It's long been a fact of life that if we are lucky enough to grow old, our hair will either turn gray or fall out. Or both. In recent years, the stigma of having gray hair is not as dire as it used to be, and gray hair has become kind of chic among young people. This shift ironically coincides with new research that shows why hair turns gray, and how we can stop it from doing so. Further medical research shows that hair that has already turned gray can, in some cases, start to grow in color again.

Fortunately, most people already know a shortcut to covering gray hair, or changing one's hair color completely. It comes in a bottle and you can even do it at home, as I have off and on since I was a teenager. Now that my hair is partially white, I have expanded my palette to include a range of shockingly unnatural hues. But I can see the value in this research, as it contributes to our understanding of how our bodies work at the cellular level. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Lake Barryessa in California's Napa County holds 1.6 million acre-feet of water, and is a popular recreational area. But before 1957, this was Berryessa Valley. The town of Monticello was here, containing 600 people, mostly ranchers and farmers who grew fruits, nuts, and grains in Napa's fertile soil. Many of them were related, and their families had lived in Monticello for a hundred years. They didn't want to move, but three military bases downstream needed a reliable water supply, so the Monticello Dam was built to maintain a reservoir on Putah Creek.

Dorothea Lange went to Barryessa Valley to document the destruction of Monticello in a photo series called Death of a Valley. Grapevines were ripped up, houses were bulldozed, and trees were burned. The residents of Monticello moved away and lost contact with each other. But the scars remain, both on the land that is now a lake, and in the people who once called Monticello home. Read about the destruction of Monticello for Lake Barryessa at Alta magazine. See more of Dorothea Lange's images here.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Sharon Hahn Darlin)

You know those cute aliens who do everything earthlings do, except they use very literal language that makes us laugh? They love each other, their three-eyed dogs, and their vibrating cats. Their creator, Nathan W. Pyle (previously at Neatorama) has teamed up with Dan Harmon (who created Rick and Morty and Community) to brings those aliens to TV. Voices are provided by Hannah Einbinder, Tunde Adebimpe, Demi Adejuyigbe, Lori Tan Chinn, and Danny Pudi. The series Strange Planet will premiere on Apple+ streaming on August 9th.  -via Fark, where you'll find plenty of favorite Strange Planet comics.

"the other guys" should work for a french audience, right?

france: non. VERY BAD COPS pic.twitter.com/TMMn36J2eJ

— juan (@juanbuis) March 8, 2023

Juan at Twitter... excuse me, X, tells us how French movie distributors often change the title of an American movie. But the new title is still in English. Why? It appears that they are trying to make it more clear what the movie is about, although the French moviegoer would have to know some English to see that. Juan gives ten examples in the Twitter X thread, many of which are so straightforward they are just "Sex" plus whatever makes the movie different from the next feature.

"what's your number?" works well for this cute romcom, right?

france: non. SEX LIST pic.twitter.com/DmSJnOeXrc

— juan (@juanbuis) March 8, 2023

Those are followed by many contributions in the comments, although some are real and some are jokes and parodies of the idea. We find out that The Hangover in Portuguese is titled If You Drink, Don't Get Married, and in Hebrew, it's On the Way to the Wedding, We Stop in Vegas. One contribution from the comments was how the French version of Cool Runnings was called Rasta Rockett. See the original ten examples and some highlights from the X thread at Bored Panda.

PS: Even though Twitter is currently rebranded to X, the transformation seems to be quite incomplete. Posts are still called Tweets and you go to Twitter Publish to get the embed code.

The western part of Kentucky is made up of karst, which means the ground is like Swiss cheese, with holes running through it. The most famous of these holes is Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system in the world. But it's not the only cave. Mammoth Cave was an important saltpeter mine up through the War of 1812, but when the supply of saltpeter petered out, so to speak, it became a tourist attraction. Tourism grew slowly until the advent of the automobile, and then took off substantially. Around the beginning of the 20th century, landowners around the area who also had caves on their property wanted in on some of those tourist dollars, too.

If you owned any property in the area, you searched diligently for a cave entrance, or even the presence of a cave underground, because you can always create an entrance. If you didn't own land, you could work for someone who did. And competition was ruthless. The many tourist caves would employ "cappers," whose job it was to bring in tourists, in any way they saw fit. They would waylay tourists and guide them to a cave, or hand out maps to a cave other than Mammoth. They would also sabotage a competitor's business, up to and including killing them.

