You've heard about Atlantis and El Dorado, legendary cities that disappeared and may have never existed at all. This year, we also learned about Dunwich and Heracleion that really did disappear into the ocean. Germany has its own lost city, named Rungholt. Except it was in Denmark when it disappeared.

Rungholt was once thought to be a legend, and it had its own legendary story. The city was a den of iniquity, having grown prideful and complacent due to its wealth. One night, some drunken young men harassed a priest to give last rites to a pig. The priest asked God to send a punishment to the young men, and when the priest left town, a huge storm wiped out the entire city, and it was never seen again. But the legend says that afterward you could hear the sound of the church's bell ring from the North Sea.

That storm was the Grote Mandrenke, or Saint Marcellus's flood, of January 1362. It raged across several countries and killed around 30,000 people. It also changed the coastline of Denmark. Rungholt, a port city of around 3,000 people, was wiped out and left underwater.

The first signs of what might be Rungholt were found in 1921 near the islands created by the storm. Archaeologists have been studying relics in the mudflats of the UNESCO Wadden Sea World Heritage Site. Last month, they found the remains of a large church near the island of Südfall. They had already found a large drainage system, dykes, and two smaller churches. This discovery may confirm that the excavation area is indeed, the lost city of Rungholt. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Ralf Roletschek)

Microsoft Office 97 came with a virtual assistant named Clippy, an animated paper clip. He could be helpful if you had no idea what you were doing, but as you mastered the program, Clippy became more annoying by the day. He was cute, but could be snarky at times, and always managed to treat you like an idiot. But Clippy managed to escape his original job and became a meme, so now he is less an annoyance and more of nostalgic reminder of 1990s computer culture. You know, if it weren't for Clippy, we might not have Siri or Alexa now. Or we might have a really annoying Siri or Alexa now.     

You wouldn't be at all surprised that the guy who created Clippy was a children's book illustrator. Or at least he is now. Kevan J. Atteberry tells the story of how Clippy came about. -via Nag on the Lake

A big portion of the Netherlands is below sea level, and the Dutch are masters at controlling water levels to maintain that land. The city of Utrecht is shot through with dams, canals, and locks as part of that water control system. That caused a problem for migrating fish. Many species travel from the Vecht river to the shallower water of the Kromme river in order to spawn. But getting through Utrecht was an obstacle course, until ecologist Mark van Heukelum came up with the Fish Doorbell, or Visdeurbel.

The Fish Doorbell starts with an underground camera that anyone can access online. When fish gather near a lock, a user can activate the doorbell, and an operator will open the lock for the fish to pass through. The system has been online three springs now, and has gathered a community of "fisherman" around the world who monitor the canals of Utrecht to aid the fish. They are like birdwatchers, trading sightings of different species of fish with each other. Read about this awesome project at Atlas Obscura, and you might just find yourself with a new hobby. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Хомелка) 

Modern medicine has made things so much easier for us, with vaccines, antibiotics, chemotherapy, and anesthesia, among other modern miracles. But surgery itself is pretty old. What was that like before we had knockout drugs? Do you really want to know? Back then you didn't want surgery ever, unless it was a life-or-death situation. Yeah, you could drink alcohol, but that came with its own problems, like making uncontrollable bleeding more likely. Harder drugs were tried, but they might just kill you. However, this TED-Ed video is not misery porn about the agony of surgery while awake; there's just a small bit about that before they go through the history of how relatively safe and effective modern anesthetics were developed. It was a bumpy ride from there to where we are now.

The comments at YouTube have hundreds of anesthesia stories, almost all of which are positive, even from people who were terrified of surgery. -via Digg

We've posted quite a few times about the bizarre molded Jell-O dishes of the early-to-mid-20th century, but this collection takes the cake, so to speak. There are plenty of gelatin abominations, like the Ham Buffet Mold shown above. The recipe calls for pureeing the ham and setting it in a mold of orange Jello-O, according to a commenter. I couldn't find the recipe by search, as "Ham Buffet Mold" only brought up people asking if it's okay to eat ham with mold on it. There are two recipes in which you are to set pasta in a ring mold, one with gelatin. A couple more with a whole fish set in gelatin, and way too many of shrimp swimming in gelatin.

