Arsenic has been the go-to poison for people wanting to get rid of family members for centuries. It's odorless, tasteless, produces symptoms of illness that can be attributed to natural causes, and for most of history, hard to detect after the fact. When divorce was difficult, arsenic was easy. Tests were eventually developed to detect arsenic in a human body, but they weren't reliable enough to persuade juries in cases without additional evidence. That is, until British chemist James Marsh developed the Marsh test in 1836, which made its dramatic courtroom debut a few years later.    

Perhaps the most famous use of Marsh’s test was in the trial of Marie Lafarge in 1840, in which the defendant stood accused of poisoning her husband. Young Marie had entered an arranged marriage with Charles Lafarge believing him to be a wealthy, cultured businessman, and when she found out he was in fact a boorish clod with a run-down chateau, rough sexual habits and substantial debt, she got to putting arsenic in his food. (Friends mentioned that they’d heard her asking casually about mourning fashions: How long did you have to wear black, again?) By the time Charles came to realize his wife’s devotion to home cooking was not a loving gesture, it was too late.

A back-and-forth festival of forensic testing ensued: local scientists first analyzed the dead man’s beverages, stomach tissue and vomit; and while they claimed to have found arsenic, their glassware broke during testing. Moreover, defense counsel was upset at use of outdated techniques, and called in Mateu Orfila, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine and the era’s premier toxicologist, who confirmed that only the Marsh test would be credible in court.

At the time, people were skeptical of forensic scientists, particularly when a defendant's life was at stake. Testimony about test results wasn't enough; they wanted to see the test performed. So what was left of the victim's body was brought into the court for the Marsh test, resulting in trial spectators buying 500 bottles of smelling salts. Read what happened at that trial, and how the results influenced forensic science, at Atlas Obscura.

NASA's Juno probe entered orbit around Jupiter a year ago, and has been gathering data ever since. Now the space agency is releasing spectacular images, such as this one showing Juptier's south pole. It is a composite of several images, and shows multiple cyclones up to 600 miles in diameter raging around the pole.  

“We knew, going in, that Jupiter would throw us some curves,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “But now that we are here we are finding that Jupiter can throw the heat, as well as knuckleballs and sliders. There is so much going on here that we didn’t expect that we have had to take a step back and begin to rethink of this as a whole new Jupiter.”

Among the findings that challenge assumptions are those provided by Juno’s imager, JunoCam. The images show both of Jupiter's poles are covered in Earth-sized swirling storms that are densely clustered and rubbing together.

“We're puzzled as to how they could be formed, how stable the configuration is, and why Jupiter’s north pole doesn't look like the south pole,” said Bolton. “We're questioning whether this is a dynamic system, and are we seeing just one stage, and over the next year, we're going to watch it disappear, or is this a stable configuration and these storms are circulating around one another?”

As more of the data is analyzed, we are liable to find out more amazing things about the largest planet in our solar system. Read more about the Juno mission and what it's learning about Jupiter at NASA.

(Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles)

In action movies, we hear "No time to explain!" a lot, because the audience already knows the story, and there's no reason to waste time explaining it all again to a character who was out of the loop. But what if the audience were also out of the loop? This poor guy is suddenly caught up in an adventure he doesn't understand, involving tinfoil hats, a time machine, aliens, and murder. We don't understand it, either. The two protagonists immediately encounter a paradox when they travel backward in time and encounter themselves. But there's no time to explain!

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The operative idea here is when they go back in time ten minutes, and the clueless partner says, "Why didn't you set it to 15 minutes back so we's have five minutes to talk?" Yeah, that would have required an explanation that made sense, so no. Oh, there may be more of the story to come, or maybe not. -via Digg

You may not be aware of how many first run TV shows feature vampires -I certainly didn't. Fans of vampire, monster, and supernatural fiction (redundant terms, I know) have a wealth of entertainment selections. One of the newest is Cassidy from the series Preacher.   

As one of the characters in his own series put it, Proinsias Cassiday is not an evil man, but he is a weak man who brings those beside him to ruin through the events that he sets into motion. With that said, Preacher sees his transformation from this to something more, meaning that viewers of the TV show based on the comic books are in for a treat.

That kind of undersells how completely bonkers the character and the series is. The second season of Preacher starts June 25th. Read about other vampires on TV at TVOM.

We recently posted a video about cats attacking things and knocking objects off tables. I mentioned that they were trying to cause chaos and destruction, but Chris Poole has an alternate theory. These cats are conducting experiments!

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It makes perfect sense: cats are naturally curious, and are masters of observation, exploration, and manipulation. Plus this theory gives us a reason to watch Cole and Marmalade being their everyday charming selves. -via Laughing Squid

It's a headline for your inner 12-year-old. Monday, two pickup trucks collided in Newark, Delaware, and one of the trucks smashed into the laboratory of the AnalTech company, leaving a large hole behind. A bad odor began emanating from the building, leading first responders to contact the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, leading to a HazMat team coming out to clean up the area. Three hours later, the site was declared safe. But you might still be wondering about AnalTech.  

