With our advanced dental technology and space-age materials, it's easy for us to think that using real teeth for dentures is gross. But for our dentally-challenged ancestors, it was a choice between that or dentures made of something else that look or work right, or just doing without teeth. They could have told themselves that these human teeth came from dental extractions instead of dead bodies, but we know the truth.

Such ghoulish dentures are usually referred to as “Waterloo teeth,” thanks to the practice of yanking perfectly good teeth from battlefield casualties. No one is quite sure where that name originally came from, and it’s even a bit misleading. But none of that makes the history of humans filling their mouths with the teeth of other humans any less fascinating.

“It’s kind of a misnomer, because the Waterloo battle was in 1815, and human teeth were in use in dentures already,” says Andrew Spielman, associate dean for academic affairs at the NYU School of Dentistry. According to Spielman, human teeth had been used in dentures for at least a century before the Battle of Waterloo, and were routinely culled from battlefields since at least the French Revolution in the late 1700s.

Read about the practice of using human teeth for dentures, where they came from and how they worked, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Wellcome Collection)

Let's take a fun little personality test to determine how many children you should have. Honestly, you should have the number of children that you want and have the resources to nurture. The quiz, by Jill Harness, asks questions that have little to do with children but explores your preferences in a variety of areas. What would it say about me?

Um, okay. I have seven children, but they are all grown. I do not wish to have any more, so I guess the quiz is right. Was it because I like Led Zeppelin? Was is because I haven't read Harry Potter? Take the test yourself and see what it says about you!    

 

Everyone goes through a rebellious phase. You know, that moment when daddy's little girl decides that booze, boys, and the beach are a lot more fun than the old man ever was. And, if you're lucky, you'll be able to look back on those years and laugh. If you're less lucky, you spent those years on a reality show, so for the rest of time, millions of strangers can look back on them and laugh instead. But, hey, it could be worse. You could be responsible for the fall of Western Civilization, just like Justa Grata Honoria, the Roman princess whose wild ways and naked ambition set off a chain reaction that culminated in the destruction of the Roman Empire.

Barely Regal

There are reasons that fictional characters do things that no one in real life does. Groups of real people never sit at half a round table because there is no camera or audience. But there are so many odd behaviors in movies and on TV that can get under your skin once you notice how often it happens.

You've probably noticed the police on all the Law & Order incarnations talk to witnesses who never stop working. A normal person will stop and pay attention when the cops want a word with them. But a director early on thought that was too boring, so every witness continues to lift boxes or sweep the floor or whatever while they give their eyewitness account. That really bothered me before I read the explanation somewhere a few years ago.

Other folks are bothered by these weird human behaviors, and they contributed a bunch of them to Cracked "pictofacts" post about how fictional characters are just different from normal human beings. See 34 of them at Cracked.

Simon's Cat is stuck way up in a tree and is afraid to come down! So, like any good cat owner, Simon goes up to get him, but finds it's pretty scary up there. The cat, however, likes the company. The cat would stay up there all night, playing with his human! 

(YouTube link)

Simon Tofield says the latest Simon's Cat video is a true story. That's easy to believe, at least to the rest of us cat people.

There are plenty of adages about how to be happy, like "Stop and smell the roses," and "Learn to find joy in what you have." These can be boiled down to "lower your expectations," which is a sure-fire way to make yourself feel better about not achieving all that you had hoped for. Eventually, you realize you're not going to get a PhD, scale the world's highest mountain, or write a bestseller. And that's okay, because you managed to get out of bed this morning. There are people who can't do that. This is the latest comic from Chris at Lunarbaboon.

The roads were covered with ice, and most folks in Swanage, Dorset, UK, knew that it would be useless to try to drive up this fairly steep hill. So they walked instead. Or tried to. It's a case of one step forward and ten steps back. They should have worn their Yaktrax on that day. At least they aren't rolling a rock uphill, like Sisyphus.

