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

A funeral often has a large meal afterward, because it can mean hours of ceremonies for family and friends who may have traveled a long way to be there. The meal is often provided by a church or community group. In the past, these meals were as traditional as the funeral rites themselves, and everyone knew what their role would be if someone died. Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish, and the Mennonites in the 19th century, these meals were not only traditional, they were quite lavish and well-attended. And there was always raisin pie.

Why raisin pie? For one thing, it was a pie you could make any time of year since it used preserved fruit. It was also quite extravagant and not likely to be made outside of a special occasion. Raisins were labor-intensive before seedless varieties of grapes were developed. Another reason was because it could stay on a table without refrigeration. Over time, raisin pie came to be used only for funerals in Pennsylvania, and serving it at any other time could be taken as an insult. Read about the tradition of raisin pie for funerals, and find a recipe too, at Atlas Obscura.

In 1935, William C. Adams was chief of the Division of Fish and Game in New York State. He had previously held that same post in Massachusetts, and was by all accounts an expert in the field. But at the annual meeting of the Angler's Club, he excitedly told the audience about a new species of fish that had been discovered in Yellowstone- the fur-bearing trout. He explained that the trout had evolved to grow fur because the water was so cold, and that Native Americans harvested the fur because it prevented goiter.

We don't know whether Adams ever recovered from the incident, which made the newspapers. The fur-bearing trout is as real as a jackalope or a drop bear, and whoever told that fish story to the fishing expert apparently made it quite convincing. However, he may have read it in a 1929 issue of Montana Wildlife magazine, which was published by the Montana State Fish and Game Department.

I wasn't familiar with fur-bearing trout, but I'm no fisherman. It is a legend that goes back to Iceland in the 17th century. It is told wherever bodies of water may be cold enough to convince visitors, and especially in places where taxidermists know how to wrap a fish in rabbit fur. In places where the water is warmer, the story often includes the detail of its origin, when someone spilled hair tonic in the local waterway.

(Image credit: Samantha Marx)

The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e

— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022

"In space, no one can hear you scream." That may be true, depending on who is listening. Humans can only hear a certain range of sounds. The idea also persists because the space we've been able to travel through is a vacuum. Not all of space is a vacuum, though; a portion of it is made up of gas. The Perseus galaxy has a lot of gas in its space, and the black hole at the center of the galaxy moans. These sound waves were detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, but they can't be heard in their raw form, which is 57 octaves below middle C. So NASA has "translated" the sound, much as they translate colors of far away images that are in parts of the light spectrum we cannot see with human eyes. This is what we call sonification. Read more about the project at NASA.

This sonification of a black hole was released back in May to celebrate NASA's Black Hole Week, but it appears that no one paid attention until it was posted to Twitter this past weekend. Yeah, you can guess there are already remixes. Speaking of remixes, the sonification of another black hole from the galaxy Messier87 combines data from three different sources to make the black hole sing, which you can see at the NASA link. -Thanks, WTM!

Ethel Marie Dillow married Glen Gifford Pendergraft in 1928. Glen died in 1965. Marie outlived him by quite a few years and died in... wait, when did she die? You might have to do some math to figure out that she died in 2008. This gravestone tells a story about the way we think of time. The stone was most likely erected in 1965. Back then, the 21st century seemed far away. As a kid, I thought about how very old I would be when the year 2000 rolled in. I'd be 41! At any rate, carving on a tombstone is easier and less expensive at the monument shop than in a cemetery, so Marie apparently had her death year pre-carved to begin with a 19. She didn't consider the possibility that she would live into the 21st century, but then she lived to the age of 98. Her survivors did what they could to make the gravestone accurate, even though they had to pay a premium for more characters to be carved on-site. The contrast in the black-and-white photo above may lead you to suspect Photoshop, but the images at Find-a-Grave make it clear that the gravestone is real.

(Image credit: u/kenistod)

The US has been battling invasive carp for almost 50 years, but they are thriving in the Mississippi River and other waterways. We've tried stopping them by wielding acoustic weapons, turning them into a food crop, and hunting them as a weird but challenging sport. Catching them is not hard; they just jump into the boat. But as carp multiply their way closer to the Great Lakes, where they could wreck the balance of native species, we've had to pull out the big guns.

