Global trade really opened up during the Age of Exploration, but it was an awfully long journey between oceans when you had to sail around the southern tips of Africa or South America and your trading partners were in the Northern Hemisphere. It would be a far shorter trip through the Arctic Ocean, but how? The fabled Northwest Passage was filled with icebergs and unmapped islands and the sea was frozen most of the year anyway. But intrepid explorers spent 300 years looking for that route, with expedition after expedition turning back or becoming stranded. Many died in the search. 

The first to successfully find a way around northern Canada and map the Northwest Passage was Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, better known as the first man to reach the South Pole. He accomplished this by using a much smaller ship and crew than previous expeditions. The tiny Gjøa was a 30-year-old fishing boat that was only 70 feet long. Amundsen selected only six men for his crew. The expedition set off from Norway in 1903. The ship was indeed icebound twice on the journey, once for almost two years, but the intact ship and crew reached Nome, Alaska, in 1906 and eventually continued on to San Francisco. Read how the Gjøa and crew survived and claimed a new trade route at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Michael Spiller) 

It's a good day when Bill McClintock comes out with a new music mashup. It's a great day when he mashes up two songs that are this familiar to me, like two old friends that I never knew were friends with each other. Here we have Queen's "We Will Rock You" mixed with "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath. This required some messing with the tempo, but if anyone can make it work, it's McClintock (previously at Neatorama). He calls this song "Rockanoid." 

Oh, but that's just the beginning. There are nine, count 'em, nine other rock-themed songs included in this mashup: "Sad But True" by Metallica, "Rock of Ages" from Def Leppard, "We Rock" by Dio, both "Let There Be Rock" and "For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)" by AC/DC, "Rock Hard Ride Free" from Judas Priest, "Rock 'n' Roll Rebel" by Ozzy Osbourne, Pat Benetar's "Heartbreaker," and "Rock You" by Helix. Good luck identifying them all in this fast-moving video. The only real drawback I find is that it should be much longer. 

An early rondellhund in Linköping, Sweden. (Image credit: Skvattram) 

If you've driven around a Swedish roundabout, you may have seen a homemade dog sculpture sitting in the grass center of the circle. They can be found in many places, and they vary widely in design. Who put them there? No one knows, and it's certainly not just one person. The roundabout dog, or rondellhund, is a real-world art meme, and it started in the Swedish city of Linköping. Wikipedia has the story of the first rondellhund that appeared in 2006. 

A rondellhund in Vårdsberg, Sweden. (Image credit: Peter Forss) 

People just liked the first dog, so they anonymously installed other dog sculptures in roundabouts in Sweden, or in traffic islands in smaller towns that have no roundabouts. The practice spread to  other countries, including Spain, Portugal, and the UK. 

This roundabout dog was spotted in Braga, Portugal. (Image credit: Bjornjobb) 

Most roundabout dogs are made of wood, but other materials are also used. There is no set design, and each fabricator puts their own spin on them. You can buy one from a company that makes them in custom colors, although from the pictures, those seem to end up at people's homes more than in public roundabouts. -via Metafilter 

Laurence Brown goes through the differences between housecleaning in the US and Britain. The US has air conditioning, which means cleaning AC filters as well as filters for the heating, the dryer, the dishwasher, the vacuum cleaner, the car, the lawn mower, and the fish tank. Further climate control methods mean you need to clean the ceiling fans in America. Meanwhile in Britain, dishes are washed by hand and some people don't rinse the soap off of them! Does this mean they get a lot of soap buildup in their drying towels, or are you just eating detergent with your next meal?  

Personally, I am glad that wall-to-wall carpet is declining in the US. You can clean carpets all day, every day, and they are still nasty, especially if you have children or pets or a spouse or a garden. I have my own system of house cleaning, called procrastination. I need true motivation to do it, like company coming over. 

Note: Fairy washing up liquid is made by Proctor and Gamble, and its the same formula as Dawn dishwashing liquid in the US. This video has a one-minute skippable ad at 3:30. 

