Author: Jake Rossen

In the movies, private investigators are often depicted as gun-toting outlaws who get results the police can’t by knocking down doors and shaking down suspects. In reality, licensed PIs don’t usually have to nurse any broken knuckles. They tackle insurance fraud, infidelity, and corporate impropriety by diligently combing through records and trailing persons of interest, using experience garnered from backgrounds in law enforcement, loss prevention, or the military.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have to occasionally go undercover, or think fast when they’ve been spotted. Check out these 12 lesser-known facts about what it’s like to be a detective for hire.

1. THEY WORK UNDERCOVER.

Slipping into a new job for investigative purposes isn’t limited to law enforcement. Jordan Smith, vice president of investigative operations at Pilum Defense Agency in Boulder, Colorado, says his firm frequently pursues cases relating to corporate or business fraud by getting one of their PIs hired at the company to see what’s going on. “If you’re a company with a retail location that’s missing deposits, we can go in and see what’s happening for ourselves,” he says. “Right now, we have someone at a hospital to see who might be stealing prescription drugs. Sometimes we can send a certified fraud examiner to work as an accountant.” The best part? “We can get paid the employee rate as well as for the investigative work we do.”

2. BEING CATFISHED? THEY CAN HELP.

Online dating has been a boon for PIs: people intertwined in internet romances sometimes begin to have suspicions about whether the person they’re corresponding with is telling them the truth. “They’re wondering if the person is who they say they are,” says Brendan Burke, a PI with Gilliam Burke Investigations in Edmonton, Alberta. “It gets to the point where they begin asking for money. We had one case where someone was claiming he owned businesses and properties he didn’t. Typically, the client is an older woman who’s divorced and looking for attention. They want to believe. But if you think you’re being scammed, you probably are.”

3. THEY PEE IN BOTTLES.

A key element of surveillance work—typically done to observe behavior like infidelity, or unwarranted physical exertion in the case of worker’s compensation—is remaining undetected. That means not getting out of a parked car constantly, and handling personal business during a typical 12-hour spy shift any way you can. When it comes to bathroom behavior, Smith says, “You need to go before you get there. But we’ll bring a pee bottle.”

For number twos? “We just hold it. I’ve never not held it.”

4. THEY’LL GO DUMPSTER DIVING.

Despite having a wealth of information available both online and at public records locations, detectives sometimes find their best resource is a trash can. “Once something is thrown away, we can collect it,” Burke says. “It depends on your local municipality. But we’ve had success with it. With one child custody case, we were able to find evidence of drug use—crack pipes and powders.” And yes, it’s gross. “We use face masks with some Vicks rubbed into it.”

5. THEY’LL CREATE FAKE FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS TO CHECK YOU OUT.

For intel, nothing beats “friending” a case subject on Facebook. Since subjects probably won’t accept a request from a PI, some opt for creating fake accounts. “It’s safe to say most of us have a few different accounts,” says Skyler Crowley, a private investigator in Florida. “Some guys like blondes, some guys like redheads. Whatever gets us in. My fake accounts are exponentially more popular than me.”

6. THEY CAN FIND OUT HOW MUCH MONEY YOU HAVE.

Depending on their location, it might be permissible for PIs to get access to your bank accounts—not to manage your funds, but to find out exactly how much money you have to see if you might be withholding assets during a divorce or other litigation. “It’s a trade secret, but we do have ways of finding out where someone has an account and how much money is in it,” Smith says. “It’s generally not admissible in court, but it’s info we’re allowed to give to attorneys.”

7. THEY GET ASKED TO INVESTIGATE THE PARANORMAL.

Every so often, someone will confuse Burke for a Ghostbuster. “The most unusual request, I think, was from someone who thought their TV was haunted,” he says. “That’s … well outside of what we do.”

8. SOCIAL MEDIA IS LIKE ONE GIANT DATABASE.

Having a social media profile is probably bad news if you’re trying to stay off a PI’s radar. “It’s a gold mine of information,” Smith says. “People like to document their entire life. I’ve seen people who were supposedly ‘injured’ at work posting pictures of exercising. I’ve also been able to figure out what vehicles a person owns because of photos online.” And remember, even when you delete something it might still be retrievable. “Nothing just goes away,” Smith says.

