In 1994, archaeologists in Russia retrieved the partially-mummified body of a woman who died around 2,500 years ago from a grave in southern Siberia. The woman, believed to be between 25 and 30 years old at death, was of the  Pazyryk people, a nomadic Iron Age culture known for their advanced sewing skills. With skin covering her head, they could not examine her skull and the remains were put in storage after examination. 

Thirty years later, scientists at Novosibirsk State University revisited the body with modern technology, meaning a CT scan that non-invasively revealed the skull. What they found was remarkable. The woman had suffered a devastating injury to her jaw that was repaired surgically! Her right temporomandibular joint had been crushed, which would have left her unable to eat. The scan revealed that two canals had been drilled into the jaw, and some kind of fiber, possibly horsehair or an animal tendon, was used to stabilize the joint. In other words, they tied her jaw back together. Furthermore, there are signs of healing, and her left teeth showed much worse wear, indicating she survived the surgery and thereafter chewed on her left side. Read the evidence for the prehistoric surgery at Gizmodo. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Elina Panfilo/Novosibirsk State University)  
  

Where do the eggs in your refrigerator come from? The supermarket, of course! But before that, they come from chickens. Sure, you already knew that, but you've probably never thought about how a hen makes the egg, and how they manage to do it almost every day for months at a time. What goes on inside a hen in order to lay an egg every day is astonishing.  

Egg production is managed differently depending on whether you want eggs for the breakfast table or chicks. If you don't gather eggs every day, a hen ends up with several eggs, and stops producing them in order to keep them warm for hatching. But for chicks, you'll need a rooster. But if you only have hens, and take their egg every day, they'll keep laying them as long as they have the proper nutrition and the proper stimulation- which is not a rooster, but sunlight! 

The popular idea of a psychopath is a person with a personality disorder making them incapable of distinguishing right from wrong or feeling empathy. The idea has been around for hundreds of years, and was extensively studied in the 20th century. But the studies and experiments on psychopathy mostly produce null results, meaning that whatever factor you were measuring (empathy, emotion, or impulse control), there was no significant difference between people identified as psychopaths and those who were not. Those considered psychopaths had emotions, they could recognize emotions in others, and they were capable of empathy. It began to look like psychopathy was a label that arose because we no longer wanted to classify people as evil or demon possessed. Or maybe it was a handy diagnosis for psychological conditions we just couldn't figure out.

Despite the research, psychopathy roared back into popular culture in the 1990s with movies like Natural Born Killers, Silence of the Lambs, and American Psycho. In the real world, we want to make sense of the senselessly evil things people do. But the research doesn't make that easy. Read about the science behind psychopathy and what it tells us at Aeon. -via Damn Interesting 

One thing you really did study in American history class was the California Gold Rush. John Sutter found gold and everyone on the east coast decided to move to the west coast and get rich. But that's not the entire story. Sutter was actually a settler who was building a community, and the discovery of gold upset his plans and his life.  

Samuel Brannan, on the other hand, saw opportunity in gold. His plan was not to get rich mining gold, but in publicizing it. He had come to the small village of San Francisco for religious asylum, but abandoned that to become the richest man in the territory. As people came from all over the world to seek gold, he took advantage of those people instead of the gold they were looking for. And the people who came during the Gold Rush and stayed after it was over shaped the area into what it is today. Kurzgesagt After Dark looks at the darker side of the California Gold Rush. There's a one-minute skippable ad at 4:52.

In the spring of 1967, skywatchers near Moscow saw a strange unidentified object in the sky. It looked like a crescent moon, or a big illuminated C in the sky. It happened again and again, always at the same time of day as the sun was setting. Reports got into the newspapers, and UFO hunters across the USSR flocked to Moscow to investigate- or at least see the UFO. Then suddenly the sightings stopped, and so did the newspaper reports, without comment. Government silence settled around the incidents. 

