Imagine one day you see your roommate, and his face looks like a demon or something out of Star Trek. That was the experience of Victor Sharrah when he began to suffer from a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia. Other people with the condition may see faces with features in the wrong places, weird textures, or other distortions, but only on actual faces they encounter. Pictures of faces appear normal to them, which allowed an artist to recreate what Sharrah sees in the images above. Prosopometamorphopsia is so rare that only around 100 cases have been identified since 1904. However, it is probable that people who suffer from it do not seek help for fear that they will be diagnosed with schizophrenia or other mental illness. Yet the problem in perceiving faces seems to be the only symptom. Scientists don't know what causes it, but the effects are often temporary, and if not, there are ways to treat it. Farrah is able to see faces as normal with the help of color-shifting glasses. Read more about prosopometamorphopsia at Smithsonian.

(Image credit:  A. Mello et al.)

Jeremie Carrier demonstrates a "15 note poly tempo pendulum." He describes it as "an amazing sweep of the rythmic subdivision spectrum!" I didn't understand those words, either, but I'll try to explain.

What he did was record himself 15 times, each time playing a steady beat of one note, but each recording is of a different note and a different beat. The tempos vary by only two beats per minute from one video to the next. Then all the videos were edited together. What we get is a beat that becomes more discordant, but then several of the notes will play a tune of sorts, then veer off from each other, and another set of notes will then stand out as if they were playing a tune. It's no symphony, but it gets more interesting as it goes. Carrier rang a bell to show us where a new "movement" begins. At five minutes and five seconds, all the notes and beats line up again as they were in the beginning. Cool.

As I listened, this started to sound familiar. The very first post I ever published at Neatorama was for a geometric music generator called the Whitney Music Box that produced this same effect.

-via Laughing Squid

You know about The Year Without a Summer, when the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora caused crops to fail around the world in 1816. People couldn't afford to feed their beasts of burden, and that threw a damper into transportation, which relied on horses. But necessity is the mother of invention, and a young German named Karl von Drais invented a machine to make walking faster and easier. His device that he called the laufmaschine (running machine) consisted of two wheels connected by a frame with a saddle. The rider pushed off the ground with his feet, and propelled himself further and faster than was possible by just walking. Von Drais patented his invention in France as the vélocipède. In England, the invention was called a draisine, or a hobby-horse. It wasn't long before other engineers found a way to propel the running machine without running, leading to the modern concept of a bicycle. But without a volcanic explosion, we might never have have had them. Read about the laufmaschine at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Wilhelm Siegrist)

Zoos in Japan train their employees for the possibility that one of the animals might escape. They can't use real animals for these training sessions, so they improvise with employees in costume. We've previously shown you escape drills featuring a zebra, a gorilla, a rhinoceros, and a bear. Recently, the zookeepers at the Tobu Zoo practiced capturing an escaped white tiger. The scenario was that an earthquake had broken the glass of the enclosure, freeing the tiger. The drill was apparently successful, and the "tiger" was defeated by a tranquilizer gun. It's not clear whether the tranquilizer was real, but if so, the employee probably got the rest of the day off.

While it's always good to know the protocol in advance, an actual escape would confront zookeepers with an animal that is much stronger, faster, and more bitey than any human could hope to portray. The actual white tiger makes a cameo appearance in this video, from behind glass. -via Boing Boing

In 1907, Georges Méliès illustrated how the sun and the moon fell in love and came together to create an eclipse in his movie The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon. Ever since then, both solar and lunar eclipses have played a role in cinema, often as an explanation for something magical or as a portent of coming doom. It make plenty of sense, as an eclipse is a natural phenomena that feels unnatural because they are so rare and the effects are bizarre. The sun is blotted out, or the moon changes shape, and residents of earth are left confused. The symbolism is clear when the powerful sun is defeated by the lesser moon, which should be a warning to those in power on earth.

