1766 was a bad year for farmers in Europe. As crops failed across the continent, prices of foodstuffs such as wheat, flour, corn skyrocketed. This sparked protests everywhere, and there were food riots in England, where people seized goods by force.

But despite this turmoil happening in the country, the annual Nottingham Goose Fair, which was famous for its excellent cheese, still was held on October 2 that year. The annual livestock and trade event on Old Market Square always attracted thousands of merchants, traders, peasants, and geese farmers from all over the country. This year wasn’t so different, it seemed, until the cheese was brought out to the market at nearly twice its usual price.

The locals became angry at the excessive price because it put the cheese beyond their reach. The day progressed without disturbance, but in the evening events apparently became tense when ‘some rude lads’ intercepted several Lincolnshire traders who had purchased several hundred pounds of cheese. The lads threatened the traders that they could not take the cheese away until the town was served first. An altercation followed. Eventually violence broke out, and the mob started looting hundreds of wheels of cheese and rolled them away.

Learn more about the Nottingham Cheese Riot over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Jon Sullivan/ Wikimedia Commons)

William Davis Hassler was a commercial photographer in New York City in the early 290th century. In addition to his commissioned photographs, he took plenty of pictures of his family, including his dog Bounce and his cats Reddy and Peaches. Those photos feature prominently in a collection of 5,000 or so of Hassler's images taken between 1912 and 1918. They show that families haven't changed all that much in 100 years, as the pets were i,portant members, if not the most photogenic part of the family. See some of those images at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

For four months, Ximena Velez-Zuazo and her teammates surveyed over 1,851 acres of desert in the Paracas National Reserve, battling stifling heat as well as sandstorms during their stay. Their mission: to catch glimpses of elusive Peruvian terns, who have survived in the harsh environment for years.

The tern is nearly invisible in its native habitat, which looks more like a moonscape than anything you would expect to find on Earth. Its desert camouflage makes it almost impossible for scientists to track, but that’s exactly what our team set out to do.

Peruvian terns are part of a small group of terns (Sternula) that are slender, with long beaks and short legs. They have white feathers with black “caps” that look like masks, and they lay their eggs in shallow depressions in the bare ground. They are found in Paracas National Reserve, Peru’s oldest marine protected area, where reports suggest they began nesting as early as 1920. One hundred years later, the Reserve treasures the largest nesting colony in the country.

But Peruvian terns are on a path toward extinction, and the population in Paracas is no exception. According to the IUCN’s Red List of Endangered Species, Peruvian tern populations are decreasing. A 2018 survey of Paracas’ nonbreeding terns reported fewer individuals than in the past, and the last survey of the Reserve’s breeding population was conducted nearly a decade ago. Our team wanted to find out how many terns still nest in the park and what threats they face. Locating them would be the hardest part.

More about this story over at Smithsonian Magazine.

(Image Credit: Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute)

The ear of fresh corn today is packed with 18 rows of plump kernels. But did you know that this wasn’t what it looked like before? That’s right. It is thanks to the power of genetic engineering that we’ve been able to make ears of fresh corn flavorful and more packed, compared to its ancestor, which only had 6 to 8 rows of kernels, and looked like “something you’d weed out of your lawn than something you’d put on the grill.”

The juicy version we eat today is the result of thousands of years of breeding and selection. The same is true for most every modern crop: They have been genetically modified over and over to feed an ever-growing, urbanized population.

But it seems that we have to genetically modify our food once again, because of the worsening condition of our planet.

The old strategies of improving size and yield are no longer enough. A couple centuries of human greenhouse emissions have caught up with us. With the world likely to get at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer, on average, by the middle of the century, and with extreme storms, rains, and drought already happening more frequently, growing conditions are changing faster than farmers and their crops can adapt. Zachary Lippman, a professor of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, likens the situation to an arms race—only this time around we are competing against ourselves.

The question is, how do we plan on doing it?

