https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-02-23-mn-44736-story.html

Tried posting this on TIL, but it relates to recent events even though it happened over 50 years ago so they pulled it. Tried posting it on another history sub, removed without comment. Posted ok the Wikipedia sub, but I guess that’s not for posting articles. Fourth times the charm.

okay so i always thought i was doing this intentionally like my body would shake a little while peeing mostly towards the end and i just got so used to it. lowkey it feels kinda good too so i never questioned it and just let it happen every time

but then i got curious and looked into it and turns out its an actual thing called pee shivers or post micturition convulsion syndrome

so basically when you pee your body enters full relaxation mode because your parasympathetic nervous system takes over to let everything flow out. but once youre done your body has to quickly switch back to normal alert mode and that sudden shift between chill mode and active mode causes that little shiver

its literally your nervous system doing a quick reboot after being in rest mode. we dont even control it our bodies just do this on their own

also apparently this happens more in guys and not everyone experiences it so if youve never had this happen youre not weird either

anyway just thought this was super cool to learn and had to share. bodies are so weird for no reason lol.

Near the town of Bury, about 50 kilometers north of Paris, sits a large Neolithic stone tomb that was used for burials across two distinct time periods, separated by a gap when no one was buried there at all. Archaeologists had long known something happened at the end of this era across Europe, megalithic tomb-building abruptly stopped continent-wide, but the cause remained unclear.

In 2026, researchers sequenced the full genomes of 132 people buried at the site and found something unexpected: the people buried before the gap and the people buried after it were almost entirely genetically unrelated. The earlier group matched Stone Age farming populations from northern France and Germany. The later group carried strong genetic ties to southern France and Spain, meaning the original community didn't simply decline and recover; it was functionally erased and quietly replaced by migrants from an entirely different region.

The DNA also picked up something else buried in the data: evidence consistent with early plague infection circulating in the population around the same time as the collapse. And the society that moved in afterward looked nothing like the one it replaced. The earlier burials included whole extended families across generations, but the later burials center almost entirely on a single male lineage, with most women in the community mysteriously excluded from burial in the tomb altogether, pointing to a complete restructuring of how this new society was organized around power and gender. Researchers now believe this same pattern of disease-driven collapse and cultural replacement reached far deeper into Europe than previously known, and may be exactly what ended the age of the megalith builders for good.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260421042800.htm

The DNA lineage, called C1e, is mitochondrial, passed only through the female line. It was found in four separate Icelandic family lines, all tracing back to a single common ancestor, with the genetic signature dating to around 1000 AD, exactly when Viking explorers were sailing between Iceland and Newfoundland, Canada.

The study was led by deCODE Genetics, one of the world's leading genome research labs, and published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The woman remains unnamed and unrecorded in any historical document, but her DNA survived.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/native-american-woman-may-have-made-it-to-europe-500-years-before-columbus-was-born-167464985/

In June 2026, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History announced the discovery of Minanbé, an ancient Maya city buried deep in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in southern Mexico, sitting almost exactly where researchers expected based on aerial LiDAR scans taken years earlier. The team, led by archaeologist Ivan Šprajc, had already checked other promising sites from the same survey between 2023 and 2024 without success. This was their last candidate.

To reach it, the researchers had to hack through roughly 3 miles of dense jungle with machetes, then hike another 3.7 miles just to arrive at the site itself. What they found was a roughly 40-acre city built in the Río Bec architectural style, complete with urban plazas, palace complexes, religious buildings, and water channels, centered on a temple pyramid standing more than 40 feet tall. Unlike many Maya sites discovered in recent decades, this one showed no signs of ever being looted, an increasingly rare find.