While the alignment in the heavens is a significant element for any fictional story, an eclipse is also an excellent visual for a movie. One production in 1961 even delayed shooting so that the cameras could capture a real eclipse that was part of the story (shown above). Read about how eclipses have been used in movies at Atlas Obscura.

(Image source: YouTube)

Psst! Do you want to see a lot of optical illusions in one sitting? Get ready, because The Paint Explainer (previously at Neatorama) is going to go through forty (40!) of them in this video. See, our eyes are amazing devices, sensing light in all its variations of shade, color, and movement, translating it into signals that go to our brain. Our brains are even more amazing, because they take those signals and translate them back into information we can use, in an instant, so we can negotiate the world around us. To keep up the pace, our brains take shortcuts based on what is familiar to us. The brain relies on the world being consistent in order to make these leaps in perception that give us those shortcuts. When something messes with our brains' "rules" for interpreting visual signals, we get optical illusions. While they can be confusing, they are also fun to see, and even more fun to understand. Still, since there are so many in this one video, you might want to see a few and take a break, then go back for the rest in short sessions.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

The world is full of wonders, but it's also constantly changing. We know of places that changed completely, sometimes before man was ever around to see them. There are also places that we thought were legendary that were fairly recently discovered to have been real in the past. But the most fascinating are those that are documented, and even exist in images, that we will never see again. Pictured above is the Pink and White Terraces of New Zealand. The beautiful natural warm pools and mineral formations were sacred to the Maori, and later brought in a good living for people hosting the tourists who flocked to see them. But that came to an end when Mount Tarawera erupted on June 10, 1886. The Pink and White Terraces collapsed into the volcanic crater, along with a village, never to be seen again.

Read about the Pink and White Terraces and nine other places that no longer exist at Mental Floss. Or you can listen to the list in a video.  

(Image credit: Charles Blomfield)

A really bumpy train ride
byu/not_a_profession infunny

"Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." What you see here is an everyday experience in Myanmar. The train ride from Yangon to Bagan takes around nineteen hours and is notorious for its bumpiness. Getting any sleep is impossible, even if you are in a sleeper car. The video above was posted at reddit to much delight. But then, everyone decided what it really needed was a musical soundtrack.

Through most of the 20th century, parents wanting to go out for the evening would hire a teenager from the neighborhood, or a friend's daughter, to supervise their children. Girls would often start babysitting at about twelve years old, learn responsibility and child care, and earn a small bit of spending money. I earned my first babysitting money at eleven, and had a full time job watching three girls the summer I was 15. I also remember idolizing several teenage girls (and one boy) who babysat me when I was younger.

You don't see much of that these days. Babysitters are expensive, and parents who can afford it prefer to hire adults. Many young teens aren't used to staying home by themselves, much less caring for younger children, and they have fewer siblings to give them experience. Besides, when they are old enough to work, they can get better-paying jobs. Read about the bygone rite of passage of babysitting at the Atlantic. Or if you hit a paywall, at Archive. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jared eberhardt)

Humans treating humans for illness or injury goes back much much further in our history than written records, so we have to study artifacts and the fossil record to learn about ancient medical practices. The oldest surgery we know about dates to more than 30,000 years ago, when a child's lower leg was amputated. The bones show evidence of deliberate cutting, plus healing, indicating that the patient lived for several years afterward. As amazing as that is, it doesn't tell the whole story. We don't have preserved evidence of soft tissue from people that far back, but we do know that early humans harnessed natural remedies even when we were Neanderthals. Still, "medical care" is defined by people taking care of other people, and there is evidence of early humans who wouldn't have survived long with the infirmities they were found to have unless others were caring for them. This evidence involves assumptions, because we don't know what that care involved. These practices could have happened long before we were humans. This video is shorter than it looks, as the last minute and a half are promotional.
 

In the vast realm of science, there's no shame is answering a question with "I don't know." Well, except in a science class when you are tested on things you should have studied. The whole idea of science is to explore those things we don't yet know and we're doing pretty well when we can find any answers at all. But all new discoveries lead to more questions, so it's a never-ending quest to learn all we can about the universe we live in. Vox explores those questions and discoveries in their regular podcast called Unexplainable. While they explain plenty, there are quite a few questions that science has no definitive answer for yet.