More details about this over at Nautilus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: keem1201/ Pixabay)

The guy from the Action Lab explains how to boil water with the heat of your hand. The trick is, you don't need to generate 100 degrees (212F) to cause water to boil, if the conditions are right. -via Digg

It's not uncommon that people become famous for one thing, when other things in their lives are just as interesting if not as well known. After all, we all switch roles from work to home to hobbies and other interests. There are some people that have such interesting lives outside of what they are famous for that their stories should be better-known, like that of NBA star Bison Dele, who played for the Orlando Magic, Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Clippers, and the Detroit Pistons, before suddenly retiring at age 30.

He was a prototype for the most interesting man in the world. He stumbled onto basketball because of his 6'9" (ni'ce'') height, not passion, and used his NBA career to fund adventures. His list of alleged actions reads like Hemingway fan-fic: dating Madonna, running with bulls (in Spain this time), biking from Salt Lake City to Phoenix with no water, getting a pilot's license. His best friend was the guy who started Overstock.com. Essentially, he got a high-paying job and then treated it with open indifference while he did cool stuff.

Eventually, he bought a catamaran and sailed the Pacific. Isn't that the best life?

Yes, up until the point where that life ended in a mysterious tragedy, but which still aligned with Dele's "most interesting men in the world" description. Read the story of Bison Dele, plus five other people in the Cracked list 6 Famous People With Weird-Ass Hidden Lives.

What most people know of Erwin Schrödinger is the cat. In correspondence with Albert Einstein, Schrödinger wrote of an experiment with a cat in a box with a complicated device that had a 50% chance of killing the cat within an hour. According to the theory of quantum superposition, the cat is both dead and alive until the experimenter opened the box to see the condition of the cat. Schrödinger knew quantum mechanics -he won a Nobel Prize in physics for the Schrödinger equation. But he had a problem with quantum superposition, a theory that atoms could exist in more than one state at the same time.

You see, the problem the physicist had with quantum mechanics was that no one knew where its probabilistic effects ended. Why would the life or death of the cat be dependent on our observation? Why would the system care if we observe it or not? Isn’t the cat observing the poison? Who is observing the physicist observing the inside the box? How large could these probabilistic effects be? If it has a limit in its scale, how large is it? How could a system be independent and superpositioned before our observation but then its state be defined only once we observe it? This is a mess to explain because in relative macroscopic terms, everyday objects are not in multiple states until an observer interacts with it. It is therefore illogical that before opening the box, the cat is dead and alive at the same time, and only until you open the box the cat is retroactively dead, if that’s the result observed. This was meant as a direct critique of the Copenhagen interpretation.

Schrödinger never entertained the thought of actually carrying out the experiment, because (beside the cruelty and difficulty) what could possibly be learned about the "unobserved" state? His point was like that of a tree falling in the forest, and the hubris of the observer. Read about the underlying meaning of Schrödinger’s Cat at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: The NeatoShop)

Compared to other windows, double-glazed windows have many advantages. For one, because these windows store heat, rooms with these windows are warmer in the winter. Installing these windows also means less energy consumed in heating up or cooling down a room, thus saving money in the long run. But can we take this to the next level? Turns out, we can.

… Singaporean scientists have tweaked the concept to make it even more effective. Instead of leaving an air gap between the two panes of glass, the researchers have inserted a heat-absorbing, light-blocking liquid.

[...]

During the day, as sunlight passes through the window, the liquid absorbs and stores that light's thermal energy. This keeps the room from heating up, reducing the need to run the air conditioning.

Additionally, as the liquid warms up, the hydrogel within it changes from a transparent to an opaque state. Although this ruins the view out of the window, it also reduces the amount of visible light that passes through from outside, further helping to keep the room cool.

More details about this over at New Atlas.

Now that’s epic.

(Image Credit: Nanyang Technological University/ New Atlas)

Before anyone can pull some jokes, here’s a spoiler alert : it’s your face. According to dermatologists, people need to stop washing their faces in the shower. While it is convenient to wash our faces while we shower, it can cause a major moisture loss in our facial skin. The longer you spend in the shower, the higher the chance that doing so is drying your skin out, as Health Digest details: 

Dr. Justine Hextall, a consultant dermatologist, agrees, telling Women's Health that the longer you spend in the shower, the higher the chance that doing so is drying your skin out. "Natural moisture factors like ceramides, fatty acids, and oils help retain moisture levels in the skin," Dr. Hextall explained. "The problem is that they're water soluble — so if you run your face under the shower for 10 minutes you could literally rinse them away."

