With the 2020 Olympics beginning this weekend in Tokyo, all eyes are on the elite athletes of the world. From gymnastics to weightlifting, from the 100-meter dash to equestrian events, the eyes of the world will be on the amazing feats of the human body. How in the world did we ever develop such abilities? You might say, practice and more practice, but looking back into the evolution of human abilities, we find that such skills came along before we were ever Homo sapiens. Archaeologist Anna Goldfield explains what we know about how those abilities came about. Walking upright made us into runners, but it's hardly the only athletic skill we have that differs from other animals.

While the bottom half of our body has evolved away from an arboreal lifestyle, our upper body still retains traits that we inherited from tree-dwellers. Our glenohumeral joint, the ball-and-socket connection between our upper arm and scapula, allows us to swing our arms around in a full rotation. This is a very different type of mobility from that of quadruped animals that don’t swing in trees—a dog or cat’s front legs, for example, primarily swing back and forth and couldn’t perform a butterfly swim stroke. We, on the other hand, can.

Our rotatable shoulder joint also allows us to throw overhand. The ability to throw accurately and forcefully appears to have originated at least 2 million years ago, with our ancestors Homo erectus. Recent research has also shown that Neanderthals might have thrown spears to hunt at a distance. The few known examples of Neanderthal spears were long thought to be used only for thrusting and close-in killing of prey, in part because when researchers tried to throw replicas, they didn’t go far.

Recently, however, researchers put replicas into the hands of trained javelin throwers and were stunned to see the spears fly much farther and faster—more than 65 feet.

Read how evolution got us running, jumping, grasping, and playing ball at Sapiens magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Naoki Nakashima)

This looks like the kind of tropical fish you'd see in someone's salt water aquarium, except this fish is 3.5 feet long and weighs 100 pounds! It is an opah, found washed up on the beach in Seaside, Oregon. The fish was already dead, but was found before the birds could help themselves to it.

Keith Chandler, the general manager of Seaside Aquarium, told CNN that an opah on the Oregon coast is "uncommon to find" and he also added that the fish was "in such great shape."

"They're pretty cool fish, and we don't normally see them on the shore," said Chandler. "It was pretty exciting for locals."

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), little is known about the species since they live deep in the ocean. The species is usually found in temperate and tropical waters.

The Seaside Aquarium took the opah and plan to dissect it to learn more about the species. -via Fark

"It seemed like a good idea at the time..." could be the beginning of every one of the 20 stories in this list. If you think back, you can probably recall a few huge mistakes in movies, TV, advertising, music, video games, and the like, when someone's great idea was actually executed before the target audience turned it down in spectacular fashion. And there are some that may have flown under your radar, like the time that Stephen King's horror story Carrie was turned into a Broadway musical.

Murder stories have a pretty good track record on Broadway—Sweeney Todd, Little Shop of Horrors, etc.—but the 1988 musical adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie bucked the trend. The creative team did include some musical theater heavyweights: Michael Gore, composer of 1980’s Fame, and Debbie Allen, choreographer of the Fame TV series (Allen also appeared in both the film and the show). Alas, their razzle-dazzle ’80s style clashed with all the carnage, and critics’ reviews were their own kind of bloodbath—The New York Times went so far as to compare the production to the Hindenburg disaster. Carrie closed after just five performances.

Almost thirty years after it closed on Broadway, the musical Carrie found a kind of revival in high school theater productions, where you might still be able to catch a glimpse of the carnage. Hear a song from the musical, and read 19 other stories of pop culture gone wrong at Mental Floss.  

Imagine Jason Bourne, Kylo Ren, Batman, and Villanelle all in one movie. And it's directed by Ridley Scott. With a screenplay by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Set in medieval France. Based on a true story involving both complicated ethics and violent action. I'll have to say The Last Duel looks like it might be pretty good.  

You can read the historical account of the duel between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris, which is a pretty exciting story even in plain text.

Flapper fashions from 100 years ago were all about freedom, fun, and flouting society's restrictions on women. But what in the world inspired these young ladies to put faces on their knees? The faces, and other artworks, were an extension of the fad of wearing makeup on one's knees, and that, of course, was to draw attention to what was supposedly forbidden.

