Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys, have played with dangerous things before, but they are serious when they warn us about playing with large neodymium magnets. "They will crush you." But that's exactly what they are doing in their latest video. These magnets are so attractive that you can't work with them before removing all the metal on your body, or you'll be sorry. Getting two of them together is another level- they will rush together so quickly and forcefully that they break! It happens in a blink of an eye, but these are the Slow Mo Guys. They recorded the magnets colliding at 187,000 frames per second, so we can see how it happens. The collision throws parts of the magnets off, but they are quickly sucked back together. That all occurs in the first four minutes; then they try some other experiments and show us how very weird these magnets act when they're trying to handle them.   -via Born in Space

It happens. Corporations that seem greedy or too up in people’s business online trying to be “relatable” for clicks and advertisements can get the ire of the common folk. If you’re interested in knowing which companies are really hated by the populace, the 2023 Axios Harris Poll has been released. These results were produced by asking more than 16,000 Americans to score the 100 companies they considered “most visible” across nine categories of reputation.

The list reveals the reputations of around 100 corporations in the U.S. Much to nobody’s surprise, social media companies are one of worst ranked organizations. Twitter, Meta, and TikTok were the giants included, but they were also badly ranked. Meta and Twitter scored badly in the culture and ethics categories, and this can be attributed to the recent lay-off of thousands of workers over email. We’re also going to include Musk’s reputation and as well as his choices after his acquisition of Twitter.

TikTok on the other hand, scored badly on the character category. This also is no surprise, with how American lawmakers are making a big fuss or concern over how it can be used by the Chinese federal government to gain more influence (and information). For reference, here are the other brands with bad reputations in the country according to the poll:

• The Trump Organization
• FTX
• Fox Corporation
• Twitter
• Meta
• Spirit Airlines
• TikTok

Image credit: Pixabay

Book historians refer to this binding style as "concertina" because of its accordion-like appearance. This particular book, now in the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, was in the collection of Seventeenth Century scholar Peder Scavenius. It's a copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew. Reading it requires flipping the book over as one proceeds through four divisions.

-via Paul Babinski

Who can say no to making a few extra bucks from items we’re not really interested in hanging onto anymore?

Well, with spring coming around the corner, around 77 % of households are estimated to do a full routine cleanup of their home, according to the National Cleaning Survey. This number is a record high, and it’s not going to be surprising to see a lot of old vintage items resurface in the coming months. We’re talking about old family photos, vintage frames, porcelain, music boxes, utensils, and more. 

If you’re one of the people who would brave their old family’s attic or basement for spring cleaning, you might want to keep an eye out for these items that can make you some money thanks to collectors. Check out Delish’s full piece here to learn more!

Image via Ebay 

From 1809 to 1927, this strange disease killed thousands of settlers and farmers in the Midwest—including Abraham Lincoln’s mother. https://t.co/GODTnGUwJg

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) June 20, 2023

When pioneers began settling in the United States midwest, they encountered a deadly illness that was eventually dubbed "milk sickness." It could kill a person within days. Calves died from it, and milk cows suffered as well, so the connection with drinking milk lent the illness its name. But no one knew what caused it, until Doctor Anna put her efforts into finding the cause.

Anna Pierce Bixby saw a need in her new Illinois community, and went to Philadelphia to be trained in nursing, midwifery, and dentistry, and returned to Rock Creek, Illinois, as the only medical practitioner for miles around. Besides delivering babies and pulling teeth, she searched and found the cause of milk sickness, with the aid of a Native American woman whose identity has been lost. But while cases of milk sickness waned in southern Illinois due to Bixby's efforts, it continued elsewhere because faraway doctors and officials didn't put much stock in what a frontier midwife had to say. Time and experience proved Bixby correct, yet even today she is more known for a local legend of buried treasure than for her public health work. Read how Doctor Anna fought milk sickness at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

Simone Giertz, the "queen of shitty robots" (previously at Neatorama), went to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan to meet Mohammad Waheed Hussein Asaf, who makes toys for the children of the camp. The aim was to collaborate in making a working helicopter for the children. Their time together is a contrast of old and young, Eastern and Western, man and woman, from different parts of the world who don't have a language in common.  

"He thinks I'm incompetent, and I think he's a stubborn old man."

There had to be a translator there, but the editing of this video is so exquisite that you don't even realize it. Can they come together to build a helicopter from the materials available? That seems to be almost beside the point, as the real story here is the partnership of two makers.

The video is a project of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, to celebrate World Refugee Day on June 20. The UNHCR's mini-documentary series called We Are Here has four episodes available on YouTube.  -via Metafilter

If you were to go by pop culture versions of Viking feasts, a meal would be laden with whole animals roasted over a spit, accompanied by plenty of alcoholic beverages. While that may be appropriate for a celebratory dinner after a successful pillaging, it's not what most people of the Viking era ate. Daniel Serra is the world's foremost expert on Viking cuisine, and has published a cookbook of Viking recipes. He also gives demonstrations of historic cooking in recreated Viking villages in Scandinavia. But how do you recreate meals from a culture that didn't write anything down?

Serra studies a combination of sources, such as archaeological digs, mentions of food in orally-preserved Viking sagas, and extrapolating back from later written recipes. He cross-references his findings with the science of what the area was like in the Viking age, what resources were available, and what the culture was like. Then he tests his recipes and cooking methods to see if they work.

Serra describes the everyday "comfort foods" that Viking communities would produce, and even shares a recipe for Traveller's Fish Porridge at BBC's World's Table. -via Digg

You might think that someone messed up the instructions for assembling their IKEA cat, but this is Gulliver, and he's just weird. That's how he got featured on the subreddit WhatsWrongWithYourCat.