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Paul Dubbelman, the guy recording the video is obviously warm and dry in his home upstairs, and feels free to laugh at their misery. His description is "The Swanage ice dancing team getting in some practise for the next winter Olympics". Since most of it is silent, here's a recommended soundtrack.  -via Boing Boing

(YouTube link)

How many languages can a person learn? How do language rules change over time? What are the most confusing English grammar rules? What is the real definition of "irony"? How does a new word get into our dictionaries? What are linguistics? And how does one begin to invent a new language? These are some of the questions tackled in the newest episode of the Mental Floss series Scatterbrained.

It's been more than a year now since astronaut Scott Kelly returned to earth after spending a year on the International Space Station. He and his identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, are the subject of a unique twin study comparing the changes in Scott's health while using Mark as a control. NASA is still preparing a report on the long-term findings, but have released some information on the effects of a year in space.

Scott's telomeres — or the ends of chromosomes that shorten as people get older — got a lot longer in space. This finding was known in 2017, but investigators confirmed it and also discovered that most of the telomeres got shorter again within two days of Scott's landing.

About 7 percent of Scott's genes may have longer-term changes in expression after spaceflight, in areas such as DNA repair, the immune system, how bones are formed, hypoxia (an oxygen deficiency in the tissues) and hypercapnia (excessive carbon dioxide in the bloodstream). The other 93 percent of his genes quickly returned to normal.

Scott had no significant cognitive performance decline in space after one year, compared with Mark or with typical astronauts who fly a six-month mission. Investigators did, however, see pronounced decreases in Scott's cognitive speed and accuracy after he landed. This might have happened because of "re-exposure and adjustment to Earth’s gravity, and the busy schedule that enveloped Scott after his mission," NASA officials said.

The researchers also saw that spaceflight is linked with nutrient shifts, oxygen deprivation stress and more inflammation. They gathered the evidence after looking at "large numbers" of proteins (chains of amino acids), cytokines (substances secreted by cells in the immune system) and metabolites (substances related to metabolism) in Scott's body.

If these effects turn out to be permanent, it could have implications for long space journeys, such as travel to Mars. Remember how Ray Bradbury's Mars colonists changed into Martians in more than name. And a more theoretical question arises: if one twin's DNA changes, are Mark and Scott still identical? Read more about the astronaut twin research at Space.com. -via Metafilter

"Dagnabbit" is a hilarious word that you probably learned from Yosemite Sam. It's a pseudo-swear word you can use in public when you don't want to be technically blasphemous, like gosh, golly, gee, and other substitutes. But in even broader terms, it's a "taboo deformation," and the term applies to more words than you might think.   

“Taboo deformation is one possible way for a word to change its meaning,” says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky who specializes in Indo-European languages. Basically, we are scared of the true names of certain beings or concepts, because to use them might mean we summon them, which we don’t want, or anger them, which we definitely don’t want, or simply make other humans mad at us, which is slightly less bad but still not ideal. The true name is powerful, and we normal humans can’t handle that power. So we avoid using the true name, but sometimes we still need to communicate with each other about those beings or concepts. That means we have to figure out a way to talk about something without using the actual word for it.

You can understand the concept when it applies to one's deity, or even multiple deities, but it also applied to more secular names, like "bear" and "wolf." Dan Nosowitz gives us a breakdown of how those words came to us through taboo deformations, as well as other terms such as "dagnabbit."

(Illustration: Aida Amer)

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns 85 years old today. She will probably celebrate by doing pushups. In honor of her birthday, Mental Floss has a list of 15 things you should know about the Notorious RBG, which give an overview of her life story. It's fascinating.

1. THE INJUSTICE HER MOTHER FACED LEFT A LASTING IMPRESSION.

Celia Bader, née Amster, died the day before Ginsburg’s high school graduation. But in their short time together, Celia managed to instill in her daughter that an education was not something to be taken for granted. Celia herself—whom Ginsburg regularly, according to Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s Notorious RBG, called the most intelligent person she’d ever known—went to work at age 15 in order to help put her brother through college.