9. THERE’S A TRICK TO FOLLOWING CARS.

Non-paranoid people aren’t generally suspicious of someone following them, but there’s a good way to avoid detection when PIs want to track a car on the road. “When we have to follow people, we use two drivers,” Smith says. “That way, they’re not seeing the same car behind them all the time.”

10. CLIENTS AREN’T ALWAYS FORTHCOMING.

Sometimes PIs get hired for jobs without getting the full story. “One guy called me at midnight for me to do surveillance that night on his house because he was out of town and his teenage daughter was home alone,” Cowley says. “I thought it was very weird and last minute but I wasn’t going to turn down the job. He called me every 10 minutes until 4 am. Eventually he asked me to get out of the car and sneak up to the windows to see if another man was with his daughter. That’s when I realized something more was going on there. It turns out the man was separated from his wife and was extremely jealous of her new boyfriend. He wanted me to watch them. I said no.”

11. THEY HAVE INFORMANTS.

Some PIs have a good enough rap to convince some of your associates that informing on you is in their best interests. Once, Smith was having trouble getting information on a woman who had custody of her children and spent most of her day in her apartment. “I was able to convince her landlord to call me two to three times a day with information,” Smith says. “It resulted in custody going to the father.”

12. SOME OF THEM AREN’T CRAZY ABOUT THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR LABEL.

Some detectives might not tell you they’re detectives, using terms like “legal investigator” instead to help ward off any stereotypes from pop culture. “Some PIs I know don’t like to use the term because there’s a certain image of being shady, like a Philip Marlowe character,” Burke says. “But I find that most people think it’s interesting. It’s nothing I shy away from. I operate legally and ethically, and I’m proud of the work that I do.”

All images courtesy of iStock.

Next to a house, buying a motor vehicle is going to be one of the largest purchases you’re ever going to make—especially when the sales price keeps creeping up from the number displayed on the car window. Dealers use every opportunity to up-sell consumers on additional safety or entertainment features, rust-proofing, and extended warranties.

Whether an in-seat DVD player is worth it is subjective. But should you consider adding extra repair coverage to a brand-new car?

Most new vehicles are covered for their first 36,000 miles or three years miles on the road, with engine and transmission warranties extending up to 100,000 miles or 10 years. (These figures can vary depending on manufacturer: Always check the fine print.) At the point of sale, dealers will often offer to extend the life of the warranty under many of the same terms, or to tack on additional coverage for repairs not included under the manufacturer’s terms for hundreds or thousands of dollars more. Essentially, an extended warranty offers a longer peace-of-mind period than what comes with the car off the lot.

If you’re prone to worrying, it might be worthwhile. Otherwise, some statistics point to a very uncertain return on investment. A 2013 Consumer Reports survey of 12,000 readers found that 55 percent of respondents never had to use their coverage during the period their vehicle was protected. Those that did usually had repair bills that were less than the total sum of the warranty’s cost, meaning they still lost money.

Warranty terms can also be problematic: You might be restricted to certain locations, or stumble upon an issue that isn’t covered. When discussing a warranty with a dealer, it’s a good idea to get the terms in writing to read over when you’re out of the pressurized atmosphere of a showroom. If you like to tinker with or modify cars, then you may also void the coverage.

The warranty may also be worth it to you if you feel that an inflated car loan beats the risk of high repair bills, or if you enjoy certain towing, tire repair, or car loan perks. With more and more cars relying on electronic components, diagnosing problems can get expensive. But a better idea might simply be to look for makes and models that have a positive history of minimal repair problems, reducing the odds you’ll need the coverage in the first place.

Most of us can appreciate a decent cup of joe. Then, there are those who obsess over bean sourcing, brew temperatures, and whether their paper filter is unbleached. For these friends and relatives, a gift card to the local franchise drive-thru probably won’t do. Check out 11 thoughtful gifts for the coffee and tea lovers in your life.

Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Thanks for helping us pay the bills!

