Can you mix modern hip-hop music with ballroom dancing? A video of Sara Grdan and Ivan Terrazas dancing an exhibition at the 7th Belgrade Tango Encuentro in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2016 has gone viral because they do just that. Watch them dance a sultry tango to Eminem's song "Lose Yourself." It's more than just finding a beat; they incorporate modern dance elements seamlessly into the choreography. Watch the interplay of their four feet and marvel at how they don't get tangled in the tango. No wonder people have become enchanted with their performance! -via Digg

James V. Lafferty made a name for himself in 1882 by building an elephant-shaped building in New Jersey known as Lucy the Elephant. In 1885, he built a second elephant almost twice as tall as Lucy in Coney Island that became known as the Elephant Colossus. This building was 122 feet tall and contained a 31-room hotel as well as various shops in the lower levels. The interior rooms were named after the corresponding elephant organs, which was a novelty and probably aided in navigating the building. The building became a rather well-known brothel during its short life, and inspired the phrase "seeing the elephant" for a stop there. After standing empty for some time, in 1896 the elephant suffered the fate of so many Coney Island attractions and burned to the ground.

You can see more pictures of the Elephant Colossus here. The story of the Elephantine Colossus is just one of the 11 Fun Facts About Coney Island you can read at Mental Floss.

We've come to expect the most ridiculous Rube Goldberg contraptions from Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama), but this one takes the cake. Passing the wine from one end of the table to the other involves stunts that couldn't possibly happen in the real world, could they? In many of the events, nothing happens that would advance the sequence the first time around, but maybe the second or third time around. In some places, you are sure you can see what's going to happen, but you are wrong. And then you find yourself becoming more invested in one little piece instead of the overall process, like wondering when that wine glass is going to break (because you just know it will eventually). Or worrying about the welfare of that mouse. Joseph gets his wine in about four minutes, after wrecking the entire table. The rest is Patreon credits. -via reddit

We must be careful about assigning human motives to animals, especially fish. However, whale sharks are known to interact with humans occasionally, and this fellow had a good reason to approach a fishing boat. The shark had a rope caught around its midsection. The fishermen drew the shark close enough to saw the rope loose, and lovingly told the whale shark to take off. I don't know what language they are speaking, but everyone understands "Bye!" including the fish. The whale shark even seems to wave to them as it realizes the rope is gone. But that is speculation, because we must be careful about assigning human motives to animals. At least this fish is free! -via reddit

Max Headroom was a fictional computer-generated character who was designed for TV hosting and advertising, but was actually pretty subversive underneath because the artificial intelligence program that generated him used the brain of a real (although fictional) person as a model. The character, portrayed by Matt Frewer in prosthetics, first appeared in the British movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future in 1985. He then hosted a TV show called The Max Headroom Show, followed by an American drama titled simply Max Headroom, and also appeared in a series of ads for New Coke, all in the 1980s.   

Now Max Headroom is coming back, to be played once again by Matt Frewer. A new TV series is being developed by AMC around the glitchy TV personality, with Christopher Cantwell of Halt and Catch Fire fame as showrunner. The executive producers will be Frewer, Cantwell, Lisa Whalen, Elijah Wood, and Daniel Noah. There's no word yet on when the series is expected to air.

What's weird is that in 1985, a glitchy, digital talking head seemed like some type of science fiction that was just over the horizon. In 2022, we have talking digital avatars, deep fake videos, and artificial intelligence programs galore. We have to wonder what year the Max Headroom reboot will be set in, and whether it will explore new issues about the nature of AI, or will it be just a nostalgic romp. -via Boing Boing

Did you hear the one about the foot doctor who owed his reputation to Abraham Lincoln? Issachar Zacharie was not trained as a medical doctor, although he used the term throughout his professional life. He was a chiropodist who made a living trimming corns and bunions and cutting toenails in New York City. Zacharie used forged certificates and references to inflate his qualifications. The truth was that he learned his crafts as a child apprenticed to a physician.

Zacharie had one very important client, though. The "doctor" had suggested he be put in charge of a team of podiatrists for the Union Army in the Civil War, but the idea was not taken seriously. However, army officials and senators asked Zacharie to work on their feet. Abraham Lincoln eventually availed himself of Zacharie's services and liked the corn-cutter very much. Lincoln actually sent Zacharie on a couple of spy missions disguised as diplomacy during the war. Once Lincoln was assassinated, Zacharie quickly learned he was a nobody among Washington's elite. Read the story of the fraudulent foot doctor at The London Dead.  -via Strange Company

Oscar is sleeping, and he doesn't want to get up. No noise will disturb his slumber, and Paul makes plenty of noise when he gets home from work. The simulated snoring is funny, but I could have found him a cat that snores loudly for real. While it appears that Oscar is dead to the world, there's a part of his brain that is still working, sorting the sounds around him into important sounds and unimportant sounds. A cat has his priorities.

Paul Klusman, who you know from the Engineer's Guide to Cats and its sequel, titled this video Cat Audio Filtration Technology, as you would expect an engineer to do. Don't miss the bloopers at the end. -via Laughing Squid

We know that most adults in the world are lactose-intolerant. That means they've lost the ability to produce lactase, an enzyme that helps babies digest milk. Those who continue to produce lactase and digest milk into adulthood are overwhelmingly northern Europeans. The conventional wisdom was that Europeans evolved this trait to survive, particularly those in the far north where the growing season is short and people rely on animal fats in milk. There are a couple of problems with this theory, however. First off, there are plenty of people in northern Asia who drink milk all their lives even though they do not produce lactase beyond infancy.  It doesn't bother them nearly as much as you'd think from reading about the subject, and certainly not enough to affect group survival. The second problem is that scientists have determined that European adults drank milk as far back at 9,000 years ago, but the switch to lactose-tolerance only occurred about 5,000 years ago, and quite suddenly for an evolutionary trait.