At the 1993 White House press conference announcing her nomination to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg wrapped up her remarks with an emotional tribute to the woman who was never allowed to reach her full potential. “I have a last thank-you,” she told the crowd assembled. “It’s to my mother. My mother was the bravest, strongest person I have ever known, who was taken from me much too soon. I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons.”

2. IT WASN’T EXACTLY SMOOTH SAILING FOR GINSBURG, EITHER.

As newlyweds, Ginsburg and her husband, Marty, relocated to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Marty was expected to fulfill his Army Reserve duties for the next two years. Ruth took the civil service exam and qualified to be a claims adjustor—but then made the mistake of mentioning that she was three months pregnant with their daughter, Jane. Suddenly, RBG’s civil service ranking was reduced, and with it, her title and pay. (She learned a valuable lesson from the experience, and during her second pregnancy—which coincided with her first year as a professor at Rutgers University—she did everything she could to conceal the fact that she was expecting.)

In 1956, Ginsburg was one of just nine female students matriculating at Harvard Law School. The dean of the Law School at the time, Erwin Griswold, hosted a dinner for the women—and at the end of the meal, asked each of them to go around and share how it was they justified taking a spot that would otherwise have gone to a man. Years later—when word got back to Griswold that his former student enjoyed recounting this tale on the lecture circuit—he insisted that it had all been in good fun.

Read more of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's story, told in list form, at Mental Floss.

Mark Hamill posted a Tweet that illustrates how much Luke Skywalker action figures have changed over the years. Of course they have. The character has aged, and the tech involved in making the dolls has also changed. There were different action figures produced for every movie, and at different price points. Some are officially lisenced and others are knockoffs.  

Luke How Far I've Come:
A) Generic Lemon-Haired Ken Doll Luke
B) Black-Haired Semi-Conscious Adult-Diaper Luke
C) Pumped-Up Roid-Rage With Balcony You Could Do Shakespeare From Luke
D) Senior Citizen Jedi Pension-Plan Future Force-Ghost Luke#CollectEmAll pic.twitter.com/5q820fjTv5

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) March 14, 2018

But then you have to stop and think -is there any other person on earth who's had that many dolls made in their likeness? Ever? To get a breathtaking glimpse of how many there have been, check out the GIS. And that's just action figures; there are also the LEGO minifigs, the Funko dolls, and the tiny Lukes that fit into spaceships.



(via Uproxx)

The following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

(Image credit: Virginia State Parks)

Do you have a ring on your finger? Is it made from gold, silver, platinum, or another natural metal? Then ponder this: The metal in that ring on your finger is older than the planet you’re standing on.

WHAT IS “METAL”?

Scientifically speaking, metals are naturally occurring chemical elements that are typically hard, lustrous, and good conductors of both heat and electricity. Examples include iron, gold, silver, copper, zinc, nickel, etc., but also elements we don’t normally think of as metals. One is sodium- a metal we regularly eat: Sodium is a soft, silvery white metal that commonly bonds with the element chlorine to form sodium chloride, or common salt.

Another is astatine, which was discovered in 1940 in a lab, where it was created artificially. It wasn’t discovered in nature until 1943. Astatine is highly radioactive, and only a single ounce of it is believed to exist -in total- on Earth. Of the 118 known chemical elements in existence, 88 of them are metals.

REAL ALCHEMY

So, where did all these metals come from? Here’s a very simplified explanation:

All elements, including metals, are made of the same stuff: atomic material—electrons, neutrons, and protons. Atoms of different elements can be distinguished from one another by the number of protons they contain. (The number of neutrons and electrons can vary even among atoms of the same element.) For example, a hydrogen atom contains just one proton. A gold atom has 79. This is true of every one of the countless hydrogen and gold atoms in the universe.

