An HVAC guy in Plant City, Florida, tracked down a disconnected duct in a house he was working on last month and discovered a secret room in the attic above the garage. The video contains some NSFW language.

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From the video description:

After having the video up for a day, people were fascinated by it and started sharing it and a man came to me with information about the room and who lived there. He told me of a boy named R.J. Moore and his mother Dee Dee Moore, better known as the lottery killer. Later, someone sent me more screenshots of the plates that were hung in the secret room confirming they belonged to Dee Dee Moore. I'm not sure what the secret room was used for, but if I had to guess I would guess it was from hiding out from the police."

Dee Dee Moore was convicted of the 2009 murder of lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare. Although the story is intriguing, I haven't found anything to confirm whether the house in the video was Shakespeare's home or the property where his body was found, or anything saying that Dee Dee Moore ever hid from police. It's possible this was a cubbyhole for someone who just didn't want anyone to know he'd started collecting crime memorabilia. -via Laughing Squid

We have been learning a lot about Neanderthals in the past few years, particularly about how they left genetic evidence that they interbred with modern humans. You may be surprised to learn that most of that knowledge came from sequencing the genes of four Neanderthals, only one of whom had DNA good enough to identify variations in the genome. But now there is another- a Neanderthal woman found in Croatia who died 52,000 years ago has yielded a full genome to study. Scientists named her Vindija 33.19. And that process highlights the difficulty in hanging assumptions on Neanderthals from such a small sample size.   

Based on previous archaeological and genetic evidence, archaeologists and anthropologists suspected that Neanderthals were thinly dispersed across Europe and Asia. The lack of genetic diversity (low heterozygosity) in the Vindija 33.19 specimen affirms these earlier findings, showing that Neanderthals “lived in small and isolated populations” and “with an effective population size of around 3,000 individuals,” the researchers write in their study.

The earlier genomic analysis of the female Altai Neanderthal showed that her parents were half-siblings, which got scientists thinking that Neanderthals made it a habit of breeding with immediate family members. But the Vindija 33.19 genome is different; her parents were not as closely related, so we can no longer say that extreme inbreeding is a common fixture of the Neanderthals. That said, the Croatian Neanderthal shared a maternal ancestor with three other individuals found in the Vindija Cave (whose genomes aren’t nearly as complete).

No, we shouldn't assume anything is common about a culture from a sample size of one. However, the new genome shows that modern humans carry a few more Neanderthal genes than we previously thought, and that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals crossbred as far back as 100,000 years ago. Read more about Vindija 33.19 and the new findings at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Neozoon)

A few days ago, we learned the history of making human skeletons. In 19th-century Britain, human skeletons were often taken from criminals, who were either executed or died in prison. If you purchased a skeleton, it could have been the leftovers of a medical school dissection, and might originally have belonged to a petty thief, a murderer, or someone who was mentally deranged.  

In the mid-19th century William Hicks, the mayor of Bodmin, in Cornwall, hosted a dinner party.  As the story goes, rather than entertaining his guests with music or poetry, he chose to prank his guests with a fake seance.  He brought in the skeletal remains of a purported witch and encouraged his guests to ask it yes or no questions.   In response, the spirit of the witch would supposedly rap its responses with the extra bones placed in front of the witch’s remains.  What he didn’t tell them was that the person doing knocking was a friend who was hidden nearby.

Everything that night was going to plan until the host and partygoers encountered actual paranormal activity.  According to Cecil Williamson, the founder of The Museum of Witchcraft, the bones used for the rapping were “seized by the poltergeist force on that fateful night of the spoof seance organised by William Hicks and with which the assembled party guests were beaten about the head and shoulders.”

The bones were traced back to Joan Wytte, who was called the "Fighting Fairy Woman" because she was short and had a bad temper. Did that bad temper carry on after death? Read about Joan Wytte and the eventual disposition of her remains at Strange Remains. -via Strange Company

G. Herman Gottlieb got a bright idea in 1909. He went to the woods in Manhattan (there were apparently still woods in Manhattan then) and picked two large baskets of catnip. He then went door-to-door on Fifth Avenue to sell catnip to wealthy cat owners. Gottlieb did not consider the many New York street cats that picked up on the scent of freshly-picked catnip. Before too long, there were 30 or 40 cats following him.   

