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Signs of Blue Cheese And Beer Discovered in Well-Preserved Poop of Iron Age Europeans​

David Nield 1 hr ago
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You can tell a lot from a chunk of feces – and researchers analyzing human poop that's lasted for 2,700 years have discovered that Iron Age Europeans had a fondness for blue cheese and beer not all that dissimilar from modern-day tastes.

© Anwora - NHMW 2,600 year-old human poop from the Hallstatt salt mines.
A detailed study of stool samples recovered from the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut salt mines in Austria revealed two types of fungi: Penicillium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (also known as brewer's yeast).

These two fungi are still widely used to produce blue cheese and beers today, giving historians an insight not just into what our distant ancestors were eating, but also how sophisticated their food and drink-making techniques were.
"Genome-wide analysis indicates that both fungi were involved in food fermentation and provide the first molecular evidence for blue cheese and beer consumption during Iron Age Europe," says microbiologist Frank Maixner, from the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Italy.
To identify the fungi, the researchers used a combination of microscopic techniques to reveal the proteins, DNA, genetic material and microbes inside the samples. Plant fragments, including bran and glumes of different cereals, were also common.
The team thinks that the diet of these Europeans of yesteryear was highly fibrous and rich in carbohydrates. Broad beans, fruits, nuts, and animal food products were likely used as supplements to the main diet.
More recent poop samples from the same site reveal that right up until the Baroque period – the mid-18th century – gut microbiome analysis indicates diets were dominated by unprocessed food, fresh fruits and vegetables. That shows just how recent our Westernized eating habits really are.
"The Hallstatt miners seem to have intentionally applied food fermentation technologies with microorganisms which are still nowadays used in the food industry," says Maixner.

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Exploring the salt mines. (D. Brander and H.Reschreiter - NHMW)
If you're thinking that 2,700 years is a long time for poop to be hanging around, you'd be right: these underground salt mines are one of the few places on Earth where preserved samples can still be found.
Usually, an unusual environment is required for feces to be preserved. A dry cave as here, for example, or a frozen habitat, or a desert. Plus, the salt mines of Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut stay cool all year round, which helps.
Beer drinking and cheesemaking are of course two of the oldest practices in modern human history, stretching back thousands of years, but these findings from Austria give experts another important data point in charting eating habits and diet.
"These results shed substantial new light on the life of the prehistoric salt miners in Hallstatt and allow an understanding of ancient culinary practices in general on a whole new level," says archaeologist Kerstin Kowarik, from the Museum of Natural History Vienna in Austria.
"It is becoming increasingly clear that not only were prehistoric culinary practices sophisticated, but also that complex processed foodstuffs as well as the technique of fermentation have held a prominent role in our early food history."
The research has been published in Current Biology.

 

[CarolKing]

Bubble Wrap Was Supposed to be Wallpaper​

Daniel Ganninger
Jul 3, 2020·2 min read

Bubble Wrap, those protective sheets that keep things from breaking and are fun to pop, didn’t start its life intended for those uses. Believe it or not, bubble wrap was originally supposed to be used as wallpaper.

Bubble Wrap was invented in 1957 by two engineers named Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes. They were attempting to make a covering for walls consisting of two shower curtains made of plastic laminated together that had trapped air bubbles between the layers. It would have been a 3D looking wallpaper, but the idea never took off. People in the late 1950s weren’t interested in having bubbles on their walls.

The idea was far from dead, however. Fielding and Chavannes started the Sealed Air Corporation in 1960, and the pair first tried out the bubble material for use as insulation in greenhouses. Unfortunately, this too didn’t catch on. It was a year later when they discovered it could be used for something more practical, and it found its use as a packing material. They originally called the product Air Cap until it was changed to the more appropriately titled Bubble Wrap.

 

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[bulllee]

Ancient drinking games

Drinking by Automaton​

Photo: The Met/Public Domain​

If you ever played spin the bottle and thought, “This is great, but what if we added a robot?” allow me to present Diana and the Stag. At first glance, the figure appears to be simply a silver objet d’ art that depicts the goddess astride a deer. But it’s actually an example of an automaton that was used in drinking games in 17th-century European royal courts. After one player wound up the machine, it slowly moved around the table, until randomly stopping before someone. That person, naturally, had to drink: The stag’s head cracked open to reveal a small drinking vessel. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has Diana and the Stag on display, but you can see other automata in European museums.

