Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

[ElizabethBest]

Let's hear it please - I love a good wikipedia rabbit hole. I'll start - The Willard Suitcases. Over 400 suitcases of possessions were found in an attic at the Willard Insane Asylum belong to patients who had died whilst inpatients so never left. The New York State Museum started a project to document the cases and their contents, and you can learn all about it and see the cases on their website.

I am so fascinated by the 'Wood Wide Web' - the symbiotic relationship between trees and funghi

Some even think they can communicate!

www.sciencefocus.com/nature/mycorrhizal-networks-wood-wide-web/

I think there is a lot to be discovered there!

My DS is autistic and played geoguesser for months - learning which road signs and road markings, soil colours, rocks, rooftops, lampposts etc belong to which country.
He can pretty much guess within a few 10’s of miles where he’s been placed!

I always remember when as a child we saw the 'foam' on the sea and the sands at Backpool, we weren't allowed to even paddle. It was the same on the No8 bus into Manchester, as we past what is now Salford Uni we saw the foam on the oxbow of the River Irwell and thought it was lovely when in reality it was the crap from the mills etc further up the river!

Oooh here's one for @MNHQ - The original babies and toddlers that were being moaned about on MN at the start are now old enough that some will be on here moaning about their own DC.

I just really love this thread! So many interesting worm holes to go down when I should be working.

The people who do QI have a podcast called No Such Thing As A Fish which has so many fascinating episodes.

That is true. They had one in the library when I was at the University of Essex in the early naughties. I went on it on the top floor and I didn't realise that it went up and over until I saw a horrible light appear and it came back down over to the top floor to go down again.

I was in a huge panic and the person waiting to get on and go down looked at me very oddly as I got off, wondering why on earth I had just appeared from the above them! 😳🤣🙄

*noughties 😳🙄

That's a good point about regularity. Most women would have spent most of their married lives pregnant or nursing so actually the likelihood of having to deal with monthly periods probably wasn't that high. If you look back at family trees, especially for the poorer in society,many women had a baby once every 2 years.

When I looked at my own great grandmother on the 1911 census, she married in 1890 and by 1911 had 15 children (7 died had died according to the census question) and was pregnant with her 16th and went on to have her 17th in 1914,. So within 21 years she had 16 pregnancies. Two the daughters were called Elizabeth and Eliza, so she either liked the name or was running out of ideas

Penguins. I just can't get enough of them.

Exactly the same here. I think about how the hell we figured out bread regularly.
Same goes for metal. At what point did we figure out to pull lumps of ore out of the ground, extract, and then superheat to make pointy stuff.

Early plastic surgery in the wake of WWI.

Lots of disfigured soldiers who basically agreed to be human guinea pigs. The early ones had awful procedures like having a skin flap from their arm grafted onto their heads so the arm had to be strapped to the head while it took.

It also makes you think of the mental and emotional toll of war, beyond shell shock etc - going through the war was bad enough, but to be left with half a face and problems eating etc must have been unthinkably bad.

www.nam.ac.uk/explore/birth-plastic-surgery

Love love loveeee those videos on YouTube of restored Victorian/Edwardian footage showing people going about their day to day business

The fact there's things in our home which could potentially be poisoning us without our knowledge as we haven't got the equipment to test for it. I'm the series Hidden killers in the home by Suzanne Lipscomb, she describes how in the Victorian era. They used arsenic wallpaper that slowly poisoned everyone! And even up until the 1970's children's experiment games would blow
Children up etc. I reckon mobile phones are poisoning us with radiation but they can't detect it as such. Really good watch I recommend it!

Also ancient history - how on earth did the Egyptians build those bloody pyramids with nothing but wooden cranes and man power. Mind blown

It’s like riding the circle line on the tube.

🙂

On the Foundling Hospital, many of the children were renamed, often using the names of famous worthies (including trustees and supporters of the Foundling Hospital) as it was thought to be auspicious. This practice was halted as it led to rumours that famous men were using the Hospital to cover up their own illegitimate childrne (not sure why they would use their own names!)

A longer term misapprension is people descended from the renamed childrn eroneously thinking they were descended from someone famous.

I have seen the Foundling Hospital token books - they are utterly heartbreaking.

voynich manuscript

I love this French one. It's a colourized snowball fight from 1897. So fun and carefree.

My daughter absorbed her twin brother and there’s a huge mark on her hip from it. I don’t think she is classified as a chimera from it however. He died in utero because of unknown reasons. They called it vanishing twin syndrome. He was clearly not growing well as he was significantly smaller than his sister.

More strange is they were sharing a amniotic sack which means they would have been an extremely rare set of twins called semi-identical which basically means two of my husband’s sperms successfully entered one of my eggs and it split into two people. Which is the only type of twins that can be different sexes and share 75% DNA.

This is apparently due to the fact that my egg for one reason or the other had a delayed hardening of its shell. As most eggs harden their exterior to prevent multiple sperms from entering it. At least that’s the doctors theories. My husband jokes that maybe his sperms were just that determined!

Doctors in the hospital were wanting to do case studies on my twins until the brother was gone then they lost interest.

I don’t know the entire pregnancy was handled in a way that made me feel like the doctors were more interested in studying my children and myself than actually helping us. The loss of my son still makes me sad. Some days I’m okay and some days I wonder what life would be like if he were still here.

I try really hard not to think of it.

I was thinking about that before. All those mothers of children and teenagers, posting about their abusive/cheating husbands or hating their children. Would any of those now-adult children recognise their mother's from the old threads?

Romea grave stele for pets. The past was a different time and their values and morals often diverge hugely from ours. But sometimes we are so alike - these Romans loved their dogs.

On a holiday to China a few years ago we went to see the Terracotta Warriors.
The bit that blew my mind was that when they found them they were in bits and they had to put them together. An eternal jigsaw.
They all have different faces and most of them are still buried because when they meet the air their colouration disintegrates.
All completely mind boggling

Area 51. Obviously the thought is they have extraterrestrial beings, but surely it would leak? Even if it didn't, I get very fascinated by the ordeal. It originally started as a military base but over years has turned into something much more than thay.