Author: Mathew Ingram

The outbreak began in July 1518 when a woman began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. By early September, the outbreak began to subside. Historical documents, including “physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council” are clear that the victims danced; it is not known why. Historical sources agree that there was an outbreak of dancing after a single woman started dancing. It lasted for such a long time that it even attracted the attention of the Strasbourg magistrate and bishop, and some number of doctors ultimately intervened, putting the afflicted in a hospital. Events similar to this are said to have occurred throughout the medieval age including 11th century in Kölbigk, Saxony, where it was believed to be the result of demonic possession or divine judgment. In 15th century Apulia, Italy a woman was bitten by a tarantula, and the venom made her dance convulsively. The only way to cure the bite was to “shimmy” and to have the right sort of music available, which came to be an accepted remedy.

Mark Twain fought for the South in the Civil War, and lasted two weeks

Claire Barrett writes for History.net: “In the summer of 1861, a former riverboat pilot named Sam Clemens went to war, according to the St. Louis Magazine, on a small yellow mule carrying a valise, a carpetbag, two gray blankets, a homemade quilt, a squirrel rifle, 20 yards of rope, a frying pan and, perhaps most importantly of all, an umbrella. The 25-year-old Missourian, alongside 14 other idealistic young men, answered Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson’s call of 50,000 militia to defend their home state. They called themselves the Marion Rangers, with Twain entering their ranks as a second lieutenant. Clemens had grown up amid slavery in the South. His father had owned slaves. So had his neighbors. In 1860 Twain had voted for John Bell in the presidential election, who, although a Tennessee slaveholder, had opposed secession. Twain’s vote was seemingly a vote for the status quo he had grown up around. But as the war approached Missouri, Twain decided to take a stand — albeit a brief one. In all, the famed author’s stint lasted two weeks.”

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Continue reading “The infamous “dancing plague” in Europe in the 16th century”

Ashawnta Jackson writes for JSTOR Daily: “Elizabeth Wilkinson had a score to settle. Writing to the London Journal in 1722, she informs its readers that she and Hannah Highfield ‘had some words.’ And though words might have started it, they weren’t going to end it. Wilkinson challenged Highfield to a fight: “I do invite her to meet me on the stage and box with me for three guineas,” she wrote, “each woman holding half-a-crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops her money to lose the battle.” Highfield accepted that invitation, promising “that she will not fail…to give her more blows than words, desiring home blows, and of her no favor. She may expect a good thrumping.” Though calling out your enemy in a newspaper ad might be unusual, the fight certainly wasn’t. Randy Roberts writes, “female pugilism was so popular that the women crowned their first champion at approximately the same time as the males.”

This mom didn’t know she was in a $250K Candy Crush tournament, but she’s winning

From Sisi Jiang at Kotaku: “Erryn Rhoden is an ordinary person who works at her family’s roofing company in Columbus, Ohio. She’s also the top-ranked player in her semifinal bracket for the Candy Crush Saga All Stars Tournament, the biggest Candy Crush tournament in history, which she entered by accident. That makes her one of the most successful esports athletes in the entire country right now. Candy Crush is the most popular match-3 game of all time. Players eliminate blocks by matching three or more candies by swapping their positions until they’re next to each other. Overall Candy Crush progress is measured by the number of levels that you’ve completed. You complete levels by fulfilling their level’s objectives, such as breaking particularly sturdy blocks or accumulating a certain number of special candies that you can create by matching regular candy tiles in a certain way. If you finish a level with time remaining on the timer or in fewer moves, you get bonus points at the end.”

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Continue reading “Women have been fist-fighting since the early 1700’s”

A 50-year-old Spanish extreme athlete who spent 500 days living 70 metres deep in a cave outside Granada with no contact with the outside world said the time flew by, and she did not want to come out. Beatriz Flamini, an elite sportswoman and mountaineer, is said to have broken a world record for the longest time spent in a cave, in an experiment closely monitored by scientists seeking to learn more about the capacities of the human mind and circadian rhythms. She was 48 when she went into the cave, and celebrated two birthdays alone underground. She began her challenge on Nov. 20, 2021 — before the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the resultant cost of living crisis, the end of Spain’s lengthy COVID-19 mask requirement and the death of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. She emerged into the light of spring in southern Spain on Friday wearing dark glasses, carrying her equipment and smiling broadly. She described her experience as “excellent, unbeatable,” and said that time had flown by. “When they came in to get me, I was asleep. I thought something had happened. I said: ‘Already? Surely not.’ I hadn’t finished my book.”

How did people wake up on time before alarm clocks?

Dan Lewis explains: “The first mechanical alarm clock was patented in the late 1800s, but this was before the Industrial Revolution. Society’s ability to mass-produce mechanical ways to wake us up wasn’t coming until at least the 1920s. Workers, though — and that constituted someone in just about every family — still needed to be woken up each morning. Absent a mechanical solution, how did people wake up in the morning? One answer? A person with a very long stick. In England, at least, these people were called “knocker-ups” or “knocker-uppers,” a name which described the act they’d perform each morning. The knocker-up would come to your window, give it a few taps, and then wait to make sure you had awoken. If you had, great — he or she moved onto the next house. If not, they were typically charged with trying again, as knocker-ups were often only paid if they waited to ensure that the customer had, indeed, woken up. The job paid a few pence a week and was often performed by the elderly, by women, or by off-duty policemen.

