The phrase "a canary in a coal mine" refers to the demise of the weakest member as a warning of danger to the rest of the group. The phrase comes from the use of real canaries as carbon monoxide detectors.

Canaries were used in mines from the late 1800s to detect gases, such as carbon monoxide. The gas is deadly to humans – and canaries alike – in large quantities, but canaries are much more sensitive to small amounts of the gas, and so will react more quickly than humans.

This was discovered by John Haldane, who was asked to help determine the cause of an explosion at Tylorstown Colliery in 1896. He concluded the explosion was caused by a build-up of carbon monoxide and set out to find a way of detecting the odourless gas before it could harm humans.

You might assume, as I did, that canaries were considered expendable and often died from the practice. That's not quite so -at least not so in all mines. The cage pictured is a canary resuscitation device, with its own oxygen supply that could be turned on to revive a distressed canary, while men would evacuate the mine. Read how it worked at Museum Crush.  -via Nag on the Lake

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Auralnauts brought Kylo Ren back to talk about the latest Star Wars movie. It's an earnest movie review, although brought to you in an utterly sarcastic manner by one who has a unique relationship with the character Han Solo -as well as Uncle Chewie and Uncle Lando. Don't watch if you are avoiding spoilers. If you've seen Solo: A Star Wars Story or you don't care about spoilers, this is a hoot. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Europe had no pineapples, and they were completely unknown there until Christopher Columbus returned from his second voyage to the New World in 1496. He packed some of the fruit for import along with parrots, tomatoes, tobacco, and pumpkins. While the tobacco and pumpkins survived the journey the best, it was the pineapple that really made an impression.

The fateful pineapple that reached King Ferdinand was the sole survivor: it was the only specimen that had not dissolved into a sticky rot during the journey. It produced enough of an impression for Peter Martyr, tutor to the Spanish princes, to record the first tasting: “The most invincible King Ferdinand relates that he has eaten another fruit brought from those countries. It is like a pine-nut in form and colour, covered with scales, and firmer than a melon. Its flavour excels all other fruits.” At least part of the excitement came from the fruit’s spiked form, which sent Europeans into rapture. King Ferdinand’s envoy to Panama, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes, writes, “[It is] the most beautiful of any fruits I have seen. I do not suppose there is in the whole world any other of so exquisite and lovely appearance.” The sweetness of the pineapple, too, should not go unmentioned. Renaissance Europe was a world essentially bereft of common sweets. Sugar refined from cane was an expensive commodity, and orchard-grown fruits were subject to seasons. The pineapple may well have been the tastiest thing anyone had ever eaten. But delicious or otherwise, it was still the preserve of adventurers, and the pineapple might never have made it into common lore if it hadn’t coincided with yet another global development: the widespread dissemination of the written word.

Pineapple became a sensation for three reasons: it was completely new, it was expensive due to shipping and was therefore reserved for the wealthy, and it was really tasty. Read about the rise of the pineapple at The Paris Review.

-via Messy Nessy Chic

During World War II, a shocking number of army recruits were rejected due to malnutrition. Children of the Baby Boom were fed daily vitamin tablets to grow up big and strong. But the world is different now, yet we still buy multivitamin and trendy supplements by the ton. Do we really need to take vitamins?

We all need vitamins, but that doesn’t mean you need to take a vitamin. This week, science gave us another brick for the giant “vitamin pills are useless for most of us” sign that’s been under construction for a while. (It’s a metaphor, but I imagine it as something like the Hollywood sign, except nobody looks at it because they’re all busy shopping for vitamins in the valley below.)

Vitamin pills may be necessary if you have certain health conditions. For example, if you’re pregnant, it’s a good idea to take a prenatal vitamin that includes folic acid. If you’ve been eating nothing but ramen all semester, you might want to stock up on Emergen-C. But if you just have a vague sense that you’d like to be healthier, vitamins aren’t likely to help you, and they might hurt.

Lifehacker has a quick course on vitamins and who might need to take supplements. Do you need to take a supplement? If you have symptoms that make you suspect a vitamin deficiency, you should ask a doctor, because it might be something else that needs to be identified.  

The Boise Black Knights are a youth football team from Idaho. On their way home from a tournament in California Monday (which they won), they came across an overturned car. They helped the injured driver, but his wife was trapped inside the car. The players cut through her seatbelt, and decided the best way to free her would be to lift the vehicle up and help her to crawl out from underneath.

