Two years ago, NASA's latest Mars rover Perseverance landed on Mars in a stunning maneuver we got to witness in real time (though delayed, because Mars). Although the spacecraft crashed, that was part of the plan. The Perseverance mission took along Mars' first helicopter, named Ingenuity. On its 26th Martian reconnaissance flight, Ingenuity revisited Perseverance's landing site and recorded the debris left behind from an overhead view.

With no scavengers, fungi, bacteria, or rain on the red planet, the debris is in almost pristine condition after two years. The wind on Mars has partially buried the spacecraft's parachute under dust. The backshell is surprisingly intact, considering the speed and heat involved in its landing. Photographing and studying the debris field will help NASA to plan future missions, including one designed to return to earth carrying Martian samples. Read about Ingenuity's photographic mission and what it means at NASA. -via Kottke

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

When the US airline industry was deregulated in the late 1970s, it opened the door for almost anyone with some money to incorporate a new airline. That opportunity gave rise to an entire crop of specialty airlines, each with a gimmick to draw passengers with particular tastes or desires. For a few years, flyers could select an airline that would cater to your religion, let you smoke despite FAA regulations, fly your cat or dog to a new city, or make you feel like a movie star. There were certainly travelers who chose such amenities, but those specialty passengers mainly wanted to get to a particular destination, and none of the niche airlines were big enough to travel to that many destinations. Eventually, the novelty wore off as passengers prioritized ticket prices, direct routes, and availability over novelty. Read about five such bygone specialty airlines at CNN. -via Digg

(Image credit: Aeroprints.com)

Zombies come from dead bodies, right? No, they come from movies and TV. No, that's not right, either. The idea of zombies is much older. You're thinking of Haiti, aren't you? That's the answer if you're discussing the origin of zombies with your friends, yet this TED-Ed lesson from Christopher M. Moreman starts even further back than that. But how they were regarded in Haiti is more chilling than any movie about undead brain-eaters. The zombie metaphor was true horror, because it was a little too close to the truth. Maybe you should reserve a little sympathy and respect for zombies. Well, maybe not the walkers, but the people whose lives gave rise to the zombie myth. -via Geeks Are Sexy

By the way, the 1932 film White Zombie is available at YouTube.

In 2018, we brought you the story of Akihiko Kondo, who married virtual Vocoloid singer Hatsune Miku. A company called Gatebox built a hologram of Hatsune Miku that used artificial intelligence, allowing Kondo to interact with her and hold simple conversations. Then in March of 2020, Gatebox ceased support for the hologram, explaining that it was a limited production model that had run its course. There couldn't have been a worse time to lose communication with one's spouse, at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. However, Kondo still talks to Miku, although she doesn't reply. Miku now lives with Kondo in the form of a larger doll. Or many dolls, as seen in Kondo's Instagram gallery.

Kondo's life has changed in other ways. He took up the cause of bullying in Japan, and has enrolled in law school, hoping to explore the topics of anime, minority issues, and freedom of expression. Read about Kondo's life since marrying a fictional character at The Mainichi. -Thanks, WTM!

One of the tools that astronomers use to calculate the rhythms of space phenomena is historical accounts, which can go back as far as written language itself. The difficulty of finding these historical records is translating them, both in language and in deciphering what the description refers to in modern terms. Scholars have identified what may be the oldest written description of an aurora yet found, in an ancient Chinese text called The Bamboo Annals. These court records of King Zhāo’s reign have a reference to "a five-colored light seen in the northern part of the night sky." The writing is dated to 977 or 957 BC. That makes it 300 years earlier than the previous earliest known account.  