Secondly, shower water is often too hot, not only for your facial skin but for your entire body. "We may love hot showers, but our skin does not," Dr. Joshua Zeichner, M.D., a board-certified dermatologist, told Well+Good. "Hot water can strip the skin of oils, leading to dryness, irritation, and inflammation," he explained. According to Dr. King, showering with hot water can even result in broken capillaries. "A general rule of thumb for showering is to make it not too long, not too hot, and not too frequent," she advised Marie Claire.

Image via Health Digest 

Devoney Scarfe is an artist with lovely cakes and embroidery already perfected. Since the pandemic began, she has been obsessed with pies. This one features Homer Simpson on top of a meat and potato pie.  

The Homer pie was made as an apology to my husband. I was a bit grumpy one night in lockdown and bit his head off. He backed out of the room like the meme of Homer backing into the hedge. It made me laugh, so I made a pie about it.

Scarfe's pies come in all flavors and styles, which may take days to make and only minutes for her family to eat. This blueberry cobra pie is garnished with raspberries and flowers made of strawberries.



You can see a list of Scarfe's best pies at Bored Panda, and keep up with her future work at Instagram.

On February 15, 2018, a four person crew embarked on the sixth iteration of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) on Mauna Loa on the Big Island. What began as an eight month simulation of living on the planet Mars, ended after only four days with one of the crew members taken away on a stretcher.

The program is run by University of Hawaii and funded by NASA.

Since 2013, small groups of people have made this drive (up the Northern slope of Mauna Loa) and moved into the dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

However, on February 19th, the batteries powered by a solar array for the habitat and its systems lost its power due to lingering clouds over the volcano. When this happens, the crew is supposed to suit up, go outside, and turn on a car-size backup generator that runs on propane. After two crew members donned their space suits, they went outside and started the generator while the two other crew members flipped a switch on a circuit breaker inside the habitat.

When the suited-up crew members returned to the habitat, a crew member was typing furiously at a computer. The other looked stricken, pale. They said they didn’t feel well. They said they had sustained an electric shock. Learn about the HI-SEAS program, previous missions and what went wrong during Mission Six at The Atantic via Get Pocket.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons - Tiffany Swarmer, NASA

The extinct human species Homo denisova, which we call Denisovans, were first discovered as a distinct Homo variant in 2008. That discovery came from mitochondrial DNA in fossils from a cave in Siberia, and indicated that Denisovans lived there as long as 76,000 years ago. Traces of Denisovans DNA have since been identified in people in Asia and Australia. But more evidence of Denisovans' past is coming to light. 

Denisovan mitochondrial DNA extracted from sediment layers in Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau indicates that these humanlike folk inhabited the high-altitude site roughly 100,000 years ago and again around 60,000 years ago, say geoarchaeologist Dongju Zhang of Lanzhou University, China, and her colleagues. These are the first examples of Denisovan DNA found outside of Siberia’s Denisova Cave (SN: 12/16/19).

The discovery and accompanying artifacts hint that Denisovans were more widespread for a much longer time than we previously thought. Read the implications of the find at Science News. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Dongju Zhang)

A disembodied head goes on a trip, finding himself in a strange and frightening city. He encounters a urine monster, gets chased by an angry mob, and is finally shot by a cannon. This stop-motion video for the song "Closet Lunatic" by Caro was produced by the group's singer Adam Pardey. He writes about the process of learning to do animation here. -via Digg

pic.twitter.com/52sELhNPKn

— 100% Goats (@EverythingGoats) November 2, 2020

Ryan Kadyk has a baby rescue raccoon he named Governor. Governor has really taken to farm life, and gives his all to herding the goats, just like the dog does! That'll do, Governor, that'll do. -via Laughing Squid

I don’t really understand why people love getting tattoos in a language foreign to them. Maybe they just find the letters or characters in the language aesthetically satisfying, or maybe they were pranked. Or maybe both.

Bored Panda has compiled the funniest tattoo fails that they can find over the Internet. See them over at the site.

How about you? Do you have an embarrassing tattoo?

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)