INCREDIBLE: Youth football team lifts crashed car to rescue trapped woman after spotting crash on the side of the road. @EvaPilgrim reports. https://t.co/T3gtmmd6PF pic.twitter.com/LRcxUkZJZr

— Good Morning America (@GMA) May 31, 2018

You can see a somewhat chaotic video of the rescue operation at Buzzfeed. 

So... I JUST FOUND A CAT THAT IS NOT MINE AND IT HAS HAD BABIES UNDER MY BED. pic.twitter.com/83ktBHGgT5

— Paris Zarcilla (@ParisZarcilla) May 30, 2018

In case you want to shut the world out and wallow in the universe of warm fuzzies, here's a photo-heavy story for you. British filmmaker Paris Zarcilla found a strange cat under his bed that had just given birth to kittens. He's fallen deeply in love with them.

To my cat sons and daughters, I'll be the hero you deserve, but not the one it needs right now (because of mama cat). So I'll hunt for you, because I can afford it. I'll be your silent guardian, your watchful protector. Love, #CatDad pic.twitter.com/JkaUpGzXCP

— Paris Zarcilla (@ParisZarcilla) May 30, 2018

Well, "fallen in love" doesn't do it justice. Zarcilla has discovered a new plane of existence and uses words like "nirvana" and "fatherhood" and "the hidden depths of my own capacity to love." He is obviously suffering the effects of either oxytocin or toxoplasmosis. I'll vote for oxytocin. There's nothing like a tiny new family member (or five) to make one's outlook change. Read the entire thread here, and bookmark Zarcilla's Twitter feed for updates.  -via Metafilter

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Walter Geoffrey is a French Bulldog who does not like to be ignored. Instead of barking to get attention, he'll sing an aria like he's on stage at the Metropolitan Opera House. See more Walter Geoffrey at his Instagram page. -via Tastefully Offensive

Before home video, movies would roll out slowly, arriving in small towns months after their release date. Since theaters usually had one screen, it would only play for a few days. If a film was a hit, it'd be re-released a few years later. A movie had to be pretty old before it hit TV, and if you missed it, you just missed it. But if you were fortunate enough to have your own projector, you could buy an illegal copy of your favorite film. It was neither simple nor cheap because there wasn't any easy way to reproduce bazillions of copies of 35mm or 16mm film, yet there were people who managed to get their hands on films and made quite a profit. Movie theater operator Woody Wise tells how he got started as a movie pirate.   

“When a movie breaks back then [in the 1960s], they put it in like a hundred theaters,” Wise explained. “And, of course, that’s film. That’s 100 films. After two or three weeks, they only need like 20 and [the movie studios] pay tax on every print that’s in the room... so they have to junk 80 prints—they have to throw them away. So you can kind of guess the story there, when I find out they’re throwing these things away....”

Wise said that when he found out they were just tossing film prints in the trash, he started to offer the low-level employees in the shipping department at the movie studios a few bucks to take them. At first, it was just a single movie from time to time.

“Well, that grew,” Wise said in an understated way. The guys in the film exchanges in Washington, D.C., his friends, were more than happy to make $25 here or there for something that the studio was just going to throw in the landfill.

Wise sold movies for up to $575, which would be over $4,000 in today's money. But then the FBI found him. Read about Wise's adventures in the movie business, both the legal and illegal side, at Paleofuture.  

(Image credit: Michelle Groskopf/Gizmodo)

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If you've been following the Star Wars saga, you've no doubt noticed how many times someone's hand gets lopped off. And occasionally a leg or two. It's easy to do and not have the victim bleed out, because a lightsaber cauterizes the wound instantly, which is also handy to avoid a lot of blood on screen. A surprise in the new movie Solo has even more implications for the survivability of severe amputations. This video from Screen Prism does a deep dive into amputations and the psychological symbolism they have. -via Laughing Squid

Somehow, I was under the impression that the entire city of Pompeii had been excavated from under the ash, rock, and lava of the 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Not so. A new project to extend the excavation has uncovered its first victim of the volcano, and his fate appears to foreshadow that of a certain coyote in a Looney Tunes cartoon.           

Initial observations would appear to indicate that the individual survived the first eruptive phase of the volcano, and subsequently sought salvation along the alley now covered in a thick layer of lapilli. The body was found at the height of the first floor of the adjacent building, and thus above the lapilli layer. Here he was struck by the dense pyroclastic flow which threw him back.

A formidable stone block (perhaps a door jamb), violently thrown by the volcanic cloud, collided with his upper body, crushing the highest part of the thorax and yet-to-be-identified head, which lie at a lower height of the lower limbs, and probably under the stone block.

