A pair of conjoined twins were born with a shared pelvis, liver, and blood supply, but each had their own heart, lungs, and stomach. The one-year-old girls had three legs between them. Would it be possible to separate them? Pediatric surgeon Allan Goldstein at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston agreed to examine them and consider the possibility. He discovered that one of the girls had a congenital heart defect. And then while she was in Boston, she developed a respiratory tract infection, which endangered not only her life, but her sister's. 

But what did that mean for the upcoming operation? For one girl, her seriously ill sister posed a life-threatening danger. If she died, the other would live only a few more hours. For the other, however, the healthy sister was a life support. The 3-D model we made of the skeleton and the blood vessels of the twins clearly shows the artery running from one body to the other right across the lower chest, supplying it with oxygen-rich blood. We knew that if we separated them, we would have to cut that lifeline.

We sought advice from the pediatric ethics committee of our hospital. In many extensive conversations, I learned how important it is how to frame such a situation: Our intent was not to end the life of one girl, but rather to save the other's. The difference is subtle, because the result would be the same: We would push two living children into the operating room and leave it with only one.

Not all of us followed the argument. Three doctors -- two surgeons and one anesthesiologist -- stepped back. They said they could not participate in such a thing. The idea that our intervention would likely lead to the death of the weaker girl seemed unfathomable to them. We respected this decision.

Goldstein said the separation surgery was the first time he cried in the operating room. Read about the heartbreaking decisions involved in separating the twins at Der Spiegel. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: The New England Journal of Medicine)

The Herero people originated in Namibia, which was once called Southwest Africa under German colonial rule. A dozen Herero descendants who live in the U.S. met with officials at the American Museum of Natural History in New York last fall to see and discuss the remains of eight skeletons that had been in the museum's possession since 1924. They were Herero bones, a legacy of a dark time in history.

A little more than a hundred years ago, German colonists stole these bones from what they called German Southwest Africa, following a Herero rebellion, in 1904. General Lothar von Trotha had moved quickly and brutally to put down the uprising. “Within the German boundaries, every Herero, with or without firearms, with or without cattle, will be shot,” he wrote in his Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order. “I won’t accommodate women and children anymore.” In what has been called the first genocide of the twentieth century, colonists pushed Herero into the desert and forced others into concentration camps. Sixty-five thousand Herero died. Similar tactics killed ten thousand Nama men and women. (Both groups have called on Germany to pay reparations, and will appear in U.S. federal court on January 25th in an attempt to force the country to do so.)

The story of how the skeletons came to be in museum's collection is gruesome, but it's only one example of the many human remains that were collected during an age when museums, universities, and other institutions gathered human bones from anywhere and everywhere for their anthropology studies and exhibitions. Read about the Herero bones, and what's being done about human remains now, at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter

The 2016 thriller The Girl on the Train stars Emily Blunt as a divorced alcoholic who spends her time riding a train to spy on the people from her former, happier life. She witnesses events that might -or might not- be evidence in a murder. She tries to piece the mystery together, which puts her in danger, but her drinking habit make her memory unreliable. The movie was a box office hit, and Blunt received critical praise for her role. But there are things you might not know about The Girl on the Train.    

10. Emily Blunt was pregnant when they started shooting.

She didn’t tell anyone except one of her costars and by the time the film was done shooting she was five months along, and she had to tell them since her bump was quite noticeable.

9. Blunt would wear bloodshot contacts and cheek prostheses.

This was to give her the look of being severely inebriated and to make certain that it looked like the alcoholism had affected her in some way.

Find out more about The Girl on the Train at TVOM.

David Tran escaped Vietnam in 1978 and gave us Sriracha sauce. He concentrated on the product instead of building a successful company, but things happen. Huy Fong Foods is a wildly successful company in spite of their business practices -because the product is what consumers want.

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Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains how Tran, the serious cook and laid-back businessman, achieved incredible success without advertiusing, patents, copyright, or even the original rooster. -via Laughing Squid

The Brooklyn Bridge, which was called the East River Bridge at the time, opened to traffic on May 24, 1883. Newspapers were full of the festivities, and recorded the people who had the honor of being the first to travel across. Emily Warren Roebling, the chief engineer's wife, was the very first to cross in a horse-drawn carriage. Presumably her driver was technically first, but his name was not recorded. Two men staged a foot race when the general public was allowed to cross. But they didn't know that a cat had already crossed over the new bridge -a whole month before the official opening.  

