The case of Jennifer Carol Wilbanks, the "runaway bride" made national headlines in 2005. But you might have been too young to appreciate the story at the time, or you didn't keep up with it past reading the headlines, and besides all that, it took a long time for all the details to come out. It has nothing to do with the 1999 movie Runaway Bride, which was earlier. Wilbanks got cold feet before her wedding to John Mason, but instead of calling off the wedding, she faked a story about being kidnapped. Maybe she didn't realize that the entire nation would be mobilized into saving her. As the story played out, people who knew her were divided in their opinions, while the rest of the country went on with their lives. But what ultimately happened? For one thing, they didn't get married, at least not to each other, but there were repercussions all around. Weird History has the whole story for us.  -via Digg

How would you feel if an idea that captured your imagination and became a rock in the base of your personal philosophy turned out to have originated as a bad example? Or worse, a sarcastic joke? These things happen. We've seen it in the past few years, as people gather in places like 4chan and compete to see who can make the most people believe the most outrageous conspiracy theories. But an idea doesn't have to be all that outrageous for people to make it a long-lasting thing. Take the idea of "meritocracy." It has the same Greek suffix as democracy, theocracy, etc. so we can tell the word means political power based on merit, or ability and talent instead of wealth or social class. Sounds like a good idea, right? But the word was coined by sociologist Michael Dunlop, who wrote a dystopian book about a meritocracy in 1958 in which students were tested and assigned their life's role by their score. It was meant to be a nightmare.

Read about the satirical origins of meritocracy, along with Daylight Saving Time, Schrödinger’s cat, Hitler’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and the Trolley Problem, which was proposed in 1967 in an argument about abortion, of all things, at Cracked.

(Image credit: McGeddon)

I had no idea where YouTuber Brick Bending was going with this stack of LEGO bricks, or what was illegal about it. In the world of LEGO artists, "illegal" doesn't have anything to do with copyright. A building technique is "illegal" if it puts stress on the pieces, which would wear them out before their time. This happens when there are incomplete connections, bending, or insufficient support. In this build, he insists there is no stress on the bricks, just incomplete connections when the project is done. No, I'm not going to tell you what he is ultimately making, because the process is as interesting as the ultimate goal, but I will tell you to keep an eye out for some cool frame rate synchronization after it's completed.  

Some people were just born for war. Adrian Carton de Wiart was one of those who couldn't stay away from battle, no matter how many times fate told him to go home and retire. Wiart signed up for the British Army in 1899 for the Boer War when he was still underage, by lying about his identity. He retired in 1947 in his sixties. Wiart survived a plane crash and a stint in a POW camp in Italy (from which he escaped). He recovered from gunshot wounds in most of the wars he fought, in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, although he was left with only one eye in Somaliland, and lost two fingers, then later his hand and part of his arm in World War I.

Yet each time Wiart was wounded, he convinced his superiors to put him back into action. Oh yeah, after retiring, he broke his back and recovered from that, too. Read the thrilling and confounding story of Adrian Carton de Wiart, the most battle-scarred soldier, at Amusing Planet.  

(Image credit: Cecil Beaton)

The 1950s and '60s were the peak of the Cold War, and they were also the peak of the suburban housewife phenomena. A family that had their own backyard fallout shelter in the suburbs was a step ahead of the Communists, and were assured they could stay underground for two weeks and return to the world unscathed. Therefore, these shelters were stocked with a supply of emergency food, mostly canned goods, that would sustain a family during a nuclear disaster.

But the responsibility of caring for the family would "naturally" fall to the woman of the house, as in everyday life. The women's magazines of the period had plenty of tips and recipes for making creative meals out of fallout shelter supplies. These magazines didn't expect women to ponder the implications of nuclear annihilation, but instead gave them instructions on the more mundane details they dealt with in everyday life, from making something appetizing out of deviled ham to giving birth in a fallout shelter. Read about the advice housewives received for keeping up appearance during nuclear war at Atlas Obscura. Yes, there's a recipe included.