The answer is that there must have been an environmental stressor that made lactose-intolerant people die off in droves about 5,000 years ago, so that the genes responsible for continued lactase production could reach critical mass in the population. That would be a stressor on top of the inability to digest milk, because people do not die of lactose intolerance. The candidates are famine, drought, and pathogens that would disproportionally affect those who could not digest milk. Read what the research says so far about the evolution of lactose-tolerance at Smithsonian.

How does this optical illusion work? You may think it's simply a matter of filming the video sideways, because it's attached to a wall instead of a table. That would be the easy way. I was convinced of that and therefore couldn't see it any other way until we were shown how it works. You might be surprised as well!

Yeah, it's all a matter of perspective. Struck Duck, who made this illusion, has an Etsy store where you can buy this and other illusions. Or if you have a 3D printer, you can buy the STL files and make your own. -via Digg

Edgar Randolph Parker graduated from dental school in 1892 at the age of twenty, even though he wasn't much of a student. When his private practice didn't take off immediately, he decided to advertise, despite advertising being an ethical taboo among dentists at the time. But Parker didn't just advertise- he put on a street show! He promised his tooth extraction would be painless, a claim that was bolstered by the cocaine solution he gave to his patients. Under advice from a former employee of P.T. Barnum, Parker took his show on the road, setting up in small town after small town, offering entertainment by giving lectures on dental hygiene and having his traveling band play. If a volunteer patient screamed and moaned, the band would just play louder.

Parker claimed to have pulled 357 teeth in one day, which he wore on a necklace. Eventually, the dental board of California threatened to pull his license over false advertising for using the "painless" slogan, so Parker had his first name legally changed to Painless! Read about the dentist who found great fame through showmanship at Amusing Planet.

Remember the guy who repurposed his deceased cat by making it into a helicopter? This stunt goes much further in making a dead animal into something useful by using the its anatomy in movement! Spiders move their legs by hydraulic pressure- they pump water into them to make them extend, and then flex them with muscles. Spiders do not have opposing muscles in their legs to extend them. Mechanical engineering professor Daniel Preston and graduate student Faye Yap found a dead spider curled up in the lab and decided to do something with it. They found that they could blow air into the spider corpse and make its legs extend. By releasing the air pressure, the spider legs flexed again. It became a rather hardy gripper tool, good for at least a thousand grips, and able to pick up 130% of its weight.

This seems like a neat thing for mechanical engineers to discover, but is there any use for such a tool? The spider-gripper could be used for collecting fragile biological samples, like insects. Read about this research at Gizmodo, and if you're interested, there's also a slideshow that will show you how it's done.

When we are kids, birthdays are wonderful. Your birthday marks a milestone in the steps of growing up. Your family wants to celebrate the milestone, your friends love the parties, and you like a day when the world revolves around you (not to mention the gifts). However, for many people, the date hits differently as an adult. There are several reasons for the birthday blues, including missing how special birthdays were in your childhood. As an adult, you find that people you know often don't remember and sometimes don't care. It's also a time for taking stock of your life so far, which may be disappointing. And you can't help but ponder getting older and inching toward the end of your life. You're not the only person who feels that way when a birthday rolls around, but there are things you can do to make your birthday less depressing. Read about them at Refinery29. Practice these tips and sooner or later, you'll even forget how old you are! -via Digg

The history of food is as rich and long as the history of language or war, as just as consequential as either. Anything that makes food preparation simpler, safer, or more enjoyable is going to eventually become universal. Mental Floss take us on a tour of some culinary inventions that had a profound impact on people all over the world. You would probably guess that the process of baking food is in there, and microwave ovens, but it turns out that the simple hand-cranked can opener was a game changer, because it was invented long after canned food!  

Preservation is a major theme of food history’s biggest breakthroughs. When modern canning was invented in the early 1800s, eating nutritious meals on long journeys or during hard winters became more feasible. But perhaps just as important as canning is the invention that made cans easier to use. Believe it or not, the can opener came nearly five decades after the first metal cans. Before that, people literally had to chisel away at their containers to get dinner.

One has to wonder why they even bothered to pack food in cans when no plan was in place to open them. Read how the can opener made canned food usable, and the origins of nine other inventions at Mental Floss. Or you can listen to the list in a video at the same link.

(Image credit: Hedwig von Ebbel)

Katherine went to the livestock market in Kashgar, China, to see the big butt sheep she'd heard so much about. She found fat-tailed sheep everywhere. Like camels, they carry a deposit of fat in one place because they live in a desert, where it's too hot to have fat dispersed all along the body. In this ancient market, Katherine also found souvenirs, lamb dishes, rice dishes, ice cream, badly-translated t-shirts, and some disdain for Americans.

In the comments under the video, we get a clarification on the "pillows" being sold. They aren't for slapping, but more like an oven mitt used to bake naan without getting burned. -via Digg

Baking soda, or bicarbonate of soda, has multiple uses, like making your cake rise, killing odors in your laundry, alleviating stomach acid pains, or removing rust. Oh yeah, and that grade school volcano. And it has many other uses you might not have ever heard of. Nik Sharma is a molecular biologist who is also a cook. Along with writing recipes, he's got plenty of things to tell us about baking soda, which he believes should be used in the kitchen for a lot more than making cakes rise.

Drink a mixture of baking soda and water, and you can neutralize excess stomach acid. But you'll also belch when it's working. That's the same mechanism that works to make a cake rise. The soda neutralizes an acid, like buttermilk, and produces gas bubbles that lift the cake to lofty deliciousness. But you might not know how soda works on beans and potatoes. And coffee. Learn about those, as well as the history of baking soda, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Willis Lam)