The Artemis 1 is set to launch Monday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. This is the first launch of the Artemis mission that will send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in almost 50 years. Artemis 1 is an unmanned flight that will test the Orion spacecraft and NASA's new launch system. The spacecraft will travel 280,000 miles from earth, looping around the moon before returning home. The entire trip will take four to six weeks and cover 1.3 million miles. Tomorrow's launch is set for 8:33 AM. Read more about the mission at Jalopnik.
(Image credit: NASA)

UPDATE: The Artemis launch has been scrubbed due to an issue with one of the four rocket engines, and has been tentatively rescheduled for Friday, September 2.

The teased bouffants of the 1950s and the Aquanet curls of the 1980s couldn't hold a candle to these hairstyles! Besides, holding a candle to any such hairdo is a bad idea. For a short time in the 1770s, big hair was bigger than ever. Ladies in England copied ladies in France, and wore elaborate constructions on their heads that saw their hair lifted high and decorated with jewelry, toys, flowers, and whatever could contribute to the look. The style even traveled to America, where it was only used for special occasions by wealthy city dwellers because Americans were pretty busy in the 1770s. How high were those hairdos? We aren't sure, because the artistic depictions of them tended to be caricatures that greatly exaggerated the trend. But those caricatures are scathing and fun to see. The image below not only satirizes the enormous hair, but also the British conflict with the American colonies, as the hairdo depicts the British evacuation of Boston.



The styling of these hair constructions was lampooned, too. Stylists had to climb ladders or hang from ropes to reach the hair they were working on! Big hair wasn't limited to women, either, as men known as macaronis adopted bouffant styles, too. Enjoy a gallery of 36 caricatures of the big hair trend of the 1770s at Flashbak. -via Nag on the Lake

On August 13, 1969, the White House held the largest state dinner ever at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. The 1440 guests included movie stars, politicians, scientists, and diplomats. The guests of honor were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, who had just returned from the Apollo 11 mission a couple of weeks before. President Nixon presented the three astronauts with the Medal of Freedom during the dinner, and the whole thing was televised. Outside, war protesters chanted.

The hotel kitchen staff, led by chef Walter Roth, cooked so much food that the sprinklers went off, but they still produced an exceptional meal personally approved by Nixon. He had demanded that a fancy new dessert be created especially for the occasion, and his only requirement was that it contain ice cream. The secret menu for the banquet was leaked ahead of time, but no one knew what the dessert called Clair de Lune would be. The dessert, created by pastry chef Ernest Mueller, was brought to guests as the band played "Fly Me to the Moon." It looked like a miniature white moon with craters, with an American flag planted on it, swimming in a "sea of darkness" sauce.

Clair de Lune contained almond pastry, raisin-brandy filling, meringue scorched with a blowtorch, and a sauce made of mountain-picked Oregon blackberries. Oh yeah, there was vanilla ice cream inside, too. It sounds yummy, but making it is such an elaborate process that you will read the recipe and decide to buy a box of ice cream sandwiches instead. It was the perfect dessert to cap off a performance of luxury dining for a crew of tired astronauts, Hollywood elite, and a president who desperately wanted to take credit for the moon mission. Read about that state dinner and see its memorable dessert at Atlas Obscura.

Hannah Beswick lived at a time when premature burials were a real possibility. In fact, Bestwick's younger brother was in a coffin and ready for burial when someone noticed he was alive, and he lived for quite a few more years. So Beswick went the extra mile to avoid the same fate for herself, making arrangements with her doctor, Charles White, to not bury her until some time had passed and she was dead for sure.

However, the way Beswick's will was worded, there was a financial incentive for Dr. White to do things another way. When Beswick died in 1758, White carried out her wishes to not be buried immediately. To make that experience palatable, White embalmed her, using an ancient technique that dried the corpse out completely. And she was not buried for another 110 years! Beswick got her wish about not being buried too early, but she ended up a mummy, or what we may call a restless corpse. Read the story of the Manchester Mummy at Amusing Planet.

All the letters of the alphabet participate in a story of good and evil, of justice and revenge, of friendship and heroism. The letters are getting along fine, except for F, who terrorizes everyone. G has to take charge, and calls up the superheroes L, M, N, O, and P. An epic battle ensues, in which letters get thrown about left and right, and we learn their various personalities along the way. That just makes their ultimate fates more heart-wrenching. Q is quite the standout, because he knows everything, but fails to warn the others in time because he's naturally slow. The action movie has a bittersweet coda in which we learn why F is such a murderous psycho. You can tell it's a flashback because the same letters are lowercase, indicating they are children.  

How did this happen? Mike Salcedo had an idea for a personal project. He would animate one letter of the alphabet every day. That project turned into something very different.