These questions range from the cosmic to the mundane to the intriguing. How do we define "life"? Or conversely, how do we define "death"? Every time we think we might have an answer, something happens to bend our definitions out of existence. What effect does weed have on pregnancy? That's a sticky area to research, since both drug laws and child abuse laws keep possible subjects from participating. Are there living microbes on the moon? Astronauts who have been there left their poop behind in bags to save weight on liftoff, but we can't yet get there to check on them. Explore 17 as of yet unanswered questions in science at Vox. Each question is explained in text and also has the relevant podcast attached in case you want to learn more about a specific question.  

Experimental medical treatments are scary enough, but imagining you underwent such treatments before we had germ theory or even proper anatomy classes. Someone would get an idea, and they would try it on a patient because the alternative was death. Or they would try it because it just seemed like a good idea, like the time doctors removed some blood from a patient, bathed it in UV rays, and put it back in. It worked, but not for the reasons they thought. The same with using wine in wounds or putting a fish on your head to cure a headache.

One strange treatment didn't last long. Between the development of heart surgery and the heart-lung machine, in 1954, live human bodies were used to keep a patient's blood circulating during heart surgery, taking on the blood-pumping duties for two people. This technique, call cross-circulation, was soon discontinued, not because it didn't work (because it did!), but because the heart-lung machine soon replaced it. Read about five medical treatments that sound bonkers but worked at Cracked.   

(Image credit: Patrick J. Lynch)

Easter traditions vary widely among places that celebrate the holiday, and some can be pretty darn weird. One is the annual bottle kicking competition in the British village of Hallaton. The team from Hallaton competes with the people of nearby Medbourne to carry a "bottle" (actually three small wooden kegs) across two streams a mile apart. There is an old legend that explains the beginnings of the custom involving a miraculous hare that saved two women from a charging bull. Gratitude went to God, and not the hare, which was given to the church to be made into a pie for the poor. What does that have to do with bottle kicking? The story is a bit complicated, but it evolved into the annual competition between the two villages.

The competition has few rules, and resembles a melee. The festival surrounding the competition held each Easter Monday has been going for a couple of hundred years, but may be much older. Some consider bottle kicking to be the origin of rugby, which uses a ball shaped sort of like a keg, that Americans would recognize as a football. Read about the Easter sport of  bottle kicking and see plenty of pictures at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Michael Trolove/Bottle Kicking/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Each letter of the English alphabet has an origin story, and each one could fill a book. We don't have time for that, so linguist Olly Richards gives us the short version of all 26 letters. They start out as pictograms, which often having nothing at all to do with their modern usage. Then they get filtered through other languages, often ending with Greek and then Latin, but not always. And we learn about ancient cultures that didn't have certain sounds in their own language, but used those letters for something else. By the time we got our standard 26-letter alphabet, those origins were left behind in the mists of obscurity. By the time he's finished with all 26 letters, you will have a new respect for the people who dug all this up for us. -via Laughing Squid

A new series on AppleTV+ called Manhunt follows the search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. The first two episodes of the seven-episode miniseries are already available for streaming. The series focuses on John Wilkes Booth, of course, but also on Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was very close to the president and directed the search for Booth, involving both the Union Army and detectives from New York City. Stanton also offered $100,000 in reward money for the apprehension of Booth and two of his accomplices.

Despite the intense efforts of the federal government, Booth wasn't located until April 26, 12 days after the crime. How could a renowned actor, who face was recognizable up and down the Atlantic seaboard, kill the president in front of a theater full of people and evade capture for so long? It was because Booth had plenty of support from Confederates and Confederate sympathizers who were not ready to face the fact that they had lost the Civil War. Read the historical facts behind the show about the hunt for John Wilkes Booth at Smithsonian.