The image above is described as a "graphic representation," which sounds like it would be a photo, but in this case I'm pretty sure it's an illustration. It's meant to represent two overlapping "odd radio signals," or ORCS. Now, Tolkien fans and D&D players know what an Orc is (they are bad news), but in this case it's a huge ring of magnetized plasma, hundreds of thousands of light years wide, and only visible in radio wavelengths. They've never been seen overlapping until now, and this "Venn diagram" is particularly large and powerful. It was spotted by citizen scientists observing distant space through a radio telescope in Europe called the Low Frequency Array. 

Read some of what we know about these ORCs at Gizmodo. What we don't know covers even more ground, but studying them could lead to breakthroughs in the formation of black holes and the behavior of the universe. -via kottke 

Fire drills were always fun when I was in school. It got us outside for a while, and away from the drudgery of "learning." We didn't realize it at the time, but those protocols became well ingrained in every student and teacher, until we couldn't imagine doing it any other way. We also had nuclear attack drills occasionally, but no one took those seriously because we couldn't imagine actually surviving one.  

It's sad that most safety innovations come after a tragedy, because no one ever visualized what could possibly go wrong until it's too late. American schools grew bigger and bigger over time, and still became crowded during the Baby Boom. In December of 1958, a fire broke out at a parochial school in Chicago. Before it was over, 92 students and three nuns were dead. Immediately, school authorities nationwide rethought building standards and safety protocols for schools. The tragedy was that many of these fire codes were already in place in Chicago, but older buildings were exempt. The new idea of fire drills was found to be very useful in only a short time. Stewart Hicks explains how those came about. The video is not as long as it looks, as the last minute and a half are promotional. 

It's rare to be able to pinpoint the exact origin of a fad or a meme, as in who first thought of it, but we sometimes have documentation of the incident that made it popular. It was 45 years ago that a John Deere office got a new Xerox machine, and 21-year-old Jodi Stutz thought it would be funny to sit on the machine and photocopy her butt. After all, other employees were having fun copying their faces and hands. What made it a sensation was that Stutz was fired for the prank after the story was blown out of proportion. That firing made the national news, and suddenly similar incidents were seen in offices everywhere -or at least the results were seen. They usually consisted of just a white piece of paper with a line across it, so it didn't last long.  

Stutz became an instant celebrity, thanks in part to Johnny Carson, since the story was right up his alley. Read about the firing that led to celebrity status at Weird Universe. -via Nag on the Lake 

We don't know where Ryder's story began, but it became a tragedy when he was abandoned. From what his foster parents could tell from his personality, he had been a pet, since he was so sociable with humans. But his back was recently broken, which left his back end paralyzed. Maybe that's the reason he was tossed out in a trash bag. Or maybe the injury came as a result of the cruel method of abandonment. Then someone heard his cries and rescued him. 

Then tragedy turned into triumph. With loving care from his new family, who ended up adopting him, Ryder has adapted well to using what he has. He's now living his best life with his humans and a dog, doing almost everything an average house cat would do. He's also paying back, by being a loving cuddlebug. You can see more of Ryder, full name Low Ryder Kitty, at Instagram. 

We know that our ancestors, even our most ancient ancestors, drank wine all the time. While more expensive than water, wine was still affordable to the masses, while the more potent drugs were reserved for the rich and for special occasions, as well as medicinal use. A 2,700-year-old altar found in the Negev desert still shows traces of marijuana, showing us that the Israelites burned it during worship services. In Scythia, the Carpathian mountains, and western China, marijuana was burned at funerals, presumably to ease the mourners' pain. Greeks ate marijuana for the fun of it. 

Opium was a more serious, and more expensive drug, used in Egypt to keep children quiet, to alleviate pain, and for a "bit of extra fun." Early physicians documented how to use opium as to reduce the danger of overdose, but Romans saw it as a painless method of suicide in addition to its medicinal uses. Opium may have been the most popular hard drug, but the ancient world also knew of and used hallucinogenic drugs derived from various plants. Read about the widespread use of drugs in the ancient world at Haaretz. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Radio Tonreg) 

Artificial intelligence lent a hand in showing us what Star Trek would be like if it were more like 21st century life on earth. Remote work meetings by Zoom have become all too common, even though they are often useless, even when you can get them to work properly. Once you iron out the bugs, then it's a matter of getting everyone involved, and actually trying to discuss something worthwhile. But no, we get background interruptions and that one guy who wants to get everyone to participate in casual Fridays. Not to mention those who don't want to be there at all. Like they say, "This meeting could have been an email!" Yet they try again. 



