If you are young, you probably feel that the internet has always been with us. If you're not so young, you might be surprised at how long ago many of the milestones of the web have been around. The longest running webcam on the internet has been live for 29 years now. The first set of emojis was released in 1997. The first band to livestream a concert was all the way back in 1993!

I learned these things from Internet Artifacts, a sort of museum exhibit from Neal Agarwal (previously at Neatorama). It begins with a 1977 map of ARPANET that shows 111 computers connected to each other. We have more than that now. It has delicious tidbits like how the White House launched its website in 1994, but it was delayed because they needed more photographs of Socks the cat. The first person to purchase a book from Amazon was dismayed that he was charged money for it. And you might remember that Y2K was a big nothingburger, but that was only due to a lot of work by programmers to head off the disaster. The exhibit ends in 2007, when the iPhone was released and everything changed. -via Metafilter

Around the turn of the 20th century, Halloween was steadily gaining popularity in the US. Picture postcards were at the height of their popularity, and Halloween gave people another excuse to send one. In the estimated 3,000 Halloween designs, we see familiar icons like witches, black cats, and pumpkins, but we also get a glimpse into some mostly bygone traditions, like petty vandalism, bobbing for apples, and trying to divine one's future spouse.

Despite its appearance, I don't think they meant to show a cat being strangled. He's just drawn that way. These vintage Halloween postcards depict children being frightened in a comical way, but the very weirdness of the images can make any modern person feel a bit ...uncomfortable. So many of them feature grim grinning pumpkinheads with uncanny and unnatural pupils that seem to be leering.

See a gallery of 60 Halloween postcards dated between 1900 and 1920 at The Public Domain Review. And since they are in the public domain, they can be shared with anyone. -via Metafilter

Gremlins were a type of fairy, or "little folk" in European legends. Although seldom seen, gremlins were known to be mischievous. If something in your home was broken or out of place with no explanation, the culprit was obviously a gremlin. This idea took on a whole new meaning when airplanes were developed, particularly in the military. When something went inexplicably haywire on a plane during World War I, the Royal Air Force blamed it on sabotage by gremlins. The idea spread to more countries by World War II, when planes were more numerous, more complicated, and under battle conditions were more likely to malfunction.

The civilian world took up the idea, too, and gremlins were used as shorthand for any kind of industrial accident or malfunction. It may have been used in early computer technology a bit, but those folks settled on blaming "bugs" instead. Gremlins went on to star in a book by Roald Dahl and a hit 1984 movie. Read about the rise of gremlins at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: National Archives)

Of all the ways to lose an expensive drone camera, this is possibly the most wholesome -and it was caught on video! Adam Culbertson was flying his DJI Avata drone over some beautiful terrain near Capitol Reef National Park in Utah when a golden eagle snatched it up. Instead of dropping the drone, we see the eagle fly until the video signal was out of range. The feed was saved up to that point, but there's no indication of how far the eagle flew with it afterward. The drone is most likely not recoverable, even if the eagle would be inclined to surrender it.

The fallout from the incident is not as dire as you might imagine. The drone is made to shut down its propellers when it detects an impact, so the eagle wouldn't have been hurt. Culbertson was able to get a replacement drone from the manufacturer because the theft was classified as a flyaway, or "something outside of your control [that] causes your drone to fly away never to be seen again." -via Laughing Squid

In 1971, a toddler named Melissa Highsmith was kidnapped from her home in Texas by a new babysitter. The police investigation went nowhere, and years passed. The Highsmiths thought they would never see their daughter again. Then in 2022, her father Jeff Highsmith sent a DNA sample to 23andMe, along with other family members, to trace their genealogy. The results came back identifying a relative that was Jeff's granddaughter -one he never knew about! That could only be Melissa's daughter. Soon, the family was reunited with Melissa, who grew up with the name Melanie and never knew she had been kidnapped more than 50 years earlier.

Since home DNA tests were developed, this kind of thing happens more and more often, as cold cases are cracked by DNA from relatives that are matched with both victims and perpetrators. Sometimes the DNA confirms police suspicions in cases where the evidence against them was insufficient, and sometimes an identification comes out of the blue, decades later. Buzzfeed has a roundup of eleven cold cases, mostly murders, that were solved many years later thanks to DNA tests.

