Auntie Anne’s Pretzels is famous for their delicious pretzels (which are honestly my favorite snack). But did you know that the founder of the store initially bought a pretzel store to fund her and her husband’s counseling center for women? The origin story of Auntie Anne’s isn’t as bright as you’d expect, as Cracked details: 

She was well on the path to traditional Amish wife-and-motherhood until one of her young daughters was killed in a tractor accident, which -- if any comfort can be found in such a situation -- is at least an extremely Amish way to go.

Because people in some religious communities don't so much as change their underwear without consulting their church leader, Beiler sought help with her grief from her pastor ... who proceeded to rape her and manipulate her into a six-year coercive sexual relationship. When Beiler finally broke her silence, she blew the lid off a jar of theological deceit that was way more full than she ever guessed. It turned out the pastor had been doing the same thing to basically every woman she knew, including all of her sisters. 

That's actually why she bought her first pretzel shop in 1988. Her husband wanted to open a counseling center where women could seek free help that was guaranteed not to end in sexual torture, but the Amish are not known for their vast wealth, so she bought a local pretzel shop that happened to go on the market at a deep discount to fund the venture.

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Yoora Jung hopped on the trend of sending quizzes to her past crushes. Forget the letters Lara Jean wrote to all her crushes in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, this one takes the cake for being straightforward! She sent a Google Form link to her crushes, which she admitted was out of her comfort zone. If you need the courage to go and confess to your crushes, maybe watching this video can give you the boost! 

Jaden ‘Wolfiez’ Ashman from Essex ranked in the Fortnite World Cup last 2019. The fifteen-year old player was the youngest player to win a million dollars! BBC checks in with Ashman one year later, to see if he fulfilled his promise to buy his mom a house. Check the full video here. 

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Why withdraw hundreds of dollars to pay for a gadget when you can buy it with a swipe of your credit card? With this day and age, more people are inclined to use cashless transactions for their big purchases. However, it seems that some people still use cold cash for their most expensive purchases. In a survey done by The Hustle, they asked their readers to share their most expensive all-cash purchases: 

Nearly 500 people responded, reporting everything from a $250 pair of red leather platform goth boots to a $1,400,000 cash deal on a new house.

Overall, the median all-time high our readers spent on any one thing in cash was $5,800. Car and motorcycle purchases handily topped the list, followed by engagement rings, home repairs, and down payments. Many readers say they secured a better deal by paying in cash — oftentimes under the table.

But there was no shortage of off-the-wall, all-cash transitions, many of which had highly entertaining backstories.

Check out their full breakdown of stories per category here. 

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Seeing these photos can make you feel bad for the person involved, or may just make you feel slightly better on a crappy day. The people in these photos had a stroke of bad luck. One was going to clean up a massive olive oil spill in the supermarket. Do you know how greasy those are? Check out the other photos on Buzzfeed. 

image via Buzzfeed

Can you solve Rubik’s cubes while juggling them? I can’t juggle nor solve one, and it’s impressive to see one person do these actions at the same time! Que Jianyu set the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to solve three Rubik’s cubes while juggling at two minutes and forty-three seconds.

If you’ve noticed a few days ago that verified accounts on Twitter were unable to post for a few hours, that’s because of a massive hack targeted to verified users. Hackers took control of dozens of accounts and made them post a tweet to send bitcoins to a wallet with an unlikely promise to send back more cryptocurrency. Twitter was able to regain control and return the control back to the original owners of the accounts, as Vice detailed: 

In an email sent to victims of the massive hack, Twitter apologizes, informs them of what happened, and suggests a series of actions to keep their accounts safe.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mike Bloomberg, Apple, Jeff Bezos, Wiz Khalifa, as well as several cryptocurrency companies are among the victims of the massive hack. On Wednesday, Twitter reached out directly to the victims via email informing them of the hack, apologizing for it, and suggesting a series of actions to make sure the compromised accounts stay safe. As Motherboard reported, hackers used an internal user administration tool to take control of the accounts.

Earlier Thursday, Twitter revealed that the hackers accessed the Direct Messages inbox of up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, and they downloaded the accounts’ “Your Twitter Data”—an archive of information on the account, including tweets, DMs, Moments, media, and more—of eight of all the hacked accounts, according to a series of updates on its Twitter Support account.

image via Vice

It isn’t a Super Mario game, or any of the retro titles you were familiar with. The first ever video game in history was a 1958 tennis game similar to the 1970s game Pong. Tennis For Two was created in 1985 by physicist William Higinbotham, as Ryan Fan detailed: 

He wanted to capture visitors’ interests by creating an interactive demonstration, later telling reporters that:

“It might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society.”

The game simply involved players adjusting a knob to alter the angle of the ball, and then pushing a button to hit it to another player. They couldn’t miss the ball as long as they pressed the button when it was on their side of the net, but if they angled it poorly, it could hit the net or be out of bounds.

