When a cool science fiction weapon sticks around for half a century and gathers more and more fans and more fiction, there will be people who put way too much thought into it. The lightsabers from Star Wars were...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/09/Science-Fiction-vs-Physics-The-Lightsaber-Question/Around the turn of the 20th century, about two million children in America younger than 15 were full-time workers. Some were a lot younger than 15, and they worked dangerous jobs, sometimes 12 hours a day or mor...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/09/Pics-or-It-Didnt-Happen-Child-Labor-in-America/First, you watch the video because cat, but wow, what a fine looking cat. Then you are impressed by her behavior. Rory (short for Aurora Borealis) is a four-year-old Bengal cat with nice markings and stunning aqua blue e...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/09/Rory-the-Bengal-Cat-Talks-Back/Sometimes imaginative play can go too far.Andy Sahlstrom, an artist in Brooklyn, calls his site "Kids Toys, Adult Issues." At Shampoooty, he offers custom toys that parody the Little Tikes aesthetics marketed toward pres...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/09/Subversive-Toys/A case study from Brazil offers a tantalizing possibility for treating dementia with magic mushrooms. A woman in her 80s suffering from advanced Alzheimer's disease had been incontinent for five years, did not initiate c...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/08/What-a-Massive-Dose-of-Psilocybin-Did-for-an-Alzheimers-Patient/When you think about how your life turned out, you might wonder how it happened. How much can you attribute to, or maybe blame on, your family? An awful lot of it. You probably resemble your siblings in appearance, healt...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/08/Twin-Studies-Help-Us-Separate-Nature-from-Nurture/Before Benjamin Franklin experimented with electricity, before he was a Founding Father, he was a printer. One of the things he printed was paper money for the colony of Pennsylvania and eventually several other colonies...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/07/When-Benjamin-Franklin-Printed-Money-with-Anti-Counterfeiting-Features/Today's US military is an all-volunteer force, and they spend most of their time on military bases. These young, strong people eat a lot of food. To attract and retain them, base food is plentiful and pretty good. There...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/07/The-History-and-Current-State-of-US-Military-Food/This is going to be a hard sell when I talk to my library director on Monday, but at least there's precedent for professional wrestling in libraries. I mean, there's always been amateur, unsanctioned, and unscheduled wre...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/07/Lucha-Libro-Professional-Wrestling-in-Libraries/Robert Francis undertook the task of ranking the greatest bird names of all time. The project involved going through the common names of more than 11,000 different bird species. A lot of birds already had notable common...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/07/The-100-Best-Named-Birds-Ranked/Taco Bell food has a reputation, deserved or not, for running right through you. It's never happened to me, but then again I have never been able to eat a whole bag of their food. But that's what happens in this parody v...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/06/Adele-Has-Some-Taco-Bell-in-Rolling-in-the-Deep-Fried/Embed from Getty ImagesThe Beatles disbanded in 1970, but the cracks were there for years prior. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were best friends and songwriting partners, but the competition for "top Beatle" undergird...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/06/The-Battle-Over-Two-Songs-That-Sparked-the-End-of-the-Beatles/What is the longest plane flight you can take without leaving a country? The answer could be pretty simple and make for a very short video- but first we have to define what we're talking about. Does a "domestic flight" m...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/06/Calculating-Which-is-the-Worlds-Longest-Domestic-Flight/@badacosplay27 shares this photo of an inventive mashup cosplay. It blends the transformed Denji from the anime and manga franchise Chainsaw Man and the much more kawaii vocaloid character of Hatsune Miku.And if...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/06/Chainsaw-Miku/Water running off a stone building can cause real damage over time, so cathedrals and other classical stone buildings were equipped with gargoyles. The purpose of gargoyles was to direct rainwater away from a building, s...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/05/The-Gruesome-Architectural-Gargoyles-of-Europe/If you've ever wondered about the functions of all those buttons Darth Vader wears on his chest, the secret is now out. They are controls for his cassette deck. Yes, Vader has achieved what we've all dreamed of at one ti...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/05/Auralnauts-Brings-Us-a-New-Series-Cassette-Deck-Vader/In the few short years between the Wright Brothers' first flight and World War I, airplanes really took off, so to speak. England, France, and Germany all used them in the war as bombers, which at first consisted of pilo...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/05/Were-US-Factories-the-Victims-of-Aerial-Bombing-During-World-War-I/Researchers and engineers at the General Robotics Lab at Duke University have developed the Argus--a robot that can move in any direction. It doesn't have a back, front, or sides. It can move in any direction at once. It...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/05/Rolling-Robot-Moves-Omnidirectionally/YouTuber KoalaOK subtitled his wordless animated film Pit with "A Short Film About Human Nature." So you'd expect to see humans, right? Or maybe not- there are no humans in sight until halfway through the film....
