Back in the days when I saw every movie our local theater showed (two a week), I didn't bother studying movie posters or bothering to watch trailers (that was social time), so I was properly shocked at the twists in the movies Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes. But that was 50 years ago. It happens more and more often these days that a film studio -or rather, the marketing team- will go ahead and share way too many details that the filmmakers would rather reveal in the movie itself. Merchandise, released before opening day to capitalize on the hype, often adds to the spoilers.

Cracked has 15 examples of movie marketing spilling secrets within the movie plot. If you're lucky, you didn't know enough about the movie going in to put two and two together before you watched it. Still, the Planet of the Apes poster didn't look like it was from 1968. These do, and they have no spoilers. The more modern-looking poster was produced after the secret was out, which was just back luck for subsequent generations who could have used a good twist.  

Cannibalism, the eating of human flesh, is a universal taboo, and may I say, distasteful for everyone involved. However, there is a huge difference in degree, depending on the case. It's sad and gruesome, but understandable, to eat the bodies of people who are already dead if the alternative is your own starvation. To kill a person in order to eat them is murder. To kill someone and eat them when you're not even hungry is murder with another level of depravity added. 

Tales of cannibalism aren't as rare as you might think. Weird History brings us seven cases of cannibalism from history, specifically from the Victorian Era, arranged so that each tale is more horrifying than the one before. It is far from comprehensive, though. The case of American mountain man Alferd G. Packer is not included, even though it occurred in 1873. You can read that story in the Neatorama archives. 

Let me explain the post title. Cystic fibrosis is not communicable, but we would not know much about it without the work of one doctor. I found the story via an unattributed (probably AI) bit of copypasta that's making the rounds on Facebook. The story was worth checking out, so that's how I learned of Dr. Dorothy Andersen.

Today, we recognize cystic fibrosis as a genetic condition that affects the lungs. In the Middle Ages, it was a digestive illness identified by salty skin in children, confirmed after death as a problem with the pancreas, and attributed to witchcraft. In the early 20th century, young children who died of CF were often diagnosed with celiac disease, because they starved to death despite eating ravenously. Dorothy Hansine Andersen became a doctor in 1926, but couldn't get into the boy's club of surgeons, so she became a pathologist. She found some strange results in a 3-year-old girl whose cause of death was listed as celiac disease, and sought out other cases of celiac disease in children. She found 49 cases in which the same constellation of abnormalities was found (cysts in the pancreas, thick mucus in the lungs, etc.). She named it and developed diagnostic tests, first by sampling the intestines and later by measuring sweat salt. Andersen went on to deem CF a recessive genetic disease. 

Andersen also developed treatments for CF, which sorted out the digestive issues and led to the modern focus on the disease as a lung problem. Her discoveries led to CF patients living decades longer, but she rarely got the proper credit for her work. Read Dr. Andersen's story at Wikipedia.  -Thanks, Patrice! 

(Image source: the National Library of Medicine) 

It's been quite some time since we've posted a video from Lily Hevesh, known as Hevesh5 (previously at Neatorama). In that time, she's just gotten better at doing amazing things with dominos and has turned her talent into a career. Now she makes dominos play music!

The domino fall itself is beautiful, and involves thousands of dominos and several sets of bells. But how do you design the timing of the bells? Trial and error would involve setting up thousands of dominos over and over and over. That is a challenge Hevesh thought about for years before making the attempt. How it's done is explained in an extensive behind-the-scenes video that involves math. And a bit more trial and error than you or I could handle. But the longer videos lets us in on some secrets, like how to make dominoes turn sharply and how painted dominos act differently. -via The Kid Should See This 

Beginning February the 6th, Italy will host the Olympic winter games, with ice events in Milan and snow events in various parts of the Italian Alps. It's that time when we suddenly all become experts in skiing, figure skating, hockey, and curling for two weeks. While the winter games have always taken a back seat to the summer games, the winter Olympics have had their fair share of scandals. We all remember the rivalry between American figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, which exploded when Kerrigan was attacked and injured. Who won? Ukrainian skater Oksana Baiul.  

But there were scandals from the very first winter games in 1924, when a retired speed skater who didn't train for the event won a gold medal. The first time East Germany and West Germany fielded different teams, several women's luge competitors from East Germany were disqualified for cheating, setting the stage for East Germany's Olympic reputation forever. Lake Placid raised eyebrows when they raised money by building the Olympic Village to be a prison. Read about these scandals and more from the last century of Olympic winter games at Mental Floss. 

Ancient people were smarter than we often think. They solved problems in the most amazing ways, and sleeping outside in the winter in a cold climate can be a real problem. You could build a fire, but what if it goes out while you're asleep? The answer is the rakovalkea, or Finnish gap fire. This is a fire contained in a small area that's big enough to heat a sleeping body, that burns slow enough to last through the night. Austin of The View From the Clouds takes us through the process of building and using this type of camp fire from finding the proper wood to putting it out the next morning. It's not as tedious as it may sound. 

I was worried about the grass that reaches right up to the rakovalkea. Austin explains he is in northern Britain, where the grass is always wet, even when it's frozen. If you build a fire in the US or in any dry area, be sure to clear any flammable material away from your fire spot. -via Laughing Squid 

Caves are supposed to be dark passages with narrow openings and sharp rock formations like stalactites. Prohodna cave in Bulgaria is not like that at all. The cave is only 260 meters long, with unusually tall entrances on both ends. The result is that the cave is not dark at all. Rather, the tall ceilings, indirect light, and lack of stalactites make it resemble a cathedral more than a cave. Indeed, the cave has been used for worship in its history, and many legends have grown up around it. 