1. KOMBUCHA JAR AND BREW KIT; $65

For the uninitiated, Kombucha is a tea fermented with (good) bacteria that’s believed to be a rich source of probiotics and antioxidants. This brew kit allows enthusiasts to mix up their own exclusive 5-liter batch. It’s also dishwasher-safe and comes with a recipe booklet.

Find It: Uncommon Goods

2. FELLOW STAGG POUR OVER KETTLE; $79

Pour-over coffee aficionados have taken the time to learn the correct brewing methods using a filter and hot water kettle. Fellow makes the process a little more precise with this stainless steel kettle, which has a built-in thermometer (for monitoring ideal water temperature) and an easily-aimed gooseneck spout for spot-on pouring.

Find It: Amazon

3. MISTOBOX SUBSCRIPTION; $20 PER MONTH

Can’t find a quality coffee roaster near you? MistoBox lets users select flavor preferences and then matches them with a high-quality grind that’s shipped directly to their door every month. An extra $15 upgrades the first shipment to a holiday gift box, including a mug, two coffee sample grinds, and a festive package.

Find It: MistoBox

4. HAY CLIP CLIP SPOON; $10

Measuring spoons for coffee can be easily misplaced; bags of grounds can fail to seal properly, hastening a loss of flavor. Why not solve two problems with this brass-colored steel spoon that has a spring clip for a handle?

Find It: MoMA

5. MERLOT INFUSED COFFEE; $20

Cover all your bases by gifting your coffee-slash-wine enthusiast this merlot-infused coffee. The Arabica coffee beans have been aged in oak Merlot wine barrels to absorb the taste and scent of the famous wine. It’s alcohol-free, so they’ll remember to thank you.

Find It: Uncommon Goods

6. OXO COLD BREW COFFEE MAKER; $50

Cold brewing is the hot trend in coffee at the moment, offering lower-acidity results than conventional methods. This OXO brewer makes the process simple and still allows the user to serve up their brew warm or chilled. If you prefer the latter, the device’s silicone seal will keep it fresh in the fridge for up to two weeks.

Find It: Amazon

7. BLOOMING TEA; $21

Find yourself a clear teapot—not included—and watch as a selection of bud packets “bloom” in hot water while brewing to create drinkable works of art. Jasmine, peach, and chrysanthemum green teas are hand-sewn to the buds to create the effect.

Find It: Uncommon Goods

8. ESPRO FRENCH PRESS P5; $60

Espro promises that the P5 will make some of the smoothest, lowest-grit coffee or loose-leaf tea you’ve ever tasted. The Specialty Coffee Association of America agreed, awarding it the Best New Piece of Consumer Equipment Award for 2016; the thick glass wall ensures better heat retention.

Find It: Amazon

9. PURE TEA STARTER KIT; $50

Single estate teas are presented exclusively from a single supplier, making for better consistency. Silver Needle offers an introductory single estate sampler, along with a glass teapot for premium steeping.

Find It: Silver Needle Co.

10. COOLGEAR BRU COLD BREW COFFEE SYSTEM; $40

Not everyone wants or needs to brew up a vat of iced coffee. That’s where Coolgear comes in: Their Bru is a single-serve drip coffee maker that brews cold directly into a portable 14-ounce container. It’s the freshest coffee you can get while stuck in traffic.

Find It: Amazon

11. TOAST LIVING CARAFE; $65

For coffee lovers who want to keep it basic, Toast Living’s carafe is wonderfully understated. Just add ground coffee to the filter basket and pour over hot water for a minimalist experience.

Find It: Amazon

Edward Pearson was in his 90s when he told a newspaper reporter about the most magical day of his childhood.

“As long as I live,” he said, “and I’ve lived quite a few years, I’ll never forget that experience.”

It was December 1890, and a young Pearson was wandering the aisles of the Boston Store, an upscale department store in Brockton, Massachusetts, when he turned a corner and saw a portly man with a white beard and a red suit.

“All of a sudden, right in front of me, I saw Santa Claus,” he recalled. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.” The man smiled and approached Pearson. Like most kids, Pearson had only seen interpretations of Santa in magazine illustrations, never in the flesh. But here, in a department store in a small town near Boston, was the man himself.

