer in exchange for a place to pitch his tent, three squares, and the “small sum” of one dollar an hour. Many of these roadside clients—there were hundreds—would call themselves Boyce’s friends, but the people who knew Boyce best were those who cycled with him from gig to gig, sharing the hardships of heat, wind, rain, tedium, and minimal personal hygiene that typify the unromantic side of traveling vast distances on a bicycle.

In fact, Boyce met two of his closest associates on the road during cycling treks. The first was Ken Huse, who was riding a custom-made Braxton bicycle from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles when he encountered Boyce, who was then in his mid-30s. “I met Larry in April of 1980 in the middle of the Mojave Desert,” Huse says. “He was going one direction, I was going the other. It was kind of rainy, so I was huddling beneath some boulders. Larry came over and introduced himself. I remember I had broken a strap on my toe clip and he gave me a spare. He was very friendly, verbose, and quite a seasoned bicyclist.”

As Huse remembers it, Boyce was also quite a self-promoter and proselytizer, even in the middle of the Mojave Desert in the rain. “He broke out a collection of magazine articles on his work and started describing what he did,” Huse says. “Larry was on a mission to re-create the venerable craft of stenciling and Victorian decorative painting. He was very, very focused on that.”

Read the story of Larry Boyce's extraordinary life and see some of his beautiful work at Collectors Weekly.

A mother snow leopard at Stone Zoo is teaching her cubs what they need to know to be effective hunters. She knows what this cub is thinking, but she goes along with it and acts the startled prey. It's part of their training. Here's another, from the Bronx Zoo, with the added lesson that you cannot sneak up on prey that is looking right at you.    

And another that is pretty darn cute.

Mama snow leopard acting scared when little hunter tries to sneak up on her. pic.twitter.com/YMFOVBe3f8

— Nature is Amazing (@AMAZlNGNATURE) August 29, 2018

Snow leopards: Their tops are made out of rubber; their bottoms are made out of springs. -via r/startledcats

You might think that police work would be one of the few jobs that's in no danger of being automated. Think again. Just last month, a patent was granted to Motorola Solutions Inc for an automated arrest and booking system, called the Mobile law enforcement communication system and method. It is basically a self-driving car with all kinds of communication loaded into it. The vehicle serves as transportation and detention center in one. A cop arrests a suspect, puts him in the car, and from there he can be tested for intoxication, scanned for weapons, informed of his rights, and booked. From the vehicle, he can consult with a lawyer and appear before a judge, all by video. He can then be taken home, to jail, or somewhere else, but he'll have to arrange for bail or fine payment electronically before leaving the vehicle. All this with no human coming close to the suspect. The patent filing has a lot more information and pictures. Oh, what a brave new world! -via Boing Boing

When I was five and six years old, I was enthralled by a Saturday morning show called Fireball XL5, which started me on a lifetime love of science fiction. Fireball XL5 had earlier been a short-lived British series, one of many produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson using a style of puppetry they called Supermarionation. Relive those weirdly animated series, from the obscure Supercar to the hits series Thunderbirds, with pictures, videos, and a peak behind the scenes at Messy Nessy Chic.

Villas Las Estrellas is one of the few settlements in Antarctica where people live for years and raise children. The core population is made up of scientists and workers from Chile's military, but they stay long enough to bring their families along. There's a school, a post office, a bank, and a Russian Orthodox church. But the nearest hospital is 625 miles away, so if you want to live there, you must have your appendix removed first -children included. Getting pregnant is not prohibited, but discouraged. See what life is like in Villas Las Estrellas in a gallery from BBC Future. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: SnowSwan)

Joe Hutto has spent so much time with turkeys that he's learned their language. He can interpret the individual calls they use for other species, requests, and warnings. Hutto understands turkey language more than he can speak it, which is quite an accomplishment. This clip is from the BBC Earth series Natural World: My Life as a Turkey. -via Tastefully Offensive

When Jose Manuel Martinez was arrested for the murder of an Alabama man in 2013, he made a decision not to involve his family in an investigation, and admitted to killing more than 35 men over several decades.

Martinez, who was born and spent most of his life in California, said that for three decades he had worked as a gun for hire, collecting debts and killing people across the United States. Police say that work was often for Mexican drug cartels, though in a few cases he also killed people just because they pissed him off. Martinez refused to say anything about the drug business, including whom he worked for or with. But he was more than happy to talk about bodies. And about his own prowess in killing. They called him El Mano Negra, he said — the Black Hand.

