🐍 This has got to be one of the weirdest murders ever: a man in India was convicted of the murder of his wife, with the murder weapon being a deadly cobra.

👻 Do you need to prove that a house is not haunted? Who you gonna call?

🦠 Neat: cryo-electron tomography lets scientists look at teeny tiny stuff inside of cells.

🍰 Family gatherings are almost always improved with cakes, and I think these Thanksgiving cakes gone wrong are no exceptions. If anything else, the sheer wrongness of these cakes will bring the family closer together.

🛵 If you need to escape an office meeting quickly, there's no better way than to unfold the eBike you've got stowed under the desk and ride away in style.

🐊 Gators don't make good house pets, so when they need to be rescued, they end up in a place like this shelter for rescued alligators.

🎄 A bar in Texas sensibly banned Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas" until December 1. Thankfully, you can listen to that song simply by going to practically any store in the mall by now. But if you do go to the mall, be kind to the workers there, because they've been listening to aural torture Christmas music all day long.

❤️ Lastly, you may like your local grocery store, but not like this couple! They love the Berkeley Bowl Grocery Store so much that they took their engagement photos there. Romance on aisle 9!

More neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Supa Fluffy and Pop Culturista.

Image: Ganesh SahSudi/Wikipedia

Toot? Yes, but more than that. You might think you pass gas a lot, maybe even an abnormal amount, but an average person farts 10 to 20 times a day, and can produce up to 1,500 milliliters of gas. That's normal, even if it's embarassing. But if you notice changes in your flatulence, and not just in the sense that you start paying more attention, then the gas you pass can tell you what's going on in your body. Fart a lot more than you used to? You could be pregnant, or maybe you're just getting older. You might be starting to become lactose intolerant, which can happen at any age. Or it could be a sign of several different maladies. There are other possibilities as well. Discover magazine goes over what to look for, when to see a doctor, and tips on how to stop farting so much.

(Image credit: Towsonu2003~commonswiki) 

Yeah, I know, we had an Honest Trailer for Dune less than two months ago. But that was for the 1984 movie. If you're a fan, you have probably already seen the 2021 version in theaters. So has Screen Junkies, and they are here to give us their honest opinion. Spoiler alert: the story is just as complicated as it ever was, but they helpfully explain the basic setup, which is itself rather complex. There are other spoilers, I guess, but nothing that would diminish your enjoyment of the film. Yes, there are comparisons to Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and other space, fantasy, and time travel adventures. And a very large cast to introduce. 

Since the beginning of railroad travel, there have been people hitching a ride on freight trains. This lifestyle reached a peak during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when thousands of unemployed men traveled around the country looking for work. We called them hobos. You may have read about the graffiti they left for each other at railroad stops, cryptic symbols that conveyed information such as how welcoming a town was, whether work was available, and who was likely to give a man a meal.

The truth is, however, that men who spent decades riding the rails are unfamiliar with such a code. People who tell of the hobo code know because they read it somewhere, probably in a newspaper, in which pictures of the code were known to be staged. The one hobo who actually wrote about it was most likely trolling. It's true that hobos left graffiti, but it was for a completely different reason, which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.

For some time now, we've been referring to the history of cinema as a century, but that's not quite accurate anymore. It's more than a century and a quarter at this point. This restored and colorized sequence was filmed in 1896. It features Pope Leo XIII, the first pope to ever appear in a motion picture (and who was also noted for his preferred wine). Leo was born in 1810, during the reigns of Napoleon and King George III, and was 86 years old when the film was shot. It is thought that this makes him the earliest-born person to ever appear in a motion picture. If anyone was born before 1810 and can be seen in moving pictures, I'd like to see them. Meanwhile, enjoy a blessing from the pope, 125 years after the fact.

What makes a good song good? It may sound like a silly question, since everyone has their own tastes, but there are some songs that become worldwide hits, and some songs that stick around decades after their time. They must have something in common.

Scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark looked at Spotify to see what people listen to throughout the day. They found that the type of music preferred varies over a 24-hour cycle, and certain types of music tend to please people in different blocks of the day. These blocks were divided into morning, afternoon, evening, night, and late night/early morning (in radio, those are called dayparts). They found that slower songs are preferred in the morning, faster tunes in the afternoon, and dance music in the evening.

So what song has the features that would make it popular in all parts of the day? "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. The 1983 hit is not extreme in any of the audio features studied, and many consider it bland, but it works in any part of the day. Whether that makes it "good" is a different question altogether. Most musicians would rather produce a song that people love part of the day than a song that is acceptible around the clock.