Do you want to drive a scientist completely insane? Then give him/her a Nobel Prize! It's not a sure thing, and most Nobel Laureates are just fine, but a surprising number of scientists who won a Nobel have gone on to going off the deep end, or at least some weird places, in the years afterward. This phenomena even has a name, although it's tongue-in-cheek: Nobel Disease.

Sometimes a Nobel Laureate is considered a genius, and is drawn into discussions of subjects outside their field, where they may not be so knowledgable. In that position, it's easy to say dumb things that get a lot of publicity. Sometimes a Nobel Laureate becomes stuck in the position of being considered the world's best in their research, which makes continuing the same work difficult. They may feel they now have to either do something better or nothing at all. That's a particular problem for someone who wins a Nobel with decades left in their career, something like "peaking too early" syndrome.

An article on Nobel Disease at Big Think has examples from history, but it doesn't mean to imply anything about this year's winners, since it was written before they were announced. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Adam Baker)

In the US, and most places, you can buy land, but you can't buy air. What about water? Different nations treat water, water purity, and water rights, differently, but Australia is, so far, the only country that ever monetized their fresh water through private companies. In other words, it's up for sale through the free market. What could possibly go wrong? What happened was that water shifted from a shared public resource to an investment. When big finance is involved, it matters less that everyone has the water they need, and more that a profit can be made.

Well, that was bad enough, but Australian farmers who were doing without water learned a clever workaround that the investors couldn't monetize. And that just caused more problems. It's a really complicated subject, but Half as Interesting explains the mess better than anyone else can. This videois only 5:30 long; the rest is an ad.  -via Digg

The beautifully animated short film Chasse Galerite is a 17th-century folk tale of a talented hunter trying to win a fair maiden's hand in marriage. It's a charming and fantastical story involving flying geese, a peach pit, and a literal version of treebeard. The award-winning video by Brian Hawkins was made with water color on cut paper.

You'll have to read the subtitles, because the narration is in Missouri French Creole, a variation of French that few speak anymore. The audio was recorded almost a half-century ago by Pierre Aloysius Boyer, a French Missouri storyteller who was born in 1910. Since Chasse Galerite cannot be embedded, watch it at Vimeo.  -via Metafilter

Remember when you made faces as a kid and your mother warned that your face might freeze like that? For some, it can pay off. Jovante Carter is a TikTok star under the name HolyGxd. He is also now the world record holder for gurning.

The word "gurning" is simply the art of making funny faces, and there are even competitions for it. For the Guinness Book of World Records, gurning is specifically the act of pulling your lower lip up over your nostrils. You can't breathe while gurning, so the record is for the longest one can hold a gurn. Carter recently held that face for 62 seconds in Milan, Italy, breaking the previous record set in 2012 at 53 seconds.  

Jovante first realized he could contort his face when he was in the third grade. “I was eating lunch and my classmate told me that when I eat, my whole face disappears,” he recalled.

-via Boing Boing

Remember back in the day when you could grow a pumpkin weighing several hundred pounds and become a local, or even worldwide, hero? It seems like only yesterday when a pumpkin weighing more than a ton was unthinkable, but that line was crossed in 2014. This year, the world record has been broken by a pumpkin weighing 2,749 pounds, entered into the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California.

Travis Gienger of Anoka County, Minnesota, grew the pumpkin, but who knows what he went through to transport it to California. Gienger is a rockstar pumpkin-grower, having won three of the last four championships. He named this pumpkin Michael Jordan, because it was perfectly round, like a basketball. As you can see, that didn't last. The previous world record was held by an Italian who grew a 2,703-pound pumpkin in 2021. Read about Michael Jordan the pumpkin and how Gienger brought the record back to the US at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Miramar Events)

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2023 is Laurent Ballesta, who won for the above image titled The Golden Horseshoe. The photograph, along with others on the same subject submitted for the Portfolio Award, was taken in the Philippines. This is the second time Ballesta has taken the top prize in the competition, after he was awarded the title in 2021. Golden horseshoe crabs are an endangered species, one of only four horseshoe crab species left in the world, even though horseshoe crabs have survived for hundreds of millions of years.