They were supposed to all just hop in and say their names, but I was already bored of that by C. I had the "FRIENDS" idea the night before I made D, and the rest snowballed from there. I outlined a long list of ideas that kept changing as the series progressed.

You can see the individual letter animations in this playlist. The action movie it culminates in has so many details you may have to watch it more than once. N transforms to Ñ when he needs to. X can multiply! G uses Morse code to call to the other letters. F farts. There are punctuation marks that look suspiciously like Infinity Stones, and they each have the power of their real-world function. The group can call up props by spelling out words, but they can only use the letters that have already been introduced. Altogether, it's a masterpiece. -via Metafilter

The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group is an extensive website dedicate to the taxonomy of occlupanids. They are divided into 17 families and further classified into genus and species, with descriptions. It is a painstakingly precise project, fine-tuned by decades of work. But you might not know what occlupanids are. They are bread clips. And the group is not really a group; it is the work of computer graphics and visualization specialist John Daniel, who began his work classifying occlupanids in 1994. The website is a throwback to the days when the internet was a wondrous repository of esoteric knowledge made accessible to the world.

Daniel himself coined the word occlupanid, which combines the Latin occlu- (to close) and -pan (bread). The term has entered the general English lexicon, and is now used in the scientific community.   

Input magazine recently discovered the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, and sought out Daniel for his story. Learn what sparked his interest in bread clips, how he built the occlupanid database, and what it means to the fans who follow it in the interview. -via Metafilter

The horror film The Exorcist was a hit in 1973, but it wasn't the first time the idea of demon possession was staged for an audience. In the 1590s, a young woman from the village of Romorantin, France, exhibited the signs of possession. Her body would contort in spasms, her eyes would roll back in her head, and she would speak without opening her mouth, emitting guttural sounds seemingly from her stomach. Martha Brossier's family blamed it on a neighbor who was a witch. What would you do in this situation? Would you call a doctor or a priest? Or both?

Martha's father had a better idea. He put her on stage in a traveling show. People would pay money to see a woman under the influence of a demon! Martha and her father traveled throughout France, demonstrating her unnatural symptoms to astonished audiences, and she was often exorcized by local priests. That provided a happy ending for the audience, yet she would be possessed again in the next village. But when the two went to Paris, they found themselves under the scrutiny of Michel Marescot, the personal physician of King Henry IV. Learn how Marescot unmasked the fake victim of possession at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company 

Infinite dream (part 1) pic.twitter.com/9KgUZMlKgk

— Vaskange (@Vaskange) August 15, 2022

French artist Vaskange has been experimenting with the iPad app called Endless Paper to make zoom illustrations that tell a story. I was completely hooked into the dream above when the sheep showed up, and I can't wait to see part two. Meanwhile, here's one about a robot and his pet bird in a dystopian city of the future.

Endless robot story (part 1)
.
With a music especially composed by @adrienmelano for the video!
I am curious to know your interpretation of the story so far?
App: @endlesspaper pic.twitter.com/6ltrp3Y3Gd

— Vaskange (@Vaskange) August 26, 2022

While that one's bittersweet, or maybe creepy depending on how you see it, it's still beautiful. Want to see more? Here's one about the artist's vacation, and you'll no doubt want to bookmark Vaskange's Instagram gallery to catch further episodes.

-via Metafilter

It appeared to be an open-and-shut case. A respected Catholic priest, Father Hubert Dahme, was shot in the head on the streets of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1924. A week later, 20-year-old vagrant Harold Israel was accused of the murder. Seven eyewitnesses identified him. The gun in his possession was the one police believed to have been used to assassinate the priest. And Israel confessed to the crime. However, when it came time for his arraignment, prosecutor Homer Cummings went through the evidence against Israel and tore it down piece by piece in a 90-minute court presentation. Cummings had studied the case and determined that Israel had been railroaded.

Normally, when the prosecution finds the evidence lacking, they will quietly drop the case. That would leave Israel a free man, but the headlines about the prominent case would follow him the rest of his life. Meanwhile, there were no other suspects in the murder. Cummings said, "It is just as important for a state's attorney to use the great powers of his office to protect the innocent as it is to convict the guilty." The case was later made into a 1947 movie called Boomerang! You can read what Cummings unearthed in his own investigation, along with four other wild historical stories, in an article at Cracked.   

Paul Klusman and TJ Wingard are the cat engineers (previously at Neatorama and at Supa Fluffy). Their cats are Oscar, Ginger, and Zoey. They love the cats, but for years they've been trying to figure out if these cats can be useful at all. This video is a review of the latest in cat laser technology. Equipping cats with laser eye technology can be fun, but it can also be put to good use in welding, cutting, pest control, and communications. Also to fight aliens. And to have fun, too. The second half of this video is a throwback to what we non-engineers first used lasers for: to accompany disco music.

