Category: Science

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Corn Flakes Were Made to Get You to Stop Masturbating (+7 More Weird Facts About Cereal)

We all know that Frosted Flakes are “Grrrrrreat” and that Lucky Charms are “Magically delicious,” but I’m willing to bet that a lot of you have no idea what the real story behind some of your favorite cereals.

#1. Alpha-Bits were a concentrated effort to market cereal to children.

Image Credit: Post Cereals

Post Cereals worker Thomas Quigley, a father of seven, rose to a challenge to design a new cereal to market to kids – that combining fun, education, and sugar would be just the ticket.

He was right, of course, and the tradition of selling sugar to kids and calling it a healthy breakfast was born!

#2. Wheaties were the result of an accident.

Image Credit: Wheaties.com

In 1921, a clinician at a sanitarium accidentally spilled wheat gruel onto a hot stovetop. It dried into flakes and, inspired by the preparation of Corn Flakes, a miller and his employees tried 14 times and 36 varieties of wheat to find the perfect combination of wheat, salt, sugar, and malt syrup.

They became popular due to the first radio commercial jingle.

#3. Cap’n Crunch is designed to make you want more.

Image Credit: Quaker Oats

By the 1960s, some of the best-selling cereals marketed to kids had lots of sugar, and research showed that kids preferred cereal that floated and stayed crunchy (duh), so Quaker came up with a combination of corn and oat cereal that fit the bill.

Flavorist Pamela Low brought the key ingredient to the table, though, with a favorite combination from her childhood: brown sugar and butter sauce over rice. She called it a “want-more-ishness” and people couldn’t get enough – especially kids after the introduction of their seafaring mascot.

#4. The history of Chex is…not very nice.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Chex came from a pet food company called Ralston Purina that was led by one William Danforth and self-help author Webster Edgerly (who was looking to promote whole grains as people food). Edgerly was the founder of a cult-like movement that, in addition to promoting a healthy diet, was into mind control and racial supremacy (he advocated for non-whites to be castrated and believed watermelons were toxic to Caucasians?), but the diet piece made Edgerly interested in creating yummy sources of whole grains to his followers.

Together, the two first came up with Shredded Ralston, which was bite-sized squares of shredded wheat, changing it to “Chex” in 1950 to honor the brand’s checkerboard logo. Danforth continued to make pet food under the name Purina while Chex was sold off to General Mills.

#5. Your Corn Flakes were meant to curb sexual desire.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who worked as a physician in a Michigan sanitarium, believed (along with the rest of the Seventh-Day-Adentists) that irritating foods (like too much meat at breakfast) led to an increase in sexual desire, and that masturbation could lead to worsening illness.

He experimented until he came up with bland, grain-based breakfast flakes after he left boiled wheat out for too long and then decided what the heck, I’ll toast them and feed them to my patients anyway. Luckily, it worked out for all involved!

#6. Cheerios are the perfect result of over 500 test products.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Puffed cereals made from rice and wheat were all the rage in the 1930s and 1940s, and General Mills wanted to see if it worked with oats. Food science innovator Lester Borchardt and his team tested the oat-based recipe (and a variety of shapes) – over 500 formulas in all – before the winning donut shape won out.

It was originally called CheeriOats but the name was shortened after Quaker Oats filed a lawsuit over the use of the word ‘oats.” It was rebranded in 1945 and has been a top-selling cereal ever since.

#7. Honey Bunches of Oats combines the trifecta of popular cereal ingredients.

Image Credit: Post Cereals

In 1989, long-serving Post employee and cereal lover Vernon J. Herzing took his three favorite cereals – Toasties, Grape-Nuts Flakes, and Sugar Sparkle Flakes – and tried combining the three. Together with his daughter, Kimberly, they combined products until they landed on the perfect mix.

Its success has led to other flake-and-cluster cereals and myriad spinoffs.

#8. Rice Krispies are the product of an experiment and a gun.

Image Credit: Quaker Oats

In 1901, botanist Alexander Pierre Anderson wanted to know what might happen if he heated starch granules – he thought the water inside the granules would turn to steam and result in small puffing explosions (and of course, he was right). He then used a gas pipe and a sledgehammer to form a gun-like device that simplified the process.