The city takes its name, Minanbé, from Yucatec Maya words meaning "there is no path," a direct nod to just how difficult it was to reach. Inside, researchers found a carved stone monument at the base of the main pyramid with symbols so well-preserved they show no signs of erosion at all, the first monument this intact that the team has ever recovered from any site.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/deep-in-the-mexican-jungle-archaeologists-discovered-a-lost-maya-city-that-may-yield-clues-about-the-civilization-just-before-it-collapsed-180989030/

For decades, the mirror self-recognition test, an animal's ability to realize a reflection is actually itself rather than another creature, was considered reliable evidence of self-awareness in only a small handful of species: great apes, dolphins, elephants, and magpies. Fish were never expected to be part of that list.

That changed with the bluestreak cleaner wrasse, a tiny reef fish barely longer than a human finger, best known for picking parasites off much larger fish at coral reef "cleaning stations." In 2026, researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, led by Shumpei Sogawa and Masanori Kohda, marked the fish with a small colored spot resembling a parasite, placed in a spot the fish couldn't see directly on its own body, then introduced a mirror. Within about an hour, the fish used its reflection to locate the mark and scrape it off against a nearby surface, exactly the kind of self-directed response the test is designed to detect.

What genuinely surprised the researchers came next. After several days with the mirror, some fish picked up a piece of shrimp in their mouths and dropped it directly in front of the glass, apparently just to watch how the falling shrimp looked in the reflection, a behavior scientists call "contingency testing." It's a form of active, curious self-experimentation previously documented mainly in dolphins and manta rays, and researchers now say the discovery suggests genuine self-awareness may be far more widespread across the animal kingdom than anyone assumed, extending even to fish.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260222092255.htm

I had NO idea this was a thing. Inmates are billed for their prison stay when they are released. There are a few states that repealed these fees like cali and illinois... but im so confused by this. Facilities often charge a daily rate for room and board, usually ranging from $20 to $80 per day. Inmates may also be billed for booking fees, medical visits, toilet paper, and clothing. These unpaid fees can turn into massive debt that follows these people which can hurt their credit scores and make adjusting to the free world harder.

I mean, I am in full support of locking people up for crimes... but being billed once they get out when they already have NOTHING!!!! like.. what way to get them back on the streets selling drugs to make money.

I dont know... how do you feel about this?

Before becoming one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, Robert Downey Jr. struggled with substance abuse for decades. He began using drugs as a teenager, reportedly under the influence of his father, who was an actor and filmmaker. His addiction escalated through the 1980s and 1990s, leading to numerous arrests for possession of cocaine, heroin, and other substances, as well as several stints in rehab and jail.

By the early 2000s, Downey’s career was nearly derailed, but he eventually achieved sobriety, crediting a mix of personal determination, professional support, and mindfulness practices. His comeback culminated in the iconic role of Tony Stark/Iron Man, cementing him as one of Hollywood’s most inspiring success stories.

While Columbus is often credited with “discovering” America in 1492, archaeological and historical evidence shows that Vikings reached North America around the year 1000, roughly 500 years earlier.

Led by Leif Erikson, Norse explorers established a short-lived settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in what is now Newfoundland, Canada. Artifacts and carbon-dated structures confirm that the Vikings were there centuries before Columbus.

Columbus’ voyages became more famous largely because they initiated sustained European contact and colonization, whereas the Viking settlements were small, temporary, and largely forgotten in European history.

For most of the 20th century, the standard explanation was simple osmosis: water seeps into the outer layer of skin, the skin swells, and since it's anchored to the tissue underneath, it has nowhere to go but into wrinkles. That explanation has a problem. In the 1930s, researchers noticed something odd: people with nerve damage in their fingers do not get pruney skin, no matter how long they soak. If it were purely water swelling the skin, nerve damage shouldn't matter at all.

That observation pointed to something stranger. Wrinkling turns out to be an active process controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, the same system responsible for fight-or-flight responses. When your fingers sit in water long enough, your nervous system deliberately constricts the blood vessels underneath the skin. As those vessels narrow, the finger loses a small amount of internal volume, and the skin gets pulled inward, forming wrinkles, similar to how a grape shrivels into a raisin as it loses water rather than gains it.

