Neatorama

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• Nailed It: DIY Projects Gone Wrong
• Pompeii Victim Gets His Genome Sequenced
• Wanna Ride a Mechanical Elephant?
• Malcolm Gladwell Wants to Hire an Assistant Who Can Drive Manual Transmission
• Male Mice are Scared of Bananas
• The Women Who Ran the Mongol Empire

Nailed It: DIY Projects Gone Wrong Posted: 30 May 2022 08:06 PM PDT (Image credit: Togekriss) You know how you see something on the internet and you think "I could do that!" Maybe you can, or maybe your first attempt is nothing at all like the posted artist's 100th time doing that thing professionally. The cakes above were all supposed to recreate the cake in the middle, with some attempts coming close, and some failing spectacularly. I bet they all tasted good, though. Sometimes a recreation is nothing like the original, but it turns out to be wonderful in its own way. (Image credit: lolosun) No one would recognize these as llamas, but they are adorable in their googly-eyed glory. See a roundup of 50 projects that didn't come out quite as planned at Bored Panda.

Pompeii Victim Gets His Genome Sequenced Posted: 30 May 2022 04:27 PM PDT When archaeologists dug out the ancient city of Pompeii, they found the remains of hundreds of people trying to flee the destruction wrought by Mt. Vesuvius. But they also found two skeletons crouching in a corner of their dining room. Why weren't they trying to run away? They weren't elderly. New research gives us a clue.     An international team of scientists took a piece of bone from the male skeleton and sequenced his DNA. They found that he suffered from spinal tuberculosis, which probably meant that he was unable to run, or possibly even walk. The man, who was about 35, was doomed from the beginning of the eruption. Was his companion also afflicted with some disability, or was she just unwilling to leave without him? The study also gives us clues as to the man's origins, as he wasn't a native of Pompeii. Read about this discovery at Engadget. -via Boing Boing (Image credit: Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità)

Wanna Ride a Mechanical Elephant? Posted: 30 May 2022 10:23 AM PDT We've featured the giant mechanical figures of Les machines de l'île, in Nantes, France, a few times before at Neatorama. These impressive behemoths are like something out of a science fiction film -by Jules Verne, of course. The animals are both technological wonders and works of art. Now we can take a look inside the place where they are built, stored, and used. And if you're ever in the neighborhood, you can ride one yourself for less than ten euros! If not, take a ride with Tom Scott on a 40-foot-tall steampunk mechanical elephant in this video. It might be a little loud, and maybe a little wet, but you'll never forget it.

Malcolm Gladwell Wants to Hire an Assistant Who Can Drive Manual Transmission Posted: 30 May 2022 08:32 AM PDT Malcolm Gladwell is a public intellectual famous for his novel takes on human society. His books, which include Outliers: The Story of Success and Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, are widely-discussed bestsellers. Gladwell is a busy man, so he has personal assistants. In a recent blog post, he says that for many years, he would ask applicants for that position if they could drive a car with a manual transmission. If the answer was no, then they were disqualified. Why? It's not because they will need to drive stick while on the job. It's because he's looking for the type of 22-year old person who would want to learn that "marginally useful skill." Gladwell explains that the young person who can use a manual transmission has certain useful personality traits: One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things. It's an interesting idea, but as one commenter at Ann Althouse's blog points out, it assumes that the average 22-year old has access to a car (let alone a sports car) with a manual transmission, which I think would be fairly unusual in the United States. Gladwell would certainly be disqualifying a lot of otherwise capable 22-year olds who could have other ways of demonstrating the same characteristics. Photo: Ed Schipul

Male Mice are Scared of Bananas Posted: 29 May 2022 06:50 PM PDT Remember when we discovered that cats are frightened by cucumbers? We still don't know why, but it's probably just the appearance of a novel item they aren't familiar with. That meme went viral, so everyone had to try it. But this one is real- male mice go into high stress in the presence of bananas. I guess that's good for banana trees, but this particular fear developed for a different reason. Mice from different experiments happened to be in the same lab at McGill University, and researchers noticed a stress response in male mice when they were in the presence of pregnant or lactating females. Wanting to find out why, they designed other experiments to see what chemical may have caused it. They narrowed it down to a compound called n-pentyl acetate in the pregnant/lactating mice's urine, which induces a stress response in male mice, particularly virgin male mice. That's an adaptive strategy, as male mice tend to kill baby mice. But wait a minute. It turns out that n-pentyl acetate is the chemical that makes a banana smell the way it does! So of course the researchers went to a supermarket and bought some banana oil to check their work. Sure enough, the male mice were terrified when they were exposed to banana oil in the room. It you don't have a cat, you might be able to deter at least some mice by sticking cotton balls soaked in banana oil around the house. Maybe. The chemical also induced an analgesic effect in the mice. You can read more about these experiments at LiveScience. -via Damn Interesting

The Women Who Ran the Mongol Empire Posted: 29 May 2022 12:00 PM PDT An old saying says that behind every great man, there's a hard-working woman. The adage was always meant to point out that women rarely get the respect they deserve for what they do behind the scenes, but in the Mongol Empire, some of them got plenty of respect. While the warriors were out conquering the world, the women who were kept in place by childrearing responsibilities were also tasked with holding territory and making society work. They supervised not only the home, but activities for the entire camp, like resolving disputes, meeting with traders, overseeing livestock workers, and planning migration. Women who weren't restricted to home by children were likely to become warriors themselves. Some estimates say that up to 20% of Chinggis Khan’s forces were women! Chinggis Khan’s daughter-in-law Töregene became so powerful that she engineered the succession of the new Khan after her husband died, even though she wasn't even his head wife. She reigned as regent for her oldest son with the support of the warlords and advisors. Read about the roles of women in the Mongol Empire at Atlas Obscura.

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