When Mr. Gottlieb saw Police Sergeant John F. Higgins on 114th Street, he cried out with joy. At last, he thought, someone could help him disperse the band of felines. Sergeant Higgins wasn’t so kind though, and he immediately arrested the catnip peddler for causing a crowd to collect, which was against the law.

“Why don’t you arrest the catnip?” Gottlieb asked. “That is collecting the crowd. Not I.”

“Come on, before the cats from the Bronx and Jersey get here,” Higgins said, leading Gottlieb to the station house on East 104th Street. Several cats followed the men to the station house and made themselves at home inside while Sergeant Higgins reported the arrest to Lieutenant Lasky.

An argument ensued between Lasky and Higgins on whether the law against collecting a crowd was limited to a human crowd or could be applicable to cats. Meanwhile, the station cat defended his territory against the "crowd" that followed Gottlieb into the police station. The incident made the papers up and down the eastern seaboard. Read the tale of the catnip caper at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

The shortest regularly-scheduled commercial flight in the world is operated by Scottish airline Loganair. It runs between the islands of Westray and Papa Westray in the Orkney Islands. The entire flight takes 80 seconds to cross less than two miles. This video is three times as long as the flight. Passengers don't even have time to get scared. But then again, the plane doesn't climb all that high and it doesn't go very fast, either, for an airline.

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The flight is a lifeline for the fewer than 100 people who live on Papa Westray, because there is no bridge between the islands, and the ferry is quite time-consuming. It's almost like a city bus service. There's no mention of the airfare, so I went to Loganair's website and did not find this flight listed for advance reservations. I guess you have to be there, like getting on a bus.  -via Digg

"I don't mean to bother you but could I get a signature please?"

Redditor minipiemix dressed her pit bull in a UPS costume, but everyone else thought it should be PUPS delivery service. Her name is Peanut, and she's a sweetheart. She's not all that conscientious about her job, though.

"Hi there! Don't worry, your package is only slightly crushed!"

In fact, Peanut wrecked the entire costume not long after the pictures were taken. No matter, the moment was recorded for posterity.

When he said that, I knew there was something wrong. A gap in logic? No, he was perfectly honest in what he said, but what he meant went right over her head. Oh well, at least she had thirty years before she figured out his scheme. The thing is, even if he didn't live any longer by choosing to marry her, it probably still felt like eternity. This comic is from the deranged mind of Zack Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. 

The area around Lake Minnewanka in Alberta has been settled continuously for at least 13,000 years. One of those settlements was Minnewanka Landing, which thrived in the summer with tourists and campers. There were hotels, restaurants, tour guides, and boating. But it's all gone now. Well, the people are all gone. The town itself survives at the bottom of Lake Minnewanka. Dams were built there three times: in 1895, 1912, and 1941. It was the 1941 dam that finally flooded Minnewanka Landing.

Today the reservoir hides a secret that many people will never get the chance to experience—unless they're scuba divers, that is. Thanks to Lake Minnewanka’s glacier-fed, ice-cold waters, many structures of the former resort town still remain intact, including house and hotel foundations, wharves, an oven, a chimney, a cellar, bridge pilings and sidewalks. (A full list of sites is available here.) Even the footings from the town’s original dam, built by the federal government in 1895, along with the footings from the dam built in 1912, remain visible.

Even if you're not a scuba diver, you can take a tour of Minnewanka Landing in a video at Smithsonian.

The new animation from Simon Tofield is this year's Halloween cartoon. The cat is up in the attic, and he doesn't want to leave. I've dealt with that situation. You don't want your cat to climb the ladder to the attic- you'll never find him again!

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The attic can be a scary place, especially when the lights go out. It's full of spiders! After the new cartoon, there's a couple more classic Simon's Cat stories in this video.  -via Tastefully Offensive

King Louis XIV was upset that so many members of the French nobility were dying off in a hurry. It started in the late 1660s. Autopsies showed the victims' insides were blackened, as it they were rotting. Were they poisoned? Was it witchcraft? At the time, there was only a short leap from alchemy to witchcraft to crime. The king established a special tribunal to investigate a prosecute the murders.  