Cards, With a Side of Sadistic Power Trips​

Photo: Alamy​

You know a game is hardcore when it comes with a warning about possible stabbings. Dating back to ancient Rome and played by everyone from the lowliest pleb to Cicero, passatella begins with each player receiving four cards (from a Neapolitan deck). Whichever two players have the highest card values get designated the Boss and Underboss. Here’s where it gets interesting: While everyone has to chip in for each round of drinks, the two bosses are able to dispense and deny drinks, often through insult-laden speeches. But anyone suffering through a dry spell has the opportunity for revenge in the next round, when new bosses get crowned. By the Middle Ages, the game became downright violent, often ending with brandished knives. While this might not sound like fun to everyone, the game is still played in taverns in Southern Italy.

Drunk and Orderly​

Photo: Gary Todd/Public Domain​

Historic Chinese drinking games known as jiuling began as a means to maintain order at parties. Instead of cards, players drew lots from a silver container. Each lot came inscribed with instructions, ordering different people at the table—ranging from the youngest to the most talkative to the highest-ranking official—to imbibe. Like passatella, the game had several officiants who ruled over players; however, their job was to actually ensure things didn’t get out of hand. Players who proved too rowdy or rude were given penalties. This makes sense, until you realize that those penalties were usually just more drinks. In China's Golden Age, Charles Benn tells the story of a ninth-century drinker who committed several party fouls and was sentenced to 12 “penalty cups.” When he couldn’t drink any more, he left the game. This final act was yet one more infraction—“the fraternity of the goblet had little sympathy for such cowardice”—which would result in not being invited to future games.

Swinging Wager Cups​

Photo: The Met/Public Domain​

Many drinking games are tests of aim or balance—both of which become diminished after several glasses of wine. Dating back to 16th-century Germany, wager cups were a test of the latter. The two-sided drinking vessels came in the shape of a woman whose skirt formed one large cup and who held another small cup above her head. This tinier cup could swivel back and forth, allowing it to remain upright as the drinker attempted to sip from the skirt. At weddings, brides and grooms were challenged to drink from each cup without spilling a drop. Non-nuptial wager cups were also popular as drinking games, sometimes featuring a man instead of the skirted maiden.

 

[momofthegoons]

In 1930 the Indiana Bell building was rotated 90 degrees. Over a month, the 22 million pound structure was moved 15 inches/hour all while 600 employees still worked there. There was no interruption to gas, heat, electricity, water, sewage, or the telephone service they provided. No one inside felt it move.

 

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[bulllee]

Europeans Once Drank Distilled Human Skulls as Medicine​

“Corpse medicine” created a booming market for craniums, especially mossy ones.​

BY DIANA HUBBELLOCTOBER 22, 2021
Europeans Once Drank Distilled Human Skulls as Medicine

The gruesome concoctions definitely caused more harm than good. GETTY IMAGES


KING CHARLES II WAS ON his deathbed. The year was 1685, and the monarch had suffered a stroke. Doctors tried everything to save him, but the king was convinced that one particular remedy would work. Years before, Charles II had paid Oliver Cromwell’s own doctor and chemist, Jonathan Goddard, a handsome sum for the secret formula for Goddard’s Drops. The chemist claimed that his invention, which later came to be known as King’s Drops, was a kind of miracle cure for all manner of ailments. The recipe for this liquid concoction was complex, involving numerous components and multiple distillations, but its efficacy supposedly hinged on one crucial ingredient: a powder consisting of five pounds of crushed human skulls.

Not just any skulls would do. According to medical wisdom of the time, the bones of an elderly person might contain some of the very illness the King’s Drops were meant to cure. “Ideally, [the skull] would be from someone who died a violent death at a young, healthy age,” says Lydia Kang, co-author of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. “You wanted somebody who died in the prime of their life, so execution and war were ideal ways to get these products.”
By the end of his life, doctors were pouring 40 drops of this gruesome elixir down the king’s throat daily. Needless to say, the potion didn’t have its desired effect. King’s Drops and other bogus medical treatments may have sped up his demise on February 6, 1685. Yet the fact that the drops failed to save Charles II didn’t deter many other English people from making and drinking the concoction. In 1686, an Englishwoman named Anne Dormer wrote to her sister about the positive impact a little bit of skull juice had on her mental health. “I take the king’s drops and drink chocolate,” she wrote, “and when my soul is sad to death I run and play with the children.”