C.W. McAuliffe, a New York saloon keeper and renowned Republican supporter, had requested the first cat to be persuaded to cross the new Brooklyn Bridge. Alderman James J. Mooney went in search among the stray Brooklyn cats, and found a grey cat “that was inclined to see the world.”

The surviving record does not explain why he wanted a cat to cross the bridge, but it probably had something to do with luck. Or maybe publicity for McAuliffe's saloon. And so a stray cat was found and persuaded to cross the bridge, which earned him the name Ned. Read Ned's story at The Hatching Cat.  

(Image redit: The early bird and the night owl from the NeatoShop)

1. I’m awful in the mornings. Can science fix me?

Maybe not, but it can explain why you’re such a sleepyhead (which may or may not be of interest to your boss). “There are morning people and evening people,” says Sonia Ancoli-Israel, director of education at UC-San Diego’s Sleep Medicine Center. “We call them larks and owls.” Which one you are has to do with your circadian system.

2. How does my circadian system work?

A region of 20,000 nerve cells in your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus keeps your body on schedule throughout the day, regulating everything from hormone levels to when you digest food.And, of course, when you feel sleepy.

3. How does that explain me?

A study from the Royal Veterinary College in the UK takes us to the plains of Africa, where a team studied the athleticism of predator and prey. They put biometric collars on five cheetahs, seven impala, nine lions, and seven zebras. Since the original paper is behind a paywall, we don't know exactly how they managed to do that, but it would have been interesting to see ("Here, kitty, kitty!"). The collars recorded the speed and acceleration of each animal during a chase. They recorded data from 5,562 chase incidents, none of them involving two animals that both wore collars. But they got some interesting findings. Believe it or not, it's to the prey's advantage to keep the speed down.  

As the new study notes, the prey animal establishes the speed and route taken during the chase, but it’s the predator’s job to upset that strategy. Lions and cheetahs actually like it when their prey tries to beat them in a flat-out race. At full tilt, a prey’s movement becomes predictable—it can’t speed up any further, or make quick turns. Predators also tend to be faster than their prey. But if the prey animal runs slowly, it has more options, like twists and turns to make its movements less predictable. Incredibly, prey animals move at about half of their maximum capable speed during a chase. Predators, meanwhile, are always running faster than their prey, trying to close the gap. But when their prey makes an evasive maneuver, they have to slow down to follow the twists and turns of their target.

Using computer models, the researchers confirmed that lower speed wasn’t a terrible disadvantage for prey, and that the best escape strategy is to turn at the last possible moment, taking a path the predator couldn’t possibly follow. Ironically, the faster the predator is going, the better it is for the prey—even if it’s caught. An exhausted predator may not be able to hold onto its prey.

Read more about the study of predators and their prey at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Flickr user Adam Tusk/tuskphoto.com)

We've posted videos of professional skier Candide Thovex before, and they are always impressive. But the amazing Alpine skier doesn't even need snow to impress us!

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Watch him ski over sand, dirt, grass, volcanic ash, rock, bricks, brush, and water in some of the most beautiful places on earth. And he gets serious air when the mood strikes him. All for a car ad. But when you've got a sponsor who'll send you to such places, you go! -Thanks, Ken D!

It's something you think about every time you get on an airline flight. What if the door opens while we're flying? What if something were to affect the structural integrity of the plane? Our paranoid thoughts go to that one plane, you know the one. There was only one fatality because the passengers had their seatbelts on, but a flight attendant got sucked out of the plane at an altitude of seven miles. That's the nightmare, but it's only the worst of the bad things that can happen if your plane pops open.   

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According to AsapSCIENCE, the good news is that it's not likely to happen. And as usual, they tell us we are safer flying than driving. That's honestly not much comfort, because most of us have experienced our share of auto accidents already. You can't help but wonder if your number will come up while you're too far from the ground to survive.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Action Figure Therapy Store sells custom built but unlicensed mini figures. As such, they cannot use the real names of the characters, or the set of building blocks that they fit into, but you know them. The newest is the Calm Bearded Tree Enthusiast Painter Dude. Hmm, I wonder who this is modeled after? He joins other fabulously-named products like Wisecracking Burned Up Cancer Survivor Assassin Guy Minibrick Figure and Space Orphan With Daddy Issues And Green Laser Sword. 