In reality, Santa was James Edgar, the owner of the Boston Store and a man who bore a resemblance to the holiday icon long before he ever asked a tailor to fashion a costume for him. For the hundreds of kids who visited his store, Edgar became something their eyes could hardly believe: the first department store Santa.

Edgar was born in Duns, Berwickshire, Scotland in 1843, arriving in the United States some 24 years later [PDF]. A big, jolly man who carried his generosity with him everywhere, Edgar opened the Boston Store—later renamed Edgar’s—in 1878 and promptly began to personify the holiday spirit.

While other area stores often had their workers staying late, Edgar closed his store four evenings a week so workers could be home with their families. If a customer wanted to put an item on layaway, he gave them four percent monthly interest on whatever amount they had deposited. If a child in the area was in need of medical attention and had no money, Edgar would make sure they got the help they needed. While he did it anonymously, it wasn’t hard to figure out who was behind it.

With one daughter of his own, Edgar loved kids. He hired trolleys to ferry thousands of them into a nearby grove for a Fourth of July picnic every year, where he enjoyed dressing up in costume for their amusement. He was Uncle Sam one year and a cricket player the next. He’d climb to the roof of his store and toss pennies into the crowd below.

For Christmas, Edgar originally donned a clown costume to spread cheer inside his store. He did this for years until, in 1890, the idea struck him to try his hand at portraying Santa, using the Thomas Nast illustrations of the character from 1860s issues of Harper’s magazine as inspiration. Edgar made his way into Boston, hired a tailor, and picked up his Santa suit.

“I have never been able to understand why the great gentleman lives at the North Pole,” he once said of his ambitions. “He is so far away. He is only able to see the children one day a year. He should live closer to them.”

To say children were awestruck would not be an exaggeration. Like Pearson, they had never conceived of meeting their mysterious benefactor face-to-face before. Lines began to spiral out of the store and around the block, surging when school was let out. Edgar had planned on being Santa for just an hour a day and three on Saturdays, but he eventually had to hire a second man to play Santa when the demand outstripped his energy.

The notion of a living Santa was so intriguing that Edgar’s store attracted visitors from as far away as New York and Rhode Island. By the following year, several other stores across the country had picked up on the idea, which helped bolster foot traffic and sales. Unlike many of his successors, however, Edgar never had a place to sit and idle. He roamed his store, actively seeking out children so they could confide in him.

By the time Edgar died in September 1909, the department store Santa had become a tradition. The owners of his namesake property also seemed determined to continue his philanthropy, devoting an entire floor to cobbling shoes for the poor during the 1920s.

Edgar was not the first man to put on a Santa costume: because of the character’s many incarnations—from 4th century bishop to Coca-Cola advertising icon—that will forever be an issue of semantics. But he was the first documented department store Santa, and he arguably was the man who most closely resembled the character in terms of the good will he circulated. When he died, his funeral service was held in his second-floor apartment in Brockton. As soon as local schools let out for lunch, hundreds of children filed past his casket to pay their respects.

Additional Sources
“Original Department Store Santa,” The Billings Gazette, December 1972 [PDF]; “Department Store Santas Owe Paychecks to Col. Jim Edgar,” Enterprise, Dec. 20, 1987 [PDF]; “The First Santa Claus,” Yankee, 1979 [PDF].

More than 50 years since its premiere on CBS on December 9, 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas remains one of the most beloved holiday specials of all time. Like Charlie Brown himself, the flaws—scratchy voice recordings, rushed animation—have proven endearing. Take a look at some facts behind the show that killed aluminum trees, the struggles to animate Chuck’s round noggin, and why Willie Mays is the unsung hero of Peanuts.

1. CHARLES SCHULZ WASN’T REALLY INTERESTED IN GETTING INTO ANIMATION.

Since the debut of Peanuts in 1955, Schulz and United Press Syndicate, which distributed the strip, had gotten a steady stream of offers to adapt the characters for film and television; the artist was also directly petitioned by young readers, who would write Schulz asking when Snoopy would come to some kind of animated life. His stock reply: “There are some greater things in the world than TV animated cartoons.”

