A few years ago, we posted some contenders for the earliest-born person to be photographed. The problem with all of them is lack of credible documentation on their birth year, and the best documented of those contenders was born in the mid-1740s. 

But then there is John Owen, who was born in 1735 in Connecticut and whose photograph was taken shortly before his death in 1843 (at the age of 107). What makes his claim about being born in 1735 any more reliable than others? Because he was a soldier in the French and Indian War, which lasted from 1754 to 1763. Military records show that Owen enlisted in 1758, and there are payroll records after that. Some sources list Owen's birth year as 1741, so his real age depends on whether he was 17 or 23 years old when he joined the army. Even if he was really born in 1741, he could still be the earliest-born person photographed. 

However, Owen's new claim to fame is based on his death date, which is well documented as being February 24, 1843. Previously, Jonathan Benjamin was commonly accepted to be the last surviving veteran of the French and Indian War. But Benjamin died in 1841, while Owen survived two more years. John Owen also served in the American Revolution and lived quite a long and colorful life afterward. -via Boing Boing 

Grub is not a normal cat. He has a genetic disorder that's quite rare in cats, so rare that medical specialists are studying him to learn about it. You might imagine that it's less rare than they know, because most cats with mucopolysaccharidosis wouldn't survive long enough to be properly diagnosed.

Stephanie took Grub in as a foster cat through the rescue organization Good Mews in Georgia. She and her family fell for the kitten, and immediately knew he was now in his forever home, well before his diagnosis. Gub can get around, but he can't run or jump and has various special needs, in addition to looking different from the average house cat. But he's a calm and affectionate kitten, and relates well to his caregivers. Grub is also very much loved by his humans, who want to make the most of the time he has. You can follow Grub's progress at Instagram. 

In case you haven't been keeping up, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which preceded most of the Revolutionary War but is designated as the milestone that marks beginning of the United States of America. There are a lot of celebratory events planned for this year, all across the country. The Smithsonian Institution, being more of a museum than anything else, has an entire year of special events and exhibitions planned, with the first being an event from the National Portrait Gallery on February 14th. They also have a list of festivals and events in other parts of the country in their article Ten of the Most Exciting Ways to Commemorate America’s 250th This Year. 

But wherever you may plan to go this year, something historical happened, or else you can see the best of America on display. Explore the map called 250 Places to Celebrate America to make the most of your travels this year. 

But meanwhile, you probably have obligations at home, so you can start celebrating early by watching some historical television and brush up on the birth of the country. Smithsonian has  recommendations for the Best TV Shows About the American Revolution. I'm sure they'll have more on this historic year coming soon. 

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone! I hope the weather is overcast where you are, so the local groundhog won't see his shadow and be scared back into his den for six more weeks. 

First, there was only the traditional folklore about a groundhog emerging from its hibernation. Then we got Punxsutawney Phil, who somehow became THE groundhog people were talking about on February second. Then in 1993, we got the movie Groundhog Day, which has become traditional TV fare for the day. But what we really need is a song, a Groundhog Day carol. And The Cyborg Tim stepped in to provide that song. It's not just a lively ditty, but a hard rock song with horror overtones about a ruthless groundhog that holds our fate in its hands. 

Still, you shouldn't worry too much about groundhogs and shadows today. Whether the critter sees his shadow today or not, according to the calendar there are still six more weeks until the spring equinox. -Thanks, Tim!

The Western Front of World War I concentrated its devastation in certain parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. The terrain was permanently deformed due to entrenchments and explosions. In fact, there's an area of France called the Red Zone which remains uninhabited due to the destruction.

Unexploded munitions can emerge from the bowels of the earth and, despite the passing of a century, remain active and dangerous. Such was the case of a German artillery shell measuring 8 inches long and an inch in diameter (the article says circumference, but I think that's in error) that was found by doctors in a Frenchman's rectum.

The Daily Mail reports that it was necessary to evacuate the hospital during the removal procedure. The patient has been referred to police, although it's not clear to me what crime he is alleged to have committed.

It's barely February and I think that we have a top contender for the Petchesky Prize.