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/04/The-Short-Film-iPiti-Will-Keep-You-Guessing-All-the-Way-Through/People are traveling to Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington to celebrate the nation's 250th birthday this year. You might want to add a stop in New York, because the New York Public Library is offering something unique-...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/04/A-Library-is-Bringing-Back-George-Washingtons-Beer-Recipe/Grocery stores sell fruit in mesh bags because it's to their advantage for you to buy twelve oranges when you only need two. If the last few oranges go bad before you finish the bag, then you'll go buy more. You might ev...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/04/The-Optical-Illusion-in-the-Produce-Section/Nic C is a musician who samples music from classic television programs. He takes short slices--just a few notes each--of these famous songs and uses them to compose new music that is simulatenously original and familiar....
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/04/Sampling-Famous-TV-Openings/A game that combines food and geography is quite relevant to my interests. That game is FoodGuessr, which is a little like GeoGuessr, but it uses food instead of a location photograph. You'll be given a photograph of a d...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/03/FoodGuessr-is-a-Game-of-International-Cuisines/My Modern Met informs us the UK/Ireland division of the Subway restaurant chain has created a functional sleeping bag that looks like one of its iconic sandwiches.The art project is called "Sleeping Bag-uette." It's mode...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/03/Sandwich-Sleeping-Bag/Some serial killers commit murder in the furtherance of other crimes, like bank robbery. Some do it for a sexual thrill. Some are lashing out at a world they believe did them wrong. But it takes a truly terrifying person...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/03/The-Teenage-Sweethearts-Who-Killed-Ten-People-in-Eight-Days/The sitting room, of course. Lorelei Teegarden shared images of her grandmother's half bath, where she keeps her collection of miniature chairs. It's a work in progress, since she's been collecting them at least since Te...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/03/What-Do-You-Call-a-Bathroom-Full-of-Chairs/You know this song- "We've Only Just Begun" by The Carpenters. It was heard at every wedding you went to for about twenty years, and a lot of graduations, too. You might think it pretty clever for a bank to use it in an...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/02/Advertising-Jingles-That-Became-Hit-Songs/The Incredible Mr. Limpet was a 1964 film starring Don Knotts as a man who magically turns into a fish and helps the Allies win World War II. It was a mix of live action and animation, and Mr. Limpet was drawn a...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/02/The-Lost-Version-of-iThe-Incredible-Mr-Limpeti-Starring-Jim-Carrey/Middle Ground Lighthouse lies off of Newport News in Chesapeake Bay. Though built in 1891, it remains in nightly operation. Northern Virginia magazine reports that it's also been renovated and is available for s...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/02/For-Sale-A-Lighthouse-You-Can-Live-In/Joe Negri had been a child prodigy as a musician and was a local star in Pittsburgh when Fred Rogers hired him to star as a recurring character on his iconic children's television show. As Handyman Negri, this musician i...
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/06/02/RIP-Handyman-Negri-Joe-Negri-from-Mister-Rogers-Neighborhood/