Oh, you've got to read the description on the Worst “Bring Your Kid To Work Day” Ever Minifigure Set.

It’s like all you were trying to do was bring your kid up to the fancy, planet-killing space station where you work, show him off to some of your co-workers, and see if had any interest in pursuing the family business.

Then the next thing you know he’s trying to decapitate your boss with his green laser sword, things get crazy, and you get into huge battle.

That's just the beginning. The rest of the story is there, if you can decipher it. -via Boing Boing

Although slavery continued in the United States until the end of the Civil War, the importation of slaves from Africa was banned in 1807. By the 1850s, the practice was dead, but Mobile, Alabama, businessman Timothy Meaher commissioned the ship Clotilda, captained by William Foster, to bring in slaves to Mobile.

With the nation edging closer to civil war over the slavery issue, Alabama steamboat captain and plantation owner Timothy Meaher made an infamous bet that he could sneak slaves into the country, right under the noses of federal troops at the twin forts that guarded the mouth of Mobile Bay. Historian Sylvianne Diouf traced the evolution of the wicked scheme and the resulting journey in her excellent book, Dreams of Africa in Alabama, published in 2007. Attempts to contact Diouf were unsuccessful.

The book primarily focuses on the story of the captives, who were freed just five years after they were enslaved, thanks to the end of the Civil War. The group, 110 strong, originally asked their captor, Meaher, to pay for passage back to Africa. After he refused, they appealed to the U.S. government, again to no avail. Ultimately, some members of the group bought a small piece of land north of Mobile from Meaher and created a community called Africatown, where some of the descendants of the original slaves still live. They spoke their native tongue, farmed using traditional African methods, and ran their own school.

Upon successful completion of the smuggling operation, Foster burned and sank the ship to hide the evidence. The Clotilda wasn't seen again -until now. A reporter for Al.com believes he has found the wreckage of the Clotilda. Read the story of the Clotilda's last run and its rediscovery. -via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Leigh T Harrell)

We've told you that the most remote place on earth is Tristan da Cunha, because the island is so far from any civilized land mass and difficult to travel to. There is a different way of looking at inaccessibility. What is termed a Pole of Inaccessibility (POI) is the spot on a land mass that is furthest from any coastline. The term was coined in 1920, when even South Dakota had trains and cars, so it may seem like a nonsensical name. But the idea was developed around the exploration of the North and South Poles. The POI of North America is in Bennett County, South Dakota, 1639.623 km (1019 miles) from all three of the nearest oceans. Read about the development of the POI and where it is on all the continents at the ESRI Map Journal. -via TYWKIWDBI   
 

If you were around in the 1970s, you know that there were so many "good old boy with a vehicle" movies (and TV shows) that it was hard to tell them apart. Then in 1978, Every Which Way But Loose took that formula and added Dirty Harry and an orangutan. It couldn't miss. The movie was a light comedy, but it was an enormous hit. Even 40 years later, Every Which Way But Loose is on the list of the top 200 highest grossing films of all time. You might want to learn more about it.  

8. The movie was originally intended for Burt Reynolds.

The film came almost right on the heels of Smokey and the Bandit and was geared to take advantage of that kind of success. But Burt turned it down.

7. This was Eastwood’s first pure comedy film.

Up this point his movies had a bit of comedy in them but it was coincidental and not the main drive of the film.

There's more from behind the scenes of Every Which Way But Loose at TVOM.

Not impressed with TV  anymore? The problem might be that you watch too much TV. Maybe you should go to church, or a bar, or join a club. Or just watch a show about people who know how to make friends better than you do. That's impressive. This is the latest comic from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.

Would you drive across this bridge? It's one lane wide with no railings whatsoever, too narrow to allow for the slightest variance from the path. The surface is not at all smooth, and the wooden planks can get slippery when frost settles.   

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This is the Vitim River Bridge in Siberia. It once carried trains, which explains why it's so narrow. Not many drivers try it, but if you cross it successfully, you can join a Facebook group for those who have accomplished the feat.  -via Digg