We need nonsense like this every once in a while to remind us that the 24rd century might be more advanced than the 21st. At least we can hope. If you want to see more of Worf's casual Friday experience, artificial intelligence has rendered a song about it. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Can you name a 28-year-old? Why yes, I can, my daughter is 28. Okay, can you name a famous 28-year-old? It's not as easy as it sounds. Dylan Fugel uncovered the fact that US birth rates hit a record low in 1997. Still, there were over three million births that year, and he can't find any of them. He looked for a week, and found that all the famous people in that age range were 26 or 29. At least he says they are famous; I quit keeping up when celebrities started being so young. He goes through the litany of Disney Channel stars of the 2010s, but found the actors were all older than the characters they played. Sports stars? All either younger or older. Timothée Chalamet? He's 29 now. 

After all that research, Fugel identifies four people who are 28 right now, two that I've heard of. Yes, there are more in the comments, but Simone Biles is probably lonely in her age group. Read about Fugel's search at Defector. -via kottke 

Smithsonian posted a comprehensive article about the Dionne Quintuplets, who we posted about recently. A single line in the article caught my eye, because I'd never heard of the Lyon quintuplets, who were born in Mayfield, Kentucky, in 1896, and were the first quintuplets in America to be born alive. 

Elizabeth Lyon and her husband Oscar already had six children, and added five boys on April 29, 1896. They were delivered in one hour with a single placenta, meaning they were identical. They weighed between three and 4.25 pounds and were named Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. The news got out, and the Lyon's small farmhouse was inundated with people wanting to see the babies. The sheriff had to call in deputies to control the crowds. John, the smallest baby, died just five days later, and all of the boys were dead in two weeks. Elizabeth blamed the crowds for the infants' deaths, but later in life admitted they starved to death. She had one wet nurse to help, and shipments of milk were offered, but Elizabeth said "they" wouldn't let her bottle-feed the babies. 

But that wasn't the end of the story. The family buried the first baby, but exhumed him in fear of grave robbers. The five emaciated cadavers were embalmed and displayed locally for a couple of years, after which Elizabeth looked for a safe place to keep them. Read the saga of the Lyon quintuplets gleaned from contemporary newspaper accounts at the Trigg Cunningham family website.     

See also: The Bushnell sextuplets. 

Parents are understandably wary about their children taking candy from strangers, but in modern times we have many more safeguards than people in the 19th century had. Halloween in Bradford, England, in 1858 saw at least 19 deaths, including children, from eating candy. The candy in this case was called peppermint humbugs, a popular confection that was locally made. After people started dying, an analysis found that each bite-sized candy contained twice as much arsenic as it required to kill someone! By then, it was too late for those who had ingested the candy. 

However, this wasn't a case of intentional murder. The investigation uncovered a series of mistakes in the supply chain that involved greed, laziness, and inattention to detail. The incident led to reforms and new laws to keep those mistakes from ever happening again. Read about the case of the Bradford candy poisoning at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Willstewart) 

At one time in my life, I was cooking for six people every day. I made huge pots of food, hoping for leftovers, but since most of the family were teenagers, that didn't happen often. Now I live alone, and whatever I cook on rare occasions is guaranteed to leave leftovers, if not for a couple of days, then for many individual meals in the freezer. 

Leftovers weren't really much of a thing until we got refrigerators and freezers. Later innovations in leftovers were doggy bags, Tupperware, and ultimately microwave ovens. Along the way, we discovered that certain foods actually tasted better the next day after resting in the cold for a while. Spices diffuse, fats congeal, and food components meld into each other. It's not just your imagination (although that helps). Tom Blank of Weird History Food explains the science that proves some leftovers are better the second day, and thereafter.   

The "birthday" of television could be any of its many early points, depending on how you define "television," and it's hard to wrap our brains around how old the technology really is, since most people never saw any television until after World War II. However, it was on October 2, 1925, that Scottish inventor John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the first recognizable television image in his laboratory. He used a mechanical system that utilized the technology of German engineer Paul Nipkow to scan images of a ventriloquist's dummy's face (because its features had high contrast). Afterward, Baird scanned the face of 20-year-old William Edward Taynton to see what a real face would look like on television. The first public demonstration of his system was on January 26, 1926. 