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Continue reading “Spanish athlete emerges from a cave after 500 days”

Trung Phan writes: “Hello Kitty has been around since 1974 and, as recently as 2013, was selling $8 billion worth of merchandise annually. Hello Kitty merchandise has made $89B in lifetime sales, which is roughly equal to the combined all-time sales for Batman, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and James Bond. The company behind Hello Kitty is a Japanese firm called Sanrio, which has a very interesting story. Its founder Shintaro Tsuji was obsessed with Walt Disney. And he built a merchandise and licensing machine in an attempt to match the global influence of his idol. Hello Kitty entered the picture in 1974. Sanrio designer Yuko Shimizu dreamed up a cat-like character that would become Sanrio’s answer to Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (one of Tsuji’s main inspirations).

Alabama kidnapping is stranger than fiction

Charles Gaines writes about a case involving a wealthy Birmingham businessman who is awoken from his sleep by an audacious pair of criminals — and their two kids — who claim to have acquired the house he is sleeping in, and he subsequently gets taken for the most terrifying and bewildering ride of his life. “Every night when he goes to bed, Elton B. Stephens Jr. pulls up an app on his phone called SnoreLab that records his snoring and breathing overnight, along with any other sounds made nearby—such as those of the Kafkaesque nightmare he finds himself waking to this morning, a nightmare for which nothing in his blithe seventy-five years has prepared him. (Note: Despite the fact that it seems like someone had to have made it up, the dialogue in this article, up to when Elton leaves the house, is taken directly from the SnoreLab recording, though some of it has been edited for clarity and/or reordered.)”

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Continue reading “Hello Kitty is one of the most profitable franchises of all time”

The first Star Wars movies were filmed in a number of exotic locations: The lush and dense California Redwoods served as the forest moon of Endor, Hoth scenes were filmed on the frozen tundra of Norway’s Hardangerjokulen Glacier, and the set of the Lars Homestead was famously built in Tunisia, North Africa surrounded by sands and sun. This is where the war in the stars almost came too close to home, thanks to a border dispute, a crazed dictator, and a group of junk-trading Jawas. While a miniature was used for full shots of the Jawa’s mobile droid and salvage shop making its way through the desert, for scenes that required actor participation a large background prop of the lower tread and ramps of the sandcrawler was built. This tank-like treaded structure immediately drew the ire of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi, who demanded that Tunisia cease it’s military buildup near the Libyan border. Lucas immediately complied with the demands and moved the filming to a more discreet location.

AI described how to create 40,000 new chemical weapons in just six hours

It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of “bad actor” mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference. All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. “The biggest thing that jumped out at first was that a lot of the generated compounds were predicted to be actually more toxic than VX. And the reason that’s surprising is because VX is basically one of the most potent compounds known,” one of the scientists said.

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Continue reading “The real-life war that the movie ‘Star Wars’ almost caused”

Xuehu Wei, who is a doctoral student in the research team around Alfred Anwander and Angela Friederici, compared the brain scans of 94 native speakers of two very different languages and showed that the language we grow up with modulates the wiring in the brain. Two groups of native speakers of German and Arabic respectively were scanned in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. The high-resolution images not only show the anatomy of the brain, but also allow us to derive the connectivity between the brain areas using a technique called diffusion-weighted imaging. The data showed that the axonal white matter connections of the language network adapt to the processing demands and difficulties of the mother tongue. “Arabic native speakers showed a stronger connectivity between the left and right hemispheres than German native speakers,” explained Alfred Anwander, last author of the study.

Scientists discover RNA component buried in the dust of an asteroid

A sample extracted from an asteroid far from Earth has confirmed that RNA nucleobases can be found in space rocks. Analysis of dust ferried home from asteroid Ryugu has been found to contain uracil – one of the four nucleobases that make up RNA – in addition to niacin, a form of the vitamin B3, which plays an important role in metabolism. This adds to a growing body of evidence that the building blocks for life form in space, and may have been at least partially delivered to Earth by asteroid bombardment early in our planet’s history. “Scientists have previously found nucleobases and vitamins in certain carbon-rich meteorites, but there was always the question of contamination by exposure to the Earth’s environment,” says astrochemist Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University in Japan. “Since the Hayabusa2 spacecraft collected two samples directly from asteroid Ryugu and delivered them to Earth in sealed capsules, contamination can be ruled out.”

Continue reading “The language we speak shapes the connectivity in our brains”

In the 1800s, counterfeiting became extremely common, and the one person acknowledged as America’s greatest counterfeiter was Benjamin Boyd. Boyd used to work for a Chicago syndicate run by James “Big Jim” Kinealy. However, Abraham Lincoln’s legislation to arrest counterfeiters resulted in Boyd being sentenced to prison in 1876. With Big Jim’s top man gone, his business was in a wrecked state. He had to do something to get Boyd freed from prison. Out of the blue, a bizarre plan arose: steal Abraham Lincoln’s body, bury it in the Indiana dunes, and then ask for $200,000 for ransom along with the pardon and freedom of Benjamin Boyd. To execute this plan, Kinealy hired a bartender, Terrence Mullen, and a counterfeiter, Jack Hughes. The two decided to pull off the heist on election night when no one was in town. There was also very minimal security at Lincoln’s grave, which meant the chances for the plan to go wrong were significantly less.

Why did the US government amass a billion pounds of cheese?

The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. Decades of propping up the dairy industry—by buying up surplus milk and turning it into processed commodity cheese—had backfired, hard. The Washington Post reported that the interest and storage costs for all that dairy was costing around $1 million a day. “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible,” a USDA official was quoted as saying. “Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.” Instead, they decided to jettison 30 million pounds of it into welfare programs and school lunches through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. But the surplus was growing so fast that 30 million pounds barely made a dent. By 1984, the U.S. storage facilities contained 1.2 billion pounds, or roughly five pounds of cheese for every American.

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Continue reading “The secret plot to hold Abraham Lincoln’s dead body for ransom”