The dead were young and old, drug dealers and farm laborers, fathers and husbands. But always men. They were scattered across as many as 12 states, but his primary killing ground was Tulare County, a little-populated land of vast green fields and listless, sunblasted farm towns in California’s Central Valley, where Martinez had been born and raised.

“You want to know who killed them all?” he asked at one point. “I killed them all.”

The stunning part of Martinez's crimes was that so many of the unsolved murders had received scant attention and little investigation. Read about the 30-year career of a hitman who almost got away with it at Buzzfeed. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Matt Rota for BuzzFeed News)

You may recall the tragic tale of the Hunley, a Confederate submarine that sank a Union ship and led to the deaths of three submarine crews. You might be surprised to learn that it wasn't the first submarine used in battle. That would be the Turtle, an underwater vehicle conceived by Yale student David Bushnell in the 1770s. Bushnell was interested in underwater bombs, and built the Turtle to deliver them in service of the Revolutionary War.

Over the next year, the Turtle began to take shape. (A local clockmaker, Isaac Doolittle, helped design and construct some of the most ingenious parts.) About seven feet across in each direction, the whole thing was basically one giant cockpit. The pilot—or, as one admirer put it, “the adventurer concealed within”—sat on a chair in the middle. He was accompanied by half an hour’s worth of breathable air, which he could replenish by bobbing up to the surface and uncapping a couple of bronze tubes in the ceiling.

A complex series of pedals, cranks and hand rudders allowed said adventurer to move in all three dimensions: to sink and rise, move forwards and backwards, and turn. For daytime visibility, he could peer through a series of glass peepholes.

Read about the Turtle and its military missions at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Zenit)

They didn't tell you when you signed up to play trombone that you would eventually be risking your life for the entertainment of the crowd. And you won't even have to play the instrument! While these kids from China Spring High in Texas are impressive, you can't help but wonder how painful it was to practice until they got it right. -via reddit

Nora Emily Fornario, known as Netta, was a young woman in England who had a lifelong fascination with magic. She studied occult subjects along with like-minded friends in the 1920s. Netta was drawn to Scotland, specifically the island of Iona, which was considered to be a place where the world of spirits was closest to the world of people. It was sacred to both pagans and Christians, and sported many fairy mounds.  

Netta told her maid that she was heading to Iona to perform a magical healing ritual and would stay indefinitely. On the island, she found lodging at an isolated farm with an older woman named Mrs. MacRae. With her wild dark hair, clothing inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, and extensive silver jewelry, Netta had a distinctively metropolitan look that stuck out in rural Iona. MacRae reported that the young woman spent her days wandering the island's beaches and moorlands. At night, she would enter into mystical trances in hopes of contacting Iona’s spiritual realm. Netta told MacRae that she once fell into a trance that lasted an entire week, and should the same happen during her stay, under no circumstances was a doctor to be called.

MacRae had become used to Netta’s eccentricities, but one Sunday morning in mid-November, she noticed her lodger’s behavior had become frantic. She had the wide-eyed look of someone who was deeply frightened. Netta explained to MacRae that she believed she was being psychically attacked from a distance.

Netta's behavior was increasingly strange, until the day she went missing. Her body was found on November 19, 1929, naked and covered with scratches. Her cause of death was recorded as exposure. But how did she really die? Ninety years later, there are plenty of theories, which you can read about at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user IrenicRhonda)

Maybe you've changed the kind of cooking oil you buy because some are healthier than others, or you've at least thought about it. But it's hard to keep up, since what's "good" for us changes with new research. When you heard that olive oil is better for you than generic vegetable oil, you switched, but then someone in your family was horrified that you weren't using canola oil instead. It makes a difference, since the average American gets 400 of their daily calories from cooking oil. Dietician Dana Hunnes helped Mel magazine rank cooking oils by the amount of various types of fat, so you can decide what to use. They also note that oils have different uses depending on how well they perform at high temperatures. Keep in mind that "every kind of cooking oil" does not include butter, lard, or bacon grease, because they just assume we know better.

There's so much about the world that children are expected to just pick up from their environment. That means so many things are only half-learned because we don't realize what we are misunderstanding. Ross McClearly asked Twitter users to share the misconceptions they remember from childhood.

