Atlas Obscura rolls out their annual series of spooky and supernatural stories for the month of October with a look at the legendary witch, Baba Yaga, in an excerpt from the new book Becoming Baba Yaga: Trickster, Feminist, and Witch of the Woods.

Baba Yaga is an old witch who lives in the woods of eastern Europe, according to tales told to scare children. She sweeps down and takes children who aren't good or don't obey their parents. But in her long folklore history, she's more than that. The earliest mention of Baba Yaga in text is from 1755, and lists her in a pantheon of deities, with no kinship to other deities. There are even older woodblocks that tell her story in pictures. The witch's purpose and characteristics vary somewhat from culture to culture, hinting that Baba Yaga goes further back in oral tradition than we know. She does have an origin story featuring the devil, but it was written in 1840. Even if it was based on older tales, Baba Yaga was around long before Christianity took over Europe. Baba Yaga may be a witch, but she has been a goddess and a sorceress, too. Read more about the ancient witch at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Ivan Bilibin)

It's almost October; bring on the scary movies! The full trailer for the new version of Nosferatu dropped today. This story has already made a cinematic splash twice, once in 1922, when the tale from the novel Dracula (with the characters' names changed) was brought to the big screen for the first time. Count Orlok the vampire returned in 1979 in a film by Werner Herzog. Now Robert Eggers brings us Nosferatu, starring Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok. Other cast members include Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, and Willem Dafoe. No, we don't get to see Count Orlok in this trailer. Some things are better left to the big screen. A much bigger disappointment is that we will not get to see Nosferatu for Halloween. The movie will open on December 25th, a day on which you'll be looking for something to do.

James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924. That means that the former president will turn 100 years old tomorrow. Carter will be the first US president to live to the age of 100. The president coming the closest was George H. W. Bush, who died at 94.47 years. John Adams lived to be 90, but all those who surpassed him are relatively recent presidents, with Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan coming in third and fourth.

The Carter Center in Georgia is involving people across the country in making a digital birthday card for Carter. You can upload your picture and birthday message to be included in a mosaic image for the occasion.

Many are familiar with Carter's small town origins and his one-term presidency (1977-81). But Carter will be remembered most for his long post-presidency career in working for numerous causes, like Habitat for Humanity, fair voting procedures in many countries, and the project to eradicate the Guinea worm. There are probably a lot of things contained in Carter's 100 years that you aren't familiar with, like the time he supervised the cleanup after a nuclear accident, or his sighting of a UFO. Read about these and more in a list of 11 things you might not know about Jimmy Carter at Metal Floss.

The title of this video at YouTube is "How to Dispose of a Body," which is provocative, but might get you put on a list somewhere. It's not a phrase you want in your search history. But this is about the way humans dispose of the dead when there are no suspicious circumstances.

Most of us are obligated to plan a funeral at some point, even if it's just our own. Burial has always been an option, and for most of history, it's a pretty good plan. Put the body underground, and we don't have to witness its degradation. But we've also developed embalming, coffins, and vaults that aren't biodegradable. In some places, burial is temporary, and bones are recovered after some years so the gravesite can be used again. Setting aside land for the dead is respectful, but can get out of hand when there are too many bodies and too little land. So what's a more sustainable way to, uh, dispose of a the deceased? Hank Green of SciShow lays out several alternatives and compares them for their effects on our future. -via Damn Interesting

Modern life has given us a warped sense of time. Or, not so much time, but the importance of time. It's not quite that, either, because time is truly important -it's the only thing we can't make more of. What modern life has done is given us a sense of urgency and impatience that may serve our bosses, but doesn't enrich our lives. We have email, same-day delivery, and time-saving devices to make us more productive and give us more "free time," but then we spend time trying to figure out how to optimize that free time.