Fruit Salad Linguini, anyone? No, thank you. But there are also cakes. Cake decorating books at the time appear to be obsessed with clowns, and no matter how well they were recreated, they were still creepy. The dishes taken from the Instagram account Weird Old Food just get weirder the more you look. See a ranked list of 30 of the weirdest at Bored Panda.

Update: Andrew Dalke found the recipe for Ham Mold! You'll be delighted to see it calls for unflavored gelatin instead of orange. The color is from tomato soup. Not that those facts make it any more appetizing...

A new study on sharks may be frightening to people who swim in the Pacific Ocean, but should really be assuring. Researchers studied 26 Southern California beaches with drone cameras to find out how often swimmers and juvenile white sharks shared the same areas of water. Two of those busy beaches, in Santa Barbara County and San Diego County, are shark nurseries, where sharks tend to give birth. At those beaches, sharks and human swimmers overlapped 97% of the time! In almost all incidences, the swimmers were not aware of nearby sharks.

The reassuring part is that, during the two-year survey, only one swimmer was bitten in all of Southern California, and she wasn't even sure if it was a shark. That means that sharks just don't see humans as a food source, and tend to live and let live near the shore. That doesn't mean sharks won't ever bite, but those near land tend to limit attacks to defense, like when a surfer or a boat accidentally crashes into one. Read more about the study at Smithsonian. You'll see some footage and images that may out you on edge.

(Image credit: Ed Garcia) 

The only way I would deliberately jump out of a plane is if the alternative is crashing, but some folks love the rush of skydiving. And when you seek adrenaline like that, you are always trying to up the ante. These folks managed to all sync up and hold hands while falling head first toward earth at terminal velocity. Just watching the video gives you a rush from the speed and the weird orientation.

We don't have any information on who these people are, how high they started out, or where they are skydiving. The most I could count at once was 18, meaning 17 in the frame plus the videographer. There may have been more. How many planes does this kind of stunt require? -via Born in Space

Have you ever tried a pickle pizza? Have you ever even heard of a pickle pizza? The idea seems intriguing, if it can be pulled off right. Pizza Hut has announced that they are offering a pickle pizza for a limited time. How limited? It will be available at exactly one Pizza Hut location in New York City, for three days only (June 9-11) while supplies last. What kind of test is that?

The Pizza Hut Pickle Pizza will feature ranch sauce, cheese, Nashville hot chicken, onions, and a layer of dill pickles, topped with more ranch dressing. Frankly, I would be more liable to try a pickle pizza with marinara sauce and pepperoni, but I'm not the one making these decisions.

Pizza Hut will reserve the right to offer Pickle Pizza more widely if the demand is there, but there are other places you can get a pizza with pickles if you so choose, or you could make one at home with the ingredients you choose. Read more about the Pickle Pizza trend at The Takeout.

(Image credit:Pizza Hut)

Books become famously influential in different ways. Before mass printing and best seller lists, it depended on who got to read a certain book. If a book influenced a powerful person, it could change the world. If it were read by scholars, it could change an entire discipline, such as astronomy. In the modern world, best selling books can influence public opinion by revealing what was previously unknown to most readers, or by speculating on what might have been, or what could someday be. Public opinion goes a long way in changing society, and it was indeed books that fueled America's Revolutionary War, feminism, civil rights, environmental regulations, the Communist Revolution, and other world-changing movements.

Many of these book changed literature itself. Mary Shelley didn't set out to invent science fiction, but that's what she did with Frankenstein. You could say the same about JRR Tolkien and the fantasy genre. If you were to make a list of influential books throughout history, you'd probably guess a lot of the volumes on this list of 46 books that changed the world at MentalFloss. But probably not all of them, and therefore you'll find something new to catch up on what all the fuss is about.