But Baird's mechanical television system was soon eclipsed by an electronic system invented by Philo T. Farnsworth, barely into his 20s when he demonstrated his system in 1928. 

Television was slow to take off, first because of the competing systems, and then because it required receivers, which were too expensive for a general public that didn't understand TV. It also required programming to make the investment worth the cost. The larger radio networks worked on the problem, and Nazi Germany jumped on TV for propaganda purposes, but the rollout was halted by World War II. In the postwar boom of American prosperity, a television set became a status symbol, and TV slowly spread to almost everyone. 

In the 100 years since that first transmission, television changed society, and you can explore with a mega-list of links at Metafilter. 

Bill McClintock is still doing what he does best- seamlessly mashing up rock songs with disco dance tunes. Here, we have Van Halen's "I'll Wait" from 1984 mixed with Donna Summer's 1979 song "Bad Girls." It will grab you from the start with a clever constructed dialogue between Summer and David Lee Roth. Could that opportunity have been the inspiration for this mashup? 

The song, which McClintock calls "I'll Wait for Bad Girls" by Van Summer, also contains guitar solo snippets from Steve Vai from David Lee Roth's song "Ladies' Night in Buffalo?" and Zakk Wylde from Ozzy Osbourne's "Breaking All the Rules." 

While the music moves smoothly, the video can be jarring in places. The clips are taken from footage up to more than 20 years apart. While Donna Summer is recognizable in all of them, Van Halen's appearance changed considerably as they aged. Donna Summer passed in 2012; Eddie Van Halen in 2020. -via Laughing Squid 

Jane Goodall, who knew more about chimpanzees than anyone, died from natural causes today while she was on a speaking tour in California. Goodall spent decades studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, but also dedicated many years working to reform the treatment of chimpanzees and other wild animals, educate people about animals, and to protect their habitats.

Since childhood, Goodall dreamed of going to Africa to work with elephants. She went to Kenya and got a job as a secretary for Dr. Louis Leakey, who sent her to the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to study chimpanzees as part of Leakey's Trimates plan. Goodall also earned a PhD in ethology from Cambridge, despite the fact that she didn't have a bachelor's degree. Her work for National Geographic brought her research to a worldwide audience. In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, and went on to found other organizations to care for orphaned chimpanzees, to set aside animal reserves, and to advocate for the environment. She almost single-handedly ended the practice of using chimpanzees for medical research at the NIH.   



If you see a reference to "that Jane Goodall tramp" (like in our archives) be aware that it is not meant to be derogatory. It was the punch line to a 1987 Far Side comic. The Jane Goodall Institute took umbrage at the comic, but when Goodall arrived from Africa, she found it amusing, and later called it her favorite depiction in pop culture. Goodall later wrote the forward for one of Larson's Far Side collections. 

Goodall was still working for the benefit of the animals she loved so much when she died today. She was 91. 

The premise of the "What If" series has always been to treat stupid theoretical questions seriously, and therefore we might learn something or other. The dumb theoretical question in this video is "How long can the human race survive on only cannibalism?" Cannibalism is a disgusting idea and has always been taboo, but Randall Munroe and Henry Reich tackle it as serious (while still inserting their opinions). Relying on cannibalism would quickly make us pure carnivores, and there are many reasons that eating carnivores is a bad idea. This prohibition is passed down in cultural and religious rules, but even animals avoid it. 

Once you get around that, you get into the law of diminishing returns. If you are trying to "save" humanity, how many people must survive? It won't be enough to keep the freezers full of the unlucky ones going. Otherwise, if we all just eat each other over time, humanity will not last all that long. 

Helen Brayton was a wealthy woman whose hobby was breeding cats. In 1912, she imported a prize-winning English silver chinchilla cat named Don Dai. The cat had his own stateroom aboard the ship, plus his own private steward. On his arrival, Mrs. Brayton planned an opulent wedding for Don Dai and her show cat named The Quakeress at New York City's Plaza Hotel and invited her genteel friends who were cat lovers. The newspapers had a great time with that story. 

But even more interesting was how the Plaza Hotel began allowing pets in the first place. The rich are used to being catered to, and when one wealthy patron showed up with a tiny dog, the manager declared the hotel pet-friendly. But there are always those who push the envelope. Only a year after the new policy was enacted, an artist who was also technically a princess brought eight "pets" to the hotel that included a bear and two alligators! Then she stayed for five years. Read about the cat wedding in the latest post at The Hatching Cat, and the full story of the princess in an earlier post.