Will checking out a library book give you scarlet fever? That was a serious question a hundred and forty years ago.

In the second half of the Nineteenth Century, public health rose as a major social concern in many Western nations. Preventing the spread of infectious diseases through proper sanitation was a high priority for public policymakers.

At the same time, public libraries began to proliferate across the United States and the United Kingdom. This led to worries and, eventually, a public panic about library books as a locus of contagion. Joseph Hayes writes at Smithsonian:

Books were viewed as possible vehicles of disease transmission for several reasons. At a time when public libraries were relatively new, it was easy to worry about who had last handled a book and whether they might have been ill. Books that appeared to be benign might conceal diseases that could be unleashed “in the act of opening them,” Mann says. People were concerned about health conditions caused by “inhaling book dust,” Greenberg writes, and the possibility of “contracting cancer by coming in contact with malignant tissue expectorated upon the pages.”

The great book scare reached fever pitch in the summer of 1879, Mann says. That year, a librarian in Chicago named W.F. Poole reported that he had been asked whether books could transmit disease. Upon further investigation, Poole located several doctors who claimed to have knowledge of disease-spreading books. People in England started asking the same question, and concerns about diseased books developed “roughly contemporaneously” in the United States and Britain, Mann says. [...]

In response to the panic, libraries were expected to disinfect books suspected of carrying diseases. Numerous methods were used for disinfecting books, including holding the books in vapor from “carbolic acid crystals heated in an oven” in Sheffield, England, and sterilization via “formaldehyde solution” in Pennsylvania, according to Greenberg. In New York, books were disinfected with steam. A study in Dresden, Germany, “revealed that soiled book pages rubbed with wet fingers yielded many microbes.

-via Debby Witt | Photo: Travis Wise

Best caption wins an emoji. pic.twitter.com/HOMiBY02Jp

— Wilma Ocasio-Bobo (@fakingstarwars) August 27, 2019

Mark Hamill, along with other Star Wars alumni, attended the grand opening of the new Galaxy's Edge theme park at Walt Disney World in Florida earlier this summer. He tried out all the attractions and had a good time. But this picture shows him trying out the blue milk at the park, and it looks like he is searching for words to describe it. The suggested captions under that Tweet are marvelous. But how was the milk? And how did it compare with the blue milk he drank on set?  

"Note to self: Remember you're on-camera & Disney signs your paychecks."
(Honestly though: the warm, oily, sickly-sweet milk dyed blue from the movie was gag-inducing 🤮-while this frosty non-dairy drink tasted like a yummy fruit smoothie. 😋 #GotBlueMilk? https://t.co/C4Qx1iFfMq

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) August 28, 2019

Hamill was talking about the milk he drank on Tatooine in the first Star Wars film. He says the green milk he drank in The Last Jedi was much better, even if the scene was somewhat distasteful.

Co Hoedeman's stop-motion animation from 1970 is as cute as can be! -via Boing Boing

pic.twitter.com/zUgldSye2K

— It's spelled ''Cincinnati'' (@ItsCincinnati) August 30, 2019

It's hard for anyone to spell Cincinnati if you haven't had to do it quite a few times. People who live there have it down, but visiting rock stars do not. When KISS played Riverbend Music Center Thursday, they sold commemorative t-shirts for $50, complete with the city's name ...with two "t"s. CityBeat reports:

KISS's variation on the common misspelling is fairly common — the double "Ns" seem to confuse people. It's as if they start writing it, knowing there's a double letter somewhere, but are unsure of exactly where. Some go for a single second "N," then a double "T," but KISS went all-in with a double "N" and a double "T," just to be safe. Epic.

Anyway, thanks to Jean Simmons and the rest of the band for a great final show!

People had a good time over the snafu on Twitter. Locals couldn't wait to report the incident to the Twitter account It's spelled ''Cincinnati.'' And it wasn't the only mixup of the night.

That's not riverbend

— Christopher whiting (@mustangw69) August 31, 2019

-via Mental Floss

Lucas the spider is always looking for a new friend. Here he looks for one inside the clock! Lucas is trying to make a connection with the little bird inside, in the latest animation from Joshua Slice.

Giving birth is very stressful which Charlotte Knowles knows from experience. After her first birth, she wanted to ensure that she and her second baby wouldn't go through the same experience so they planned it to be a C-section.