The records have been available for a long time, but scientists say a 16th-century translation erred in calling the sight a comet instead of a five-colored light. They also know that at the time, the earth's magnetic pole was in the right place for aurora to have been seen in central China. Read more about this finding at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Martincco)

This is a love story, but it's not for children, because nature is metal. Don't watch this with the sound off, and don't listen to it while doing something else, because you need both the audio and visuals to get the full effect. Get ready to start caring about the fates of two random insects in a swamp. The story is gentle and inspiring, dark and absurd, tearjerking and hilarious all at once. For some reason, I feel the need to apologize for all the above, but it's Ze Frank, so you should know you're getting into something quite weird.

Nothing signifies a serious permanent commitment like comic book superheroes. But if you insist, you can get wedding rings branded with the essence of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, or the Joker. Imagine reciting your vows to your beloved while slipping on a Joker ring. The ring company Manly Bands has teamed up with DC Comics to present the DC Collection of wedding rings for which to pledge your troth.

You may wonder why there's no Green Lantern ring, as he is the only superhero who gets his powers specifically from his ring. My guess is that they don't want to reproduce the exact design familiar to us from the comic books, and even if they went with a stylized version like the other rings, it probably wouldn't sell well. Which makes us wonder how many Aquaman wedding rings will be purchased. Read about the collection and see each one up close at Nerdist.

The more we go to space, the more trash we leave behind. There are 4,852 working satellites orbiting the earth, with ever more being launched as the cost of deploying them falls. They have to steer through more than 36,000 pieces of space junk more than 10 centimeters wide, and perhaps 100,000 smaller objects in orbit. The company Privateer, founded by professor Moriba Jah, engineer Alex Fielding, and Apple founder Steve Wozniak, aims to do something about it. They've developed a product called Wayfinder with which anyone can monitor space debris. Their other idea for helping with the problem is ...to launch more satellites. This may seem counterintuitive, to say the least. These new satellites are expected to act as traffic cops, helping working satellites and manned missions avoid collisions, and they also hope to reduce the number of new satellite launches by allowing other companies to use their satellites instead of launching their own. Does it make sense? Read about the problem and the project at Inverse.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Privateer)  

We all learned about Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal, but people drank it anyway because to many, it was a necessary part of life. Less well-known, but following the same logic, earlier laws against birth control were flouted regularly. In America, the Comstock laws went into effect in 1873, banning the trade in "obscene materials" which included not only pornography, but also birth control, abortifacients, and any information about them. But all that did was drive such information underground. Birth control methods of the time weren't nearly as effective as they are today, but they were something. Women talked about them over the back fence or in their parlors, to avoid any written materials that might lead to arrest. But they were also available for sale to those who knew how to decode language designed to toe the letter of the law.  

Every day, across the nation, ads for abortion and birth control appeared in newspapers. Readers just had to know what to look for. “Women had to get creative” about how to get that information out, said Rendina. It was “restoring the menses,” not an abortion. It was “getting rid of a blockage,” or “cleansing the uterus. They came up with all these ridiculous euphemisms.”

A perusal of newspapers from this period shows advertisements for “Mother’s helper” or “Portuguese female pills,” medicine for those “laboring under the suppression of their natural illness,” “renovating pills from Germany” and the like.

Read about the whisper network in which women passed along such information when it was illegal at Atlas Obscura.

Which is better, old Batman or new Batman? The Caped Crusader has come a long way from from the campy style of the mid-'60s Batman. Now he's a dark, brooding, action-not-words type of superhero. Corridor saw the new movie The Batman and asked, why not both? And that's why we now have a version of The Batman with Adam West stepping in for Robert Pattinson. But that's not all- the Penguin and the Riddler have traveled through time to menace our hero as well. The worst thing about this mashup is that it could have been twice as long, and that's something you rarely say about a YouTube video these days. -via Digg

Anna Albertine Olga Brown was born in 1858, just one year before Jules Leotard invented the flying trapeze. Brown's parents must have been circus people, as she started performing at age nine. Under the name Miss Lala (or La La), she walked the high wire and flew on a trapeze, but what really astonished audiences was her iron jaw act. She was often elevated to the trapeze on a pulley, which she held onto with her teeth. This tiny Black woman with amazing strength could hold up the weight of a man with her teeth while suspended upside-down on a rope. She could even hold the weight of a 200-pound cannon- with her teeth! Miss Lala caught the attention of artist Edgar Degas, who in 1879 enshrined her in his only circus painting, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. Over a 20-year career, she performed at venues such as the Folies Bergère in Paris and the Royal Aquarium in London, and all over Europe under various stage names. Read about Olga Brown, Miss Lala, at Messy Nessy Chic.