He debuted his cool little trick at the 1904 World’s Fair and Quaker Oats snapped it up, marketing it as “food shot from guns.”

Interesting, right? You just never know what you’ll find online!

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Massive Hermit Crab Uses a Doll’s Head for Its Shell, and It’s Insanely Creepy

Hermit crabs are fairly common, easy-to-care-for pets that you’ve likely seen in a child’s classroom or at your local pet store. Interestingly, hermit crabs are not actual crabs because they have soft, exposed abdomens that leave them vulnerable to predators. That’s why they’re always looking for a new shell to call home.

They move in and out of shells – usually sea snail shells – as they grow.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

The coconut crab differs from a regular hermit crab in two important ways: first, it’s quite large – it can grow up to three feet long and weigh nine pounds – and second, when it outgrows the largest shell it can find, it grows a shell of its own.

Isn’t nature weird?

Image Credit: Wikipedia

One particular coconut crab, though, isn’t going to be growing his own shell anytime soon, since he found a lovely (meaning totally creepy) discarded doll’s head to live in instead of a shell.

A redditor shared a photo of the crab found on Henderson Island. Part of the Pitcairn Islands, the remote Pacific spot is vulnerable to human litter (obviously).

Image Credit: Reddit

There’s just something about dolls that creep some people out (including me), but I suppose the crab is perfectly happy living inside one – maybe he even considers the eyes cool little peepholes?

Image Credit: Reddit

I have no idea what I’m talking about, but hey, there’s got to be some reason he likes it.

The photo is also making people recall the mutant Toy Story toy that was a doll’s head on top of a crab’s body. A strange coincidence to be sure.

Image Credit: Disney

Not as strange as reality, but close.

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6 Incredible Ancient Finds Discovered by Workers Expanding the London Underground

The funny thing about people is that we’re kind of lazy. Instead of making entirely new cities out of scratch, we’re just like “Hey, why not just build right on top of this existing city? Way easier, amirite guys?”

As a result, digging around in cities can reveal all kinds of interesting things from the past. That’s what happened during the 2009-2018 expansion of the London Underground. Here are six totally neat things that came out of England’s latest modernization.

#1. A rare Roman medallion

Image Credit: Crossrail

Archaeologists who excavated Crossrail’s Liverpool Street uncovered more than 100 copper Roman coins and a bit of silver currency that ranged from 43 CE to 348 CE.

There was also a rare bronze medallion issued to mark the new year 245 CE. It was presented by Emperor Phillip I to a high-ranking government official and is the only one of its kind to date.

#2. A 55-million-year-old piece of amber

Image Credit: Crossrail

Engineers found the piece of amber from 50 feet below the dock bed beneath Canary Wharf before construction officially began – it’s the oldest amber ever to be found in London.

Don’t worry, no one has reported a mosquito containing dinosaur blood (yet). It did contain bubbles of trapped gasses that could yield new scientific insights about climate change.

#3. Victims of the Black Death

Image Credit: Crossrail Site

Archaeologists unearthed dozens of Black Death-related skeletons beneath London’s Charterhouse Square back in 2013 – the remains indicated that the people died during 14th and 15th century pandemics. Their teeth contained DNA traces of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that caused the bubonic plague, and carbon dating indicated the burial ground had been used from 1348-1350 and again during the 1430s.

Not all of the skeletons were plague victims, however, suggesting the burial ground was for dead in general.

#4. A humorous Victorian chamber pot

Image Credit: Crossrail

When you’re poo-ing in something that has to be dumped manually, a sense of humor seems to be a no-brainer – and this chamber pot found during Stepney Green Station in East London verifies my assumption. It was found in a 19th-century cesspit filled with tobacco pipes and fragments of pots like this chamber pot that contains a cartoon of a grimacing man and the phrase “Oh what I see/I will not tell. …when you in it want to p*ss/remember they who gave you this.”

Ha!

#5. A cluster of Roman skulls

Image Credit: Crossrail

In 2013, workers at the Liverpool Street station site dug up Roman pottery and around 20 Roman skulls. Similar skulls have been found in the area, and some archaeologists suspect they belonged to rebels led by the Iceni warrior-queen Boudicca, who revolted against the Empire during the 1st Century CE.