As Velma’s character croons, these young women often forwent garters and rolled their stocking down into a bunch, drawing attention to the knee. Dress styles were still too long to show upper legs, but the popular dances of the era, from the Charleston to the Fox Trot, allowed for glimpses of the blushing knees, bringing more attention to that illicit flash of skin. Flappers might have started rouging their bodies because the 1920s was also when cosmetic formulas were first developed for commercial use and many women copied the looks of movie stars, especially Theda Bara’s vamp aesthetic and Joan Crawford’s wide-eyed beauty. As Emily Spivack wrote in Smithsonian, blush had historically been associated with promiscuity, “but with the introduction of the compact case, rouge became transportable, socially acceptable and easy to apply. The red or sometimes orange makeup was applied in circles on the cheeks, as opposed to dabbed along the cheekbones as it is today.”

Once makeup was worn on knees, it took some effort to make them even more outrageous. Read about the rise and fall of decorated knees (with plenty of pictures) at Messy Nessy Chic.

One of the bonuses from last year's lockdown is that we now get Honest Trailers for movies that are still in theaters. The drawback is that this trailer for Black Widow surely has some spoilers, but not so much that you wouldn't still want to see the entire film. Screen Junkies' major criticism is that this Marvel film has a formulaic plot and stereotypical characters, as if that's a real surprise. Nothing could have prevented this movie from being a big hit.

A tubulum is a percussion instrument made of flexible pipes of different lengths. Israeli designer Asaf Wainberg took that idea and made it wearable. He calls this musical instrument an OCTAV, for when you've got such a good beat you have to dance to it.



See a video of the eight-armed OCTAV in action at Yanko Design. Now, if Wainberg could just make those pipes move around like the Spider-Man villain, he could take over the world. -via Everlasting Blort 

The most famous pigeon ever was a bird named Cher Ami. The homing pigeon worked for the US Army Signal Corps during World War I and was mentioned in the Neatorama article The Lost Battalion. Cher Ami was a genuine war hero.

In the fourth year of World War I on October 4, 1918, as the story goes, Cher Ami, an English-bred bird, was the last available pigeon for the American doughboys of the Lost Battalion, cut off and surrounded by German troops. On the afternoon of the fourth, the Americans found themselves being shelled by their own artillery. The commander of the Lost Battalion, Major Charles W. Whittlesey, hurriedly wrote a brief message: “We are along the road parallel 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake stop it.” The message was inserted into a holder on Cher Ami’s leg, and the pigeon went aloft amidst a hail of exploding shells and enemy rifle fire. When the pigeon reached its loft behind the front, either a bullet or shell fragment had almost completely severed its right leg and sliced across the bird’s breast. Miraculously the message capsule hung to the tendons of the severed limb. The capsule’s contents revealed the location of the beleaguered Americans and helped contribute to their relief on the night of October 7.

Cher Ami received the best veterinary care available, and even toured the United States, but succumbed to those devastating war wounds the next summer. The pigeon was given a taxidermist's treatment and was displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. But one mystery remained: was Cher Ami a hen or a cock? The military records referred the the pigeon as "she," but the Smithsonian's description gave the bird male pronouns. The different press outlets went with either one when describing Cher Ami's exploits. The taxidermist left no evidence or records of the bird's sex. More than a hundred years later, the Smithsonian leveraged the technology of DNA analysis to find out who was right, a story you can read at The National Museum of American History. -via Smithsonian

A couple of months ago, student pilot Brian Parsley did his solo cross country flight, a required step in getting his license. About 12 miles short of his destination, his engine sputtered out. What to do? While he is obviously stressed, he did not panic and just did what had to be done. Parsley managed an emergency landing on a stretch of grass. He explained more of what happened in a further video.   -via Digg

Whenever we confront the problem of opioid addiction, the response is to restrict their use in one way or another. However, opioids are currently the world's best pain relievers. Restricting their use hurts patients who deal with severe or chronic pain from conditions that cannot be immediately fixed. At the same time, offering opioids to relieve the pain often turns the patient into an addict. Short of finding a better pain reliever, the best option science can offer is to turn opioids into something non-addictive. And scientists are working on that.

Many of the addictive qualities of opioids are due to the feelings of calm and euphoria they induce in the brain. For conditions like arthritis and wound and postoperative pain, however, these drugs need to target only the diseased or injured areas of the body to provide pain relief. The question researchers face is whether it’s possible to limit the effect of opioids to specific areas of the body without affecting the brain.