In the town of Funchal on the island of Madiera in Portugal, workers once used wooden sledges to transport lumber down the mountains to the cities and ports. Once easier cargo transport was developed, the sledges were repurposed for tourists. The hills are just as steep as they ever were, but now the sledges are fitted with wicker couches for people to ride while being pushed downhill at terrifying speeds by Carreiros do Monte. Why is it terrifying? Because you're sliding downhill on a public road with traffic and no seatbelt. What a thrill! Tom Scott tried it out so you don't have to. But if you want to, the Carreiros do Monte will be greasing the skids and resoling their shoes for you.

Tom sure gets around, but you have to admit he's put in the work to get there. He's come a long way from soaking his fingers in pineapple puree and throwing drums off a cliff.

As many times as I've written and posted about serial killers, the world always has more crime and depravity. I'd never heard of Jesse Pomeroy until this past weekend, and now here's a list of fifteen serial killers who you probably aren't all that familiar with. Some of them flew under your radar because their crimes happened in some other country, and some of them were cases that were concluded before you were born. There are still others that should have made national news, but didn't for some reason, or else they are just relatively forgettable -of course, unless you know one of their victims. They range from the clearly psychotic to war criminals to a convenient way to collect someone else's pension checks. We've posted about a couple of these fifteen before, but there's plenty to learn in a list of serial killers at Cracked. Each killer has links to read more about them.

You know Pachelbel's Canon in D; we've posted about it enough. It provides a steady and pleasant basis for many popular songs you've heard. Well, pleasant unless you are a cellist. But pianist Hiromi Uehara performs the classic tune in ways you've never heard. It starts out in the most familiar manner, but gradually she adds jazz elements while keeping the basic bass line intact.  

Tony Williams transcribed Uehara's improvised performance so you can follow the insanity of what's she's doing in real time underneath the performance video. Note how she skillfully adds a half-beat at around the two-minute mark in order to synch the music with the offbeat clapping from the audience. She also alters her prepared piano during the song. The metal ruler gives it a harpsichord sound, but changing it while playing can't be easy. Even if you don't read musical notation, the narrative comments on the transcript add to the experience. -via reddit

In 1874, a 14-year-old boy named Jesse Pomeroy was arrested and convicted of murder in Massachusetts for the deaths of two children. He was also suspected of assaulting at least half a dozen other children, and possibly more murders. Donna Wells, a former archivist at the Boston Police Department, writes about how she fairly randomly found a photograph of Pomeroy (above), which ends up being the only known photograph of Pomeroy as a teenager. His crimes were pretty chilling.

When fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested in 1874 for the murder of Horace Millen, he was thought to have tortured at least six children and tortured and murdered two more. The two murder victims, ten-year-old Katie Curran and four-year-old Horace Millen had both been stabbed and nearly decapitated. Katie also had a fractured skull and several broken bones. Horace had also been nearly castrated, had one eyeball deeply pierced, and been set on fire. The victims that had managed to survive his attacks had suffered whippings, stabbings, beatings, which included broken noses and split lips, vicious bites to the face and buttocks, attempted castration, and attempted scalping. At the time of his arrest for Horace Millen’s murder, Jesse’s reputation in Boston as the “Boy Torturer” was firmly established.

Read how the photograph was found and identified at Murder by Gaslight. But you really want to find out what happened to the 14-year-old killer, and you can read that at Wikipedia. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Donna Wells)