These skulls, however, appear to date after the uprising, and likely washed out of a Roman cemetery long ago.

#6. An 8,000-year-old tool

Image Credit: Crossrail Site

At North Woolrich, in southeast London, scientists discovered a Mesolithic-era site near the Thames where early humans crafted tools 8500-6000 years ago. There were traces of campfires, flint pieces, and an 8,000-year-old stone tool.

The find is only one of a handful that confirms humans lived in the Thames valley after an Ice Age hiatus.

I’m all for progress if it means finding more delightful things like these!

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This Poor Gentleman’s Ginormous Poop Nearly Killed Him (Seriously)

You might be proud of your ability to “hold it” until you get home, until after the kids go to bed, until a more convenient time, but take heed, people – holding in your poo for too long can literally kill you.

Proof? This 53-year-old Australian man went to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain, swelling, nausea, and a sudden inability to feel or move his right leg. Doctors confirmed the leg was paralyzed – it also had no palpable pulse and was cold to the touch.

At first, physicians were stumped. The man had no history of drug abuse, no risk of vascular disease, and really no significant or out-of-the-ordinary medical history at all.

What he did have was a really, really big poo.

Image Credit: BMJ Case Report

Holy sh*t.

A rectal examination and abdominal scans revealed massive fecal compaction that was putting life-threatening pressure on his abdominal organs. There was so much of it that it had distended his large intestine and put pressure on his right iliac artery, which is what caused the pain and paralysis in his leg.

The case was serious – he was showing signs of renal impairment and metabolic acidosis – the man required surgery to remove the backlog of poo and relieve the building pressure. The team wrote a case report, which expanded on their findings.

“Significant faecal disimpaction was performed manually under general anaesthesia with approximately 2 liters of feces removed.”

Image Credit: BMJ Case Report

2 liters, y’all. How long had it been since he’d gone?!

He was given constipation relief during recovery and left the hospital after four days. He finally walked again after 13 days.

Doctors are unsure what caused the massive build-up, but there’s no doubt that not being able to (or choosing not to) poop for a long period of time is incredibly dangerous. A teenage girl with a toilet phobia actually died in 2015 after holding it for 8 weeks, and this guy would have suffered the same fate had he not visited the doctors when he did.

Like my grandfather always said, better out than in. Never go against your body when death is on the line, my friends. You’ll come out on the losing end.

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Tumblr User Blows Everyone’s Mind with Post About a Horse’s Ass

What do a horse’s ass and a spaceship have in common? It’s definitely a question I’ve never once considered until today, because you wouldn’t tend to think they have anything in common.

But, it turns out I couldn’t be more wrong. Just follow along now.

It starts out simple enough…

Photo Credit: themattbusbyway

Indeed. Why WAS that gauge used? You’re about to find out…

Photo Credit: themattbusbyway

Get ready! You’re about to learn the wonders of wheel ruts!

Photo Credit: themattbusbyway

Of course the Romans were involved. Because they ran things back in the day.

Photo Credit: themattbusbyway

Now, the horses come in and it’s glorious…

Photo Credit: themattbusbyway

Trains and tunnels and rockets! Oh my!

Photo Credit: themattbusbyway

Well, my ass is officially astounded!

Photo Credit: themattbusbyway

Boom! Mind blown! ?

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Sorry, Night Owls: Your Brain Chemistry Could be Sabotaging Your 9-5 Schedule

I believe humanity can be divided into two basic categories: the morning people who are just bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the minute the sun comes up, and the night owls who hit their stride when the sun goes down.

While there’s nothing wrong with being one or the other, day people definitely have an advantage, since the world tends to operate on a 9-5 schedule.

“A huge number of people struggle to deliver their best performance during work or school hours they are not naturally suited to,” said lead researcher Dr. Elise Facer-Childs. “There is a critical need to increase our understanding of these issues in order to minimise health risks in society, as well as maximise productivity.”

Roughly 50% of people identify as a night owl, which for the purpose of the study meant going to bed “late” and rising after 8:20am.

Image Credit: Pixabay

If that’s the half of the world you fall into, this new study published in the journal Sleep proves it’s not just something you can up and change – your brain is physically and chemically different from those who leap out of bed in the morning.