As he died, Charles II tried to stave off the inevitable with King’s Drops. GETTY IMAGES


The idea of ingesting human skulls from the freshly killed seems repulsive today, but it was shockingly common among British and other European aristocrats from the 16th century all the way up into the so-called Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. Medical science was still very much an evolving field, one which left plenty of room for treatments ranging from the bizarre to the downright disturbing.



King’s Drops were especially popular, but medical books across Europe published all sorts of other recipes for various skull-related cures. Oswald Croll, a German alchemist, published a recipe for an epileptic cure in 1643 that called for three skulls from men killed by violent means. In 1651’s The Art of Distillation, English physician John French wrote up the following recipe for “Essence of Man’s Brains,” which he touted as a cure for epilepsy:

“Take the brains of a young man that has died a violent death, together with the membranes, arteries, and veins, nerves … and bruise these in a stone mortar until they become a kind of pap. Then put as much of the spirit of wine as will cover it … [then] digest it half a year in horse dung.”

This jar once held human skull residue for medical use. EINSAMER SCHÜTZE/CC BY-SA 3.0

Much of this macabre fixation on corpse medicine had a single source. Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, was a 16th-century Swiss alchemist, physician, philosopher, and all-around polymath. Prior to his work, the amalgamation of ancient Greek and Roman beliefs known as Galenism dominated European medical circles. According to Galenism, the body consists of different humors—blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile—and the key to health was keeping them all in balance.

While Galenism led to some utterly ineffective medical treatments, it was nothing compared to the horror that came out of Paracelsus’s work. Essentially, his philosophy was that “like cures like,” or similar elements from outside the body could restore health within it. His book Der grossen Wundartzney (Great Surgery Book) was one of the most influential medical books of its time.

According to Paracelsus, if someone’s illness centered on their head, the best remedy was to, in turn, consume part of the head of a healthy individual. Paracelsus advocated drinking the blood, powdered skulls, and other parts of corpses, particularly those of men in their prime who died a sudden, violent death, since their “vital spirit” was so strong.

Paracelsus changed medical science in Europe with his writings. WELLCOME COLLECTION/CC BY 4.0

People eating human body parts to cure themselves became such a widely accepted concept that it crossed the Atlantic to New England, where the 17th-century Puritan town physician Edward Taylor enthusiastically touted all sorts of cannibalistic remedies in his handwritten Dispensary. Taylor had an extensive list of useful human body parts, including “Man’s Skull” (“good for head diseases and the falling sickness,” or epilepsy) and “Moss in the skull of dead man exposed to the aire,” to stop bleeding.
While most of these cures did more harm than good, patients swore by them. Skulls and other body parts were mixed with chocolate, wine, hard spirits, or other substances that, when combined with a pinch of willful denial, may have made the afflicted feel better. “As with a lot of old-fashioned remedies, they were often mixed with other intoxicants like opiates or alcohol,” says Kang. “There was a lot of magical belief and placebo going into these.”

An ugly side effect of the Western obsession with corpse medicine was the demand it created for human remains. “In England, there was a huge trade in skulls and cannibalistic treatments,” Kang says. Executioner’s blocks were a popular place to procure the requisite body parts. A thriving, well-documented trade in Egyptian mummies went on in Europe for years.

In this painting of botanist John Tradescant, the moss-covered skull is meant to evoke its medicinal usage. PUBLIC DOMAIN


Whenever there’s a market for a particular commodity, no matter how unsavory, history dictates that some unscrupulous entrepreneur will find a way to fill it. “Often, they would go to Ireland because there were so many people who had died on the battlefield and there were so many skulls lying around,” Kang says. The English philosopher Francis Bacon once remarked that skull moss, which was thought to be good for nosebleeds, could be harvested from the “heaps of slain bodies lying unburied over in Ireland.” Moss-covered skulls looted from the battlefields became a common sight in London druggist shops.

The marketing of their skulls for consumption was one more brutality in a long list of oppressions against the Irish at this time. The fact that there was money to be made, particularly from the export of skulls, seemed to be enough to keep anyone, English or otherwise, from questioning the ethics of this business for an uncomfortably long time. “Germany had a particularly big hunger for corpse medications,” Kang says. “So there was a brisk trade in pillaging Irish skulls and selling them to Germany.”