He relented for Ford Motors—he had only ever driven a Ford—and allowed Charlie Brown to appear in a series of commercials for the Ford Falcon in the early 1960s. The spots were animated by Bill Melendez, who earned Schulz’s favor by keeping the art simple and not using the exaggerated movements of the Disney films—Bambi, Dumbo—Melendez had worked on previously.

2. WILLIE MAYS PLAYED A PART IN GETTING IT MADE.

Schulz capitulated to a full-length special based on the professional reputations of his two collaborators. The cartoonist had seen and enjoyed executive producer Lee Mendelson’s documentary on baseball player Willie Mays, A Man Named Mays; when Mendelson proposed a similar project on Schulz and his strip, he agreed—but only if they enlisted Melendez of the Ford commercials. The finished documentary and its brief snippet of animation cemented Schulz’s working relationship with the two and led Schulz to agree when Mendelson called him about a Christmas special.

3. CBS AND COCA-COLA ONLY GAVE THEM $76,000 TO PRODUCE IT.

When Coke executives got a look at the Schulz documentary and caught Charlie Brown on the April 1965 cover of Time, they inquired about the possibility of sponsoring an hour-long animated holiday special. Melendez felt the short lead time—only six months—made that impossible. Instead, he proposed a half-hour, but had no idea how much the show should be budgeted for; when he called colleague Bill Hanna (of Hanna-Barbera fame) for advice, Hanna refused to give out any trade secrets. Melendez wound up getting a paltry $76,000 to cover production costs. (It evened out: Schulz, Mendelson, and Melendez wound up earning roughly $5 million total for the special through 2000.)

4. IT WAS GOING TO HAVE A LAUGH TRACK.

In the ‘60s, it was standard procedure to lay a laugh track over virtually any half-hour comedy, even if the performers were drawn in: The Flintstones was among the series that used a canned “studio audience” to help cue viewers for jokes. When Mendelson told Schulz he didn’t see the Peanuts special being any different, the artist got up and left the room for several minutes before coming in and continuing as if nothing had happened. Mendelson got the hint.

5. SNOOPY’S VOICE IS JUST SPED-UP NONSENSE.

The early Peanuts specials made use of both untrained kids and professional actors: Peter Robbins (Charlie Brown) and Christopher Shea (Linus) were working child performers, while the rest of the cast consisted of “regular” kids coached by Melendez in the studio. When Schulz told Melendez that Snoopy couldn’t have any lines in the show—he’s a dog, and Schulz’s dogs didn’t talk—the animator decided to bark and chuff into a microphone himself, then speed up the recording to give it a more emotive quality.

6. SCHULZ HATED JAZZ.

The breezy instrumental score by composer Vince Guaraldi would go on to become synonymous with Peanuts animation—but it wasn’t up to Schulz. He left the music decisions to Mendelson, telling a reporter shortly after the special aired that he thought jazz was “awful.”

7. CHARLIE BROWN’S HEAD WAS A NIGHTMARE TO ANIMATE.

Because Melendez was unwilling to stray from Schulz’s distinctive character designs—which were never intended to be animated—he found himself in a contentious battle with Charlie Brown’s noggin. Its round shape made it difficult to depict Charlie turning around; as with most of the characters, his arms were too tiny to scratch his head. Snoopy, in contrast, was free of a ball-shaped cranium and became the show’s easiest figure to animate.

8. SCHULZ WAS EMBARRASSED BY ONE SCENE.

Careful (or repeated) viewings of the special reveal a continuity error: in scenes where Charlie Brown is standing near his tree, the branches appear to grow from moment to moment. The goof annoyed Schulz, who blamed the mistake on two animators who didn’t know what the other was doing. 

9. IT ALMOST GOT SCRAPPED BY COKE.

Mendelson recently told USA Today that an executive from McCann-Erikson—the ad agency behind Coke—paid him an impromptu visit while he was midway through production. Without hearing the music or seeing the finished animation, the ad man thought it looked disastrous and cautioned that if he shared his thoughts with Coca-Cola, they’d pull the plug. Mendelson argued that the charm of Schulz’s characters would come through; the exec kept his opinion to himself.

