You knew it was coming sooner or later- a game about the year 2020. Now that we've gotten through and made it to 2021, you can relive the previous year with a side-scrolling game that leads you through the major events of 2020, starting with the Australian wildfires. Use your arrows to run and leap, save the baby koalas, and... I don't know what happens after that, because I keep getting killed in the fire. The caption teases that you'll encounter a pandemic, a stock market crash, an election, and more, so if you get that far, let us know how you fare. -via Boing Boing
Bored of just looking at cute bonsai trees? Now, you can eat them! Or at least, these bonsai trees. In reality, these are chocolate candy made to look like the tiny trees. The great thing is, you can make them, too!
… while some Japanese confectionaries require a talented artisan chef to look as visually appealing as they do, the Okashi de Tsukuru Bonsai (“Making a Bonsai Out of Candy”) is simple enough that anyone can make it, and requires no special tools beyond a mug, spoon, and toothpick.
The kit comes with three molding trays, chocolate candies, “leaf powder,” and a “pot” to put your finished tree in.
(Image Credit: SoraNews24)
The United States has been swearing in presidents since 1789. While there has been an effort to make the ceremony consistent and traditional, each one is slightly different. Of course, when a president dies, his successor may take the oath of office in strange circumstances: one in an airplane, another oath administered by the president's father. But even the public ceremonies have had their moments, like when Andrew Johnson showed up drunk. Believe it or not, two different inaugurations had to contend with dead birds! Then there's the story of two Founding Fathers and their on-again, off-again friendship.
For many years, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been close friends. Together, they’d helped create the Declaration of Independence, worked in Europe as fellow diplomats, and had even stolen a piece of Shakespeare’s favorite chair. (Seriously.)
But as their political careers diverged, the two became rivals. When Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, Adams was nowhere to be found. Eight hours before the big event, he’d left Washington and started making his way back to his family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. This made Adams the first president who chose to skip his successor’s swearing-in ceremony. (History repeated itself 28 years later, when John Quincy Adams boycotted Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. Like father, like son.)
Adams and Jefferson eventually made up when, in 1811, Adams casually told some houseguests, “I always loved Jefferson, and I still love him.” Mutual friends forwarded this comment along to Monticello. Jefferson was thrilled. “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards [Adams] all of the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives,” he proclaimed. Over the next 15 years, the two ex-presidents exchanged more than 150 friendly letters. They both died within hours of each other on the same day—July 4, 1826.
Read the details of the 35 weirdest stories Mental Floss dug up about presidential inaugurations.
One that didn't make the list, but was certainly memorable, was the drunken brawl following Andrew Jackson's inauguration.
Most people today carry around at least a trace of Neanderthal DNA, the legacy of reproduction between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis thousands of years ago. Genetic studies show that such interbreeding happened time and again in different populations, and although we don't know the circumstances, we might assume that a variety of circumstances were involved over time. An article at BBC Future begins with a scenario taken from romance novels, but soon gets into the science of Neanderthal-modern human relations, like a study of Neanderthal dental plaque. Anthropologist Laura Weyrich discovered the common oral microbe Methanobrevibacter oralis, but this sample was the human version, not the variety that normally inhabited Neanderthal mouths.
Weyrich explains that one possible route for the transfer is kissing. “When you kiss someone, oral microbes will go back and forth between your mouths,” she says. “It could have happened once but then sort of been somehow magically propagated, if it happened that the group of people who were infected went on to be very successful. But it could also be something that occurred more regularly.”
Another way to transfer your oral microbes is by sharing food. And although there is no direct evidence of a Neanderthal preparing a meal for an early modern human, a romantic meal could have been an alternative source of M. oralis.
Such studies also give us insight into Neanderthal-human transfer of sex-linked chromosomes, cancer, STDs, and immune systems. This much sharing may eventually lead us to conclude that humans didn't wipe out the Neanderthals so much as we just absorbed them. -via Digg
(Image credit: Trougnouf/Benoit Brummer)
Mood-altering drugs are not all the same. Opium is plant-based, LSD is synthetic (although often adulterated), and mushrooms are fungi. A fungus can go through a lot and still survive enough to grow. A yet-to-be-published report tells of a 30-year-old man, an experienced opioid user, who injected himself with a "tea" made from magic mushrooms, which led to a serious infection.