The skeleton is identified as that of a male, over 30 years of age, with a bone disease that would have impeded his escape. Read more about the discovery at Parco Arceologico Di Pompei.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Pompeii - Parco Archeologico)

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The annual Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire, England, was this past weekend. People who have lost their minds chase a rolling wheel of cheese down a hill. The hill is a lot steeper than you'd think from the camera angle, but when people start running, you'll get an idea. They really aren't so much running as falling, and there were quite a few injuries: cuts, bruises, and at least one dislocated shoulder. There's also a video featuring closeups of certain participants set to a musical soundtrack here. The competition is so dangerous that the event no longer has an official governing body or sponsors. -via Tastefully Offensive

Twitter has a link that you can use to go back and see what your feed would have looked like ten years ago if you followed all the same accounts you do now. Try it here. I thought it was a silly idea until I actually read through the resulting feed. Here's what I noticed.

1. There are no pictures.
2. There are no politics, except from the 2008 presidential candidates themselves, and those were just announcing their next campaign stops.   
3. There are no long nested threads. If someone had more to say, they linked to their website.
4. Sadly, many of those links went to blogs that I once read daily, but are no longer active.

And the subjects! People were lamenting how expensive a Wii is. Britney Spears was contemplating a comeback. Gas was $4 a gallon. The Phoenix Mars lander was about to touch down. Digg had a new comment system. Times have changed. Andy Baio has some tips on how to maximize the process and change the date, so you can relive those Twitter moments from anytime since you joined. -via Nag on the Lake

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In most restaurants, you get a menu that tells you the name of the dishes or meals and how much each costs. If you're lucky, you get a description. But there are some places that get really creative to convey more information. The cocktail menu above is arranged like a scatterplot, so you can see how relatively strong and creative the drinks are. The menu below is a Venn diagram with all the possible breakfast sandwich combinations and prices.   

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Other menus have ranked charts for the spiciness, or size, or temperature of the offerings. Some are weird, like the beer board with prices that change due to supply and demand, and others are just fun. See a roundup of creative restaurant menus at Buzzfeed.

Macaroni and cheese has been an American (and Canadian) staple since Thomas Jefferson regaled the recipe he encountered in France. It expanded to nearly all American tables because it was simple, delicious, and most of all, cheap. After all, cheese itself was invented as a survival food to make milk last longer when there was nothing else to eat.   

Although processed cheese was invented in Switzerland, big American cheese producers—as part of our factory-scale, get-big-or-get-out philosophy of food production—bought into processed cheese so heavily that the very definition of “American cheese” has come to be a processed product. Many Americans may never have had a macaroni and cheese made with real cheese, and many who grew up on mac and cheese may never have had a version that wasn’t made with a powdered mix. While the most popular brand of boxed mac only just recently quietly removed artificial colors and preservatives from their “cheese sauce,” it seems, from a traditional roux-making perspective, still far removed from the original recipe.

Macaroni and cheese has been served as long as there has been a United States of America, but in a 20th-century economy driven by convenience packaging and industrialization, it was elevated to an ideal American food: Pasta and processed cheese are very cheap to make and easy to ship and store, and they certainly fill up a belly. It’s no wonder a hot gooey Velveeta mac and cheese tastes like a winner to so many Americans, even those attending a fancy contest in San Francisco.

The contest the author refers to is one in which the popular vote went to a chef whose recipe for macaroni and cheese included Velveeta, causing a scandal among the gourmet judges. Read about how Americans fell in love with macaroni and cheese at Smithsonian.

Hacking into new technology for nefarious reasons isn't exactly new. Only the technology is new. People scheming to profit from someone else's system is as old as time. Such a scheme befell France's government communication system in 1834, which amounted to an old-fashioned game of telephone, but was a great innovation for the time -long before actual telephones.   

The world’s first national data network was constructed in France during the 1790s. It was a mechanical telegraph system, consisting of chains of towers, each of which had a system of movable wooden arms on top. Different configurations of these arms corresponded to letters, numbers and other characters. Operators in each tower would adjust the arms to match the configuration of an adjacent tower, observed through a telescope, causing sequences of characters to ripple along the line. Messages could now be sent much faster than letters, whizzing from one end of France to the other in minutes. The network was reserved for government use but in 1834 two bankers, François and Joseph Blanc, devised a way to subvert it to their own ends.

The plan was genius: they conspired to add in a code that they could intercept ahead of their competitors in order to manipulate the market. The Blancs were groundbreakers, in that communications security was a completely new concept and there was no law yet against what they did. Read how they did it at 1843 Magazine. -via Boing Boing