Being the first modern democracy, the United States ended up with some weird kinks in our governmental framework. Sure, we can change the Constitution, but we have so many people now that it's hard to get them to agree on anything. The battle between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams shows how the best laid plans of our Founding Fathers can go wrong.

One of the reasons we only have two major political parties is that you can't get to the 50% "magic number" of electoral votes when there are more than two major candidates. In the election of 1824, there were four presidential candidates who got a substantial number of votes, although they were strangely all from the same party. Andrew Jackson got more votes than any of them, and more electoral votes, too, but he didn't reach the then-required 131 electoral college votes. So the election was thrown into Congress. When the dust settled, John Quincy Adams was declared president. How did that happen? Mental Floss explains the shenanigans that went on behind the scenes of the election of 1824.

When I started school in the 1960s, the two first grade classes were part of an experiment. Class A, which I was in, learned to read by the phonics method. Class B was taught by the whole word method, or cuing as its called in this video, but we knew it as the block reading method. When the students talked about what we were learning, I couldn't wrap my head around learning whole words at a time just by looking at them. The two classes were kept separate until the 7th grade. I don't know what the findings were, because I was well out of school before I learned of the experiment. But all the top students in high school were from Class A.

Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) looks at both these methods of learning to read, where they came from, how they differ, and how they are turning out all these years later. Which method was used when you were taught to read?  

Up until the 20th century, women kept their legs hidden under long skirts. Often they also hid the shape of their legs with wide, flowing skirts. Even showing a hint of ankle was scandalous. Then the flappers of the Roaring '20s declared their freedom by wearing skirts they could dance in, and the 1960s saw hemlines soar above the knees with the miniskirt.

It was no coincidence that miniskirts came with Baby Boomers, the Pill, and second-wave feminism. The freedom to show one's legs was just one of the many freedoms young people in the 1960s wanted to assert. While young people loved the miniskirt, others were scandalized, but the fashion was just one more thing to bemoan about a younger generation that was full of things to bemoan. And while the trend of miniskirts eventually died down, if not out, it wasn't just a matter of hemline height that did them in. Read about the rise and fall, so to speak, of the miniskirt at The Saturday Evening Post. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Ed Uthman)

We've featured a lot of a cappella covers of pop songs here at Neatorama. We've featured a lot of bluegrass covers. We've also highlighted yodeling when the mood strikes. But in this strange, fascinating, and rather short video we have all of that, when the Spooky Men's Chorale performs Queen's operatic rock anthem "Bohemian Rhapsody." They say they always try to do something surprising to end their shows, and this time they raised the bar pretty high. This being a chorale with no instrumets, it's a bit shorter than the original- no guitar solo. The Australian group has been together more than 20 years, but has yet to play in the US. We may need to do something about that. Meanwhile, you can check out their range and their sense of humor at their YouTube channel. This performance was recorded at Fairport Convention’s Cropedy Festival last month.  -via Laughing Squid

Have you ever thought about a woodpecker's tongue? We know woodpeckers by their hard beaks that they ram against trees (and houses and even metal siding) like jackhammers. They do that to find the ants and other insects living in those trees, which make up their diet. A woodpecker's tongue is very long, made to reach in and extract those insects, extending up to four inches past the tip of its beak.

But that's not the only thing a woodpecker's tongue does. It also works as a seat belt of sorts to cushion and stabilize the bird's brain while it violently pecks wood. The tongue actually wraps around the brain inside the woodpecker's head! The tongue is anchored to the hyoid bone, just like in humans, but a woodpecker's hyoid bone is in its upper beak near the nostrils and pointed backwards. The tongue wraps around the back of the brain inside the skull and finally emerges out of the mouth. You can see a video of a woodpecker's tongue in action at Boing Boing, but you won't see inside the bird's head. You will see a woodpecker's hyoid bone at work if you look closely at a previous video.