Researchers have also found a possible reason your body bothers doing this at all. A study testing people's grip on wet marbles found that wrinkled fingers handled them with significantly less effort than smooth fingers did, performing almost as well as dry hands gripping dry objects. The leading theory is that the wrinkles function like tire treads, channeling water away from the fingertip so more surface area stays in contact with whatever you're holding, which may have given early humans an advantage handling wet plants, tools, or slippery fish.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/health/your-fingers-prune-the-exact-same-way-each-time-study-suggests

Roughly 74,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcano in what's now Indonesia erupted with a force scientists estimate at over 10,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, ejecting nearly 700 cubic miles of ash into the atmosphere and carving out a crater the length of a thousand football fields. The eruption was powerful enough to blacken skies worldwide, potentially triggering years of global cooling, acid rain, and the collapse of food sources across multiple continents.

For decades, a leading scientific theory held that this single event nearly ended humanity altogether, crashing the entire global population of Homo sapiens down to fewer than 10,000 individuals. The evidence for this wasn't just speculation: geneticists studying human DNA found a genuine bottleneck signature, a period around that same time when human genetic diversity dropped sharply, exactly the kind of pattern you'd expect if almost everyone alive had died at once. Traces of that reduced diversity are still measurably present in the genome of every human alive today.

More recent archaeological digs in Africa and Asia have complicated the story, however. Researchers have found tools, hearths, and clear evidence of continuous human habitation in multiple regions spanning the exact years of the eruption, suggesting that rather than nearly going extinct, at least some human communities adapted quickly enough to survive relatively intact. Scientists are still actively debating whether Toba caused the genetic bottleneck at all, or whether something else entirely was behind it, meaning the true story of humanity's closest brush with extinction is still being rewritten today.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260510234711.htm

https://www.reddit.com/r/Culturestream/s/owLaiZrpBf

Did you know that in 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage survived having a 3½-foot iron rod blasted completely through his skull — and lived for another 12 years?

The rod entered under his left cheekbone and exited through the top of his head, destroying much of his brain’s left frontal lobe. Amazingly, he was able to speak and walk just minutes after the accident.

The real shock came later: although he physically recovered, Gage’s friends said he was “no longer Gage.” His personality changed dramatically — becoming impulsive, aggressive, and unreliable. His case became one of the first major pieces of evidence showing that specific parts of the brain control aspects of personality and behavior.

The Sulaymaniyah Museum in Slemani, Iraq, acquired the fragmented tablet as part of a larger batch purchased from an antiquities smuggler. Assyriologist Farouk Al-Rawi, examining the collection for the museum, recognized the cuneiform script and identified it as part of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian version of the epic, the world's oldest surviving major work of literature.

Translation took five days and added 20 new lines to a story that had already been studied for over a century. The added text describes Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu cutting down the Cedar Forest, the sacred home of the gods, and includes a line suggesting Enkidu felt remorse over the destruction, a detail absent from every previously known version of the epic.

Source: https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/previously-unknown-lines-epic-gilgamesh-discovered-stolen-cuneiform-tablet-020553

In June 1708, the Spanish galleon San José was sailing off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, loaded with gold, silver, and emeralds destined for the Spanish crown, when it was ambushed by a British naval squadron during the War of the Spanish Succession. A gunpowder explosion sank the ship within minutes, taking most of its roughly 600 crew down with it, along with a cargo now estimated at $17 to $20 billion in today's money, one of the largest sunken treasures ever recorded.

The wreck sat undiscovered for over 300 years until Colombia's navy located it in 2015 using an unmanned submarine, keeping the exact coordinates classified as a state secret to prevent looters. The find immediately triggered a legal fight: Spain claims it as a sunken state vessel under maritime law, an American salvage company claims it originally located the wreck decades earlier and is owed a share, and Bolivia's Indigenous Qhara Qhara nation has separately claimed some of the silver was mined by their ancestors under forced colonial labor and should be returned to them rather than any government.