One recently proposed solution focuses on the acidity difference between injured and healthy tissue. Injured tissue is more acidic than healthy tissue due to a process known as acidosis, where lactic acid and other acidic byproducts produced by damaged tissue collect. This means that an opioid could potentially be altered to be positively charged and active only in injured tissue, while staying neutral and inactive in normal tissue. The drug would be biochemically active only at a higher acidity level than found in healthy tissue.

Read more about this research and its potential at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Vaprotan)

This beautifully-animated short by Michael Dockery is set in an apocalyptic future in which humans are gone, but the tech we left behind is still being used... by the tech we left behind. You may read into it what you want. I recommend watching it in a larger format.  -via Nag on the Lake

The Print Shop Club will transport you back to 1984, when you first discovered what marvelous things you can do with a computer! Broderbund's program called The Print Shop allowed us to design signs, banners, and even our own greeting cards on our Apple II home computers, and that was quite exciting. Except this version doesn't feed our banners to our dot-matrix printer loaded with fanfold paper, but converts our creations to .pdfs for sharing ...or even printing, if you choose to do so.

Once you try it out, you'll also remember what a pain that all was, and realize that the value of this throwback, while nostalgic, is also to show our kids what we went through to become the computer whizzes that we are today. Melody and April Ayres-Griffiths created this application to pay tribute to David Balsam and Martin Kahn, who created The Print Shop and exposed a generation of children (and adults) to the wonders of computing. -via Metafilter

Imagine trying to figure out a calendar from scratch, in which one could keep track of the days of the year, year after year. It's such a difficult project that what really happened was that every few hundred years we figured out what the problems with the existing calendar were and started over again to correct them. Today we use the Gregorian calendar, which takes into account that a year is 365.25 days and 11.5 minutes long. Before that, there was the Julian calendar, which didn't account for those 11.5 minutes, and before that it was the Roman calendar that didn't have much consistency from year to year at all.   

The Julian Calendar itself was created by Julius Caesar in 46 BC in order to fix the inherent errors of a lunisolar calendar, which the Roman calendar was. The Roman calendar consisted of 12 months for a total of 355 days, which is approximately 10 days shorter than the solar year. In order to catch up with the sun, the Roman calendar added either 22 or 23 days to every alternate year, the same way we add leap days every four years. As a result, Roman years alternated between 355, 377 and 378 days.

To make matter worse, the leap days (also known as the intercalary period) were not added in a regular and systematic manner, but was determined by the Pontifex maximus, the high priest of the College of Pontiffs. Often the Pontifex would abuse his power and lengthen a year when his political allies was in office, and reduce it when his opponents were in power. The net effect of this was that the average Roman citizen often did not have a clue what date the current day was.

The Julian calendar offered some consistency, but it wasn't an easy transition. Read about the shenanigans involved with changing a calendar at Amusing Planet.

St. John the Baptist Church in Danbury, Essex, UK, was built in the 13th century and is the burial place of a few Knights Templar. One of the graves, in the floor of the church, was unearthed briefly in 1779, and an account of the disinterment was published in a magazine in 1789. It describes the discovery of a lead vault containing an elm coffin with a shell inside, and inside that, a corpse. The following excerpt may be disturbing for sensitive readers.

The magazine continues, “The lid of this shell being taken off, we were presented with a view of the body laying in a liquor or pickle resembling mushroom catchup…As I never possessed the sense of smelling and was willing to ascertain the flavour of the liquor, I tasted; and found it to be aromatic, though not very pungent partaking of the taste of catchup and of the pickle of Spanish olives. The body was tolerably perfect…The flesh, except of the face and throat appeared exceedingly white and firm…The body was covered with a shirt of linen; the stitches were very evident, and attached very strongly…There was no hair on the head, nor do I remember any in the liquor, though feathers, flowers and herbs in abundance were floating..the leaves and stalks of which appeared quite perfect.”

Read about the church, its Templar connections, and the pickled knight at MJ Wayland's blog. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Malcolm Reid)

Imagine you are on a spaceship approaching the solar system's largest planet, but first you swing by its largest moon. This is what you might see.

On June 7, 2021, NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Ganymede than any spacecraft in more than two decades. Less than a day later, Juno made its 34th flyby of Jupiter. This animation provides a “starship captain” point of view of each flyby. For both worlds, JunoCam images were orthographically projected onto a digital sphere and used to create the flyby animation. Synthetic frames were added to provide views of approach and departure for both Ganymede and Jupiter.

If you liked this, you'll love the gallery of more images from Juno at NASA. -via Metafilter