-via Jarvis Best

UPDATE 2/2/2026: There is a photo of the shell circulating. If you're into that sort of thing.

Imagine you are a surgical patient, and your doctor is under pressure from elsewhere to let you die on the table. Imagine your surgeon suffers a heart attack during your operation, or lets his kid "help" with surgery. Or imagine you are a surgeon and a patient comes to you with an emergency hidden under a heavy and complicated theatrical costume.

Or, in the case of Angus Wallace, you respond to the classic "Is there a doctor on board?" request during an airline flight. The patient must have surgery before landing because that process could kill her, unless you cut her open using only what's available on the plane. Nothing is sterile and you have no trained assistants. That's a true story, as well as the others. Read them all in a list of five medical operations with a twist at Mental Floss. Only one of the cases ended in death, that one's a doozy.    

Nearly all domestic dogs are descended from the Eurasian gray wolf (Canis lupus). They first became pets long before we domesticated farm animals or developed agriculture or the written word, so we don't know where or when it happened. However, it only makes sense that the wolves who were the least fearful of humans got close enough to eat our leftovers. Their domestication was part natural selection and part deliberate breeding, and that's how we got the dogs we cherish so much today. 

There is plenty of evidence that ancient people loved their dogs just as much, even when their dogs weren't at all useful outside of companionship. This is probably because the puppies they raised learned to communicate with humans in a human way- the dogs made eye contact, which wolves will never do. They learned to read our moods and intentions. They learned that we like how they depend on us. They learned how to make us love them. Read how all this came about at LitHub. -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: Razvan Antonescu) 

The Comedy Store in Los Angeles opened in 1972 and soon became a mecca for those hoping to break into the big time in standup comedy. The nightclub became famous for incubating the careers of some of the biggest comedians of the last 50 years. Of course, there have been plenty of comedians who graced the stage at The Comedy Store or else waited tables and never made it big. And some of them swear that the place is haunted.

Ghostly apparitions appeared early in The Comedy Store, and they are dressed in garb from the 1940s. Maybe that's because the building was not new in 1972. It had been a nightclub before, one run by the mob, with plenty of grisly stories to go with its reputation. The ghosts don't hurt anyone, but the stories can be pretty scary. And that's why no one wants to go down into the basement at The Comedy Store.   

 

You may consider yourself a pretty sedentary person, maybe even a couch potato. But even so, you are constantly traveling through space. You travel thousands of miles every day as the earth rotates (24,000 if you live at the equator, less towards the poles). You are also traveling with earth around the sun. And the sun is moving, too. How far have we come?

As they say, there's an app for that. The Cosmic Odometer will calculate how far you've traveled through space by your date and time of birth. There will be some variance because they don't ask for latitude, but the totals are so enormous it doesn't matter. You can see my stats above. I have traveled far enough to reach the moon and back more than two million times, to Pluto 306 times, and 19% of a light year. As they also say, your mileage may vary. -via Boing Boing 

Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece known as the Mona Lisa is the world's most famous painting. As such, you might be surprised to find out it's a rather small portrait, and so many people go to the Louvre to see it that you can't really get close enough to study it. But that's okay, because we have plenty of photographs. We can admire her smile, her eyes, and ...where's her eyebrows? Did Lisa del Giocondo, the model for the portrait, have her brows plucked out? Or did Leonardo just leave them out of the picture? 

August Moon takes us through serious research on the subject of the Mona Lisa's eyebrows, and what they are supposed to look like. In the process, we find that many of the world's greatest paintings are not what they seem on the surface. That surface is constantly being messed with in the hopes of keeping the paintings clean and undamaged, which still ends up damaging them. And we get a lesson in what really makes the Mona Lisa such a unique and memorable portrait.  -via Laughing Squid 

When Spain conquered Mexico, it opened up trade in all sorts of previously unknown products from the New World. One was Lignum nephriticum, a type of wood that, when soaked in water, would produce a tincture useful for treating kidney and urinary ailments. Lignum nephriticum literally means kidney wood. Physician Nicolás Monardes first described the wood in 1569. He couldn't describe the plant it came from, though, because he'd never been to Mexico. Monardes wrote about soaking wood chips in water, and seeing the water turn blue. But then other Europeans described a different result. When the wood chips were soaked with water in a cup made of Lignum nephriticum, the water turned blue, yellow, orange, and red depending on the light! The liquid could even display more than one color at once.

