In my lifetime, we have gone from zero people ever having been in space (as defined as 50 miles above the earth) to more than 700 people who have been up there. Who are these people? Scientific American crunched the numbers to give us some neat visualizations about space travelers. The graphic above is the latter portion of the chart that tracks the ages of people who have gone to space. When the NASA astronaut program began, all astronauts were military test pilots and those who went to space in 1961 had a median age of 30. In 2024 that median age is 50, and the age spread for flights in 2020, the beginning of space tourism, went from 18-year-old Oliver Daemon to 90-year-old William Shatner. The outlier on the left half above is when 77-year-old John Glenn returned to space in 1998.

Other graphics show us what countries astronauts came from and how they've diversified over time. Then there's a chart of every space traveler with their background, mission type, duration in space, and other information. It's fascinating to get into the details and see how space travelers have changed over time. Check it all out here. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Zane Wolf)

You may have heard that eggs are bad for you because they cause high cholesterol. That was the conventional wisdom since the 1960s, but it's far from the whole story. We've learned a lot about cholesterol since then. It's all about fats, which we need, but not a lot, and come in many different types, some more harmful than others. Then there's HDL, or good cholesterol, which counteracts LDL, or bad cholesterol, and it's hard to keep up with which is which and how to regulate them in your body.

Luckily, we have this new TED-Ed lesson to set us straight on cholesterol and how to keep our arteries in good shape. Sure, it's about what we eat, but also about a combination of foods and other lifestyle choices that all work together to keep our cholesterol at a healthy level. Put another way, cholesterol levels are another reason to exercise and eat your fruits and vegetables. -via Geeks Are Sexy

There's a saying that goes "It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit." Sadly, in the case of Martha “Marty” Goddard, her idea would never have flown if she hadn't agreed to let others take all the credit.

In the mid-1970s, Goddard was aghast at the minuscule rate of rapes that were reported and the small fraction of those that ever made it to court. Hospitals had no training in evidence collection, and even when they did, police officers did not know how to preserve it. That changed with the introduction of the “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” which is the trademarked name of what we know now as a rape kit. It is named after Louis Vitullo, the head of the Chicago Police Department's crime lab, but the idea came from Martha Goddard. Vitullo put the kit together after he dismissed Goddard's idea and threw her out of his office.

Goddard not only invented the kit, but also raised the money to produce it, and designed and taught training programs for using it. Read about the invention of the rape kit and the woman who made it work at the Atlantic. -via Kottke

(Image credit: Vartika Sharma)

We have always loved watching tires rolling around on their own, especially downhill where they can get up some impressive speed. This fascination even gave us a feature-length movie in 2011 titled Rubber. The guys from How Ridiculous had fun rolling tires down a hillside in New Zealand, and in one brief sequence, actually flew a drone through a rolling tire! They were as surprised as we are that it worked. Was it skill or just plain luck? It really doesn't matter as long as you have the footage. Still, you've got to have a bit of confidence to even attempt such a trick. That's special, but if you want more, you can see the extended sequence below.

An extended cut at only 12 minutes surprised me. I would post more of these guys' shenanigans if their videos weren't mostly around a half-hour long. A good time was had by all. -via Born in Space

The unique culture of Japan stands out in many ways. One is that they have the world's most modern mass transit that is used by everyone, especially in the larger cities. Another thing is that those cities have rather compact train cars, sidewalks, passageways, elevators, and apartments in order to serve a huge number of people in the busiest parts of town. Also, Japan is unique for their obsession with kawaii characters that are used for advertising anything and everything.

Now, when humans portray these characters, the costumes are invariably wide to imply their shortness and therefore cuteness. When a mascot goes out in public, there's always the possibility of getting stuck in those narrow turnstiles and elevators. They are forbidden to come out of their costume in public, and often have to rely on the kindness of strangers to make it to work. This series of pictures (click to the right to see them all) documents the hazards of the job. -via Boing Boing

The rule of thumb on the internet these days is that half the participants don't know much at all about proper language use, and the other half are cringing at the errors. It's best for your blood pressure to let those errors slide, but it's really hard not to judge someone for making the same language mistakes that have been pointed out a million times.  