The US Army Corps of Engineers built a series of "fences" by electrifying the water in canals leading to Chicago in order to stop the traveling carp from entering Lake Michigan. This electrified water is serious business, and canal traffic has to adhere to strict rules to keep people safe from being electrocuted. Tom Scott explains how it works.

In 1663, the partial fossilised skeleton of a woolly rhinoceros was discovered in Germany. This is the “Magdeburg Unicorn”, one of the worst fossil reconstructions in human history. pic.twitter.com/rmV1vcB3LY

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) August 14, 2022

This ridiculous picture can't help but make you laugh. It's as if someone played tinkertoys with a drawer of fossils. But that's exactly what happened. I had to look up the Magdeburg Unicorn, and lucky for me, Snopes has already done the research.

The fossils were unearthed at Seweckenberge, Germany, in 1663. Those who dug them up weren't particularly rigorous about documenting their depth or relative positions, or even with keeping the fossils from breaking. It was a long time ago. A few years later, Prussian scientist Otto von Geuricke constructed the beast that is now known as the Magdeburg Unicorn. The unicorn was later deconstructed, but we don't know when, and that's where things get complicated. Michael Bernhard Valentini drew a picture of the fossil construction dated 1704, but he did it from Geuricke's notes and descriptions instead of viewing the unicorn. Philosopher and scientist Gottfried Leibniz published a description of the unicorn in 1749, along with Valentini's drawing. But Leibniz's book that contained the description was published after his death, so no one could question him about it. There is speculation that Valentini's drawing, or some other drawing, may have come before Geuricke's fossil construction. In fact, some scientists question whether Geuricke was the one who put the bones together in the first place.

Today you can see the unicorn at the Museum für Naturkunde in Magdeburg, Germany. Scientists have identified three different animals that the bones once belonged to. -via Everlasting Blort

As the earth warms up, we have to think about our global food supply and the crops that feed nearly eight billion people. The world's crops are now dominated by wheat, corn, and rice. Large parts of the US grow nothing but one variety of corn year after year, depleting the land and causing erosion. Single species food is particularly vulnerable to climate change. If we can't quickly heal the land and stabilize global temperatures, what will we eat in the future? Yeah, you've heard about insects, but plant crops will be necessary to sustain human society.

Scientists are looking to the past, to crops that already flourish under harsh conditions, but never made it to the global table. Yet. Four of them are traditional crops that are candidates for diversifying our agriculture, plus there's a crop called Kernza that has been developed for the specific purpose of dealing with climate change. Kernza is a perennial wheat grass that doesn't require a farmer to buy seed, till the soil, or replant every year. Read about all five of these agricultural wonders at the Guardian.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Dehaan)

Ayer en San Telmo se perdió Juan Cruz y entonces pasó esto: pic.twitter.com/qIzsY9DHmn

— madrazzzo (@madrazzzo) August 21, 2022

It was a busy day yesterday at Plaza Dorrego in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A boy named Juan Cruz got separated from his father Eduardo. As is custom, the child was placed atop the tallest man around, and the crowd clapped in unison to draw attention. Then the band stepped in. They are singing, "Eduardo, come pick up Juan Cruz." It wasn't all that long before Eduardo showed up, but it may have seemed like a long time to Juan.

They do this in Brazil, too. According to the comments, this tactic among crowds is pretty standard across South America. -via reddit 

(Image credit: Richard Rogerson)

A historic house in England is a testament to the difficulty of living with no separation of church and state, even among the wealthy. In the 16th century, the British monarchs were Catholic, Protestant, Catholic, and Protestant again, and woe unto any subject who wouldn't change their religious practices accordingly. In 1578, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Humphrey Pakington inherited a fine manor home called Harvington Hall. In 1585, Catholic priests and Jesuits were banned from England on pain of death. Pakington, a devout Catholic, set about remodeling Harvington Hall accordingly with places for priests to hide during a raid.

In total, seven priest hides were placed within Harvington Hall. One, probably the earliest, is a small space below a floorboard in the chapel, which was located on the top floor of the house to allow the greatest amount of time to hide the instruments of Mass were people to arrive to search the house. This space was intended just to hide the objects related to Catholic Mass. However, the rest of the hides in the house were large enough to hold a person, and were intended to shield priests from hunters for days on end. Scattered across the house, they can be found above the bread oven, beneath a corridor, inside a staircase and in the roof.