At the time, the US and the Soviet Union were operating under two nuclear arms treaties, one in effect and one pending, prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons in space. But the Soviets had developed an intercontinental ballistic missile that would go into orbit for a trip around the earth in order to sneak through US military surveillance. The Americans were, of course, monitoring the Soviet press and knew about the sightings. Oops. Read about the UFOs that revealed Soviet shenanigans at Popular Mechanics. Alternate link, if needed. -via Strange Company   

(Image credit: ISC Kosmotras) 

The odds of winning millions of dollars in a lottery are very, very small, and are only slightly improved by buying a ticket. But people do win. The problem is that most winners believe they are now rich, when they have little understanding of how much money it takes to live like a truly rich person. Your payout is not going to be what you were led to believe, and it can be drained really quick when you see yourself as set for life. 

First, there's income taxes. Then you need to pay people to manage your money. Then you need to consider your life span and how to make a limited amount of cash last before you quit your job. This TED-Ed lesson takes a hypothetical $3 million lottery jackpot and shows how it will not make you fabulously wealthy. However, it can provide you with a comfortable life if you manage it wisely. Personally, I have managed to avoid the curse of wealth by not buying a ticket.  

In grade school, we learn that St. Augustine, founded in 1565, is the US's oldest permanent city settled by Europeans. Outside of Florida, we learned nothing about what happened after that. Florida remained a Spanish colony for centuries, constantly at odds with the British colonies to the north. In 1738, a Spanish royal decree offered freedom and citizenship to enslaved people who escaped British rule and came to St. Augustine, if they converted to Catholicism and served in the militia. Plenty of people who escaped the plantations made their way through alligator-filled swamps to do just that. The new Spanish citizens built Fort Mose just north of St. Augustine and used it to defend the city from British incursions. 

Fort Mose (and Florida) were eventually lost to the British and then the Americans. The destroyed fort was forgotten for more than 200 years, but has been restored and made into a state park. You can now see volunteers staging re-enactments of the history of Fort Mose. Read the story of the formerly-enslaved people who sought freedom in Florida at Smithsonian. 

There are 54 countries in Africa (plus three disputed territories), more than any other continent. You can try memorizing them by studying a map and then picturing the map while you recite them, but that hasn't worked for me because I always miss a few. I'd probably do much better by listening to a pleasant song that recites them in rhyme. I was too old to benefit much from "Yakko's World" (which is now outdated), but now such a song for Africa is finally here. 

Dustin Ballard of There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) constructed a song to the tune of the 1982 hit "Africa" by Toto with lyrics that name every country on that continent. Yes, they rhyme wherever they can, and the visuals help with a bit of context. Far from ruining it, this song actually improves on the infinitely catchy original by having something to do with Africa. 

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is so common that almost all children are infected before the age of two. There are vaccines and therapies have been developed from the antibodies produced by people who have had RSV, but they aren't effective against all the many strains of RSV. New research in China is looking at a population of people who may have a better range of antibodies- pediatricians. 

It is known among medical professionals that pediatricians catch colds and other respiratory diseases from their patients quite often early in their careers, but not so much as time goes on. A team at the Children’s Hospital of Chongqing Medical University took blood from ten pediatricians who had been on the job for more than ten years, and found 56 kinds of antibodies that may be of use in the fight against RSV and other respiratory illnesses, such as the common cold. These antibodies were up to 25 times better at preventing illness than existing therapies. Read more about this research at NewScientist. -via kottke 

(Image credit: Oequihua) 

A strange formation of lights made their way across the sky over Texas in 1951. There were multiple reports, photographs, and even radar sightings. Once the sightings hit the newspapers, other accounts rolled in until the formation was dubbed "the Lubbock Lights." Those reports came not only from drunks and cranks, but also scientists, professors, and government employees. The Air Force took those reports seriously, but no explanation was ever offered. 