The original paper did not mention lyrics or a song's subject matter in the audio features studied. The audio features were divided and ranked by artificial intelligence. Read more about the research at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting

In Europe, cars are a luxury because most people can get by without one. In the US, automobiles are a fact of life because everything is relatively far away. Therefore, cars in America are heavily regulated, as are traffic laws and even parking spaces.

That's not quite the case in the town of Conegliano in Italy. Angelo Fregolent used a 1962 Lancia Fulvia to bring newspapers to his newsstand, until he retired in 1974. He didn't need the car anymore, so he left it where it was. And it stayed there for 47 years, without tickets or towing because it didn't bother anyone. The car became a local legend, enshrined in Google Street View and many selfies. That is, until recently when the city decided to eliminate street parking in order to widen the traffic lanes. What would happen to the beloved Lancia?

The car was towed, but thanks to public outcry, it will not be junked. In fact, there's an elaborate plan to celebrate the classic car that you can read about at The Drive.  -via Digg

🛰️ Here's the ultimate home tour video: Take a tour of the International Space Station in this 360-degree video tour, courtesy of ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet. Who knew that there's so many cables there?

🌼 The corpse plant blooms once every three to four years, but when it does, boy, it's worth it!

🏠 Got $5 million? You can buy this fascinating McMansion in Illinois that's a compendium of pretty much all known architectural styles throughout history.

👜 Don't have $5 million? No worries, you can still get the world's most beautiful randoseru backpack for school children for a mere $500.

☀️ Impressive: 15-year-old Vinisha Umashankar of India invented a solar-powered ironing cart.

🎵 Three up-and-coming comedians got the opportunity of a lifetime when Pete Davidson asked them to be in his music video. They soon realized that the point of the video was basically to make fun of them, but all of the humiliation is worth it in the end because they get to be touched by Taylor Swift.

🚲 Here's the cutest and safest way to take your pet along on your eBike ride: Mopet.

🍪 Cookie artist duo WHIP SUGAR recreated the Laputian Robot from Studio Ghibli's Castle in the Sky in sugar cookie. Amazing!

📷 Lastly, something touching and beautiful: Photographer Lauren Smith-Kennedy offers end-of-life photo shoots to pet owners whose dog is about to die.

Many more neat and interesting stories over at our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Laughosaurus, Supa Fluffy and Pop Culturista.

The internet is an amazing tool. If you encounter an annoying problem of any kind, and post about it, you will soon find that others share the same annoyance all over the world. Pretty soon, you have enough content for a gallery, no matter how niche the subject may be. That's the story of McSengets, an Instagram account that documents McDonald's food served just plain wrong. The account originated in Singapore, using the Malay word senget, which means tilted. Founder Ben Chia tells Vice how he and his friends noticed the screwy way McDonald's served their sandwiches, which took the joy out of eating.

“We just get very annoyed [that] when we order Filet-O-Fish—specifically Filet-O-Fish—it tends to be senget. It tends to be off,” Chia said.

The petty problem proved to be a major inconvenience, Chia explained, because unlike other McDonald’s sandwiches, the Filet-O-Fish sports what appear to be softer steamed buns. This means that when one tries to reassemble the misaligned sandwich, the melted cheese tends to tear the bread apart.   

As someone who doesn't like fish and rarely ever goes to McDonald's, yet still gets a Filet-o-Fish craving a couple of times a year, I can confirm that this happens all over the world. But the Instagram gallery isn't limited to fish, because tragedy happens with all kinds of MCDonald's offerings. Here's someone who ordered a Deluxe Breakfast and requested them to add cheese. You might expect them to put the cheese on the bread or the sausage, but this piece end up mostly on the pancakes.



 -via Digg

We are so used to computer-generated special effects in movies that we sometimes forget how difficult and ingenious old-school practical effects were. Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out 30 years ago. Recall when gunshots were fired at the T-1000 terminator, which was made of an intelligent liquid metal. Bullets wouldn't stop him, they just made a metallic "splash" on his surface. That wasn't CGI at all! Instead, those were foam rubber and metal splashes that burst from the actor's clothing, created by master effects artist Stan Winston. You can see that they worked well in the test footage here, shared by the Stan Winston School of Character Arts.

Learn how Winston and his team designed and built this effect at Hackaday. -via Damn Interesting
 
Bonus: Here is test footage of the later effect in which the T-1000's head gets blown in half.

He recovered rather well from that one, too.

John Dee and his son Arthur Dee were 16th- and 17th-century alchemists. In 2018, Megan Piorko found some odd things in one of Arthur Dees' notebooks in the archives of the British Library. There were several pages written in code, upside-down. Considering Dee's subject matter, this must be his most important discoveries, or maybe formulas he wanted to keep secret.  