There are quite a few examples of how we could look at time in a different way. If you ask an engineering firm to optimize a train ride, they will figure out the fastest way to get to the destination. If you ask the Disney company to optimize the same train route, they will make the train ride so enjoyable that you will much prefer it to driving. It will probably take longer, but which is the best use of one's time? The human brain can adjust to looking at time in a more satisfying way, but the behavior of groups makes this more difficult, as the acceleration of everything makes us too impatient to enjoy anything. Rory Sutherland addresses the question of our changing perception of time in several dimensions in an essay at Behavioral Science that you won't mind spending a few minutes reading. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Isabelle Grosjean)

Bryan Cranston's Hollywood career goes back further than you know. For twenty years, he was a reliable character actor used for small roles in a variety of TV shows and movies. Yeah, he was "that guy" that people sometimes recognize but don't know the actor's name. Cranston's generic good looks got him picked for guest spots, but it wasn't until the year 2000 that he landed a regular role on the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, and even then he wasn't the star. However, he made the role his own and became a favorite of the show's fans. Malcolm in the Middle lasted seven seasons, and cemented Cranston as a talented comedic actor.

Then in 2008, we were all shocked that this sitcom dad was suddenly the star of Breaking Bad, playing a methamphetamine manufacturer who evolved into a drug kingpin. Cranston pulled this off perfectly, and proved he's not just a character actor or a comedic actor, he is an actor. Nerdstalgic goes through Bryan Cranston's career and explains how he got the role of a lifetime in Walter White. -via Digg 
 

Drinking games have been with us for as long as drinking itself has. It only takes a little alcohol to relieve a person of their normal inhibitions and open them up for silliness and competition -and more drinking. Still, there have been some notorious drinking games that led to significant consequences, some of them deadly. There was that time that Alexander the Great staged a drinking competition at a funeral and offered a gold crown to whoever drank the most. The winner drank a stupendous amount, and captured the crown, but then died. And so did most of the finalists. There was also a customary drinking game at Stalin's notorious parties, and another that resulted from a government overthrow- and led to another. An ancient Korean drinking game was like truth or dare, and one option was "Drink from a cup without removing the dirty thing floating in it." Read the stories of five terrifying drinking games from the historical records at Cracked.

(Image credit: Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne)

DNA analysis has changed so much about science, and history, too, now that we can trace individual genes back to their geographic origin. We knew that the Vikings were keen on trading ivory, which was in high demand in Europe. They didn't get it from elephants, but rather walrus tusks. A recent study of the DNA contained in that ivory indicates that some of it came from the very north end of Greenland and upper Canada, on the Arctic Ocean. Norse ships were not previously known to travel that far north, and their New World settlements were mainly in the southwest of Greenland.

Hunting in that area would mean catching a window of only ten weeks when the sea was ice-free, and the trip from southwest Greenland would have taken a month. That leaves only two weeks to catch a year's worth of walruses for their ivory. An alternate theory is that the Norse bought the ivory from indigenous Inuit people, but that would also involve travel as the Inuit did not tend to go south to trade. The discovery speaks to the toughness of Vikings and their ships, and to the extreme value of the ivory they brought back. Read more about this discovery at ScienceAlert.  -via Real Clear Science

(Image credit: Captain Budd Christman, NOAA Corps)

Our night sky will soon have a temporary "new star" when T Coronae Borealis goes nova. T Coronae Borealis, or T Cor Bor for short, is a a white dwarf about 3,000 light years from earth. It sucks up material from red giant star relatively nearby, and explodes into a nova every 80 years. The indications are there that this may happen soon. There are records from previous nova explosions, but the last time it happened, we had no no X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes to record the data.

T Cor Bor is not the only "dead" star to have intermittent novas, but the others either go much longer between novas or are more unpredictable. And there are most likely many that are too far away for us to know about. When the nova happens, the explosion will be as bright to observers on earth as Polaris, the North Star. Stargazers will be able to see it with just our eyes for a few days, or with telescopes for longer. But astronomers will track and collect data from the nova for months. Read a longer explanation of what is expected at Space.com. -via Damn Interesting   

(Image credit: NASA/Conceptual Image Lab/Goddard Space Flight Center)

Redditor randomlyassigned20 bought a house that's around 100 years old. He found a feature underneath the house that has him stumped, and he posted three pictures. Normally, the folks at the Old Houses subreddit are pretty helpful, and indeed some guessed it was for salt storage, or ice storage, or the ash clean-out for a previous chimney. But the rest of the comment forum leaned into another story altogether.    