(Image credit: Quodvultdeus)

The designs of these "priest hides" were ingenious. Some had two openings so that a priest could not only hide but also escape. They were disguised from detection by a confusing interior layout that put rooms at different levels on the same floor, as you can see from the back of the house. Harvington Hall is now in the possession of the Catholic church and is open to visitors. Read about the unique hiding spots in Harvington Hall at Just History Posts.  -via Strange Company
 

It's that timeof year! Cake Wrecks has a roundup of seven cakes decorated for back to school that contain typos, misspellings, and grammar errors. Someone said of the giant cookie above that it needs to be read like the Farmer's Insurance jingle: "We are teacher, bum ba-dum-dum bum bum bum!" I think it's supposed to say "We love our teacher." In the collection of seven cakes, we suspect one is misspelled on purpose, but there are other things about that cake that will furrow your brow. Having done this kind of work (and better than this), I must point out that professional cake decorators as a group are quite literate. However, when you pick out a ready-made cake at your local supermarket and request a message to be added at the last minute, the employee roped into doing it is not a professional cake decorator. See the rest of the back-to-school cakes at Cake Wrecks.

When Jill Tarter was a little girl, she was fascinated with the vastness of the universe and the stars and planets in it. She declared she was going to be an engineer when she grew up, in the days when people laughed at such ambitions in a little girl. Tarter was stubborn, and earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell, then a master's and PhD from Berkeley, where she got in on the ground floor in computer programming by neccesity. That skill helped her become involved in the search for extraterrestrial life. Tarter eventually worked for 35 years in the field, and worked her way up to director of the Center for SETI Research. In 1985, Carl Sagan wrote a novel named Contact in which the protagonist, Ellie Arroway, was based on Tarter. Here we meet the real Arroway as Tarter tells us a bit about her life and inspirations.   

On August 16, 1942, Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams took off from an island in San Francisco Bay in a US Navy blimp. Their mission was simple: surveillance of the West Coast for signs of Japanese submarines. Their ship, designated the L-8, was a Goodyear blimp repurposed for the war effort. Five hours later, the L-8 crashed into a street in Daly City. There was no fire and minimal damage to the blimp, but there was no one on board. A Navy investigation found multiple witnesses who saw the blimp through its journey that day, so they could retrace its steps, but the witnesses gave unreliable and contradictory testimony about the crew. No trace of Cody and Adams was ever found.

Plenty of theories about what happened to the men were proposed, some more outlandish than others, yet none were confirmed. The L-8 went on to serve the Navy through the rest of the war, but became known as the ghost blimp. Read about the mystery of the L-8 that still lingers 80 years later at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: U.S. National Archives)

RiffTrax, the online successor to MST3K, skewered the 1989 movie The Return of Swamp Thing last night. You can see the original trailer to get a taste of how over-the-top that movie was. "He's got a grudge, 'cause they turned him to sludge!" Kevin Murphy and The RiffTones (featuring Brian Murphy) were so inspired by the love story between Swamp Thing and Heather Locklear that they wrote a little song about it. You'll find the full lyrics at Metafilter.

We know the term tutti frutti as a shortcut for a mixed fruit flavor for ice cream or lollipops, or a nonsense song from Little Richard. But in the 19th century, it was a recipe for preserving summer fruits of almost any kind in brandy. Before refrigeration, alcohol was one of the more dependable ways to make fruit last through the winter. Home cooks would begin making tutti frutti in the spring with strawberries, sugar, and brandy, and later add berries, peaches, cherries, pineapples, and whatever else was available as the crops rolled in. By the time the jar was full, the delicious fruit compote was ready for storage or eating. And it made those long winter days a bit more sunny.

Sadly, tutti frutti was made illegal during Prohibition, and by the time brandy was legal again, other fruit preservation methods were well established, and advances in transporting crops made fresh fruit available all year. But you can go back to the days of tutti frutti, because the history of tutti frutti is accompanied by a modern recipe for making your own at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Ionutzmovie)