If you could find a way to mash 79 hydrogen atoms together into one atom, you’d have an atom with 79 protons, and therefore you’d have a gold atom. And that’s almost exactly what happens… except it happens inside stars.

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THAR STARS

Roughly 13.7 billion years ago, matter first appeared in the form of atoms of the two lightest elements: hydrogen, with one proton, and helium, with two. They remain, by far, the most abundant elements in the universe.

The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.

Like us, you probably can’t remember a world without highways—a time before there were gas stations, fast-food places, or shopping centers. Well, it all had to start somewhere…and this is where.

WHERE’S THE HORSE?

The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was in full swing when a gentleman walked up to a contraption that looked like a metal carriage and wound the crank on its front end. The machine rumbled and grumbled and coughed out black smoke. Then the man got into the thing and -to the amazement of onlookers- started driving it around the fair grounds. What was so strange about that? The metal carriage didn’t have a horse to pull it. It was a horseless carriage, one with an internal-combustion engine that ran on gasoline. The public’s response: They were dumbfounded, but most people loved it. Suddenly the country had a new toy, and despite the naysayers who protested against the new “devil wagon,” the car was here to stay.

STALLED CARS

Auto manufacturers and investors cropped up almost overnight. In just the first four months of 1899, investors poured $388 million (about $11 billion today) into new automobile companies; by the turn of the century, more than 8,000 cars were puttering around the United States. But there was still nothing in the way of the necessary infrastructure: no gas stations, traffic lights, mechanic’s shops, or -most importantly- roads. The existing throughways were deeply rutted wagon trails that meandered into the countryside from the centers of towns and often simply ended. During the winter months, these “roads” became so unusable that most early auto owners drained their radiators and put the machines in their barns until spring.

Something had to be done about America’s roads, but public funds weren’t forthcoming. The federal government saw the car as a novelty and refused to allocate funds for road building. By 1905, when the first modern gasoline filling station appeared, there still wasn’t a single mile of paved rural road in the entire country. And, as Henry Ford’s assembly line process drove down manufacturing costs, the cars kept coming. Within five years, more than half a million cars were sputtering around with nary a real road to drive on.

A few days ago, zoos and aquariums began giving their animals Amazon-style ratings on Twitter. As more and more reviews came in, biologists, science labs, and universities got involved. Everyday people started rating their pets and favorite species, too.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ YOU WONT BE DISAPPOINTED
This stylish little unit is amazing. Sound quality A+. No distortion at full volume but bass is a little weak. Top rotates which is a plus. #rateaspecies pic.twitter.com/OYaWOfzosA

— Oregon Zoo (@OregonZoo) March 9, 2018

⭐️NOT WHAT I ORDERED
I ordered a duck, otter, and beaver bundle apparently there was some kind of freak accident in shipping or something. Contacted shipper, they claim no error. Bad seller. NEVER BUYING AGAIN!#rateaspecies pic.twitter.com/e13u4K657F

— Tyger (@TygerWDR) March 9, 2018

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ PRAYING THEY KEEP MAKING THESE
As seen on @Oatmeal. Full set is the ultimate seafood multi-tool: tenderizes, slices and serves in milliseconds! Comes in all colors plus some you can’t see.#rateaspecies pic.twitter.com/vm2YhrBihR

— Monterey Bay Aquarium (@MontereyAq) March 9, 2018

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 Great product!
Speedy deliver. Makes a weird chirping sound instead of the roar as advertised, but not a deal breaker. Runs efficiently - would recommend. #rateaspecies pic.twitter.com/9uAvnKw4AX

— National Zoo & Aqua (@national_zoo) March 14, 2018

⭐ very unsatisfied with the shipping. I ordered a frog and what I got was this big melted pile. #rateaspecies pic.twitter.com/6pj9D2HcED

— Slartibartfast (@shtoopy) March 9, 2018

You can see a ton of these as they come in with the Twitter hashtag #rateaspecies or see a roundup of some really funny examples at Buzzfeed.