The title of Young Photographer of the Year was awarded to Israeli photographer Carmel Bechler, for this image titled Owls' Road House. You have to look closely to see the owls who have taken up residence in an abandoned building. The winning images from the competition will go on exhibit at the Natural History museum this Friday. See more photographs from the competition at the exhibit page. Be aware that some images may be disturbing.  

An archaeological dig at Gough’s Cave in southeastern England revealed human bones that are 15,000 or so years old. They showed evidence that they had been gnawed on, and skulls were turned into cups. For some time, archaeologists thought the scene was unique, but more and more sites along northern Europe have revealed that the practice of eating humans was quite widespread among the Magdalenian culture of the Upper Paleolithic era. These people were homo sapiens, and it appears that this cannibalism was a funerary practice, and not war tactic or a defense against starvation. To them, it was just what you did when someone died. At the same time, the Epigravettian culture, mostly in southern Europe, burned or buried their dead.

Genetic studies show that the Magdalenian culture didn't just switch to burying their dead, but were actually replaced by people of the Epigravettian culture. We don't yet know what kind of beliefs led to funerary cannibalism, and it's possible we may never know. Read about the ritual cannibalism of Stone Age Europe at the Natural History Museum.  -via ScienceAlert 

(Image credit: Ethan Doyle White)

The way this video begins will make you think it's about Lucretia Borgia, but that's just setting the scene for the real story. Even if Borgia were guilty of all the crimes she's been accused of, she still wouldn't hold a candle to Giulia Tofana. Tofana made a good living manufacturing cosmetics, but her real talent went into her signature product, Aqua Tofana. It's a perfect product name that will stick with you because it's fun to say. Aqua. Tofana. While the concoction was officially a cosmetic, those in the know could use it to obtain an old-fashioned divorce... if you know what I mean. And if you don't, you should read the many posts we've shared about arsenic. In other words, Giulia Tofana was a 17th-century professional poisoner, and a prolific one, too. Weird History tells her story with a bit of snark, since that's the only way to make it palatable.

For nearly 100 years, archaeologists knew how North and South America were populated by humans. They crossed over from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge about 13,000 years ago, when sea levels were lower. From there, they slowly sent their descendants southward through the two continents. But more recent archaeological discoveries, paired with genome studies, have sent the question back into the realm of "we don't know."

One of the most intriguing artifacts is a collection of human footprints at White Sands National Park, once thought to be around 10,000 years old, then maybe up to 13,000 years old, but have recently been dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. Other sites have artifacts that date prior to the previously-accepted Beringia crossing, although the oldest ones are questionable. Could humans have arrived in boats? After all, humans reached Australia in boats 50,000 years ago. Read about the oldest human artifacts in the Americas and what they mean to the story of human migration at LiveScience. -via Digg

(Image credit: National Park Service)

It took a few hundred years for science to go from wishful thinking to rigorous experimentation. During that time, the most renowned scientists who made great breakthroughs still spent time on alchemy. But each generation considered itself more enlightened than the one before. During the 19th century, there was an explosion of belief in spiritualism, communication with the dead, ghost sightings, and seances. So naturally, scientists of the day wanted to study the phenomena. Some went in looking for logical explanations for eerie events in new scientific fields, such as electrical activity and magnetism, or possibly psychology.

These scientists included Pierre and Marie Curie, Michael Faraday, and others you may be familiar with. While some discovered intriguing reasons for tables to move and Ouija boards to spell out messages, others revealed the spiritualist's tricks. And a some became sucked into the wishful thinking aspect of communication with the dead, often for personal reasons. Read the accounts of eight well-regarded Victorian era scientists who studied ghosts and other spiritual phenomena at Mental Floss.