There was nothing fancy about the game, and the graphics simply had a cathode ray tube display that had two lines, one representing the ground, and another representing the net. The ball was just a dot.

Players couldn’t even keep score. They had to do that themselves. The circuitry of the game involved resistors, capacitors, and relays, and it used some transistors for fast switching, especially when the ball was in play.

image via Medium

Batman vs. Predator is a three-part comic series written by Dave Gibbons and illustrated by Andy and Adam Kubert. Before you judge the comic for being a simple cash grab from two fandoms, this particular comic won an Eisner award (yes, it won a prestigious comic award)! Of course, preference is subjective, so if you want to read for yourself to know if the crossover comic is really good, you can still catch it on digital platforms. 

image via Polygon

There are a lot of installments to the Final Fantasy franchise that it's hard to pick which one is the best game out of them all, however one can point out that there are specific titles that have a deep impact and relevance to people, like Final Fantasy VII. With a lot of games available for players, it can’t be helped that some installments in the franchise would not be remembered well, like Final Fantasy IX. This underrated entry is one of the most definitive games ever, and series creator Hironobu Skaguchi’s favorite. Check out IGN’s full piece on Final Fantasy IX here.

image via IGN

A telescope was able to capture a portrait of another solar system with two planets orbiting around a star. Sound familiar? It’s like our solar system (but with fewer planets involved)! The portrait was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The sun and the two giant gas planets are fairly close to each other, as US News detailed: 

What makes this group shot so appealing is it’s a “very young version of our own sun,” said Alexander Bohn of the Netherlands' Leiden University, who led the study.

Bohn said he was “extremely excited" about the discovery. “This is the first time astronomers were able to capture such a shot,” he said in an email.

The observations can help scientists better understand the evolution of our own solar system.

Astronomers typically confirm worlds around other stars by observing brief but periodic dimming of the starlight, indicating an orbiting planet. Such indirect observations have identified thousands planets in our Milky Way galaxy.

image via US News

It depends on the location. Sharks are missing from 19% of the world’s coral reefs. This number is the highest percentage of reef shark decline ever recorded. The decline of sharks is caused by overfishing, according to a new study. Don’t worry, sharks aren’t fully extinct, this means that some reefs in the world have no sharks, as Science Magazine details: 

”This study is a tour de force,” says Nick Dulvy, a conservation biologist at Simon Fraser University. “It’s the most comprehensive study that’s ever been done to look at shark abundance,” adds Ellen Pikitch, a marine biologist at Stony Brook University. Both say the findings bolster the conclusion that fishing has profoundly depleted reef shark populations in many places. (Neither was involved in the project.)

Like other large animals, sharks are vulnerable to overfishing because they grow slowly and don’t have many offspring. Demand for shark fins has grown, along with consumption, by a burgeoning Asian middle class. In other places, fishing communities are eating more shark meat as other species have declined. Researchers know shark populations have dropped in many places, but these studies are difficult to compare.

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A woman’s medication caused a burning sensation in her legs and the loss of one of her toes. These are symptoms of ergotism (also known as St. Anthony’s fire), a rare condition that cause outbreaks in medieval Europe, as Live Science details: 

The 24-year-old woman went to the doctor after she suddenly began to experience a severe burning pain in her legs, from her midthigh down to her toes, according to the report, published Wednesday (July 22) in The New England Journal of Medicine. She also had discoloration in her feet and trouble walking, and both legs were cold to the touch, according to the authors, from Government Medical College in Thiruvananthapuram, a city in southern India. Four days earlier, she had started taking a medication called ergotamine for migraine headaches. The woman was also born with HIV and was taking several antiviral medications to treat the disease.

image via Live Science

It’s all thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). Photo and film restoration specialist DutchSteamMachine was able to enhance the original Apollo film, making the footage strikingly clear and vivid. Now people can watch footage of several moon missions in high definition! If you’re curious as to how DutchSteamMachine managed to restore the footage check out the ScienceAlert’s full piece on the topic here. 

image via ScienceAlert

No worries, these hackers aren’t targeting personal bank accounts. These clever thieves have found a way to make ATMs spit out massive wads of cash. The process involves “black boxes”- rogue devices that open up programming interfaces inside the machine, as Futurism details: 

Jackpotting involves attaching rogue devices called “black boxes” to open up programming interfaces inside the ATM machine’s software and issue commands, forcing it to, proverbially, make it rain.

According to a statement issued by multinational banking solutions corporation Diebold Nixdorf, thieves have worked out a new way to get their hands of copious amounts of cash.

The hacks typically involve a combination of brute force and cyberattack savvy.

“In the recent incidents, attackers are focusing on outdoor systems and are destroying parts of the fascia in order to gain physical access to the head compartment,” reads the security alert. After getting inside of the ATM, the thieves hook up special USB devices, in order to trigger the banking machine to dispense money.

image via Futurism