(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)

Home Economics just bought a house, and decided to throw a party. They've invited every subject they know, and a few they've forgotten. They've also forgotten how none of those subjects get along with each other at all. Physical Education thinks Drama is useless, and vice-versa. Science and Religion won't speak to each other, but Geography knows his place. Meanwhile, Latin wants everyone to get off his lawn, and Maths, well, nobody likes him. When there's an emergency, Media Studies has to communicate it, so that's a disaster. Why wasn't Music invited to the party? It's a silly premise, but these interactions will take you back to your school days, or maybe college, as my school didn't offer nearly this many subjects. It's the latest nonsense from Foil Arms and Hogg.

Emergency rooms are often confronted with a case of a penis injury or some object stuck in a bodily orifice, in which the patient has some outlandish explanation for their predicament that no one believes. Can you imagine having to consult a doctor for such an embarrassing problem with a perfectly good scientific explanation and still having trouble making them believe you? Of course that is usually secondary to getting the problem taken care of. The patient in this case was way more frightened than embarrassed, we presume. And in pain.

The strange case was found in the 1857 book A Collection of Remarkable Cases in Surgery. A young man went to a doctor because his penis was stuck in a bottle. The opening of the bottle was only three-quarters of an inch in diameter, but his penis was indeed inside, painfully swollen and turning black. The doctor had to break the bottle in a scary maneuver. The explanation for how it happened was a pure accident, just plausible enough for the doctor to recreate the circumstances to test if it were possible. Well, not all the circumstances- the doctor used his finger in the recreation, and even that seemed ill-advised to me. What happened was an extreme version of this (SFW) video, except it involved volatile chemicals. Read the entire account in a transcription of the case at Boing Boing.

(Image credit: MET)

As someone whose knowledge of world history is mostly self-taught, I must admit that I occasionally mix up Attila the Hun with Genghis Khan. They were both imperial conquerors from the east, both fierce and ruthless warriors, both known by their titles instead of their birth names, both considered barbarians in their time (by those they conquered), and both have unknown burial places thanks to lots of witnesses being murdered. But Genghis Khan lived 600 years later, and had a well-documented life. Not so for Attila. The Huns didn't write anything down, and the people who did write about them hated the Huns. So in this mini-biography of Attila the Hun, you will hear "maybe" and "possibly" a lot. What we know about him is swamped by what we don't know for sure. One thing I learned that's pretty neat is how Budapest, Hungary, is named for Bleda the Hun, although this, too, is disputed.

We've posted about Attila before, but it was mostly about his love life. Weird History fills in the gaps as much as they can. -via Digg

I have long used the term "restless corpse" to tag the many posts in which most of the story takes place after the subject died. Only this time, it's not a human subject.

Ethelbert was the name given to an 13-foot orca that swam 100 miles up the Columbia River in 1931. No one had ever seen a whale so far inland, and people came from miles around to see Ethelbert. But officials didn't know what to do with the orca, slowly dying miles away from salt water. The governor already had to stop people from shooting at it. Businessmen wanted to capture and exhibit it. The Humane Society wanted to put Ethelbert out of its misery. Some wanted to tow the orca back to sea, and others wanted to let nature take its course. Meanwhile, Edward Lesserd and his son got in a boat and harpooned Ethelbert, killing the orca almost instantly.

But then what? Lesserd was arrested, but no one could find a law that he broke. Ethelbert's corpse was preserved in formaldehyde, and the story really takes off after that. Read the whole whale of a tale of Ethelbert the orca at Amusing Planet.

(Unrelated image credit: Liam Quinn)

In the 1940s, around 300 babies were born with the address of P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. If that happened today, some blogger would be investigating that anomaly, but this was wartime. All the mail that came to that box was transferred further up into the desert to a secret town of several thousand people called Los Alamos. Just a few years earlier, it had been empty desert except for a residential school for cowboys, but it suddenly became the scientific center of the Manhattan Project. No one knew how long the war would last, or how long it would take to develop the atomic bomb, so Los Alamos was home for thousands of secret residents as long as it needed to be.

Today, Los Alamos is a city of 12,000 people, many of whom work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. You can't keep a secret forever.

When a particular shiny rock has its own name, and hundreds of years of documentation, you have to figure that it's quite rare and valuable. You could also guess that its history would involve some question of who the "rightful" owner should be. Many of the world's largest gemstones got where they are today after a long sequence of questionable moves, including gifts bestowed under duress, political ploys, tribute to an overlord, spoils of war, slavery, looting, and outright theft. In between those episodes are also the more benign acts of buying, selling, gifting, and inheritance, which only muddy the rights of ownership further.

As you might also guess, the British royal family ended up with an outsized proportion of the world's largest and most controversial gemstones. Three of them can be seen in the photo above: the Black Prince’s Ruby, on the front of King Charles' crown, the Cullinan II just below it, and the Lahore Diamond on Queen Camilla's necklace. Read about ten gemstones with less-than-wholesome stories behind them at Mental Floss.

Remember Crusoe the Dachshund (previously at Neatorama)? Since we last saw him, he's grown a bit. In fact, in this video he's the size of a respectable government building! This dachshund doesn't know his size, as he tears up the pavement around town just by walking. A wag of the tail can destroy windows! I hope the folks at the cookie factory got out alright, because dachshunds love cookies. Can anyone stop this behemoth before he destroys the entire city? It surely won't be Karen, or will it? This story will remind you of a 1950s B-movie, in which something grows to enormous size due to nuclear radiation. The difference is that this is an adorable little dog, and the special effects are better than those old movies.