Days before the ER visit, he had decided to use mushrooms by first boiling them down into what he called “mushroom tea,” then filtering the mixture through a cotton swab and intravenously injecting it. Soon after, he developed symptoms including lethargy, jaundice, diarrhea, and nausea, along with vomiting up blood.
By the time he was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit, multiple organs had started to fail, including his lungs and kidney. Tests revealed that he had both a bacterial and fungal infection in his blood, meaning that the mushrooms he injected were now literally feeding off him and growing. Among other treatments, he was given an intense course of antibiotics and antifungal drugs.
The man spent 22 days in the hospital, and even after discharge is taking antimicrobial drugs. Read more of the story at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Alan Rockefeller)
It’s not often that Screen Junkies gives us an Honest Trailer for movie that’s still in theaters. Or scratch that, let’s say a new movie, because Wonder Woman 1984 is both in theaters and on HBO. Still, you’ve wondered whether this movie was worth seeing. The critical reception wasn’t all that great, but we’ve suffered from a real lack of blockbuster superhero movies lately, and we’ve become used to them. So strap in and see what WW84 is all about. Be mindful that this Honest Trailer is full of spoilers, as they all are.
These workers in Yuzawa, Japan need to remove the snow from the roof before it falls and injures someone. Triggering an avalanche takes a while, but at the end of the video, the entire mountain of snow pours on to the pavement.
Now the workers have a new problem.
-via Born in Space
Bella Rose gets really excited when the horses leave the gate! According to her owner Madison Coates, Bella is a fan of all animal activities on TV, although horse racing is her favorite. -via Laughing Squid
Napoleon Bonaparte was only 51 when he died in exile on the island of Saint Helena in 1821. Doctors who attended his autopsy concluded that the cause was untreated stomach cancer, which caused years of suffering. Irish surgeon Barry Edward O’Meara described the former emperor's condition in a recently-sold letter from 1818.
“I found [Napoleon] laboring under a considerable degree of fever, his countenance displaying anxiety and being evidently that of a man who was experiencing severe corporeal sufferings,” O’Meara observed.
He added that the politician’s symptoms included “great increase of pain in the Right side, rending headache, general anxiety and oppression, skin hot and dry, pulse quickened,” all of which signaled a “crisis of a serious natures.”
While O'Meara had reason to exaggerate Napoleon's condition, the letter is one of the rare artifacts of his final years in exile. Read more about Napoleon's death at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Charles von Steuben)
Luxembourg trucking company P. Adams Schwertransporte posted pictures of a truck that you might find hard to wrap your head around. The cargo is a rotor blade that's 67 meters (220 feet) long! Yes, holding it up in the air certainly makes negotiating turns and traffic easier, but what incredible balancing powers this must require. Sure, the inner end of the blade is much heavier than the other end, but just imagine what a change in the weather could do to this rig. What a sight to see this drive past your home! -via Jalopnik
Have you ever wondered how archaeologists work? You probably have asked yourself questions like “how do they know where to dig?” or “what tools do they use?” before. Gabriel D. Wrobel and Stacey Camp reveal to us the answers to these questions, over at Atlas Obscura. For now, here’s the answer to the first question.
The simplest and oldest identification method is a pedestrian survey: looking for evidence of human activity, either on unstructured strolls or when walking in a grid. Unless the evidence is crystal clear – like those broken pots – such surveys usually need a trained eye to read the clues.
Check out the rest over at the site.
(Image Credit: Walkerssk/ Pixabay)
Microsoft has finally made the tab syncing feature in Microsoft Edge available to everyone. The said feature, which was only made available for users in its Insider Dev and Canary channels last October, allows a user sync his tabs across devices, making it a handy tool for those who work with multiple devices. While this feature is not unique to Edge, as Google Chrome and Apple Safari already had this feature way before Edge did, this makes Edge a great alternative to those.