The ‘girl with the pearl earring’ by #Vermeer will come to #Osaka in August during the renovation of the #Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. Judging from the press-conference, she is very popular in #Japan. Maybe this is her last tour, since she is ‘advancing in age’ like all of us pic.twitter.com/I862Y1XUNi

— Dutch ambassador to Japan (@GillesBP) May 27, 2026

For the first time in a decade, Johannes Vermeer's masterpiece Girl With a Pearl Earring is traveling outside of Netherlands. The artwork will go on display at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka in August. To announce the exhibit, the museum held an event attended by a life-size version of a rabbit character called Miffy, dressed as the subject of the painting. The event went viral. 

Miffy, who is hugely popular in Japan, is also a Netherlands export. She was created by Dutch artist Dick Bruna, who later sued Hello Kitty company Sanrio over their suspiciously similar rabbit character named Cathy. Using Miffy as a "spokesrabbit" for the Vermeer loan appears to have many layers. 

Girl With a Pearl Earring normally resides at the Mauritshuis in the Hague, which is closed for renovations. But you can order a crocheted Miffy doll in the Pearl costume through their online shop. Both the costumed character and the doll have a pearl earring, but strangely it is not attached to the rabbit ears.   -via Everlasting Blort 

The internet began as "a complicated, global interconnected system almost entirely made up of people who do not want to be told what to do." This was fine for free countries, mostly, although anyone could see how scammy and toxic the system could become. But what about totalitarian nations who were used to controlling what information their citizens are exposed to? China saw the danger early, and locked down what kind of access they would allow. Russia was busy going through a lot of changes in the 1990s, and confronted the danger to government oppression relatively late in the game. But when they did, it was like holding back a flood with a bucket. One method of controlling the World Wide Web they use is to block sources from outside of Russia, directly and also indirectly by making the whole internet slow and creaky. At the same time, they created their own internet services, from providers to websites to social media platforms, that seem like just weird, ersatz alternatives in order to censor what Russians see. Half as Interesting takes us on a tour of the odd Russian internet.

A movie about weather forecasting doesn't sound all that exciting, until you realize that one forecast was the difference between life and death for an invading force, and even the course of the entire war. That's the premise of the movie Pressure that opened this weekend- the weather forecast for the D-Day Invasion of Normandy. Brendan Frasier plays General Dwight Eisenhower and Andrew Scott plays James Martin Stagg, the chief meteorologist of the Allied forces in Europe. The tension is between meteorologists who disagreed on what weather would greet the invading Allies, and whose advice Eisenhower would trust when he set the date. 

The movie, as you might expect, plays around with the timeline and emphasizes relationships between characters that probably didn't happen as portrayed. But the competing forecasts are real. Stagg was actually a geophysicist and was surprised at his assignment. He had a different philosophy of weather forecasting that was often at odds with meteorologists, especially US Army forecasters led by Irving P. Krick. These forecasting methods as used for the D-Day decision are explained at Smithsonian. It contains movie spoilers, if you aren't already aware of what date the Allies invaded Normandy. -via Strange Company   

The process of giving birth may be a shock and a new experience to modern people, but pre-civilization communities knew what they were doing. A new mother had already helped her own mother, her sisters, and her friends through it, under the supervision of older women who knew more than they did. Sure, men were excluded, which is why women became the experts in childbirth and by extension, other medical events. Giving birth was a team effort, and everyone did their part. 

We lost this type of communal childbirth in the modern world, when men took over medical science and women who practiced it were labeled as witches. Not that it ever really went away, especially in traditional cultures. I am glad to see that some of these practices are coming back. While my mother was completely knocked out for labor and delivery, my daughter had a doula, a midwife, and a woman obstetrician in a birthing center that was anything but medicalized. 

This image is not AI, nor is it Photoshopped. This is left-handed Estonian javelin thrower Magnus Kirt competing in the 2022 Estonian Athletics Championships. He appears to have a unique style that includes throwing a javelin further by running it through the back of his head as he launches. Shades of Phineas Gage! But Kirt was not hurt; in fact he is fine, and has since retired from the sport with the national record, and has happily become a father. This photograph is an optical illusion.

Can you figure out what happened before you learn the story behind the photo? You probably can, but in case you are stumped, it's all explained at PetaPixel. Although I doubt the effect was in any way intended by the photographer. The photograph is more likely a happy accident, and not the unhappy accident it first appears to be. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Stanislav Moshkov/Õhtuleht Photo) 

Key West is the southernmost part of the continental United States, but up until the early 20th century, it was hard to get to. Now there's a 113-mile highway that has 42 bridges (one is seven miles long) that will take you to all the Florida Keys. The Overseas Highway is an amazing feat of engineering, and you might be surprised to learn that it started out as a railroad. 