This video is the second of the day to feature monotone engineers with a fascinating subject. But while arches and chains left us with a cool new understanding of physics in architecture, this one just leaves us glad to have watched it. -via Laughing Squid

The American Alliance of Museums posted a list of the best museum bathrooms. Sure, they are all pretty and clean and have the conveniences one would need, but the loos listed are so much more than that. To be a best museum bathroom, you have to consider what makes this bathroom in this museum not only nice, but also clever, interesting, and appropriate. Some are downright fascinating!

History museums tend to continue their lessons right into the more private facilities. The head in the Mariner's Museum and Park has its own exhibition about, well, you can probably guess. The Charleston Museum has a fancy display of fancy chamber pots in its ladies room. Art museums are more likely to commission well-known artists to design their restrooms as functioning works of art. Then there are illusion restrooms, experimental restrooms, and unexpected experience restrooms, which you can see at The American Alliance of Museums.  -via Boing Boing

I knew a little bit about how arches work, but I didn't know how they related to hanging chains. If you've never taken an engineering course, this lesson might blow your mind. The concept is described in a clear and concise way at the beginning, but the further you go into how arches and chains actually work, the more interesting it gets. We may laugh at the lack of medical knowledge up through the medieval era, but at the same time engineers and architects were transforming their physics observations and experiments into amazing bridges and cathedrals that are still in use hundreds of years later. After watching this video from Engineering Models, I feel like I have learned an awful lot in just a few minutes.

If you enjoyed that and want more, the same channel explains the physics that govern the designs of suspension bridges, Gothic cathedrals, dams, retaining walls, silos and tanks, and tunnels and culverts. -via Nag on the Lake

A new project at Cambridge University, funded by Wellcome, seeks to digitize more than 180 medieval manuscripts containing the state of medicine of the time. These manuscripts go back a thousand years, but most are from the 14th and 15th centuries. The difficulty of this project lies in the fact that the original volumes are crumbling, and those that are in English are in Middle English, which is not all that easy to translate. Others are in Latin or French, but still need to be translated through a lens of time. But these manuscript contain around 8,000 medical recipes of the time when medical cures were often just wishful thinking. Some of them seem to fall into the category of "giving the sufferer or his family something to do."

One treatment for gout involves stuffing a puppy with snails and sage and roasting him over a fire: the rendered fat was then used to make a salve. Another proposes salting an owl and baking it until it can be ground into a powder, mixing it with boar’s grease to make a salve, and likewise rubbing it onto the sufferer’s body.

To treat cataracts – described as a ‘web in the eye’ – one recipe recommends taking the gall bladder of a hare and some honey, mixing them together and then applying it to the eye with a feather over the course of three nights.

The project, expected to take two years, will result in an online database that anyone can access. Read about this project at the University of Cambridge. -via Damn Interesting

We all know the story of King Arthur. He was born of a king, but not acknowledged until he magically pulled a sword out of a stone. He united Britain and established the rule of law. He brought knights to his round table and set them off in search of the Holy Grail. He conquered his enemies in battle and endured an affair between his queen and his best knight. His was finally beaten in battle by his own kinsman and was taken off to Avalon, where he awaits the call to return to power.

However, almost all of that story was added and embellished over the past 1600 years. If you go back to the oldest documentation on Arthur, he was not a king but a local hero who defended his homeland against all enemies. This hero was apparently famous enough that even in the Dark Ages others were compared to him. He might not have even been named Arthur, but there is the possibility that the stories are told about a real person in 6th century Britain.

After the Romans left Britain in 410 AD, the land was plunged into the Dark Ages. The islands fell into economic collapse, illiteracy, and famine. Community alliances splintered as Saxons invaded. But archeological evidence at the ruins of Tintagel, the stronghold in Cornwall where Arthur was supposedly born, hint that it had a flourishing community in the 6th century, faring far better than other areas of Britain. Could that be because a mighty warrior led their defenses? Read what we've learned about the legend of Arthur, and how difficult it is to sort fact from fiction at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Astrobiologic)

Lowbrow Studios makes Pac-Man a lot more dramatic and a lot more bloody with the addition of an evil mad scientist. Dr. Albert Gerhardt Bergstrom is more than the ghosts can handle! He's made what was supposed to be a fun little game into a disgusting series of tortures. After all, the ghosts normally just kill Pac-Man, which they know isn't so bad because the ghosts are already dead yet still chasing around, and Pac-Man will come back for more. But will he come back for more of this?

But there's a twist. Once Dr. Albert Gerhardt Bergstrom is gone, someone even worse takes his place! -via Geeks Are Sexy