Edge’s version of tab syncing works nearly identically to Chrome: sign in to your profile, turn on sync, and bam, you’re done. You can also browse as a guest and add multiple profiles, which is especially useful if you use different email addresses on the same computer, but don’t want the same tabs, or even bookmarks, to show up on different accounts. Each account also opens in a new browser window, just like Chrome.
The new feature also syncs your browsing history across devices—any device, whether that’s Windows, macOS, iOS or Android. Again, that’s just like Chrome, but for anyone who has been getting more worried about their privacy using Chrome, these two big features justify an easy switch to Edge.
Cool!
(Image Credit: Microsoft/ Gizmodo)
When you hammer a nail into a tree or a block of wood, it stays there. That's how nails are useful to us. Now consider the woodpecker. A woodpecker drives its beak into a tree with the force of a hammer, but then immediately pulls the beak out to hammer again. You've probably never thought about that before, but scientists have, and by slowing downside close-up footage of a woodpecker in action, they've figured out how they do it.
Once the tip of the woodpecker’s bill hits the wood, the bird’s head rotates to the side ever so slightly, lifting the top part of the beak and twisting it a bit in the other direction, the videos reveal. This pull opens the bill a tiny amount and creates free space between the beak tip and the wood at the bottom of the punctured hole, so the bird can then easily retract its beak.
-via Boing Boing
When the 18th Amendment made booze illegal in the US, people went to great lengths to get something alcoholic to drink. Industrial methanol found its way into bootleg liquor, leaving behind blind or even dead drinkers by the thousands over the period known as Prohibition. Dr. W.H. Miles of the Oklahoma City Health Board was familiar with methanol poisoning, but he and his assistant Dr. Ephraim Goldfain began seeing cases of paralysis in 1930 that they suspected were from drinking alcohol, yet the symptoms differed from anything they'd seen before.
But the strange paralysis exhibited by Dr. Miles and Dr. Goldfain’s patients was something completely new. After tracking down and investigating more than 60 cases, the pair soon noticed an intriguing pattern: all the victims were regular users of Jamaica Ginger, a popular brand of Patent Medicine. Patent Medicines were a type of proprietary cure-all sold over-the-counter in most drugstores. These could contain all kinds of substances, including herbal extracts, opium, cocaine, turpentine, and mineral oil, but not – strangely enough – actual snake oil. But one ingredient nearly all brands had in common was copious amounts of alcohol – up to 90% in certain cases. This had made Patent Medicines a popular source of alcohol in dry counties for decades. Jamaica Ginger was especially popular among poor labourers in the South. Boasting a 90% alcohol content and costing only 35 cents a bottle, it was typically mixed with soft drinks at soda fountains to help cut down its strong bitter flavour. Among drinkers the concoction was commonly known as ‘Jake’, and the paralysis it caused soon came to be known as ‘Jake Leg’ or ‘Jake Walk’.
But while the link between Jake consumption and paralysis was convincing, it was also puzzling. Jamaica Ginger had been sold since 1863 without any negative effects. What had changed?
The story as it unraveled revealed shenanigans with regulatory systems and the way manufacturers tried to get around them, which you can read at Today I Found Out.
(Image source: Library of Congress)
Unhappy with a recent glow-in-the-dark paint job for a friend, Andy Zsinko created Lumilor while having a beer with his friends in 2009 after thinking “What if I could control the light, and what if I could make it shine brightly for hours?”
Lumilor coating is made of several layers where the top & bottom layers are conductive & connected to an AC source. Unlike light emitting diodes (LEDs), the brightness of the coating appears the same from all angles and through different atmospheric conditions like smoke, snow, and fog. And it turns on at the flick of a switch.
It begins as grey, similar to primer, but can be used with airbrushing and top coats. And although it's been around for over 10 years the cost can be a bit much, However, it's gone down from $4.50 to $0.46 per square inch since then, so we expect to see more of this awesome creation soon.
Via Oddity Central, Medium, Lumilor.com, & Business Wire