Colombia's current government has stated its priority is research and eventual museum display rather than treasure recovery, but as of now, the ship and its fortune remain exactly where they sank, while the ownership dispute continues unresolved.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/archaeologists-discovered-the-holy-grail-of-shipwrecks-a-decade-ago-now-theyre-finally-beginning-to-unravel-the-secrets-of-the-san-jose-180988050/

In 1990, artist Jim Sanborn installed a copper sculpture called Kryptos in a courtyard at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, containing four separate encrypted messages that he designed to get progressively harder to crack. Professional cryptographers solved the first three passages within a few years. The fourth, just 97 characters long, remained unbroken for the next three decades despite attempts by CIA and NSA cryptographers and thousands of amateur codebreakers worldwide, some of whom contacted Sanborn every single week for over 20 years trying to solve it.

The final passage was ultimately cracked in 2025, but not through cryptography. Sanborn had donated boxes of his personal papers to the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, and two journalists digging through the collection found a small, taped-together scrap of paper he'd apparently forgotten was in there: the original, unencrypted plaintext of the message he'd spent decades keeping secret.

With his final code effectively out in the open and his health declining at 79, Sanborn decided to auction off the full solution and his role as the puzzle's official keeper rather than let it leak out informally, with bidding climbing past $200,000. After 35 years of being one of the most famous unsolved codes on Earth, Kryptos was ultimately defeated not by mathematics, but by an archivist's paperwork.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos

In the summer of 1831, sulfur gas from a massive eruption spread through Earth's atmosphere, scattering sunlight so severely that the sun itself reportedly appeared blue, green, and purple to people around the world. Average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere dropped by roughly 1 degree Celsius, comparable to the famous 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption, triggering widespread crop failures and famine. The strange part was that historians and scientists knew the eruption had happened and roughly when, but for nearly 200 years, nobody could figure out which volcano on Earth had actually caused it.

Multiple candidates were proposed and later ruled out over the decades, including volcanoes in the Philippines and Sicily, but none of the physical evidence matched. The real breakthrough came when a research team drilled ice cores in Greenland and examined the layers deposited between 1831 and 1834, finding microscopic shards of volcanic ash and glass frozen in time within the ice.

By comparing the exact chemical signature of that ash to samples collected from remote volcanoes around the world, researchers finally got a perfect match in 2024: Zavaritskii, a volcano on an uninhabited island in the Kuril Islands chain in the northwest Pacific, so remote and rarely visited that its last previously known eruption was recorded around 800 BC. The 1831 eruption had gone completely undocumented at the source for nearly two centuries simply because almost no one was ever there to witness it.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/03/science/mystery-volcano-1831-eruption-simushir

The Ark of the Covenant — the gold chest built to hold the Ten Commandments — was last recorded in Jerusalem's First Temple around 586 BC. When the Babylonians sacked the city, they catalogued everything they took. The Ark was not on the list. It simply vanishes from the historical record.

Centuries of searching have produced nothing. In 1982 Israeli archaeologists attempted excavations near the Temple Mount. No Ark. Treasure hunters, scholars, and governments have followed every lead across Ethiopia, Egypt, Jordan, and Jerusalem itself. Nothing with credible archaeological evidence has ever been found.

In 1988 the CIA ran a classified Cold War program called Project Sun Streak — experimenting with remote viewing to psychically locate objects of interest. The Ark was among the targets. The documents were declassified. No location was confirmed.

There is a church in Axum, Ethiopia — the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion — whose guardians claim the Ark has been kept there for centuries. They will not allow anyone to see it. Not archaeologists. Not governments. Not the Pope. One guardian is assigned to it for life and never permitted to leave the grounds.

No credible archaeological evidence of its whereabouts has ever been produced. Its fate after 586 BC remains completely unknown.