The Kentucky Cave Wars lasted for decades. You can still find a lot of caves around the area of Cave City. There's Mammoth Cave National Park, plus Horse Cave, Hidden River Cave, Outlaw Cave, Diamond Caverns, Lost River Cave, Crystal Onyx Cave, Waterfall Cave, and more. If Mammoth Cave is ever fully explored and mapped, they may prove to all be connected. Read about the Kentucky Cave Wars at Smithsonian.

See also: The Man Who Made Mammoth Cave and The 1925 Cave-In That Captivated the Nation.

(Image credit: National Park Service)

The new song from Claud Mintz is "A Good Thing" in more ways than one. The song is a real toe-tapper, but the video is a mini-film featuring Paul Rudd as a clueless mail carrier who has a ferret with an eye problem. Believe it or not, that's not what the video is about at all. It's about Claud, and the gift from their girlfriend. There's a cat who looks exactly like my Marshmallow, and then things get weird. When the song was over, I had to look up the lyrics to see what the song is about. It's a normal angsty love song, but I couldn't follow at the time because I was busy concentrating on what was happening in the video, which is both cute and funny. "A Good Thing" is from the album Supermodels. -via Nag on the Lake

Early in the 20th century, as Americans traveled more and more by train to exotic destinations in their own country, they mailed or brought back novelty "tall tale" postcards to show where they'd been. These are still funny, and charmingly retro. Most were the work of Edward Henry Mitchell. While this type of fantasy image can easily be done in Photoshop today, Mitchell made them the old-fashioned way, in his photo shop in San Francisco.

Mitchell would lay out a picture of a background, often a photograph of the the Southern Pacific Railroad, then cut out  produce from a different photograph and just lay it over top. Then he'd take another photo of the whole thing together. These templates would be offered to various businesses, governments, and Chambers of Commerce, and their name or location added before printing mass quantities.

Ridiculously large produce shipments were just a small part of Mitchell's postcard business. His business published at least 4,000 designs between 1898 and 1915. See a gallery of his tall tale postcards from the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort

Yogi, are you ready for your closeup? To understand this story, you'll need to see last week's video in which bears test bear-resistant trash cans at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center. A bear looting a trash can made off with Tom's GoPro camera, and I made a remark about it being a write-off. But there's more to the story. Someone commented that the camera should be okay since GoPros are fairly waterproof. But are they bear-proof? After all, that's what the testing center is for. And this GoPro was covered in honey and peanut butter, which bears just love. Miraculously, the camera was later recovered from the bear pond, and it more or less worked. So this week we get to see the footage from the camera that the bear chewed on and then dropped in the pond. Strangely, the bear remembered the camera and went back to retrieve it himself!

It's become common for parents to console children about bad grades by comparing them to Einstein, saying he got bad grades, and look how he ended up. Then the child drops out of school and tells his parents, well, Einstein dropped out, too, and look how he ended up. The myth about bad grades came from a misunderstanding of how numeric grades in Switzerland (and later Italy) worked. Einstein was brilliant in science and math, and okay in other subjects. He just hated school because it was regimented and boring. He did drop out of school at 15, because he wanted to join his parents who were living in Italy. Einstein went on to get a PhD in Zurich.



This myth came about purely because of Hollywood. It's much more exciting to see a body flying as it is shot than to just see the victim slump to the ground. Things are a bit different in wartime, with missiles, bombs, and cannons, and the only way to make a mundane murder by gun look as exciting on screen is to emulate the explosions of war. In fact, a lot of what we think of as "common knowledge" commonly comes from Hollywood or debunked science or someone just making a good story better. Find out the stories behind a bunch of these myths at Cracked. 

Is risking your life to be attractive ever worth it? Maybe, if you've been taught that beauty is the only thing you have to offer, or if everyone around you is doing the same risky thing, or if you have no idea how dangerous an everyday beauty regimen can be. Society has gone through many cycles of less-than-healthy beauty fads, from makeup made of lead to eating disorders. Weird History focuses in on some unhealthy trends of the Victorian era, namely consumption chic, corsets, arsenic baths, and wildly dangerous makeup ingredients. While we can look back and say "What were they thinking?" we also have to wonder what we are doing today that will cause people of the future, say a hundred years from now, to say the same about us.

A lava tube forms when a stream of lava is rolling downhill, and the outside of the flow cools and solidifies before the inner flow. The hot lava inside eventually runs out, and meanwhile more lava and rock has buried the tube, leaving a cave.