(Unrelated image credit: Tim Wightman/US Navy)

Remember when you graduated and got your first full time job? You moved to your own apartment, in a new town with new people and new opportunities? Those were the days. I remember rescuing furniture from the dumpster, counting change to see if I could do laundry, volunteering for public appearances in the evenings because they might have food, and feeling free as a bird- living the dream. But I certainly wouldn't want to do it in this day and age.

This award-winning little ditty called Living the Dream from Ben Meinhardt illustrates the joyful accomplishments of a young man making his way in the world as a new adult. Don't let it get you down too much. -via The Awesomer

A woolly mammoth that was born 17,100 years ago in Alaska only got a name a few years ago. They call him Kik. For the first two years of his life, Kik stayed close to his mother near the Yukon River Basin. Then he roamed more widely, along the grasslands of Alaska and its land bridge to Asia. When he turned 16, he roamed even further, walking at least ten miles a day, eating grass and covering a 700-mile route, each way, for years. In his short life, Kik walked far enough to circle the earth twice! At around age 27, he slowed down from a lack of food, and starved to death at age 28 in the Kikiakrorak River valley. More than 17,000 years later, his tusks were recovered and studied.

How can we possibly know that much about one woolly mammoth? That's the real story. One of Kik's tusks fell into the hands of isotope scientist Matthew Wooller, who assembled a multinational team of scientists to study it. They used a machine called a Laser Ablation Multi-Collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer. It cost almost a million dollars and was so heavy they put it in the basement for safety. Read how they mapped Kik's whereabouts through his lifetime, which sheds new light on how woolly mammoths lived, at Smithsonian.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Mauricio Antón)

First let's learn the word "toponym," which means a place name. Sometimes a place name can reveal who named it, how old the name is, and its original meaning. Some original names for places are quite descriptive, and give a lot of information if you know the language. Others are named for people, often when a previously-named place was claimed by new colonizers. Coining or changing a place name is the most blatant form of marking one's territory, after all. In modern times, there's a worldwide effort to revert colonial names back to their more original form, like Mt. McKinley reverting to Denali. Dr. Erica Brozovsky looks into how places are named and why, plus a lot of interesting trivia like the longest and shortest place names, and a few wild stories about toponyms for the PBS series Otherwords. -via Laughing Squid

On October 16, the Nebraska Humane Society took in three small kittens. Two seemed healthy, but the third kitten, eventually named Thorn, was weak and lethargic and appeared to be suffering from "flea anemia." The tiny kitten needed a blood transfusion, but there was a problem. While cats have blood types, there is no feline universal donor type, and there wasn't time to test for a compatible donor. However, the shelter has a six-year-old husky named Bret Michaels who just had blood work done that morning, and was a donor candidate. Surprisingly, dogs can donate blood to cats. Bret Michaels was a very good boy while his blood was drawn and transfused into the kitten. Thorn appeared to feel better almost immediately after the first of several transfusions. Here is our husky hero.

The Facebook post about the transfusion went viral, and the rock star Bret Michaels heard about it. The singer for Poison has experience with huskies, and called to adopt the dog named after him. 

Bret Michaels (the man) is adopting Bret Michaels (the dog)! We can't wait to see how he thrives in his new home, we just hope it doesn't get too confusing when someone tells Bret Michaels to fetch!

Michaels posted pictures of his new dog at Facebook, and pledged to find a good home for the kitten Thorn, too. Michaels is calling his new dog Bret, Jr. and will soon welcome the hero husky into a home that already has two German shepherds.

(Images credit: Nebraska Humane Society)

The fastest Formula One cars can go from zero to 100 km/h (62 mph) in about two seconds. Some experimental cars can accelerate even faster. But how about an electric vehicle? The car called mythen by AMZ Racing (in conjunction with Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and ETH Zurich) is an EV that holds the world record for electric vehicle acceleration: 0-100 km/h in 0.956 seconds! And since it's electric, it makes barely any noise doing it. To achieve such a feat, mythen designers had to build a system to keep it on the ground where it can get traction, instead of flying off into the air. It sounds kind of scary, especially when Tom Scott is recruited into driving it himself.

When you see his reaction, you realize that the most likely real-world application of this technology will be to make it a theme park ride. It will be short and expensive and have very long lines. And everyone will say it was worth it.