Could this code be solved? Piorko spent quite a bit of time trying to find the encryption key, which involved a lot of historical research for 17th-century coding practices. Ultimately, she presented the problem to the 2021 virtual HistoCrypt conference. Plenty of amateur cryptologists wanted to try it. Mathematician and noted cryptologist Richard Bean figured it out through a painfully convoluted process.

The encoded passages are Dee's "Philosopher's Stone," or a recipe for the elixir of life, which will be presented in a scientific paper some time in the future. Meanwhile, read about the process of getting a hundreds-of-years-old Latin scientific secret code decrypted at Atlas Obscura.

The Slow Mo Guys made a fire tornado in 2015 and rainbow colored flames in 2016. Now Gavin Free has combined the two experiments and recorded a burning rainbow tornado on their 1000-fps camera to give us a real good look at it.

The colors are made by burning different chemicals, and the tornado is thanks to 14 fans aimed obliquely at the fire. The surprise comes when the different burning chemicals express their colors at different flame heights, instead of colors just twisting around each other. It just looks neat! -via Laughing Squid

In case you're wondering where Free's usual partner Dan Gruchy is, they were separated by the pandemic. The videos are normally recorded at Dan's home in Texas, but this one comes from Gav's home in Britain. With travel restrictions easing, we hope to see the two Slow Mo Guys together again soon. See some of their previous videos.

The holiday we celebrate as Thanksgiving did not originate with the Pilgrims, nor was it celebrated consistently since then. A day set aside in gratitude for a bountiful harvest occurred in the US sporadically, but was often used to give thanks for battlefield successes as well. It wasn't celebrated nationally until after the Revolutionary War, and only consistently since the Civil War. And there are plenty of other countries that have festivals and celebrations revolving around giving thanks. But somewhere along the way, we settled on the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock as the model for America's "first Thanksgiving," and have used their celebration feast, which was relatively well-documented, as the inspiration for ours.  

The feast can be described as a showcase of American food. Turkey, cranberries, pumpkins, corn, and potatoes are New World foods, but the Pilgrims were European newcomers in Massachusetts, and didn't have all of those things available. They also didn't have flour, sugar, or ovens. And in the year 1621, they had very few woman to prepare elaborate dishes. This means quite a disconnect between the Pilgrim's Thanksgiving dinner and what we traditionally serve today. Not that there's anything wrong with our traditional dishes, but they aren't what the Pilgrims ate, which is explained in detail at Mental Floss.

Mark Zuckerberg has been the butt of plenty of jokes since he changed the name of Facebook to Meta, in order to roll out other products such as virtual reality. He introduced the Metaverse in a characteristically stilted video, which was even weirder considering the scrutiny Facebook is currently facing in the wake of the company's internal shenanigans. The marketing organization Inspired by Iceland took the opportunity to poke fun at Zuckerberg's announcement by introducing the Icelandverse. As long as we're making up universes, it's good to get in on the ground floor.

But the video is more than just a parody. Iceland has suffered from lack of tourism during the pandemic, even though they've not suffered from COVID-19 as much as other nations. Now that vaccinated tourists can travel again, they really want you to come and see their lovely landscapes, hot springs, geysers, waterfalls, and horses that you can glimpse in the video. -via Gizmodo

🎈 A few months ago, airline pilots saw what looks like someone flying with a jetpack near Los Angeles International Airport. Now, new video from the LAPD helicopter crew suggests that what they saw was a human-shaped inflatable balloon that looked like Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

⛏️ Archaeologists revealed the largest mosaic floor in the world. It's made from 5 million pieces of stone and depicts 38 different geometric scenes and floral patterns, including a fascinating "Tree of Life" design.

🚀 Forget launching satellites using rockets! The new method is to yeet it into orbit.

🎬 To celebrate Monsters, Inc's 20th anniversary, Pixar has just released a 4-minute old timey silent film version.

🏠 You can now rent Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw's apartment on Airbnb.

🦎 The one thing you don't expect to find in your toilet: an iguana. But apparently that's a thing in Florida.

😻 Coconut the cat loves to bring "gifts" to its owner, Taryn Troutman, who compiled the best (candy, toys, and green bean) to the worst (knife, garbage, and litter, oh yuck).

🦊 And lastly, here's a curious fox who loves to be serenaded with banjo music.

For more neat stories, check out our new sites: Pictojam, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Supa Fluffy, and Homes & Hues. Thank you!