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The Impossible Case of Lilly and Jack: How Did Two Kids Vanish in Nova Scotia? (slTheWalrus) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 7:03 AM - 0 comments

"My head assploded and harsh words came out after reading the ABCs stupidest ever 730 report on EVs." John Birmingham has many pertinent thoughts on stupid people trying to appeal to stupid people. In this instance, it's to do with a particularly stupid article about electric vehicles. (Sorry about Substack;, I'm sure he'll eventually get the message and change venues. He's an Australian national treasure who sums things up very well indeed).
posted by h00py at 6:23 AM - 2 comments

"ADHD Symptom Manifestation in Adulthood" A new study in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine argues that current diagnostic tools are stuck in a "childhood" mindset, focusing too much on physical hyperactivity. Through interviews with ADHD adults, researchers identified six new critical dimensions that better describe the adult experience but are often ignored by the DSM-5. [more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 6:19 AM - 4 comments

[CW: sexy times] Alice Giddings in Metro: “To splosh is to derive sexual pleasure and arousal from being covered in wet and messy substances like food products and beverages” ... “and Gigi says cake-sitting is hugely popular. She explains: ‘Cake sitting is very popular on OnlyFans, there are a lot of women who sit in cakes as a part of their content creation” ... “When 'Sploshing' first occurred in our history I don’t know for sure. But the earliest records showing grapes being crushed under feet for wine was in 7000BC and I have a feeling someone would have been watching those women with a semi in their pants.”
posted by Wordshore at 2:43 AM - 16 comments

Whether in the form of fail videos, of clips of highway accidents, or of footage of celebrities eating really spicy foods, pain is one of the last forms of “real”—because spontaneous, anti-theatrical—experience left. Human suffering has been refigured as the opposite of algorithmic slop. And even if the fathomless availability of others’ pain has dulled our affective responses, what has changed is the way in which we select, frame, and invest particular instances of others’ pain with heightened symbolic meaning.
posted by chavenet at 2:42 AM - 3 comments

Bandicoots bounce back in Brown Hill Creek as team works towards "superhighway". A small colony of endangered brown bandicoots just south of Adelaide continue to breed as conservationists hope to connect them with other populations.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:48 PM - 2 comments

The SPLC indictment, the Klan history behind it...... and the ignominy of Todd Blanche. A very detailed legal explainer of the background of the recent court case. [more inside]
posted by Silvery Fish at 9:21 PM - 7 comments

Guinea worm disease is poised to become the second human disease in history to be eradicated. When the Carter Center's work began in 1986, Guinea worm disease afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people every year in 21 countries in Africa and Asia. In 2025 there were only 10 reported human cases. The eradication effort is the first to be done without vaccines or medicine. Instead, thousands of community volunteers were recruited, teaching people to filter all drinking water and keep infected people and animals away from water sources. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 7:24 PM - 7 comments

This scammer used an AI-generated MAGA girl to grift ‘super dumb’ men. (ungated)
posted by Literaryhero at 4:41 PM - 28 comments

Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired?: "Three Harvard-affiliated academics stepped down from their posts with the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, alleging the university was getting in the way of their work. The former executive director of the initiative stepped down for “personal reasons”, and 10 researchers who had been working on projects related to the initiative had been fired."
posted by hydropsyche at 1:46 PM - 10 comments

Every cheese is a combination of milk, texture, rind, mold, aging, and processing. Put all the combinations in a grid and you find holes — cheeses nobody has made yet, or that only exist in one remote valley. This is that grid. Click any cell to expand it.
posted by chavenet at 1:30 PM - 22 comments

Most people care about farm animals — our food system doesn't reflect that. An article about the disconnect between our values and how the sausage is made. It is interesting that there is such broad agreement that these common practices are not acceptable, when our values and opinions are generally fractured along so many lines.
posted by SaltySalticid at 12:50 PM - 12 comments

Fandom is *REALLY* intense these days (archive link) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:23 AM - 81 comments

Disabled Aotearoa/New Zealand parrot uses broken beak to achieve status. Without a curvy upper beak to get in the way, Bruce the kea uses his lower beak to stab or joust at other birds in his social group.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:21 AM - 7 comments

Popularity of names in the US over time. A fun little toy.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:24 AM - 69 comments

"There was no need to say that things were bad. Everyone knew it. The mood wasn’t sour—citrus farmers could handle sour. It was something else. Postapocalyptic. Florida is in the midst of its worst drought in 25 years, but the dry spell actually ranked far down on the list of challenges these bedraggled growers were facing. In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent." Who Killed the Florida Orange?, in Slate.
posted by mittens at 2:20 AM - 47 comments

If people with limitless resources could sponsor litigation against news organizations they disliked, constitutional protections would be no match for the sheer cost and complexity of defense. Now, they’ve found an AI-assisted way to supercharge those effects. [Coda Story] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:44 AM - 18 comments

In The Verge, Liz Lopatto writes well on a tried-and-true theme: “Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want”.

Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.

posted by Going To Maine at 12:35 AM - 28 comments

Giant echidna fossil rewrites understanding of Victoria's prehistoric past. A fossil hidden in a museum collection for 119 years has revealed giant echidnas once roamed Victoria's east, filling a major gap in Australia's prehistoric record.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:09 PM - 7 comments

in 2004 truck driver Joe Macken started making a model of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. He then spent the next twenty years creating a model of all of New York's five boroughs and more, including every building, street and bridge, now on display at the Museum of the City of New York.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:58 AM - 28 comments

Global Tetrahedron, owners of The Onion, have officially taken control of Free Speech Systems and InfoWars. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:50 AM - 43 comments

What do you spend most of your time thinking about? The past? The present moment (whoops, too late)? The future? Positive events or negative? Yourself or others? Work or leisure time? The Meaning of Life? Flights of fancy or pragmatic facts? Do you think about the things you need to do? Do you need to write yourself lots of to-do lists so you don't forget them? Do you think about what you're forgetting to think about? Or just talk about whatever's on your mind (except politics, of course), because this is your weekly Free Thread!
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:06 AM - 67 comments

“Let us stop talking about human-wildlife conflict. Some of us live with this reality and we pay a heavy price for sharing space with wildlife.” The remark was made by a community leader at the 2023 Community-led Conservation Congress in Namibia. It was not framed as a critique of conservation policy so much as a correction to how it is described. The phrase “human-wildlife conflict” appears frequently in reports and strategies, often as a category that can be measured and managed. For those living closest to wildlife, the experience it refers to is less abstract and less contained.
posted by sciatrix at 9:26 AM - 2 comments

How the legacy of Australia's Black Power movement continues today.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:54 AM - 2 comments

And while it’s tempting to believe this sense of urgency can be wholly blamed on Donald Trump, he was, in reality, an accelerant to a necrotic system. (slTheBitterSoutherner) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:31 AM - 37 comments

Robert Skidelsky, economic historian, author of the definitive three-volume biography of JM Keynes (as well as the post-2008 bestseller Keynes: Return of the Master), has passed away at age 86.
posted by mittens at 6:26 AM - 5 comments

Dime Store Adventures is a YouTube channel mostly about interesting minutiae of New England history though sometimes it deals with other topics, like a font on US house numbers and the state senator that wanted to ban popcorn and peanuts in movie theaters. But creator Henry Goodridge's main theme is local history and folklore, making videos that are mostly shot on location, such as one on a Massachusetts headstone that contains a murder accusation, the search for a sorcerous Rhode Island rock mentioned by Lovecraft and, maybe my favorite, the story of a controversial birthmarker in Whitingham, Vermont and Frog Rock in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There are over 200 more videos on the channel.
posted by Kattullus at 6:07 AM - 11 comments

Chinese carmaker Seres has been granted a patent for what it calls an "in-vehicle toilet" that slides under a passenger's seat for visits to the loo while on the road.
posted by Literaryhero at 12:47 AM - 52 comments

World-famous Bibbulmun Track considered for heritage list. Councils support moves for the Bibbulmun Track to be declared a heritage-listed site, which conservationists hope could protect the track from future mining expansions.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:49 PM - 7 comments

Markus Englund wrote copy-paste-detective to scan open science datasets for copy-paste errors. After scanning 600 datasets, the tool found 18 instances of highly improbable preserved sequences. [more inside]
posted by pwnguin at 7:53 PM - 34 comments

"Of the many works of fiction that are published, very few involve mathematics or mathematicians. However, people who like mathematics (or are mathematicians ourselves) may especially enjoy reading those few that do. Moreover, as I argue in an article in the AMS Notices, mathematicians should be interested in these works of "mathematical fiction" even if we do not enjoy them because they both affect and reflect the non-mathematician's view of this subject." "At the moment, there are 1726 works of mathematical fiction listed in this database. This is much more than I expected when I started, and I have every reason to think that it will continue to grow as I learn of new works to list here." [more inside]
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:55 PM - 17 comments

Every figure here comes from a real source. A few come with honest footnotes. We owe you both.
posted by chavenet at 2:58 PM - 11 comments

In The Music Video Is Dead, Long Live The Music Video, Patrick (H) Willems explores the history of music videos, how important they were both to culture and to film, and performs a bit of a eulogy to an art form which used to command millions of dollars and today continues is a greatly diminished form. ~1hour
posted by Dawn Trask-Dontell at 1:59 PM - 22 comments

Stood up by Mr. Swiveller* and the Marchioness? Cole from Gather Together Games shows how to play Cribbage Solitaire [YT 3 min.] The “Solitaire E-Man” has a longer demonstration. [~12 min.] if you’re not into that whole “brevity” thing. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:02 AM - 3 comments

On the Poetics of Space Travel...being able to see the activities of people 250,000 miles away in real time still feels completely science fiction. Every time I see them scrolling while floating, I experience that jolt of surprise: “But surely there’s no 5G?” No: this is a literal Zero G environment. [more inside]
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 10:08 AM - 4 comments