(Image credit: Denise Takahashi/American Bird Conservancy)

Milo and his fireplace
byu/ThaanksIHateIt infunny

Lest anyone think that Milo isn't the most spoiled cat on the planet, he has his own room. And he has his own fireplace. What else could he possibly want? It seems obvious to anyone that Milo wants his human Erika to turn his electric fireplace on for him. Milo is a very good communicator. But Erika is busy recording the sequence and does not respond as promptly as a cat expects. So he finally resorts to taking a bite of her leg. That's when he gets what he wants, and this is a mistake. It tells Milo that a bite will get him what he wants, so next time he might use that move first. See, cats don't really associate punishment with their behavior, but they understand "reward" vs. "no reward." Whenever you interact with a cat, you should end all contact the second they begin to bite.

But that's Erika's problem. We are free to just enjoy Milo's desire and enjoyment of the pleasures in life. You can see more of Milo and his sister Poppy at Instagram.

PS: I don't know why this video became mis-sized on the front page, but if you click the title, it shows up correctly.

We were introduced to tribbles in the 1967 Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." They were small, furry aliens that didn't do much of anything besides reproduce abundantly until they were in every nook and cranny of the USS Enterprise. Tribbles have made encore appearances in other Star Trek series and are now a permanent and somewhat comedic part of Star Trek lore.

But now a new comic book looks further into tribbles. IDW’s Star Trek #500 comic book revisits the tribbles and the ST:TOS crew in a story written by Jordan Blum and Patton Oswalt called “I Knew You Were Tribble When You Walked In.” It retells the tale of that first visit to the Enterprise ...from the point of view of the tribbles themselves. It's a bit shocking to think of tribbles as sentient at all, since we considered them a form of wildlife- an invasive species, actually. But here we learn about their thoughts and the way they communicate with each other. Spoiler- one of them has a crush on Captain Kirk. Read about the inner lives of tribbles in a review at Inverse.

Medical science advances with every war. The American Civil War saw surgeons mastering the art of amputation, which saved soldier's lives. Each medical advance meant that more soldiers would survive later wars, though it also meant more would survive with lifelong disabilities. By World War I, doctors could save some men who had their faces blown off, but what about their lives afterward? That called for more medical advances.

The first real plastic surgery was the reconstruction of Walter Yeo's face after he was badly wounded in World War I. Dr. Harold Gillies found Yeo to be a good candidate for a surgical technique he had developed involving skin grafts, but it had never been used for a wounded face covered in scar tissue. It wasn't easy. The technique worked, but Yeo's treatment took years to complete due to infections. We've come a long way since then with, for example, surgical gloves and masks. Gillies improved his grafting technique and was able to repair the faces of many other war veterans with even worse damage. A hundred years later, we've seen quite a few complete face transplants that can restore drastically injured people to a semblance of normal life.

Since ancient history, people have been looking for a magic potion to stimulate their sex lives, whether by boosting one's sex drive, enabling an erection, lowering inhibitions, or in seducing a partner. Fertility aids factored in, too, although until modern medicine came in, it was assumed that plenty of sex would lead to procreation. Classic aphrodisiacs fall into three categories: drugs with actual physical effects of some sort, those with psychological effects, and magic potions that might work due to the placebo effect.

Some aphrodisiacs were associated with animals that appeared to have a good sex life. Some were plants that grew in shapes that resembled genitals, so they obviously had a purpose there. And some just make you feel good or made a potential partner happy to receive them as a gift. Hey, when your partner has a headache, anything that would relieve the pain will make progress. Substances that contained needed nutrients got their reputation as an aphrodisiacs by restoring overall health and therefore sexual ability. And some were just downright dangerous. That said, there are more supposed aphrodisiacs than can be enumerated in anything short of an encyclopedia, but you'll learn about an awful lot of them at Today I Found Out.

Design Boom introduces us to Mamonaku Kohi, a Japanese-styled cafe in Quezon City, the Philippines. It's not a place where you can park yourself for a couple of hours, sip your drink, and enjoy free WiFi in an air conditioned environment. The service point is literally a roughly-cut hole in the concrete wall.