While there are documented records of skull sales as late as 1778, medical cannibalism in England trailed off in the 19th century. “You really start to see the physician’s understanding of anatomy [and] physiology come into more modern clarity,” Kang says, “when lot of these more magical theories start to disintegrate. They just don’t hold up against science.”

 

[momofthegoons]

 

[bulllee]

Marie Antoinette's Adultery Unmasked by Modern Science​

Nancy Goldstone 9 hrs ago

In a recent study employing a technique called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, scientists discovered formerly redacted phrases on eight letters between Marie Antoinette and the Swedish count Axel Fersen, who was rumored to have been her lover. Further analysis revealed that the correspondence had been censored by Count Fersen himself. The altered words, which included “beloved,” “adore,” and “madly,” have now sparked something of a controversy: Are these recovered phrases additional evidence of an affair, or are they not?

© Provided by The Daily Beast Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty
The answer to this is a resounding yes. Just to set the record straight, no queen, Marie Antoinette included, used a word like “beloved” lightly to a man other than her husband. She could be punished for adultery, and even possibly executed, for doing so. That’s a pretty big risk to take if you don’t mean it, and it is why Fersen, who kept copies of these letters and feared they might fall into the wrong hands, edited those particular words.
It has long been suspected that Marie Antoinette was in love with the Swedish count. In 1779, her attraction to Fersen was so obvious that the Swedish ambassador noted that the queen could not disguise her feelings in public. The diplomat was thrilled when his countryman left to fight in the American Revolution and a scandal was avoided. But after Fersen returned in 1783, there is substantive evidence of intimacy. The documentation includes the exchange of secret letters, as well as Fersen’s diary, which is filled with entries detailing how much he loved someone named “Elle” (his code name for the queen), but how he couldn’t wed her because she was already married. But the most significant disclosures came from the head of the royal guard at Versailles, the Comte de Saint-Priest, who reported that, when Fersen was in town, he stayed over, often for days at a time, at Marie Antoinette’s private sanctuary, the Petit Trianon, and that the king was aware of the affair but the queen had somehow gotten around him.
Then there are Marie Antoinette’s pregnancies. Before the arrival of Fersen, it took her seven years to conceive her first child, a daughter. Nearly three years elapsed between the birth of this first girl and her next child, a son. This latter period corresponds to the years that Fersen was away fighting in America.
But within a month of his return, she went from having two pregnancies in ten years to having three pregnancies in three years. The first of these ended in miscarriage, but the other two yielded first a son and then another daughter, who died in infancy. The surviving boy bore a strong resemblance, not to Louis XVI, but to Fersen. This is the child who would die in the tower during the Revolution, who is today known as Louis XVII. (Those who deny the affair point to a 2019 study by a French geneticist, who claimed to have established a genetic connection between Louis XVI and this second son by testing a hair purported to have been preserved since 1792. This same scientist, obviously a busy guy, is also the author of a paper in which he asserted that he had isolated the DNA of Jesus from a tunic and reconstructed his appearance.)

There is additional evidence that the king and the queen did not spend a whole lot of time together and that Louis frequently ate and drank so much that he became almost comatose and his servants had to carry him to bed. It’s difficult to get someone pregnant when you are passed out all night alone in your bedroom.
As strong as this documentation is, until now it has always been rejected on the grounds that if all of this was true, Marie Antoinette would certainly have been caught and punished. But X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy is not the only technique to yield new evidence. Advancements in neurology have made it possible to determine that Louis XVI was born with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Although highly intelligent, he was unable to look anyone in the eye, had great difficulty conversing, needed to keep to a rigorous schedule, and cried when upset. He also did not understand the mechanics of conception until his wife’s brother came for a visit and explained it to him. Louis did not seem to need sex. Marie Antoinette’s enemies threw women at him, but he ignored them.
Autism also explains how the king could know about the queen’s affair and not put a stop to it. Marie Antoinette was Louis’ emotional support. He needed her.
Marie Antoinette recognized this. She cared about Louis and did all she could to protect him during the Revolution. She would sacrifice her life in this effort. But it was Fersen she loved. The count had a series of mistresses, it’s true, but that was only because he couldn’t have her. He said as much in his diary. Fersen worked frantically until the day of her death to save her. When these two wrote “beloved” and “adored” to each other, they meant it.
The redacted letters were written between 1791 and 1792, near the end, when Marie Antoinette was a prisoner in Paris. They are simply more proof of an affair that should have been written into the history books long ago.