Some highlights from special collections libraries’ blogs this week.
The Weld-Grimké Quilt What can careful imaging tell us about a 19th century quilt and the women who made it?
Puzzle Vessels Master their secrets if you want to end up with wine in your mouth, not your lap.
Celebrated Pedestrians The golden age of feats of the feet.
Declarations: Printing a New Nation An online exhibition showcasing some of the earliest publications of the Declaration of Independence.

posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:56 AM - 8 comments

Study finds decades of intensive logging worsens bushfire [forest fire] risk. Scientists have studied satellite images of a Tasmanian bushfire and found regrowth from extensive logging and recent bushfires has absolutely increased the risk of more severe bushfires.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:00 AM - 7 comments

How did aviators navigate over long distances before the advent of radio navigation and GPS? The same way sailors did: celestial navigation. In the early days, this meant using a sextant from the cockpit; some airplanes had a dedicated observation "tower." This was eventually replaced by a plexiglass dome and increasingly sophisticated and automated equipment, which may have reached its zenith with the B-52's electromechanical angle computer, an analog computer, which Ken Shirriff (previously 1 2 3 4 5) tears down and analyzes in detail.
posted by adamrice at 10:58 PM - 11 comments

My Baby
Have You Seen Me Dance Alone
In a Minute
Come Closer
(Sl'yt) "There’s a point, early in the conversation, where Tom Rowlands starts talking about what it felt like to make music with AURORA without any expectation attached to it. No plan. No outcome. No sense of where it needed to go. [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 9:40 PM - 1 comment

The recycling project turning used tennis balls into shoes. What should be done with all those used tennis balls that get inevitably sent to landfill? Lilian Xu might have found the answer.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:33 PM - 14 comments

From teen prodigy to 11-time Grammy award winner, jazz bassist Christian McBride has played with pretty much everyone. Through his lifetime of live gigs and studio sessions with the legends of jazz and a dizzying array of A-list rock, pop, hip-hop, soul, and classical artists, the Juilliard-trained master has never stopped learning. Which all makes this heartfelt personal reflection of his singular, Ray Brown-inspired, decades-long dive into the deepest wells of Frank Sinatra - and its transformative lessons - all the more rewarding. “You have to listen to singers. You can’t just learn the changes—you have to learn the melody and the lyrics, too.”
posted by thecincinnatikid at 4:22 PM - 10 comments

On October 25th 2025, 55 intrepid runners took on an extraordinary challenge: to run the deepest marathon ever run. Covering 42.2km within the Garpenberg Zinc Mine in Sweden, they descended to a staggering depth of 1,120 metres below sea level. No one had attempted a marathon at this depth before. Participants endured temperatures of 24°C and 72% humidity, in total silence and ran in complete darkness with only their head torches for light. The Guardian: I won the world’s deepest underground marathon
posted by ShooBoo at 3:04 PM - 15 comments

We all love Space Ghost. But have you heard him in Spanish? [more inside]
posted by CarrotAdventure at 12:22 PM - 4 comments

3 Southern California residents sentenced in bear suit insurance fraud scheme. This story is why we need to support professional journalism. The photo and video are the honey on top.
posted by JimInSYR at 10:08 AM - 20 comments

BBC: “For the first 18 years of my life, I had no idea my surname was funny. I grew up in Buxton, a market town in Derbyshire, where Mycock is a popular name. There are more than 2,000 in the UK, give or take ... In the digital world, I have difficulties too: filling out online forms or setting up an email address can see my name rejected and the emails I send often go into spam folders. Searching for my surname is banned on some social media platforms. My mother Patricia had a dreadful time when she took on the surname. Her joy of divorcing my father was twofold as she not only left a somewhat feckless husband, but also de-Mycock-ed herself.”
posted by Wordshore at 8:56 AM - 80 comments

The first census of Saorstát Éireann = the Irish Free State was taken on 18th April 1926, 3½ years after Independence. 12 hours ago, a searchable index of the citizenry was released. Under GDPR, 1,000+ centenarians were given the option of having their names redacted. Background, context, ExecSumm, quirks on RTE, the state broadcaster.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:55 AM - 11 comments

Colombia approves cull of up to 80 feral hippos. Colombian officials have authorised a plan to cull dozens of feral hippos, years after notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar brought in the first ones.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:23 AM - 35 comments

This clock displays the current time alphabetically.
posted by chavenet at 3:20 PM - 39 comments

"No living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting. In one week alone last fall, he published 13 books on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects, ranging from the collapse of Near Eastern civilizations in 1177 BCE to the recent discovery of a huge Silk Road–era city in Central Asia."
Who Is Blake Whiting? The most astonishingly productive historian in recent times is someone you’ll never meet [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 2:25 PM - 15 comments

Why was I invited to Beast Studios? (SLYT; 1h18). What? Dan Olson was invited by MrBeast's team to a tour of Beast Studios? Dan Olson, of the Folding Ideas channel? The "Line goes up" guy? That Dan Olson? An essay on (in)authenticity and inefficiency. Also the first essay recorded on a bouncy castle, among other firsts.
posted by JSilva at 1:52 PM - 35 comments