There are dozens more of these. Even randomlyassigned20 got into the humor of it. When the same pictures were posted to the Century Homes subreddit, the consensus was that this is an ash clean-out with a coal chute to the right. There's no chimney in that spot, but many old houses, including mine, had more chimneys back when fireplaces were the only heat source, which were later removed when central heating systems were introduced. But even that post still had jokes about Canadian hieroglyphs. Sometimes you just have to roll with the joke.   

Bill Schaumberg is a producer and editor at The Dodo, so you know that animals are important to him. He started dating Kate, who has a cat named Rita. Bonus! Yeah, Bill has plenty of pets of his own, but he still wanted to make friends with Rita. Badly. However, Rita is definitely a one-person cat who is clearly very attached to Kate, and she is set in her ways. That set up a challenge- can Bill persuade Rita to hug on him the way she hugs on Kate? You can't get too pushy in this situation, because cats can see through that. Winning a cat over takes time, dedication, and consistency. But Bill knows that. Watch his adventures in wooing Rita over time. Not only does he eventually make a good impression on Rita, he also gains points with Kate, because women love a man who is good to their pets.   

You probably don't recognize the title of the song "Monkeys Spinning Monkeys," but you will certainly recognize it when you hear it. It's an instrumental tune that Kevin MacLeod composed ten years ago to evoke a lighthearted, whimsical, and comical mood. MacLeod has made a name for himself (and quite a bit of money) by composing music and releasing it under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can use it for any purpose, as long as they give him attribution. Or you can pay him and use it without attribution.

Since the song is royalty-free, millions of users on YouTube, Instagram, and especially TikTok have selected "Monkeys Spinning Monkeys" as the background music for their funny videos. It's far from the most annoying TikTok soundtrack, and you can hear it here. Read how "Monkeys Spinning Monkeys" came about and how it's been used all over the internet at NPR. -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: Owuor Jack)

You know how we who aren't rich like to make fun of the dumb ways rich people spend their money? One of the easiest ways to do that is to check out real estate offerings of expensive homes, and we've done that a lot at Neatorama and at Homes and Hues. It's what makes McMansion Hell such a fun site, because money doesn't automatically bestow good taste. Even when an expensive home is perfectly built and appointed, it strikes us as wastefully large and too difficult to care for. Conspicuous consumption is a serious affair, but it also makes you look weird. But there are often ridiculous quirks in these properties that make us feel better about not having the money to embarrass ourselves like that. Ryan George manages to put all our thoughts on such real estate excess into words and shows us pictures of the weird homes designed to suck up money from those who have way too much to care.

The seventh film in the Jurassic Park franchise has just wrapped up filming. Jurassic World Rebirth will take up the story of dinosaur de-extinction years after the end of Jurassic World Dominion, and we find that mankind is mostly safe from the escaped dinosaurs because they can't survive outside of equatorial jungles. But the three largest dinosaurs hold the key to a lifesaving drug that will benefit all mankind. So a top secret expedition goes to find them and bring back genetic material. Back in 1993, when Dr. Ian Malcolm said, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should," he had no clue how that could be turned around to our benefit.  

Jurassic World Rebirth will feature an all-new cast led by Scarlett Johansson, and is expected in theaters on July 2, 2025. Screen Rant has an update on the filming and some speculation about what the movie should be.

One day I was driving up the interstate with the truck windows down and distinctly smelled pizza. I turned and saw a pizza parlor to the right. How does a pizza smell get to a speeding vehicle that far from the frontage road? That small event stuck with me until I ended up eating pizza that night.

Restaurants and other food vendors know the value of smell, and chain restaurants encourage associations with the unique smell recognizable at all their locations. That's why outlets like KFC and Burger King have toyed with perfumes that evoke the smell of their restaurants. It's why Cinnabon and Subway put their ovens near the entry door. It's also why Starbucks had to pull their breakfast sandwiches and redesign them in 2008- because the smell of the sandwiches interfered with the customary smell of the coffee, and customers noticed. Read up on how restaurants customize and maximize the smell of their food to lure customers in at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Btotanes)