George Washington was of English extraction and his family can be traced to northeastern England as far back to at least the 11th century. You can visit the manor house inhabited by the earlier Washingtons (then called Wessyington) in the town of Washington in County Durham.

The beautiful Durham Cathedral, built in the 11th century and substantially developed in the Fifteenth Century, is an architectural treasure. John Washington, a Benedictine monk and abbot, oversaw much of the 15th-century expansion.

A more recent plaque to honor John Washington's work notes that the monk's family has earned "everlasting fame in lands to him unknown," which is truly a great fortune for any family.

-via Grizzlegutweed the Bear | Photo: Kaihsu Tai

In January, we'll get a new film from Bong Joon-ho, who brought us Parasite. In Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a space colonist on a fictional planet who volunteers for the most dangerous and deadly tasks that could easily get him killed. And they do! But every time he dies, they regenerate him so they can use him again. What a wacky slapstick premise! What could possibly go wrong? The story is based on the novel Mickey7, which is not a comedy. Indeed, the beginning of the trailer seems deadly serious, but soon gets ridiculous as the situation spirals out of control.  

The trailer doesn't give too much away. We don't know why Mickey volunteered to be an "expendable," nor how the story turns out. Mickey 17 also stars Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. The film will premiere in South Korea on January 28 and open in the US on January 31.

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 while he was an inmate at a mental asylum in Arles, France. It became the best-known of his many paintings. The turbulence of the sky is often seen as a metaphor for the turbulence in the artist's psyche. But there may be more to it. A new study published in Physics of Fluids sees turbulence in the sky way beyond the 14 eddies and vortices we all notice.

The air flow in the painting is also evident in the paint strokes, which reveal a shimmering effect by the contrast in the amount of light reflected by the various shades of paint, and by the size of the strokes. We cannot say "brush strokes," because Van Gogh made The Starry Night by heaping globs of paint onto the canvas with a knife or his fingers. The physicists who studied these strokes believe that Van Gogh had an intuitive understanding of how fluid dynamics work. Others say, yeah, no, Van Gogh didn't know anything about fluid dynamics, but like many great artists, he had a preternatural talent for observation of the natural world, and he spent a lot of time outdoors. Read about the fluid dynamics that most of us cannot see, but we can feel in The Starry Night at Ars Technica.

The Nikon Small World in Motion Competition is an extension of their Small World Microphotography competition for video and time-lapse photography of microscopic worlds that we can never see with just our eyes. And now we know the winners for 2024.  First place went to Dr. Bruno Vellutini of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics for the video below showing a time-lapse of the embryogenesis of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). You can see the mitotic waves created when its cells divide. Read more about the video at the winner's page.

Dr. Vellutini wins a $5,000 prize for his efforts, internet virality, and bragging rights among his peers. See the full videos of all five winners at the competition gallery, and see the honorable mentions, too. The stories behind each are poresented with the videos. -via Gizmodo

The United State Constitutional Convention met in September of 1787 to approve the final draft of the US Constitution. They sent the document to the Confederation Congress in New York City, who also approved it, on September 28, 1787. Secretary of Congress Charles Thomson ordered 100 copies printed, and he signed 13 of them to send to the 13 states to be ratified. Only eight of those 13 signed copies are known to still exist, and seven of them are in public hands. The eighth could be yours.

That copy was discovered in 2022 when Hayes Farm, a plantation in North Carolina, was being cleared out for sale. The farm was once owned by the state's governor, and the Constitution was found in an old file cabinet, where it had sat for more than 200 years. The document is in excellent condition, and is going up for auction on September 28, exactly 237 years after Congress approved it. Brunk Auctions of Asheville, North Carolina, has already accepted an opening bid of one million dollars. The final price could be astronomical. Read about this document and how you can have it at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Brunk Auctions)