Then there's sangu811's cat, who can sleep in what would be a most uncomfortable position for humans. Honestly, there's usually nothing wrong with these cats, it's just that cats are open to new experiences, exceedingly flexible, and they don't care what you think. If you enjoy cats caught on camera being all weird, check out 50 of them in a ranked list at Bored Panda. 

Red velvet cake wasn't on the table for the first Juneteenth celebration in 1865, because it wasn't all that widespread, or all that red yet. But other red foods were there, like watermelon for dessert, and became symbolic of the holiday. So it's no mystery why red velvet cake is served at modern Juneteenth celebrations, and at Christmas, too. Besides, it's delicious!

The first velvet cake was a deluxe chocolate cake, and the faint red tinge was a byproduct of how the cocoa reacted with the leavening agents. The cake was a hit, and people liked the red tint as much as they liked the flavor. Yes, you had to use the right kind of cocoa to produce the red color, but if you wanted to make sure, you could add food coloring. A recipe for red velvet cake was even used to promote the sale of food coloring in the 1940s. The shockingly bright red color with the additive proved very popular, and now you don't even need chocolate to have a festive red cake. But don't forget the cream cheese frosting!

Read how red velvet cake came about, and try a recipe for the classic Velvet Cocoa Cake that produces the natural reddish brown color, posted at Atlas Obscura. I made a set of red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting Friday for an office gathering, and I will be eating my sole portion today in honor of Juneteenth.    

(Image credit: I made this.)

Initially, the crime appeared to be straightforward. Police responded to a report of a robbery at a convenience store in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The clerk reported that a man had presented him with a written note that said "Give me all your money or I will shoot you." The clerk complied. Police tracked down the suspected robber and arrested him.

That's when the situation became complicated.

The suspect confessed to the crime, but said that a friend had set him up for the robbery. The police then talked to the friend, a young lady whom they arrested for an outstanding warrant. She said that one of her friends--the clerk at the convenience store--had asked her to rob the store because "he was tired and wanted to go home."* She provided texts to prove her claim.

All three criminal masterminds were arrested.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Pixabay

*We've all been there. Don't be jealous because someone else thought of this solution first and you didn't.

Luiz Pereira, a physicist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and his colleagues recently published the results of their study of why peanuts move up and down inside beer.

Placing peanuts inside beer is apparently a custom in Argentina, so generations of drinkers have noticed that peanuts tend to move up and down repeatedly. Why? If I understand the article correctly, it is because during their descent into the beer, air bubbles within the liquid attach to the peanuts, causing them to become buoyant. When the peanuts arrive at the surface of the beer, the bubbles pop and the peanuts lose their buoyancy.

-via Dave Barry

Throwing a cable across a ravine is easier than building a bridge. Actually, throwing a cable across is the first step to building a bridge, but sometimes the project stops there, because people can cross with just a cable if they are brave enough. Slovenia has several manual cable cars strung across some of its more inaccessible ravines, but Tom Scott found only one that is regularly maintained. When you see it, you'll have your doubts. But Tom watched other people use it, and was game to demonstrate it for us. There's no way on earth you'd get me in that thing, even if I were being chased by some bad guys out of an Indiana Jones movie, and I grew up in the land of rickety swinging footbridges. Would you ride a rusty 70-year-old zipline? If heights make you queasy, be warned that they do show images of what Tom is crossing over.

From the early days of photography, here's a story of a torture that became a badge of honor. Born in 1799, Captain Jonathan W. Walker was an avid abolitionist. He worked with the Underground Railroad, and helped those who escaped slavery settle in Mexico. But in 1844, he was on a boat taking seven escapees to the West Indies when they got into trouble and were rescued by a ship with a pro-slavery crew. Walker was arrested, and a US Marshall branded his right hand with "SS," which stood for "slave stealer." He was jailed in Florida for eleven months.

The incident didn't slow Walker down at all, and he continued his abolitionist work lecturing and arranging for escapes after his bail was paid by an abolitionist group. Not long after, he commissioned a photograph to be made of his branded right hand. The image, however, is reversed and appears to be his left hand- notice that the Ss are backward. Read Walker's story that left us a lasting image of the fight over slavery at Vintage Everyday.  -via Nag on the Lake

At its most basic level, cancer is when our own cells decide to grow out of control. Yes, it's much more malignant than that sounds. Your body will recognize and fight the danger, but if it gets bad enough, your immune system will need outside help.

In this video, Kurzgesagt describes the immune system's battle against cancer in an analogy of a city and its emergency systems going up against a chaotic gang of dangerous troublemakers, some of them with malevolent supernatural power. That makes it easier to understand, but I also see another analogy here in the story of drug-resistant bacteria. If you spread antibiotics out too widely, such as treating entire livestock herds before any infection is present, or using antimicrobial soaps, you risk allowing some surviving superbugs to evolve and flourish. So who wins the battle? It's hard to say, because this can all go on without us ever knowing it. But concerning the cancers that become bad enough for us to detect them, we are learning more and more about building more powerful weapons against these malignant cells all the time.

Before you get too excited, I must manage your expectations: the townsfolk do eventually pull the politician back out of the river. The immersion is a temporary affair.

The city of Trento in northern Italy holds an annual celebration called Feste Vigilane to celebrate the life of their patron saint, Vigilis, who was martyred after ordering Christians to throw an idol into the Adige River. My Modern Met explains that part of the festivities includes the Tonca, a ritualized and comedic dunking of a selected villain into the river.

A dramatic presentation of a Court of Penance determines who in the town is most worthy of being dunked. Politicians are a favorite choice. At the time of the Tonca, the convict is lowered into the river three times to the amusement of the population.

Photo: Feste Vigilane