A hundred years ago, steamships employed coal stokers to shovel coal into the boilers that kept the vessel going. It was hard, dirty, and dangerous work, but someone had do it. Arthur John Priest became possibly the most famous coal stoker on any steamship for his eventful career. He survived two ship collisions and four sinkings, including that of the Titanic! Of course, he was very lucky to have survived all that, but there comes a point when steamship crews start to look at such a person as a bad omen. But perhaps Priest was more like Adrian Carton de Wiart, and refused to give up his profession even as fate kept telling him to retire.

Priest was only 24 when he survived the sinking of the Titanic. He jumped into the water and was picked up by a lifeboat. Then came World War I, and Priest joined the British military. He was stoking coal on the HMS Alcantara when it was sunk by a German ship disguised as a Norwegian merchant ship. Priest then served on the hospital ship HMS Britannic, sunk by a German mine in the Mediterranean. He survived that sinking alongside two other Titanic survivors. Then in 1917, he was serving as a fireman on the hospital ship SS Donegal, which was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat. Read about the many adventures of the unsinkable Arthur John Priest at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company  

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, we saw Space Station V, a rotating wheel in space that contained a luxury hotel for space travelers. The rotation provided enough force to simulate gravity and allow people to operate almost normally.

Digital artist Erik Wernquist imagined such a structure and designed the SSPO Esperanta, a sort of space cruise ship for interplanetary tourists. It has a radius of 450 meters and spins at one revolution per minute, generating artificial gravity at half that of earth. In the short film ONE REVOLUTION PER MINUTE, he shows us the views from the Esperanta, with available light moving all around every minute. It would be quite disorienting, but still beautiful. He admits that a spacecraft with this many windows is impractical, not to mention far beyond any earth budget, but it's an art film that explores those lights and shadows, so just consider it fictional. -via TYWKIWDBI 

Star Trek has grown into a beloved franchise with millions of fans, but when Gene Roddenberry's original series aired from 1966 to 1969, it had a notoriously small budget. This led to some very creative decisions, like inventing the transporter, because using a shuttle was both expensive and time-consuming. It also led to some really cheap-looking aliens, although with the dearth of science fiction on TV at the time, we didn't mind. This extreme parsimony was evident on the set, too. The futuristic interiors had chairs that were bought off the shelf at furniture stores, sometimes slightly altered, but recognizable. Later Star Trek series and movies with bigger budgets were able to get designer seats, but are often still recognized by trekkies who know furniture.

Four of those fans have built a database of commercially-available Star Trek chairs. Each of the 163 identified chairs are listed by category, with its movie or episode, history, and availability. For example, the chair shown above from "The Trouble with Tribbles" is the Chromcraft Sculpta Unicorn. The same design was later used in Star Trek: Discovery.  

Ex Astris Scientia is also asking for help in identifying more chairs. If you are inclined to buy seating based on the story you can tell about it, you'll want to take a look. Who knows, you might already have one of these designs in your home!  -via Everlasting Blort 

Zoos often purchase or exchange animals with each other in order to keep their populations stable, provide proper space for the creatures, and to promote genetic diversity in their progeny. In this case, the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro had to relocate their flock of 15 Chilean flamingos to make way for a demolition and construction project. They were shipped to the Greenville Zoo in South Carolina. In cardboard boxes. So you can consider the above an "unboxing video."

This is no aberration, but the optimum method for shipping flamingos, or "best practices." They are big birds that only weigh about four pounds each. Cardboard is safer for them and their delicate wings than a crate or a metal cage would be, and they had plenty of airflow. The birds were given a health check as they were unpacked, and appear to be settling in just fine in their new home. -via Fark

The Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon opens nationwide today. The film has received glowing reviews and is a shoe-in for Oscar nominations. It's a Scorsese crime movie, but also a love story, based on real events. But it could have been very different.

Native American representation in film has been abysmal since the beginning of film. Knowing that Killers of the Flower Moon would be widely seen, a group of Osage leaders invited Scorsese to meet with them and hear their views on how the movie should address their concerns regarding historical accuracy and perspective. They included James Roan Gray, great-grandson of Henry Roan, a victim of the Osage murders and the ex-husband of main character Mollie Burkhart. After the meeting, Scorsese rewrote the entire script to change the focus of the story. When he returned to Oklahoma after the pandemic lockdown, the Osage were ready to provide actors, language instructors, craftspeople, and consultants for the movie. Jim Gray talked to Smithsonian's Chris Klimek about his family history, the Osage influence on Killers of the Flower Moon, and other topics like the Trail of Tears and the Tulsa Race Massacre. You can read it or listen in podcast form at Smithsonian.