 

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Brass Against Issued An Apology After Their Lead Vocalist Urinated On A Fan During A Festival Set​

Brass Against’s Sophia Urista Apologizes For Urinating On A Fan

The incident, involving singer Sophia Urist,a was caught on camera by someone in the crowd and it’s quite the watch.

uproxx.com

What more needs to be said ?

 

[Helios]

Wild if you think about it. yea its the SUN lol.

Inside the US military bases that are MORE secretive than Area 51

WHILE the highly classified Area 51 might be the United States’ most famous military base it’s far from the country’s most secretive. The covert Air Force base, located in Lincoln…

www.the-sun.com

 

[bulllee]

Here I find that I'm cool for being so friggin cheap .

Gen Z is making corded headphones cool again because they don't want to look like finance bros​

© Provided by Business InsiderWired headphones have made a comeback. Bruno Gori/Getty Images

• Gen Z is making wired headphones cool again, reported The WSJ's Rory Satran.
• They're more practical than cordless AirPods and part of the Y2k trend, but Gen Z also doesn't want to look "finance bro."
• Many of Gen Z's fashion choices function as rejections of the trends that came before them.

Tired: AirPods.
Wired: wired headphones.
That's according to Gen Z, at least, the trendsetters of the new decade.
As The Wall Street Journal's Rory Satran recently reported, everyone from Bella Hadid to Lily-Rose Depp has been spotted eschewing AirPods for the earbuds of yesteryear. While the trend spans both Gen Z and millennials, the former is leading the way in plugging their headphones back in.
That's partly because corded headphones are the preferred medium for TikTokers recording videos, Satran reported. The reasons are plenty: They're more practical, cheaper, and eliminate some of the "vague" radiation concerns some people have with AirPods (which are considered safe, per the FDA). Corded headphones are more than just function, Satran added; they're also about aesthetics, emitting a cool, grungy vibe reminiscent of the "2010s Tumblr" era.
That means they're the latest iteration of the Y2K trend that Gen Z loves so much. From straight-legged jeans and claw clips to Adam Sandler and "Friends," Gen Z has been reviving the turn of the millennium's biggest trends in what Sara Fischer of Axios has deemed a "throwback economy" characterized by bright clothes, sentimental entertainment, and old-school tech.
Research has shown that, in moments of economic turmoil, humans are more likely to feel nostalgia. Turning to a nostalgic time before social media took over has been a way for Gen Z to escape the instability of the pandemic.
But corded headphones are also a way for Gen Z to make an "anti-finance bro" statement. As 25-year-old Courtney Park explained to Satran, "A lot of people make fun of that whole tech-finance-bro look where they always have their Patagonia vest on and their AirPods in."

Gen Z loves to be sartorially contrarian​

It's not the first time Gen Z has elicited an aesthetic that stemmed from the rejection of an ongoing trend. They've been lusting after an "old money" aesthetic characterized by Oxford shirts, tennis skirts, and tweed blazers, a sharp contrast from the looks that characterized the 2010s.
"It embodies the socialite lifestyle represented in culture by shows and films such as 'Gossip Girl' and 'The Talented Mr. Ripley,' and is the perfect opposite to the 'California Rich' aesthetic that was made popular by the Kardashian family," Morgane Le Caer, content lead at Lyst, previously told Insider.
It's also a response to the casual outfits that typifies the new millennial billionaire class, explained Vox's Rebecca Jennings, who first reported on the trend: Dressing in the polished way of a northeastern socialite is ultimately a rejection of the tech CEO's hoodie and sneaker ensemble.
Two years prior to the rise of "old money," the VSCO girl had the internet buzzing. Characterized by a natural look that embodied a crossover between '90s fashion and a surfer lifestyle, she was a contrast to the contoured faces and lip fillers of Instagram influencers.
It seems, then, that Gen Z's fashion choices are largely driven by an adverse reaction — and opposition — to everything that came before them.
Beyond fashion, Gen Z remains "anti" a lot of things. They're even taking their contrarian attitude into the workplace with the rise of the "antiwork" movement, as Insider's Juliana Kaplan reported. In other words, get ready for Gen Z's "anti" attitude to reshape a lot more than just fashion over the next decade.
Read the original article on Business Insider