Scientists of the time were more interested in the colors than they were with the wood's medicinal value. But why were the descriptions so different? Could Mexico have more than one type of kidney wood? For one reason or another, no one put too much energy into solving the mystery until the 20th century. Read about the real origins of Lignum nephriticum at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Safford, William Edwin) 

We think of camouflage as what animals use to blend in with their background. A ship that has zebra stripes that aren't even straight is not what a normal person would call camouflage. But a still photo doesn't do it justice, because ships are always in motion, and the enemy is looking for a ship in motion. If a ship sits still, it's probably not in a battle zone. 

Razzle Dazzle camouflage was developed in World War I in response to submarines attacking them with torpedos. In order to understand the mechanism behind the idea, we have to put ourselves in the place of an enemy submarine aiming a torpedo. The bedazzled ship doesn't have to be invisible; it just has to be hard to destroy. Did it work? Not as well as hoped for, but any edge is worth the effort to save a battleship and its huge crew. Half as Interesting takes us through the steps behind the design. The camouflage ends around 5:35; the rest is an ad for a good cause. 

The JJ Walser House in Chicago was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1903. The home is on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated a Chicago Landmark. Nevertheless, it is falling apart. The longtime owner died in 2019 and her family discovered she had taken out a mortgage to fix the roof. They couldn't afford the payments, so the home is in foreclosure. Since it has been unoccupied for six years (except for squatters), the house is deteriorating rapidly. 

Someone recently listed the house for sale at Zillow for far above the actual value, and drew the attention of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. The listing was deemed a fraud and was removed, but the images show how far the home has fallen. The Walser house is being auctioned by Fannie Mae. Various conservancy groups are interested, but none can afford the expensive repairs in addition to the purchase price. 

Frank Lloyd Wright is the most famous architect America has ever produced. His buildings display clean lines and beautiful details. Yet no one wants to actually live in his houses, since they are form over function. The flat roofs leak, the doorways are too short, and the lovely ledges and stairs are dangerous. Read the story of the Walser House at Dwell. -via Metafilter 
 
(Image credit: Zol87) 

Someone observed that when a chocolate ice cream cone sideswipes a vanilla ice cream cone, both of them end up with a bit of each other. Others of the TikTok generation rushed out to replicate the experiment because, hey, ice cream! James Orgill of the Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) explains why they don't just mix together and why it's always both cones involved.

I must admit he almost lost me in the middle of the video. I understand laminar flow, but not so much quantum physics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But hang on, because all he's explaining there is what's not happening. Then he compares the two ice cream cones to planets colliding and it all becomes clear. Still, all I could think of during this video is the old Reece's campaign: "You got your peanut butter on my chocolate! You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" Because after all, these ice creams are two great tastes that taste great together.   

You can buy all kinds of memorabilia on eBay, often for a pittance. It takes a good eye and often meticulous research to know if it has historical significance, a task way beyond volume sellers. In 2010, space historian and collector Robert Pearlman paid $5.50 for a bundle of "remove before flight" tags. These are tags attached to parts of aircraft like pins and covers that are protective on the ground, but must be removed in order for the aircraft to function. He intended to use the tags, listed as from the space shuttle program, as giveaways. 

About a year later, Pearlman decided to check out the numbers on the tags. Such tags are labeled so they can be inventoried before flight to make sure each component is removed. By cross-referencing the numbers with NASA records, he found the tags were removed from the doomed space shuttle Challenger before it exploded soon after launch 40 years ago this week. But NASA was in flux at the time, and Pearlman had no luck in finding out more about the journey the tags took from NASA to eBay. He hopes to trace their story before donating the tags to a museum. Read his account of these tags so far at Ars Technica. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: collectSPACE)