In an email sent to the Houston Chronicle, a spokesperson revealed, "In 1964, the company paid a marketing firm to come up with a different name. They said, 'Well, you guys do Analytical Technology – why don’t you put the two words together and call it ‘AnalTech!' ”

However, the spokesperson admitted that "AnalTech faces certain challenges because of the 'juvenile' humor that has developed in the past few decades and current web filters that may block the company name" and has considered rebranding as a result.

The drivers of the two trucks sustained non-life threatening injuries. State Police are investigating the incident.  -Thanks, John Farrier!

(Image credit: Google Maps)

The following article is from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into California.

San Francisco is known for being accepting of nonconformists, but few people better exemplify the city’s love of eccentricity than Joshua Abraham Norton, the self-proclaimed “Emperor of these United States.”

HOW RICE MADE ROYALTY

Few monarchs have ruled as kindly or been as revered by their subjects as Joshua Abraham Norton—aka his Imperial Majesty Norton I. Calling himself the “Emperor of these United States” (he later added “Protector of Mexico”), Norton “ruled” from 1859 to 1880 from his home in San Francisco. True, Norton was out of his mind at the time, and by “ruled,” we mean “made a lot of laws that no one ever followed.” But in San Francisco he was so popular that he’s still celebrated to this day.

Norton was born around 1819 to a Jewish family in London, England, and grew up in South Africa, where he served in the military and worked in his father’s retail business. After his parents died, he moved to San Francisco in 1849 with an inheritance of $40,000. But instead of hunting for gold like most 49ers, he opened an office to seek his fortune in commodities and real estate. Norton soon became well known and successful around the city. By 1852 he’d managed to acquire a fortune of more than $200,000 (about $5 million today). But then came the bad investment.

For most of the 20th century, drug companies ignored rare diseases, because it wasn't prudent to sink millions of dollars into research to develop drugs for rare patients. If less than 200,000 people in America had the disease, no one wanted to take the financial risk when drug companies could make much more money developing a new arthritis drug. But there were many rare diseases, and many lives lost due to the expense of research -or lack of profit, if you look at it another way. However, fixing the problem led to unintended consequences, as the latest cover article at Bloomberg Businessweek explains.  

To address neglected research areas, Congress in 1983 passed the Orphan Drug Act, which gave drugmakers federal grants, tax incentives, and seven years of marketing exclusivity for new rare-disease treatments (vs. three to five years of exclusivity for a more common new drug). In the ensuing 34 years, more than 600 orphan drugs have been approved in the U.S., compared with 10 in the decade before the law was passed.

But government-protected monopolies, combined with desperate patients, led to today’s prices. Genzyme Corp. started the trend in 1991 by charging $150,000 for a year’s supply of a drug for treating Gaucher disease, an ailment that weakens bones and internal organs. In 2016, Biogen Inc. began charging $750,000 for the first year of treatment with a drug called Spinraza, which targets a deadly muscle disease. “Many of these manufacturers have perceived it as essentially a blank check to price the drug where they think it’s reasonable,” says Rena Conti, associate professor of health policy and economics at the University of Chicago.

The pharmaceutical company Alexion developed a drug called Soliris for two rare conditions and initially priced the therapy at $389,000 per year. Now, each of the 11,000 sufferers of a condition called aHUS can mean more than a half million dollars a year for the company. So was it any wonder that the sales force, using nurses as well as sales representatives, pressured doctors and patients to stay on the drug? Or funded lawsuits to get the drug paid for? Or sponsored support groups for patients? Read about the unnerving way that orphan drugs are sold at Bloomberg. -via Digg

They say that if you love sausage or law, you shouldn't watch either being made. Maybe they should say the same for CGI filmmaking. Disney gives us a look at how Dan Stevens acted out the part of the Beast in the recent live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. Yeah, he's a handsome man, but wearing a motion capture suit with beast prosthetics while Emma Watson was perfectly dressed in a ball gown -well, it just looks ridiculous.  

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Sure, it's interesting to see how it's done, but it would be even more interesting to find out how the cast and crew managed to keep a straight face during the filming. -via The Daily Dot

William Hamilton Page made wood type, but he really made a name for himself for his unique way of selling his blocks that made beautiful color print. In 1874, he set them into a sample book, a sales catalog called Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, &c. Modern type nerds have called it "the most beautiful book in the world," although the original published run is down to just a few copies. The text is nothing to write home about, but the type, colors, and even the borders are something special.  