It's been almost two years since the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted in the Canary Islands covered La Palma island with 200 million cubic meters of lava, with an average depth of 50 feet. Hundreds of residents are still waiting to go home, and construction of new communities has begun, even thought the lava is still hot in places. That leaves scientists scrambling to study the eruption and its effects before the lava is moved or destroyed. It's a risky endeavor, as the lava tubes are just barely cool enough to enter with protective gear, and you can't tell if the rock underneath is stable enough to complete the journey. The ceilings can fall, too.

But the research goes on. So far, explorers have found stalactites and stalagmites formed by dripping lava, and mineral deposits that leave streaks of colors behind, all within just two years of the eruption. If these lava tubes survive long enough, they could become home to microorganisms and develop their own ecosystem. Read about the lava tubes of La Palma and the scientists who dare enter them at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

How could you not be drawn to a story headlined "the golfer who married five women and murdered five men"? That was Alvin C. Thomas, better known under his nickname Titanic Thompson. I was halfway through the story and remembered that this was supposed to be about a golfer, and it hadn't mentioned golf yet. Thompson took up golf suddenly as an adult, and discovered he was very good at it. He could have been a professional golfer, but Thompson scoffed at the idea because he already made a better living gambling. In fact, he made an awful lot of money gambling because he cheated.

Thompson didn't kill five men at once; those were three different instances, and he had an indirect hand in a sixth death. Yet he never served time for any of them. The five women he married were all teenagers, between 15 and 18 years old. The 18-year-old was his fifth wife, and he was in his 60s when he married her. So you can see that a timeline of Thompson's life would be pretty complicated. And he got away with it all, dying in a nursing home at age 80. Read his story at Historic Mysteries.  -via Strange Company

As a kid reading Laura Ingalls Wilder stories, I was fascinated to read about making maple syrup and snow candy. It seemed so neat that you could go collect tree juice from the forest and make candy from it! But that was more than 100 years ago, and she saw it from a child's point of view. Making proper grade A maple syrup takes a lot of work and expertise, but more importantly, it takes time. Forty years to grow a sugar maple tree, although you can skip that if you're lucky. Weeks of slowly gathering sap, which must be done at just the right time, and you'd better get a year's worth when you do it. Many hours of filtering and greatly reducing each gallon of sap. It's no wonder then, that grade A maple syrup can cost $200 a gallon, and that tiny bottle at the grocery will cost you $15. In this video, Jeffrey Schad and Ashley Ruprecht of Laurel & Ash Farm in New York take us through the process of producing maple syrup, from the trees to the table.  

(Image credit: Eran Sandler)

In 1968, the Beatles traveled to Rishikesh, India, to spend time with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his Transcendental Meditation Center. It wasn't exactly a "getaway" in the way you or I would think, as they took an entourage of 60 people and were followed by the press. None of the Fab Four stayed as long as they had planned, but John and George were there for a couple of months. The Beatles returned to England with a slew of their most creative songs having been written during their stay.

(Image credit: Daniel Echeverri)

So what happened after that? Rishikesh, which has many ashrams, became quite popular among Westerners who discovered Transcendental Meditation and other Eastern disciplines and religions. The Maharishi died in 1981, and the Transcendental Meditation Center was abandoned and left to be taken over by nature. Yet visitors still came, and in 2015, it was officially opened to the public again. Learn about this unique Ashram, its place in history, and what it's like now at Messy Nessy Chic. 

It wasn't until 1840 that James Marsh developed a test to determine if someone had been killed by arsenic, changing forensic science forever. But the idea has been around for a couple of hundred years already.
 
The career of John Cotta shows us that the idea of forensic toxicology greatly preceded the ability. Cotta was a doctor in the early 1600s, a strange time in which old superstitions overlapped with the scientific study of medicine. He wrote a book about the modern and scientific methods of discovering witches in 1616. Really. Cotta also thought of himself as an expert in forensics. In 1620, he was summoned by Sir Euseby Andrew, who was ill and convinced that he was being poisoned. He suspected his wife's companion, Mistress Moyle, of giving him poisoned "broths and jellies." Andrew made no secret of his worries, but no one believed him but Cotta. A minister who attended Andrew near his death even admonished him not to make false accusations just before he meets his maker. Then Andrew died.  

Cotta and another physician performed an autopsy, and Moyle was eventually charged with murder. But there was no Marsh test at the time. Read about the case of possible poisoning and the trial that followed at Legal History Miscellany. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)