Remember, this was in 1951, the era of experimental weapons and aircraft, Cold War espionage, and general distrust of ...everything. Reports of "flying saucers" had been a thing for a few years already, but aliens from outer space were not always the first thing that came to observers' minds. However, aliens or birds or hoaxes were always a possibility. Still, no explanation of the lights was confirmed, and the US Air Force began Project Blue Book to investigate what's going on up there. Dr. Emily Zarka gives us the rundown on the Lubbock Lights  

In English, L'Oeuf Electrique means electric egg. Why it was dubbed an egg is obvious, and the electric part is how it's powered. But don't expect to find one of these cars at your local dealer, because there was only one ever built, and that was in 1942.

Industrial designer Paul Arzens had already given the world La Baleine (the Whale), a huge art deco luxury gas guzzler. But then the Germans invaded France and suddenly gas was very difficult to get. Arzens experimented with converting existing vehicles to electric power, and learned some lessons. A large car would not do, so he had to start over from scratch. His electric car would have to be lightweight and easy to maneuver through city streets. Arzens hand-built the L'Oeuf Electrique out of aluminum and plexiglass, kept it small, and set it on three wheels. Most of the car's finished weight came from its battery, and the driver had surprisingly good visibility. Alas, there was no demand for new cars during the war, and afterward drivers went back to stylish gas guzzlers. Read about L'Oeuf Electrique at Utterly Interesting. 

The term hypnosis grew out of the work of Franz Mesmer in the 18th century. He promoted the theory of animal magnetism and would cure illness with magnetic fluids. His successes were later attributed to the power of suggestion, which eventually gave us both the placebo effect and the concept of hypnosis. Hypnosis is based on the power of suggestion in humans, but was depicted in movies as a "power" to force people to do things they normally wouldn't, often for nerfarious purposes. As such, it was relegated to the realm of myth, entertainment, or just plain bunk.

The truth is that hypnosis is a technique that works on some people more than others, but is not as dramatic as the movies would have us believe. It's more of an exercise in opening one's mind to new ways of thinking and behaving, and can be therapeutic for certain purposes. -via Damn Interesting 

The problem with being a Renaissance man is that your favorite skill may not be as in-demand as your least favorite skill. Michelangelo was uniquely talented in all aspects of art: design, drawing, sculpting, and painting. He considered himself a sculptor foremost, but when the pope commissioned him to paint a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, he couldn't refuse (although he tried).  

Michelangelo never liked to paint, preferring to draw instead. He spent several years on his back painting the chapel ceiling and complaining about it. “I am not in the right place – I am not a painter.” But he enjoyed the preparatory work, the overall design and the study sketches he made of the various characters and elements. One of those studies, of a woman's foot, was recently discovered and sold for more than $27 million, which is orders of magnitude above what Michelangelo was paid to paint the entire ceiling. Read more on Michelangelo's artistic inclinations at the Conversation. 

(Image credit: Jörg Bittner Unna) 

Imagine you are a spy in a medieval fantasy out on a dark night. You have a flashlight, but it only illuminates a small piece of what's in front of you. You move the flashlight around, trying to make sense of what you see. How fast can you figure out what's happening? That's the goal in the game Castlelight. You must discern who's doing what to whom from what little you can see. I aced the easy mode, then went to the medium mode and found out that what makes that level harder is the time limit. You might then consider the easy mode as your practice run. Maybe your flashlight batteries run out faster in the upper levels, which is anachronistic to the max. I can imagine this game would lose its charm after a few tries, since you'll memorize the scenes in time. Mefites report that it works better on some devices than others. -via Metafilter 

In the original Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi returns from the dead to remind Luke to trust the Force. In The Lion King, Mufasa appears in the clouds to advise Simba. Mulan had a whole group of ancient ancestors watching out for her. And if I recall correctly, something similar happened in Field of Dreams. Movies often have inspiring scenes of the lessons we learned from our forefathers coming back to save us when we really need it. But how far back can you go before the wisdom of our beloved relatives is totally useless?

Ryan George brings us just such a scene. His deceased grandfather shows up. Grandpa has no expertise to lend, yet he's supportive and encouraging. But then Great-great-grandpa appears, and he has no clue what's going on. Even if he did, he wouldn't approve. Don't be intimidated by the length of the video, the skit is only 3:50.