10. CBS HATED IT, TOO.

After toiling on the special for six months, Melendez and Mendelson screened it for CBS executives just three weeks before it was set to air. The mood in the room was less than enthusiastic: the network found it slow and lacking in energy, telling Melendez they weren’t interested in any more specials. To add insult, someone had misspelled Schulz in the credits, adding a “T” to his last name. (Schulz himself thought the whole project was a “disaster” due to the crude animation.)

11. GOOD THING HALF THE COUNTRY WATCHED IT.

Viewers weren’t nearly as cynical about Charlie Brown’s holiday woes as his corporate benefactors. Preempting a 7:30 p.m. EST episode of The Munsters, A Charlie Brown Christmas pulled a 50 share, meaning half of all households with a television turned on were watching it. (That amounted to roughly 15 million people, behind only Bonanza.) CBS finally acknowledged it was a winner, but not without one of the executives getting in one last dig and telling Mendelson that his “aunt in New Jersey didn’t like it.”

12. IT KILLED ALUMINUM TREE SALES.

Aluminum Christmas trees were marketed beginning in 1958 and enjoyed fairly strong sales by eliminating pesky needles and tree sap. But the annual airings of A Charlie Brown Christmas swayed public thinking: In the special, Charlie Brown refuses to get a fake tree. Viewers began to do the same, and the product was virtually phased out by 1969. The leftovers are now collector’s items.

13. THERE’S A LIVE-ACTION PLAY.

Up until 2013, anyone staging a live-action rendition of A Charlie Brown Christmas for their local school or theater had one thing in common: they were copyright infringers. The official rights to the story and characters weren’t offered until recently. Tams-Witmark fields licensing requests for the play, which includes permission to perform original songs and advertise with the Peanuts characters—Snoopy costume not included.

14. THE VOICE OF CHARLIE BROWN WAS ARRESTED.

Peter Robbins continued voicing Charlie Brown until he turned 13 years old, at which point puberty prohibited him from continuing. In November 2015, the 59-year-old Robbins pleaded guilty to making criminal threats against a mobile home park manager and a sheriff. According to CBS News, the troubled former actor claimed that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder led him to make the threats. He was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison.

Additional Sources:
The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation
Schulz and Peanuts
A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition.

Every year, around 486,000 people are medically treated for burns in the United States. Severe cases can result in grafting and long-term monitoring. But a new company is hoping a technological breakthrough may provide a less painful alternative.

New York biotech firm RenovaCare has obtained a patent for the SkinGun, a space-age-looking tool that contains harvested stem cells from a patient’s own skin and then sprays the solution over the affected burn area. The hope is that the healthy stem cells will begin to heal the damaged skin with only minimal intervention and mild scarring.

First, a physician obtains cells from a one-inch patch of undamaged skin. Next, the stem cells extracted from the sample are suspended in a water vial, which is then loaded into the SkinGun. RenovaCare reports that patients can be treated in as little as 90 minutes after arriving for care, with new skin developing within days. The company estimates that 97.3 percent of the harvested cells remain viable after being ejected.

Nearly 50 patients at the University of Pittsburgh have been treated with the device. RenovaCare is hoping to pursue large clinical trials to obtain clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to market the SkinGun commercially.

[h/t CNN]

If you have access to an industrial crane and a piano, why not use the former to drop the latter from a great height? That’s the attitude behind the annual piano drop in Winters, California, where the township gathers to see an old, discarded piano raised 60 feet (or more) off the ground and then dropped, smashing to the asphalt below.

The pianos are gathered from a stable of unwanted instruments that would typically be found in the dump or gathering mold in someone’s basement—too warped or rusted to be of any practical use. After a mini-memorial service during which organizers play Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” the pianos are sent hurtling toward the ground. Kids even gather up afterward to collect the broken bits. MIT students performed a similar ritual starting in 1972, when aeronautical engineering student Charlie Bruno decided to push a baby grand off a six-story building.

Roughly 350 attendees watched this year’s drop, which has a close cousin in the military-inspired ritual of burning unwanted pianos. Last year, a piano in Winters was also apparently thrown off a bridge.