Henry Flagler was one of the founding partners of Standard Oil, a very wealthy man, who fell in love with Florida. In the 1880s, the biggest city in the state only had 10,000 people, but Flagler was about to change that. He bought hotels. And he needed railroads to bring in guests. Flagler became obsessed with transportation in Florida, and bought or built railroads all along the eastern coast. In 1905, he launched his biggest project yet- building a railroad through the Keys. He set up 83 work camps for 5,000 men at a time. He built floating concrete mixers. He shipped in millions of gallons of fresh water. And in 1912, his railroad was open all the way to Key West. It was nice while it lasted, but the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 caused so much damage that the state of Florida took over the railroad. And it became the foundation of the highway. 

That's only part of the story. Turning a railroad into the Overseas Highway took some imagination. Read how it all happened at The Autopian. 

(Image credit: Tinsley Advertising; Mercedes Streeter) 

There are now seven films in the Jurassic Park franchise, because people like adventure movies with dinosaurs. The first movie back in 1993 set the stage with amazing breakthroughs in computer-generated imagery that made the dinosaurs seem real, and every subsequent film upped the ante by making the dinosaurs bigger and more dangerous. But each iteration makes less and less sense overall because the characters constantly forgot the lesson of the first film. 

In the first movie, the dinosaurs took up only about 15 minutes of the more than two-hour film. The actual story was a deep dive into the ethics and philosophy of messing with Mother Nature, which makes it a think piece compared with the many sequels. It is also the only one of the series directed by Steven Spielberg. In this video, InCinematic looks at the crucial conversations that unveil the true meaning of the story, and how Spielberg frames them to emphasize the point. It's no wonder the only two quotes you recall from any of the Jurassic Park movies are from Jeff Goldblum's character Dr. Ian Malcolm. 

YouTuber Max Miller makes historic recipes and shares the results online. Recently, he posted a video about a cheesecake recipe in a book by Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman famous for ending all speeches in the Senate, regardless of the subject, by calling for the destruction of Carthage. Cato's recipe for savillum (cheesecake) can be found here.

Miller's video mentions other Roman recipes that I suspect you haven't tried yet. They're listed in Apicius, a Fifth Century AD cookbook that you can read in Latin or English.

There are three recipes for pig uterus: grilled, boiled, and, if I understand the text correctly, pickled.

Cook a pig uterus and slip it into the backpack of a friend.

The army of the Roman Republic wasn't much compared to that of the Roman Empire that came afterward. The size and fierce reputation of that army was in large part the work of Gaius Marius. Marius served as consul of the Roman Republic for seven terms. He came from a humble background, and worked his way up the political ladder, and therefore many of his reforms were in extending privileges to common people that were once reserved for the aristocracy and landed gentry. 

That included the Roman military. Previously restricted to land owners, the military was expanded to a professional force open to warriors from all over Italy. He took care of veterans, too. But one innovation you might never have heard of is that Marius ordered his men to carry backpacks. At first that seemed undignified to the soldiers, but it turned out to be crucial in the Battle of Aquae Sextiae which gave the Roman army a new reputation as a force to be feared. Read how backpacks gave them a battlefield advantage at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company 

(Image source: Francesco Saverio Altamura) 

In a trendy, upscale neighbhorhood of Pittsburgh close to the Allegheny River is the Pinksburgh House. It's an Airbnb that is marketed by the owners as the perfect place to stay for a girls' trip or a bachelorette party in the Steel City.

This eccentric two bedroom, one bathroom house is now listed for sale on Zillow.

The Walmart website is confused about whether this item they are selling is a book about Reconstruction in Arkansas or a bra.

It has an author and a cover photo but also comes in different bust sizes. pic.twitter.com/xNPVmHZGlB

— Hereward the Woke (@BamaExpat) May 28, 2026

Sadly, Walmart has already fixed the listing. Otherwise, it would have been possible to learn Reconstruction history in four different band sizes. Oddly, it appears that one cup size fits all for this highly specialized work.