It's that time of year! The Iowa State Fair will take place August 10-20. There will be a variety of attractions, but here at Neatorama, we usually focus on the food, because every year food vendors compete to come up with the most outrageous, delicious, artery-clogging combinations to draw in publicity and hungry fairgoers. This year Iowa has 64 new gastronomic offerings from various restaurants who will be set up at the fair. Of those 64, a panel of judges has selected three finalists for the title of Best New State Fair Food.

One is the Grinder Ball, which are bacon balls that are stuffed with mozarella, wrapped in more bacon, and then smoked and dipped in marinara sauce. They make sure to inform us that it's gluten-free.

The Iowa Twinkie is anything but a Twinkie. This is a jalapeño pepper stuffed with pulled pork, sweet corn, cream cheese, and ranch seasoning. It is then glazed with barbecue sauce and ranch dressing.

The third finalist is the Deep-Fried Bacon Brisket Mac-n-Cheese Grilled Cheese. The title is the description.

Strangely, none of the three finalists are served on a stick. If you're going to the Iowa State Fair, you can find the foods you want to try by downloading their app. Then you can vote for the Best New Fair Food online between August 10th and 14th. The winner will be announced August 16th, which leaves several days for everyone else to try it.

(Image credit: Iowa State Fair)

Most simple children's electric toys run on five volts or less. YouTuber Aboringday has time on his hands and a lot of toys, so he took their batteries out and hooked up a WANPTEK DC power supply to various toys to see what boosting that voltage would do, in increments up to 30 volts! What happens? Well, they go faster. They sound like they are screaming, although that's just the moving parts trying to keep up. And sometimes they tear themselves apart. That can be pretty funny, but what's really fascinating is how odd the toys are in the first place. I would love to have the duck slide; that's just cool. The dancing monkey is charming and clever. But the bee sting dog is downright horrific at any speed. Would a child actually get pleasure from it? Oh, but there's more.



The anticipation grows as we wait to see what more power will do to a Thomas the Tank Engine train! It's an illustration of the phrase "going off the rails." But for consistency's sake, he feels he has to show us all the higher voltage levels anyway. The crab had to be tied down! What he did to the dog bank was downright sadistic. We got some laughs, and now all his toys are broken. -via Metafilter

The life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer has been told in several venues, but none have come close to capturing the complexity of the man. The new movie Oppenheimer from Chris Nolan opens this weekend in another attempt. The real Oppenheimer was a superbly intelligent and educated physicist, a nerd from an early age, who answered the call when the US military needed all the superbly intelligent physicists it could round up. Those physicists included Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr, Felix Bloch, James Franck, and the young Richard Feynman. Amid that distinguished team, Oppenheimer was appointed head of the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, a role he surprisingly excelled in.

Oppenheimer put his heart and soul into his work on the atomic bomb, but that was not all he was. He also had relationships with at least two women who belonged to the Communist Party. And the ethics of the bomb his team created weren't lost on the physicist. Read about the real J. Robert Oppenheimer before you see the movie this weekend, at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Ed Westcott, U.S. Government photographer)

The sinking of the Titanic was such a momentous disaster that movies are made about it over and over. CaptainJZH collected a dozen of those movies or TV shows and put together clips of the final plunge of the ship as it slipped underwater, out of sight. Theses movies span a hundred years, and you can watch the special effects get better over time. I had to laugh at the first one, but the rest are pretty moving.

You might notice that all the cinematic sinkings before 1985 showed the ship in one piece, and all those afterward show a ship broken in two. The Titanic was gone before any other ships arrived, but most of the 705 survivors said that the ship broke in two pieces before sinking. But those hundreds of eyewitness accounts were not believed! That fact was only confirmed after the wreckage on the sea floor was discovered in 1985. -via Kottke

During the Golden Age of Piracy, any pirate ship that had a surgeon, or any kind of medical practitioner, onboard probably got him by kidnapping him from another ship. But hey, it beat getting slaughtered like so many others.

Mark C. Kehoe has always been fascinated with pirates. He participated in pirate forums, which led to becoming a pirate re-enactor, which led to difficult research on what the life a pirate surgeon was like, as there are few contemporary accounts, and those are hard to find. All this led to the The Pirate Surgeon's Journals. It contains an extensive history of the medical profession itself and how it fits into seafaring, plus articles on how these surgeons dealt with the plague, alcoholism, provisioning and dietary struggles, and other difficulties of taking care of outlaws at sea. We also get a look at the horrific injuries these surgeons confronted, as well as the diseases and disabilities they encountered. Oh yeah, there are plenty of other pirate topics outside of the medical realm, too. You'll want to bookmark the site because there's just so much. -via Boing Boing

The whole world uses the same basic calendar for communication and trade reasons, but there are still cultural differences that go way back. The four seasons are delineated by the solstices and the equinoxes, but you still hear local jokes about five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, and mud. The Japanese calendar divides the four main seasons into 72 much more detailed units called ko, each about five days long. If you want to be in tune with nature, each of these ko describe what the world around us will be doing as the weather, plants, and animals go through their annual cycles.

According to the very detailed calendar, the first cherry blossoms will appear March 26–30, frogs begin to sing May 5–9, and praying mantises hatch June 6–10. Keeping up with such things sounds quite pleasant, as long as the world acts normally. Those who follow traditional ko are the first to notice how climate change is affecting the calendar. As a casual gardener, I am well aware of which flowers should bloom each month, and they've been alarmingly off schedule this year.

Read how the Japanese micro-seasons came about and see a list of all 72 of them at Amusing Planet.    

(Image credit: Toshihiro Matsui)