I thought the the Americans were fighting gorillas in the jungles of Vietnam called the Viet Kong, and their leader was King Kong. A peculiar problem of a 1960s childhood. I

— Rufus MacDufus (@RufusLongpaws) September 7, 2018

My daughter told me that when she was very young, she'd watch me do laundry. I would clean the lint filter out and put the lint in the "magic pink box" on the shelf. And after it got full, she'd look in and all the lint had disappeared! Magic!

"Honey, that's a waste basket. I emptied it."

"I know! I felt like an idiot when I got older and figured that out!"

My daughter stopped eating all ceareal as a kid. She told us years later she heard on the news a serial killer was on the loose. Thought he was in the cereal box. Didn’t want to take a chance. And she loved cereal.

— Diane Lander-Simon (@dishwithdi) September 7, 2018

Read some of the other things people completely misunderstood when they were children at Buzzfeed. There's more in the comments, too, and in the original Twitter thread.

Around the turn of the 20th century, fire stations in New York City were allowed to have one dog as a mascot, or one cat, but not both. Of course, they all had horses to pull the fire engines. Engine Company No. 31 and No. 1 Tower Company, at 87 Lafayette Street, broke the rules and sheltered all kinds of mascots, including a monkey named Mrs. Herman, who considered herself a firefighter just like the men she lived among.  

Mrs. Herman was a native of Java, an island of Indonesia primarily comprising a tropical rain forest. I don’t know how or why she came to the United States, but I do know that she joined the fire department in 1904.

Mrs. Herman knew every firefighter by name, and she enjoyed wearing the regulation fire-fighting attire of her male counterparts (she did not like to wear dresses). She also liked to spend time with Pluto, the big gray horse of the No. 1 Tower Company, and with Pinky, the four-year-old spotted coach dog mascot owned by Lieutenant Sullivan of the tower company. Two of her favorite things to do were ride around the block on Pinky’s back and take naps on Pluto’s back.

Mrs. Herman didn’t get along very well with Boxer, the firehouse cat. In fact, she made his life pretty miserable. Poor thing.

Read about Mrs. Herman and the firefighters of Engine Company No. 31 at The Hatching Cat.

It's been a popular tidbit from history that doctors during the Victorian era once treated hysteria in women by manually stimulating them to orgasm. This made doctors popular but tired, so Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the vibrator to automate the treatment.

It’s a disturbing insight, implying that vibrators succeeded not because they advanced female pleasure, but because they saved labor for male physicians. And in the past few years, it has careened around popular culture. It’s given rise to a Tony-nominated play, a rom-com starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, and even a line of branded vibrators. Samantha Bee did a skit about it in March. A seemingly endless march of quirky news stories has instructed readers in its surprising but true quality, including in Vice, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today.

In short, the tale has become a commonplace one in how people think about Victorian sex. And according to a contentious new paper, it may also be almost totally false.

Read how the story of the vibrator began, and how it turned into common knowledge without evidence, at The Atlantic.

(Image credit: Wellcome)

A wildcat crept into an abandoned train carriage in Russia and gave birth to cubs. Workers moved the car to the Daursky Biosphere reserve, without knowing who lived inside. The mother Palllas's Cat abandoned the carriage during the move, but one cub was left behind. Several days later, reserve director Vadim Kirilyuk heard a kitten meowing, and saw her crawl out of the train car. The cub's mother was nowhere to be found. She was tiny and weak, and the scientists called wildlife experts for advice on feeding her. Kirilyuk named her Dasha.   

Scientists had to play the role of Dasha’s mother, massaging her stomach after each meal, and keeping a hand on the kitten’s back to help her fall asleep in a den made out of a cardboard and an old fur hat.

Their efforts paid off and Dasha grew into a curios and healthy kitten.

‘Her eye colour changed from blue to yellow just before she was two months old.

'In the middle of June she went outside for the first time, and immediately ran back inside, to her humans, because she got too scared’, said Vadim Kirilyuk, the reserve’s director.

The scientists hope to return Dasha to the wild someday, if she can be properly prepared for life on her own. Read more about Dasha at The Siberian Times, and see plenty of pictures. Follow Dasha's life at Kirilyuk's Facebook page. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Vadim Kirilyuk)