Prohodna cave has also been used in the past for imprisonment, and for hiding treasure. Now it is a popular tourist site and a draw for bungee jumpers. Many visitors report feeling spiritual as they walk through the legendary cave, especially when they see its most notable formation- two natural skylights, which are called "the Eyes of God." They are something you have to see to believe, so go to Kuriositas to see and read about those "eyes" in Prohodna cave. 

(Image credit: Ibovec) 

For thousands of years, humans have captured and then bred traits into wild animals that make them useful to us, a process called domestication. Cats and dogs live with us as pets, horses do all kinds of useful work, and livestock became manageable enough for us to eat. Monkeys, on the other hand, are very difficult to domesticate. MinuteEarth goes through the domestication process, and explains why monkeys are so difficult to make into pets -although it has been done here and there. While they lay out the nuts and bolts of how attempts to domesticate monkeys continue to fail, it appears that it comes down to monkeys being very much like humans. They are smart, and they don't want to be domesticated. It shouldn't be that hard for humans to understand. After all, we don't want to be domesticated by another species either, do we? -via Geeks are Sexy 

Some people celebrate the New Year with champagne, others with black-eyed peas. But many people who throw a holiday party offer a cake as well, decorated just for the occasion. That means there's plenty of material for Cake Wrecks. When I first saw the cake shown here, I thought it was shaped like a boot for some reason. But the cupcakes on the side look like a handle, so it might be a beer mug. So what's going on at the bottom? It may have been a case of a certain required number of cupcakes.  

The other cakes in a roundup at Cake Wrecks include one in which "year" is misspelled, and a cake in the shape of a clock that confirms some people can't read an analog clock. There's also a really well-crafted cake in the inexplicable shape of a bald man's head that emphasizes his very bloodshot eyes. But wait, there's more! A second post of New Year cakes gives us a cake in the shape of a champagne bottle that was so bad they added a label to explain what it's supposed to be, among other bakery abominations. 

It's the first of January of a new year, so, under United States copyright law, sound recordings from 1925 and other creative works from 1930 are now in the public domain.

You're free to print copies of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and sell them. You can make a horror film adaptation of Watty Piper's children's book The Little Engine That Could without consulting the Piper literary estate.

The above video from the Duke University School of Law highlights some of the newest public domain works. They include the Marx Brothers' film Animal Crackers, Bing Crosby's first screen appearance, and the first film with John Wayne in a starring role.

-via Internet Archive

What makes Noah Verrier's paintings so enjoyable is that they juxtapose the rare with the commonplace. His still lives are reminiscent of Baroque depictions of food still lives. But his subject matter, such as this box of McDonald's French fries paired with a flute of champagne, seem out of phase.

The duo known as Shuffle Pack demonstrates the dance called the airwalk. It's darned cool when they get to it, as they appear to float in the air slightly above ground level. Ignore the reference to a "stranger;" they do that all the time. Shuffle Pack consists of 14-year-old British twin brothers Alex and Alister, so they are always in tune with each other. 

The dance itself is an illusion. What's happening here is a classic example of misdirection, like a magician would use. Your eye is drawn to the part of the dance step that does not touch the ground, while the dancer's weight is supported by the other foot at that time. See another example here, where the shadows might give you a clue. Their tutorials make it look easy, but like the moonwalk, the final appearance depends on how smoothly you pull it off. They say that this will really strain your leg muscles if you do it for more than a few seconds at a time. See plenty more dance steps at Shuffle Pack's YouTube channel. 

We should all be wary of what we put into our bodies. If you think that something is okay to eat just because someone is selling it to you or because other people are eating it, remember that there's the possibility of a rare case in which things go terribly wrong. Those cases are liable to make global news. The good news is that no one actually died in these five medical stories, although all the patients most likely thought about it. 

I almost titled this post the Five Most Disgusting Medical Stories of 2025 (That Are Fit to Print), but thought that might scare you away from reading it. Hey, I read it while eating, so it isn't that disgusting, but the cases are frightening while still fascinating us. What they have in common is that they resulted from eating something. Find out what that was for each case and how it wrecked someone's body at Ars Technica.

(Image credit: Tamorlan)

Some people don't get out of the house much because they suffer from depression, loneliness, social anxiety, or they don't have the means to go anywhere. And then there are those who are fine but they just prefer to stay home. There's nothing wrong with that, and this video explains what's going on their heads. 

But this is a short video, and only looks at people who have friends and social opportunities and live alone. If you live with friends or family, it's likely you have all the social interaction you need. You might also have little control and no peace and quiet, or maybe you have both. While I loved the challenge and chaos of raising a family, I also appreciate the peace and quiet of living alone, not to mention the freedom to make my own schedule and cover a room with a project whenever I want to. -via Laughing Squid

Let's say that you passed on while alone at home, perhaps due to a fatal blogging accident. Would your dog or cat, cut off from outside support, eat you? How soon would they reclassify you from human companion to food source?

Popular Science examined the scientific literature and consulted animal behavior experts. Dogs in particular may start feeding immediately, as dogs are more natural scavengers. Cats tend toward predatory behavior, and so would hesitate before eating carrion.

Dr. Lena DeTar of Cornell University says that cats will likely to persist with hunting behaviors in these extreme scenarios, whereas dogs, who are wholly dependent on humans for food will just, uh, continue to depend upon humans for food.

-via Instapundit | Photo: PickPic