As baby Lyla was going out however, she fell asleep halfway through and so doctors needed to wake her up after which she wriggled herself out.

Under the watchful eye of proud dad Ricky, and grandmother Tracy Wright, 54, she woke up and wiggled her torso free, before pushing herself out.

The method is considered more peaceful than traditional c-sections and is slowly being introduced to more hospitals across the UK each year. Charlotte from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, said it was the perfect way to bring her second child into the world.

To watch the video of the whole technique called "calm birthing" happen, check it out on the Daily Mail.

(Image credit: Charlotte Knowles/SWNS.com)

Street artist E. Lee doesn't just paint his works anywhere, but integrates them into the surrounding scenes. In this case, he made use of the pre-existing "please back in" sign in his painting in Chicago of Wile E. Coyote trying to trap the Road Runner.

It's not the first time that E. Lee has collaborated with Wile E. We've previously seen them try and fail to lure the Road Runner with a trap baited with free bird seed. That failed, as this one surely will, too. But Lee is loyal to his friend. He explains:

I love Wile E Coyote. And I’m sure most people trying to make a living in a creative field see a little of themselves in him. I think it’s important that we find humor in our plight of constantly having to create, optimistically making plans and then seeing those plans rarely work the way we’d hoped.

Over the past 30 years, Cindy Stirling has fostered runaways, orphans, teen sex workers, abuse victims and cancer patients. She was indeed an image of a supermom!

She spent most of her years doing community service especially to homeless children. Later on she met a guy, Ross, with the same passion as hers and then got married in 1986. For them, the decision to foster was obvious. Through their work, they’d seen how many kids needed loving parents, and what happened when kids didn’t have them: they might get into drugs, drop out of school, end up on the streets, end up in prison, or end up someplace worse.

In the Stirling household, a few things are non-negotiable. Kids have to attend school, and Stirling always checks if they have homework. All children are expected to be home for dinner—amazingly, they eat at 3:30 p.m., because that’s the only time everyone’s schedules allow. Each kid has a rotating list of chores: sweeping, vacuuming, mowing the lawn, laundry, garbage, setting the table, doing dishes. If one kid breaks a rule or acts out, Stirling sits them down away from the rest and talks it out. One foster daughter who stayed with the Stirlings for several years told me she couldn’t recall a time Stirling lost her cool. “It really takes a lot to piss that woman off.”

The couple worked several jobs to support the kids. Caring for children has become part of their identity, more than any nine-to-five would ever be. They were good at it, and it made them feel good, too. Then they decided to separate.

Find out more how the story unfolds over at Toronto Life.

(Image Credit: Vanessa Heins/Toronto Life)

Sigal Samuel expected that she would suffer from writer’s block (the inability to think of what to write) day by day for the rest of her life as a journalist and a novelist. After all, the writer’s block is a part of her profession. But Sigal now thinks that she would suffer less thanks to her new writing buddy, GPT-2.

Let me back up a bit: Six months ago, the research lab OpenAI created an AI system that generates text — from fake news to poetry — that in some cases actually sounds like it’s written by a human being. The OpenAI team has been rolling it out in stages, each time giving us a more powerful version of the language model they dubbed GPT-2, and carefully watching to see how we use it.

They’ve just put out the most powerful version yet. It boasts 50 percent of the power of the full version, which has yet to be released. As you can tell by trying it out for yourself, this model is already plenty powerful.

I was excited to find out what this AI system could do for me as a fiction writer. Over the past couple of years, AI has been creating some pretty striking music and paintings and even Renaissance-style selfies. While some artists worry that AI will put them out of a job — just as it’s expected to do for, say, truck drivers and factory workers — I’ve been more inclined to see it as a collaborator than a competitor. I don’t think AI will be good enough to write a superb novel on its own, but I do think it can be very helpful in a novelist’s creative process.

Do you agree with her?

(Image Credit: DarkWorkX/ Pixabay)

Archaelogists have uncovered charred ruins of the Turkish city Sam'al which was revealed to have been burned by the Hittite Empire on their way to destroying Babylon.

“It’s an incredibly lucky find. Every archaeologist hopes for an intact destruction layer because it gives you a snapshot of a day in the life of this town,” said David Schloen, a professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a leading scholar of the ancient Middle Eastern world who co-directs the excavation.