The international team of scientists, led by the University of Birmingham in the UK, found that night owls have lower connectivity in the areas of the brain linked to consciousness. That means that during “normal” working hours, night people are affected by sleepiness, a lack of attention, and slower reaction times.

“This mismatch between a person’s biological time and social time – which most of us have experienced in the form of jet lag – is a common issue for night owls trying to follow a normal working day. Our study is the first to show a potential intrinsic neuronal mechanism behind why ‘night owls’ may face cognitive disadvantages when being forced to fit into these constraints,” explains Facer-Childs.

Image Credit: Pixabay

38 volunteers completed questionnaires and underwent MRI scans at various points of the day, all the while reporting how sleepy they felt.

Research concluded that morning people were less sleepy and had faster reaction times in the early morning working hours, while night owls hit their stride around 8 in the evening and struggled after rolling out of bed. Night owls did not, however, perform significantly better than morning people at 8pm, which could mean that society’s business hours could have a detrimental effect on those whose natural body rhythms encourage them to wake up later.

Facer-Childs explains how this can be applied to the real world:

“To manage this, we need to get better at taking an individual’s personal body clock into account – particularly in the world of work. A typical day might last from 9am-5pm, but for a night owl, this could result in diminished performance during the morning, lower brain connectivity in regions linked to consciousness and increased daytime sleepiness. If, as a society, we could be more flexible about how we manage time we could go a long way toward maximising productivity and minimising health risks.”

Which is to say, you just might have an argument if you want to lobby your boss for flexible work hours.

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Mysterious Skeleton of Powerful Viking Warrior Confirmed to be Female

Back in 1878, archaeologists came across a Viking burial chamber in an important trade center known as Birka. Judging by the way the body had bee placed into the grave, they assessed that it must have belonged to a prominent Viking warrior.

The body was found buried with their weapons, fancy clothes, and two horses. The assumption at the time was that the remains must have been those of a man,but a DNA study concluded that the remains were biologically female.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Critics of the findings argued that the weapons could have belonged to her husband or that there could have been two skeletons in the grave and the analysis was done on the wrong one. They argued that thinking that women were Viking warriors is wishful thinking and that we don’t have enough historical evidence to support the claim.

Researchers, though, are defending their findings in the journal Antiquity, saying the remains buried in the chamber are “unassailably female.” They confirm that there was only one skeleton in the grave, so they couldn’t have mixed up the remains, and asserted that all documentation was correct.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

“Grave Bj.581 had only one human occupant,” confirms Professor Neil Price to IFLScience. “An extra thigh-bone in the Bj.581 museum storage box – much hyped by our online critics – is clearly labeled as coming from another grave and had just been misplaced in the wrong box (the possibility of which is why bones are labeled to begin with!).”

He also continues to make an even finer point:

“To those who do take issue, we suggest that it is not supportable to react only now, when the individual has been shown to be female, without explaining why neither the warrior interpretations nor any supposed source-critical factors were a problem when the person in Bj.581 was believed to be male.”

Ideas about gender, of course, are not set in stone and vary between cultures, so it’s fair to say the skeleton could belong to a person who was both a female and a warrior, and also to accept the fact that being a woman might not have meant the same thing in that culture as it does in ours today.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Professor Price agrees.

“The body’s XX chromosomes revealed in the genomic study provide an unambiguously female sex determination, but the gender of the Bj.581 individual is a different matter. There is, of course, a broad spectrum of possibilities, many of them involving contested contemporary terminologies that can also be problematic to apply to people of the past.”

The archaeologists on the study expect that, in the future, we’ll probably find more and more Viking Age female warriors, whether they’re new finds or reassessments of remains already catalogued.

The future – and the past – is female, it would seem.

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This Guy Made a “Glitter Bomb” that Blows Up in Amazon Thieves’ Faces

YouTuber Mark Rober has a pretty impressive engineering background, having worked on the Mars Rover for NASA. Needless to say, when you steal a package from a guy like that, he’s going to start finding creative solutions to the problem. Guys like Mark aren’t content with just calling the cops and getting just regular old revenge against them. Nope, he spent six months building a glitter bomb that would self-detonate when the thieves opened the package.

To be fair, Mark had no choice! The local police told him they didn’t have time to investigate the robberies, even though Mark had captured the whole thing on his home surveillance camera.