The musical sadism is overseen by the Winters City Council: Council member Bruce Guelden told Atlas Obscura that he considered this year’s drop a success because “nobody died.” We’re not really sure what’s going on in Winters, but we like it.

[h/t Atlas Obscura]

Recognizing a fellow human’s face is about more than just identifying a nose or mouth. It’s believed we use something called configural recognition to process the entire facial structure altogether, which is why there’s often a little bit of a lag time when we see a face upside-down (humans have an easier time recognizing other objects, like cars or houses, that have been flipped).

Researchers now believe chimpanzees have something similar to configural recognition. Only they use it to recognize each other’s butts.

In a paper published in the journal PLOS One, researchers from the Netherlands and Japan observed chimps as they examined photographs of primate buttocks and played a variation on the “match” game, coupling two identical butts together on a touch screen. They appeared slower to recognize posteriors when the images were rotated 180 degrees, indicating they rely on the same configural clues humans do. The researchers also carried out experiments on humans, who (as expected) took a longer time to process images of human faces flipped upside-down, but whose reaction time didn’t change significantly when they were presented with upside-down images of human behinds.

It’s believed chimps have evolved to focus on butts due to their proximity to them while moving in groups. Walking on four legs, they’re often (literally) faced with a rump ahead of them. Since ovulating females usually have red, swollen rear ends, male chimps benefit from being able to identify them. What’s more, chimps can typically separate an ovulating non-relative from a relative, preventing inbreeding.

The paper concludes, “The findings suggest an evolutionary shift in socio-sexual signalling function from behinds to faces, two hairless, symmetrical and attractive body parts, which might have attuned the human brain to process faces, and the human face to become more behind-like.”

[h/t Discover]

Certain Christmas traditions never seem to go out of style. Along with wreaths, gingerbread cookies, and reruns of A Christmas Story sits the poinsettia, a red-tinged leafy arrangement that’s become synonymous with the holiday. Upwards of 100 million of them are sold in the six weeks before December 25.

Why do people associate the potted plant with seasonal cheer? Chalk it up to some brilliant marketing.

In 1900, a German immigrant named Albert Ecke was planning to move his family to Fiji. Along the way, they became enamored of the beautiful sights found in Los Angeles—specifically, the wild-growing poinsettia, which was named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the U.S.-Mexican ambassador who first brought it to the States in 1828. Ecke saw the appeal of the plant’s bright red leaves that blossomed in winter (it’s not actually a flower, despite the common assumption) and began marketing it from roadside stands to local growers as “the Christmas plant.”

The response was so strong that poinsettias became the Ecke family business, with their crop making up more than 90 percent of all poinsettias sold throughout most of the 20th century: Ecke, his son Paul, and Paul’s son, Paul Jr., offered a unique single-stem arrangement that stood up to shipping, which their competitors couldn’t duplicate. When Paul III took over the business in the 1960s, he began sending arrangements to television networks for use during their holiday specials. In a priceless bit of advertising, stars like Ronald Reagan, Dinah Shore, and Bob Hope were sharing screen time with the plant, leading millions of Americans to associate it with the holiday.

While the Ecke single-stem secret was eventually cracked by other florists—it involved grafting two stems to make one—and their market share dwindled, their innovative marketing ensured that the poinsettia would forever be linked to Christmas.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

Sometime in early 2017, residents of Seattle, Washington, will be able to experience what promises to be a revolution in shopping: Amazon’s first brick and mortar retail grocery store, Amazon Go, which promises to hold all the thrill of shoplifting without the legal consequences.

According to the company’s press release, Amazon Go will use a mobile app to completely transform how shoppers interact with a consumer environment. A visitor will be able to walk into the compact, 1800-square-foot space to grab food and beverage items, including ready-to-eat goods. Tracking sensors keep tabs on both the shoppers and the product items, knowing when they’ve been put in a cart or back on the shelf. When the trip is over, visitors simply walk through electronic turnstiles and out the door with their bags—the app performs a “checkout” that completely eliminates conveyor belts and lines.

Amazon calls it “Just Walk Out Technology”—a model it’s been working on for the past four years. The company plans to emulate it in a series of locations across the country. You can sign up for an email notification of when they’re open to the public here.

[h/t engadget]