The “Affair of the Poisons,” as it came to be known, is a misleading name for one of the largest witch trials in modern history. Over just five years, from 1677 to 1682, 319 subpoenas were issued, 194 individuals arrested, and 36 executed (with perhaps dozens more dead from suicide, or in prison or exile). In total, it claimed between two and three times as many lives as the Salem witch trials across the Atlantic, 10 years later. It began with what appeared to be an isolated case, but then door after door after door opened, eventually implicating rich and poor alike.

As the events unfolded, suspects were tortured before being killed, and their confessions implicated others, and scandals among the nobility were uncovered. There was definitely some rotten things going on underneath all that wealth and power. You can read an account of the Affair of the Poisons at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Wellcome Library, London)

The award-winning 2009 independent film 500 Days of Summer is a romance that paired Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. What could be cuter than that? Despite the star power, the narrative is experimental, and it worked. If you liked 500 Days of Summer, you'll want to learn more about it.  

6. One of the screenwriters claimed that three-quarters of the movie is about stuff that actually happened to him.

It seems reasonable to think that screenwriters will add in something from their own experience every once in a while just to spice things up.

5. The coloring and mood tend to change in accordance with how each day is going.

For good days the mood would be upbeat and the colors would be bright, for bad days it would be opposite and everything would look a bit dreary.

Be warned that there are spoilers in the trivia list, but otherwise you'll want to read 10 Things You Didn’t Know about 500 Days of Summer.  

A few seconds of a new movie called Batman Ninja were unveiled at New York Comic Con on Thursday. The Warner Bros. movie is an anime adventure in which Batman and his regular cast of characters are set in medieval Japan. Director Jumpei Mizusaki spoke about the movie, and Charles Pulliam-Moore gives us a report at io9.

Picture Batman, decked out in shogun’s armor and wielding a katana, charging at the Joker, who’s also brandishing a sword, but draped in a fanciful, ancient Japanese courtier’s outfit that’s overflowing with tattered ruffles that bounce along with his maniacal laugh.

On a tiled roof, the pair crash and slash at one another in a dizzying flow of gorgeous swordsmanship and the Joker taunts Batman that, even in this unfamiliar time and place, he’s still every bit the bloodthirsty killer he was in Gotham.

He says in a comment,

During the panel, Mizusaki actually made a point of emphasizing that the film is very much a Japanese production that’s about how Japan sees Batman rather than how Batman sees Japan.

Read what we know about Batman Ninja so far at io9.

When you are a child, life is like a race to the finish line, meaning adulthood. My children are adults, but they still act as if their lives are a race to the next goal: a degree, a job in their chosen field, marriage, etc. It's what they are used to. I have to remind them to slow down and remember they are living their lives right now, and achieving those goals won't make them any more complete than they already are. We could all take a lesson from trees, and never stop growing. This comic is from John McNamee at Pie Comic.

Two kittens try to squeeze through a small hole in a cardboard box at the same time. They're babies, so they don't know it would be more efficient to take turns. But soon you'll see that taking turns doesn't amount to much when you see how many more kittens there are!

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And they kept coming. I was beginning to think that some human was putting the kittens back in the box out of camera range, so we'd keep seeing the same kittens go through the hole. If not, there are ten kittens. -via Tastefully Offensive

A great costume that looks exactly like some pop culture character might win you first prize at your local costume contest, but will only take you so far on the internet. To be both viral and memorable, it takes a clever joke. The drawback is that you will spend all evening on Halloween explaining your costume to the many folks who just don't get it, especially after a few drinks. Here are some pun costumes that may make you groan, but you'll laugh a little, too.  

1. Morticia and Gomez

SavioSega and his wife went all out with their couples costume for Halloween last year. The comments they got said that he has a cigar, but she's smokin'. In case you are wondering why they are wearing hula hoops with tennis balls, surely you recognize the Atoms Family.

2. Sister Testa and Sister Norris

Puns can became a habit -a bad habit. As if two dudes dressed as nuns wouldn't be funny enough, they had to wear name tags to make sure everyone knew they were nun Chucks. It would have been funny if they had a chain linking the two of them together, but I'm sure they already had enough to explain that night.

3. Your "Date"