In the context of wood type, “chromatic” is the SAT word for “highly colored.” To be sure, in the 1870s, it was hardly unheard of for fonts to show off their serifs, shoulders, and arms in rainbows hues, but black-on-white was the rule. Not so in the Page catalog, whose title page is composed of no fewer than nine different colors, which means each sheet took nine trips to the letterpress to achieve its effect. (Incredibly, despite this repetition, no one caught the typo in the word “Type” in the center of the page.)

Throughout the rest of Specimens, individual letters—offered for sale at a nickel to 80 cents each, depending mostly on their size—show off their capabilities in two and three colors. In fact, color was so important to Page’s products that just about every page of his company’s catalog features a plug for Wade Inks, which supplied ink to none other than the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Wade Inks, particularly its “transparent” inks, were key to the printed appearance of type cut by Page—transparent inks remain a staple of rock-poster screenprinters today. In the context of printing, the word “transparent” means that when one color was printed on top of another, the color below would affect the appearance of the color printed on top of it, creating a third color where the two overlapped. To help ensure that the registration between the two pieces was as precise as possible, blank pieces of maple destined for pairing were cut with a router at the same time. Then, voids would be carved out and outlining “shadows” would be cut away. When the finished pieces of type were subsequently swapped in the press, the colors would align, differentiate, and overlap cleanly.

A new reprint of the book has just been made available to modern type fans. Read about the business of 19th-century type and the book Page made that archives the art at Collectors Weekly.

On May 25, 1977, forty years ago today, a new movie named Star Wars opened at 42 theaters.  No one knew it would become an unstoppable juggernaut, spawning seven sequels and prequels with another opening this year, plus video games, TV shows, million of toys, and even a theme park. In 1977, the idea of a "franchise" in filmmaking had been put on the back burner after the cheaply-made Saturday morning serials of the 1930-'50s. If Star Wars hadn't been such a moneymaker, there never would have been The Empire Strikes Back or any other sequel. And what would that have been like?   

If no Star Wars sequels would have changed Lucas, think of how it would have changed Star Wars. Darth Vader is never Luke Skywalker’s father. We never meet Yoda. (Which has to affect Frank Oz’s career somehow, no? Do we still get What About Bob?) There’s no Jabba the Hutt, or Lando Calrissian, or Han Solo frozen in carbonite, or Ewoks. (Some of these changes, admittedly, would be greater losses than others.)

We would have never known which hero gets the girl! And while there might still be the "special editions," even they would have been different. Read more about this fantasy at Screen Crush.

And since it is the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, here are some more articles paying tribute to Luke, Darth, and the galaxy far, far away.  

When No Theater Wanted to Show the Movie in 1977.

The $11 million spent on Star Wars in 1977 was the best film investment ever made.

Revisiting Original Star Wars Reviews from 1977.

Why the blockbuster saga is the greatest soap opera in the galaxy.

Ranking the 40 greatest Star Wars quotes of all time, for the 40th anniversary.

Celebrities share their Star Wars memories.

That’s no moon ... but what if it were?

40 Years of Star Wars Anniversary Posters.

(Image credit: StarWars.com)

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, starring Andy Samberg and Andre Braugher, is a police comedy that's just finished its fourth and best season yet. Since the show started out well and has only improved, it may stick around for a while. But besides a great cast and talented writers, what makes it so funny?

Well, that might answer the question. You'll learn a lot of other trivial tidbits about Brooklyn Nine-Nine at TVOM.

Steve Urkel was designed to be a peripheral character to the Winslow family on the sitcom Family Matters, just to provide some comic relief. But as portrayed by Jaleel White, the over-the-top craziness of Urkel upstaged the rest ofhte cast and became an icon. He was bad to the bone -at least in his own mind.

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Melodysheep (previously at Neatorama) went through about ten years of clips from Family Matters, edited them down, and added some autotune to made this tribute to one of the strangest "crazy neighbor" characters in all of television. -via Tastefully Offensive 

We could learn a lot from animals. Mainly that we are not as important as we think we are.

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This delightful animation from The School of Life reminds us that living simply, as animals do, can go a long way toward letting go of the anxieties we carry around. -via Laughing Squid

As part of the celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary, the Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) Botanical Garden planted their Canada 150 Celebration Tulip Garden. The bulbs were planted last fall to bloom this spring, and included white tulips, red tulips, and the special Canada 150 tulip, developed to resemble the flag of Canada. As the tulips were about to bloom, a moose came through and ate them.

The moose munched on the entire red and white tulip display - Canada's 150th maple leaf design and all! Our garden staff survey the damage and will begin to clear the leftovers. While the moose completely ruined the display, how bloomin' Canadian is that, than to have moose 'garden experience'?!

The display won't be what they had planned, but considering how much he ate, the moose must have loved his dinner. -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: MUN Botanical Garden)