(Image credit: Sally Wilson)

The rocking theme song for the 80s action show The A-Team is really energizing. This creation by composers Mike Post and Pete Carpenter is arguably the greatest television theme song every written. Media personality Al Roker likes to play it when he wakes up in the morning to boost his energy for the day.

The show was dubbed into French. Producers changed the theme song a bit to make it upbeat and added lyrics about the organization called "L'Agence Tous Risques" -- "The All Risks Team." You can read the complete lyrics at Digital Spy. They sync well with the music.

-via Super Punch

French pianist Aurelien Froissart visited the public piano at the St. Pancras train station in London and set up several cameras, as he often does for his TikTok videos in which he plays requests. This time a request came from a woman carrying a violin case. She asked if he knew Vivaldi's "Summer" from his Four Seasons. Froissart did, but got a little flustered during the duet wondering if he could keep up with the violinist.

Was it staged? Froissart has an awful lot of performance videos of public pianos with talented musicians joining in with him, so that's up in the air, but this one garnered 50 million views on TikTok. Unfortunately, the woman with the violin was never identified. But the performance was magic. -via Metafilter

Update: Rusty Blazenhoff reveals that the violinist is Ugne Liepa Zuklyte, a Lithuanian student at the Royal College of Music.

In 1977, a hospital in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, purchased a cylinder full of pelleted cobalt-60, a highly radioactive element, to be used in radiotherapy, and never registered the purchase with the government as required. The radiotherapy program never got off the ground, and the cylinder remained in storage. That is, until 1983 when a hospital employee took the cylinder to a scrapyard and sold it as scrap metal.

Do you recall the story about the butterfly who flapped its wings and set off a chain reaction that caused a tornado weeks later? The unregistered cobalt-60 was kind of like that, except it involved nuclear radiation. By January of 1984, a truck passing the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico set off alarms in their radiation detectors, leading to an investigation that turned up an accident that has been called “a hundred times more intense” than the Three Mile Island incident. Authorities identified 17,000 buildings in Mexico and the US that contained contaminated rebar, and 800 buildings had to be demolished. Thousands of people in Mexico were exposed to the radiation, some at dangerously high levels. Read how all that happened at Amusing Planet.

(Unrelated image credit: Petty Officer 2nd Class Tucker Yates)

Rain Noe of Core77 shows us an unusual tool. Can you guess what it's for? The answer is below the fold.

Science gives us an ever-expanding archive of knowledge, and each discovery bring a need for labeling. New species, chemicals, and processes each need their own name so that other scientists will know what you're talking about. Things can get weird. We may laugh at the term "spaghettification," but thanks to whichever physicist who came up with the term, it's pretty self-explanatory. And that's what's important.

You can't get much clearer than that. As long as a species name stays within the limits of taxonomic nomenclature, you can name a species anything you want, if you are the one with the right to do so. Besides, the western lowland gorilla can claim early adopter status. He can always claim he is the default gorilla! See a dozen of these strange science terms in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

PS: I believe they meant a Jiffy is a "short amount of time."

See also: 11 Naughty-Sounding Scientific Names, Funny Chemical Names, and Diabolic Acid and other Chemical Structures. And don't forget about the thagomizer.

If you want to know what color the sun is, the worst way to find out would be to look at it, especially it's high in the sky. That's a good way to damage your eyes. When you look at the sun as it is rising or setting, you get the idea that it is yellow, or maybe a bit orange. But you can't always believe your eyes. Atmospheric conditions affect the way things appear to us, and the limitations of our eyes affect what we perceive. So what color is the sun really emitting? All of them, but it turns out that it emits a green wavelength more than any other. To determine this, we first have to define color, and then measure the sun's wavelengths, and explain ehy we don't see the green color by looking at the factors that affect our perception. SciShow gives us an overview of all that in just five minutes.