Elle Cordova (previously at Neatorama) illustrates the struggle between a grammarian, who really cares about language and how it should be used, and an errorist, who superficially appears to wax eloquent but is making language errors left and right. You have to really pay attention to get all the humor out of this one, as the errorist touches on every pet peeve you can imagine. When yours shows up, you'll want to rewind and see how many others you can identify. If you can keep up will all the errors the first time through, you'll be impressed with Cordova's extensive knowledge of self-replicating language mistakes endemic to the internet. -via Everlasting Blort

Can you read the document pictured above? Around the turn of the century, many schools quit teaching children how to read and write in cursive, instead using that class time to teach typing skills. While schools are starting to go back to teaching cursive, that still leaves a generation of Americans without those skills. Since much of our history is documented in beautiful handwritten cursive script, the National Archives and Records Administration is going above and beyond to preserve, transcribe, and make accessible the documents that tell the story of America. These include letters, pension grants, land records, and diaries. They want to put a lot of American history online to prepare for America's 250th birthday next year.

So they are seeking your help. If you can read cursive handwriting, you can sign up as a volunteer for the National Archives. Work as little or as much as you like, and help make those handwritten documents accessible to everyone. Read about the project and how you can get involved at Smithsonian.

PS: I had no trouble reading the declaration, but I ran into conflicting advice on whether "National Archives" should be treated as a single entity or a plural.

Frozen Hair Round 2:
(Since everyone else is posting my video on this cesspool of an app, I will too!) pic.twitter.com/LKsdySTuZV

— Voicesofjake (@Fischer3Jake) January 16, 2025

Jake Fischer of Voicesofjake shows us both how cold it is outside and how crazy he is by letting his hair freeze. The viral "wet hair challenge" involves going outside in the freezing cold with wet hair and seeing what kind of wild shape you can achieve when your hair freezes in place. It's not for the faint-hearted. Jake went for the straight-up look, and since he has long hair, that was very far up. But think of how cold it can be on your head to wait for the hair to freeze! I'd have to say no thanks, because my hair is short and it wouldn't look much different. Also because it is currently 5° above zero (-15° Celsius) outside my house, and that's just too cold. There are some challenges that aren't worth "winning." Jake also froze his pants off, meaning they were off when he froze them. -via Laughing Squid

We've talked about viruses as being an outlier that strains the definition of life. Viruses do not have the ability to reproduce on their own, but must harness a host cell of another species to replicate. But now there's a new type of life form that is even more primitive than viruses called obelisks.

Obelisks consist of a viroid-like disc of RNA, but they do not have the protein shell that viruses have. Their genetic information is completely distinct from any known species, putting them into a unique phylogenic group. They reproduce by infecting another cell, like viruses do. They haven't yet been classified into the Tree of Life because scientists aren't really sure where they belong. But obelisks have been found in the microbiome of humans, in the digestive tract. One type of obelisks studied infects the bacteria Streptococcus sanguinis, found in human mouths. The impact of obelisks in the human biome has not been determined, but they've been there all this time and just haven't been found until recently. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ivan N. Zheludev et al. via Cell magazine)

When you are desperate to cure an illness or heal a wound, you are willing to try anything. And eventually, any substance could be tried as a medicine. If it worked, great. If it didn't, we'd probably find out why in a couple hundred years. But by then, students of history would think us really dumb. Not dumb; just desperate. After all, some of our greatest medical discoveries came about by accident or by someone trying some random substance as medicine.

Rabies is a good example of that desperation. Once symptoms appear, the disease is fatal, so victims were willing to eat burnt hair or the liver of the dog that bit them. After all, it couldn't hurt. For arthritis, people were advised to sit inside of rotting whale carcass and breathe in the fumes emitted by its decaying flesh. Those patients would be mighty relieved to have access to some opioids. Weird History is eager to fill us on bizarre medicines that were once trusted, but now just make us say, "What were they thinking?"