Photo Credit: YouTube, Mark Rober

“I just felt like something needs to be done to take a stand against dishonest punks like this,” Mark explained.

“If anyone was going to make a revenge bait package and over-engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me.”

The glitter bomb also included four cameras to capture the thieves’ reactions, which took a good deal of ingenuity. There was also fart spray!

As a hint to any would-be thieves, Mark wrote a fake return address using the names and location of Home Alone. Luckily for viewers at home, it didn’t deter the thieves.

The glitter bomb package completely worked, as you can see in the video below.

Thankfully, the same bait package can be retrieved and used more than once. Genius.

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This Simple Dating Test Helps You Identify Potentially Abusive Partners

Here’s a shocking stat: intimate partner violence affects nearly 20 people around the U.S. every single minute. That’s over 10 million victims every year! It’s clearly a problem that needs to be tackled head-on, and we simply can’t afford to keep it hidden behind closed doors any longer.

Abusive relationships are notoriously difficult (and dangerous) to escape, so naturally, the best solution would be to never enter one in the first place. But with abuse so common, and abusers so sneaky, how can people possibly avoid them all?

One domestic violence counselor has a test to help out. The “No Test,” as he calls it, can help identify potential abusers early in a relationship.

Photo Credit: Pexels

“The No Test is basically to watch out for the way your partner responds the first time you change your mind or say no,” Rob explained on ABC News.

“While expressing disappointment is OK, it’s not the same as annoyed. Annoyed is ‘how dare you,’ a sign of ownership or entitlement.”

Rob points out that this test isn’t new knowledge for most women. Instead, the test helps validate that gut feeling that abusers are so good at manipulating you to ignore. It’s okay to say no to people. It never warrants anger.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

An important thing to remember, too, is that people don’t enter relationships with abusers on purpose. Abusers are quite good at charming people, and ending up in a relationship with an abuser is never your fault. Some abusers would pass the No Test with flying colors!

But if a partner fails this test? It’s a bright red flag that they’re a dangerous person, and you should trust your instinct.

As Rob said: “The only person who can stop the abuse is the person who is doing the abusing.”

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Police Solved a 25-Year-Old Murder by Using Ancestry DNA Data and a Dirty Napkin

Most of think that all these new DNA testing services are just a fun way to find out what mix of ethnicities you really are. Maybe you’ll discover an ancestor who was on the Mayflower, or get connected to a long-lost cousin.

It turns out, however, that the DNA databases you’re submitting your sample to can also be utilized by law enforcement agencies, helping them do things like, oh, let’s say, linking the DNA they got from the spit on your Chipotle napkin to the evidence from that cold-case murder you’ve managed to keep covered up since the 1990s.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Hope you enjoyed that extra guac. It’s the last you’re going to get for a while.

Minnesota businessman Jerry Westrom, 52,  was arrested by police after his DNA was linked to crime scene evidence from the scene of 35-year-old Jeanie Childs 1993 stabbing death. They got that DNA from a napkin he tossed into a trash can at his daughter’s hockey game. He was brought in for questioning and, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, denied all allegations, but the hard evidence meant he still had to post $1 million bail for his release. (Lest you feel sorry for Mr. Westrom, the DNA matched sperm found on a towel and a comforter in the murdered woman’s apartment. Gross.)

Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office

This isn’t the first time a personal ancestry company has helped police solve a cold case. DNA that matched records from one such company helped solve the 1986 murder of a 12-year-old girl in Washington State, and also helped catch the notorious Golden State Killer. A lot of people are up in arms about the ethics of using DNA matches from these databases to justify arrests, saying that most people send their spit to these companies for entertainment’s sake, and they don’t expect their distant cousins to get arrested as a result.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Police say that’s too bad. They’ve been using DNA evidence to solve cases, both hot and cold, for decades. Bio-data companies, recreational or not, are just one more source of that information – and they’re exploding in popularity. Considering that these services can match you up with third and fourth cousins based on one little q-tip of spit, a lot more criminals can look forward to the very real possibility of being arrested for a crime committed decades ago.

So, if you have any literal skeletons in your closet, or really anywhere that police may have noticed at any point in time…you may want to think twice before throwing out your used napkins.

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