“Pottery is still sitting inside the buildings where the inhabitants left it in 1650 B.C. You know that everything is where it would be on a typical day, which is really valuable cultural knowledge.”

(Image credit: Henrik Brahe)

Global surface temperatures have been steadily increasing for centuries, but we saw a dramatic rise in temperature in the past 50 years. That has affected many regions of the world, in particular Greenland where data show how much the glaciers have changed only in the past half century.

NASA shared Landsat images of Greenland’s glaciers and they show how these icy structures have significantly changed over the last half century. The chilling images, which focus on the group of glaciers that empty into Greenland’s Sermilik Fjord, detail appearance and composition changes in hi-res form, NASA said in a press release.

Landsat images taken in August 2019 were compared to Landsat images snapped in 1972, and they show that these massive ice hubs are changing in color and melting at shocking rates.

(Image credit: NASA/Chris Shuman)

It's rare for a tourist to be able to meet the Queen in person as one would generally need to set an appointment or rather, be summoned to stand before the Queen, however, there are very rare occasions when one could meet the Queen on a leisurely stroll at her estate.

Now, some unwitting tourists had the chance to actually meet the Queen but failed to recognize her, even asking whether she has already met the Queen. And to this, she responded with a little quip.

(Image credit: Graham Laird/Wikimedia Commons)

Cosplayers Operation MJ and Claudia Stelmach are especially fond of The Nightmare Before Christmas and play Jack Skellington and Sally in various incarnations. Recently, they attended the D23 Expo with Jack as Han Solo and Sally as Leia.

Photo: whitewalker_mo

It's a look that totally works!

An exotic and primitive plant, cycad, has produced male and female cones outdoors on the sheltered undercliffs of Ventnor Botanic Garden on the Isle of Wight for the first time in 60 million years. Botanists say that this is a sign of the unfortunate global heating.

Cycads previously lived in what is now Britain millions of years ago, with fossils of the plants found in the Jurassic strata of rock stretching from the Isle of Wight to the Dorset coast, an era when the Earth’s climate had naturally high levels of carbon dioxide. According to Chris Kidd, curator of Ventnor Botanic Gardens, last summer’s heat wave and this year’s record-breaking temperatures have caused the plant’s production of cones, with a run of milder winters also helping.

Now that is a strong indicator of climate change, not only from the scientists but from plants as well!

(Image Credit: Phil Lemay/Ventnor Botanic Garden)

This operating system is Unix, an OS born half a century ago from a failure of an ambitious project which involved the giants in the tech industry, such as Bell Labs, General Electric (GE), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Unix is the brainchild of a few programmers in Bell Labs, and its story starts from a meeting on the top floor of a not-so-interesting annex of the Bell Labs complex in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

It was a bright, cold Monday, the last day of March 1969, and the computer sciences department was hosting distinguished guests: Bill Baker, a Bell Labs vice president, and Ed David, the director of research. Baker was about to pull the plug on Multics (a condensed form of MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service), a software project that the computer sciences department had been working on for four years. Multics was two years overdue, way over budget, and functional only in the loosest possible understanding of the term.

Trying to put the best spin possible on what was clearly an abject failure, Baker gave a speech in which he claimed that Bell Labs had accomplished everything it was trying to accomplish in Multics and that they no longer needed to work on the project. As Berk Tague, a staffer present at the meeting, later told Princeton University, “Like Vietnam, he declared victory and got out of Multics.”

Within the department, this announcement was hardly unexpected. The programmers were acutely aware of the various issues with both the scope of the project and the computer they had been asked to build it for.

Still, it was something to work on, and as long as Bell Labs was working on Multics, they would also have a $7 million mainframe computer to play around with in their spare time. Dennis Ritchie, one of the programmers working on Multics, later said they all felt some stake in the success of the project, even though they knew the odds of that success were exceedingly remote.

The cancellation of Multics, however, meant two things for the programmers at the computer science department. It meant that the only project they were working on will end, and the only computer in the department will also be pulled out. And just like that, and poof! What’s left for the department were a few office supplies and a few terminals.

However, out of this massive software project failure came one of the most influential operating systems all over the world. Those who did not give up did not have much of their own resources. What they have inside them, however, is more than enough to compensate: passion, perseverance, and creativity.

See the history of Unix over at Ars Technica.

(Image Credit: Bell Labs/ Ars Technica)