The city with the largest population in the world is no longer Shanghai. The link said, "I bet you can’t name it." I thought, I bet that Guangzhou and Hong Kong were officially merged and got a new name. While I was wrong, that is the way that Chongqing, China, became a municipality with 32,054,159 residents.

Like many superlatives, it all comes down to how you define your terms. The Chinese government designated Chongqing in southwestern China as a "direct-administered municipality" which includes the city of Chongqing proper plus several surrounding cities and the rural areas in between. However, Chongqing proper still has 22 million people, which puts it close to Shanghai's 25 million. Wikipedia still lists Tokyo as the biggest city, but such rankings depend on whether you go by city limits, government designations, or metropolitan areas.

At any rate, Chongqing is massive, the size of Austria, and has more people than many of the world's countries. Read about Chongqing and see some gorgeous pictures at Kuriositas.  -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: Jay Huang)

How does this even happen??? pic.twitter.com/gEHesbYxq8

— Springfield Cardinals (@Sgf_Cardinals) January 15, 2025

This guy had the best seat in the house for a Springfield Cardinals game. He was sitting in the front row, behind home plate. He was ready for the action with a beer that probably cost fifteen dollars. And then a foul ball arced over and landed right in that beer, splashing foam all over him. One in a million shot! He wasn't hurt, and his instant reaction was to laugh at the situation. He knows he'll get over the wet face and the lost beer, but he gained a great new story to tell. One redditor mentioned he surely told at least 38 people before the video hit the internet. But it's not just a story, it's a viral video, which is made even greater by his laughter. It's sure to make the ESPN highlight reel. This is a fellow who knows how to enjoy a baseball game. And a beer. -via reddit

Experts say it's best to clean your winter coat at least twice a season. And the rest of us laugh. As Mitch Hedberg once said, "My jacket says 'Dry clean only' on it. Which means ...it's dirty." That label deters many of us from doing anything about it, but even if your winter coat is completely washable, it's easy to put it off until you don't need that coat anymore in the spring.

But you can get your winter coat clean; it just takes getting around to it and knowing how. If your coat is wool or natural fur, it really should go to a professional cleaner. Down, fleece, and leather can be cleaned at home. But don't just throw them into the washing machine, because different materials require different techniques. And don't be intimidated by the idea of washing a winter coat by hand in the sink. It could take some time, but your friends, family, and co-workers will appreciate you showing up without the smell of coat that is years overdue for a cleaning. Read the best methods for cleaning each kind of winter coat at Mental Floss.

In every movie, there's an extra character that never gets mentioned, but that character's point of view is crucial. That's the camera, because the camera is the viewer. A filmmaker has to make a choice as to what the viewer will see, what they will focus on, and what that point of view means to moving the story along. That decision is also affected by the way the characters in the scene move around, and the way you want the camera to move around, because after all, the camera is representing the viewer.

So many of us watch movies and either enjoy them or not, but never think about the hundreds of different decisions filmmakers have to make with every scene. But those decisions together drive how well a film incorporates the viewer into the story. Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting (previously at Neatorama) takes us into the nuts and bolts of the rigorous decision-making process behind every film. Or at least, every good film. -via Nag on the Lake

In the 1920s, the role of women in public life was changing. They could vote, drive, and hold jobs formerly reserved for men, and they reflected this freedom by wearing short hair and shorter skirts than their mothers. Most noticeable were the party girls who drank and danced and were known as flappers. Rebecca Bradley wasn't that kind of woman. She was a graduate student who also held a job and took care of her elderly mother, but she wore her hair short, so the newspapers branded her as a flapper when she was caught robbing two banks -by herself- in Texas. Her very appearance led bank employees to trust her up until the moment she made off with the money.

Newspapers recognized a sensational story when they saw it. Bradley was pretty and petite, and the sexy headlines about her crime sold a lot of papers. She wasn't even the only "flapper bandit" of the time, because who needs facts when you've got a sympathetic criminal to write about? Even the justice system was confused. How could such a pretty young woman pull of these crimes? Read about Rebecca Bradley and her criminal activities at Atlas Obscura.