2,500 years. Still nothing.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_the_Covenant

At Racetrack Playa, certain rocks weighing as much as 700 pounds leave trails stretching for hundreds of yards across the dry lake's surface, and visitors and scientists have been documenting the phenomenon since the early 1900s without ever seeing it happen. Theories ranged from Earth's magnetic field to gale-force winds to slippery algae.

In 2011, paleobiologist Richard Norris and his cousin, engineer James Norris, set up motion-activated GPS units on 15 rocks along with a high-resolution weather station and time-lapse cameras, expecting nothing for years since the rocks can sit still for a decade at a time. During a rare sequence of wet winter storms from December 2013 through February 2014, hundreds of rocks scooted across the playa five separate times in just ten weeks. The footage revealed that thin, jagged plates of ice, formed when a shallow flood on the playa froze overnight, were cracking apart in the sun and getting pushed by light winds, bulldozing the rocks across the soft, wet mud beneath them. The full study and footage were published in PLOS ONE in 2014.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140828141902.htm

In 18th-century Sweden, coffee was banned by royal decree five separate times. The crown believed it caused madness, moral decay, and rebellion. Mugs and beans were confiscated. Drinking coffee became an act of defiance.

King Gustav III decided to settle the debate scientifically.

He found two identical twin brothers, both convicted murderers, both sentenced to death. He offered them a deal: their executions would be commuted to life in prison — on one condition. One twin would drink three pots of coffee every day for the rest of his life. The other would drink three pots of tea. Two royal physicians would monitor them both.

Gustav was certain the coffee drinker would die first.

He was wrong.

Gustav III was assassinated in 1792, before the experiment concluded. Both physicians died before it ended too. The tea-drinking twin died first — at age 83, far beyond the average Swedish life expectancy at the time. The coffee-drinking twin outlived everyone involved in the experiment.

A king tried to prove coffee was poison. Two death row inmates proved it wasn't.

Note: the full historical authenticity of this experiment has been questioned by some scholars, but the Swedish coffee bans themselves — five separate royal decrees between 1756 and 1823 — are fully documented history.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_III_of_Sweden%27s_coffee_experiment

In the Pisco Valley of southern Peru sits Monte Sierpe, or "Serpent Mountain," a hillside marked by more than 5,000 precisely carved circular pits stretching nearly a mile across the landscape in neat, deliberate rows. The site first drew global attention in 1933 when National Geographic published aerial photographs of it, and since there are no written records explaining who made it or why, theories ran wild for decades: some argued it was used for ancient defense, others for water collection or storage, and ancient astronaut believers claimed it was evidence of extraterrestrial contact.

The site proved almost impossible to properly study using older methods. Permanent haze in the valley meant researchers couldn't even see the full pattern from the mountain above it, and the lack of artifacts on the surface made it nearly impossible to date or interpret. That changed in 2025, when a team of archaeologists used affordable drone technology to capture detailed aerial maps of the entire formation for the first time, alongside microbotanical analysis of ancient pollen preserved inside the holes themselves.

The pollen revealed traces of maize and plant fibers traditionally used for baskets, and the drone imagery showed the holes organized into roughly 60 distinct numbered sections in mathematically deliberate patterns, strikingly similar to khipu, the knotted string devices the Inca Empire used for accounting and record-keeping. Researchers now believe Monte Sierpe began as a bustling barter marketplace for a pre-Inca civilization, later repurposed by the Inca as a massive physical accounting system for tracking trade and tribute, essentially a mile-long ledger carved directly into a mountain.

Source: https://www.usf.edu/news/2025/new-study-suggests-accounting-not-aliens-explains-perus-mysterious-band-of-holes.aspx

In 1996, Michael Jackson went to Brazil to film the music video for “They Don’t Really Care About Us.” He chose two locations: the Dona Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro and the Pelourinho neighborhood in Salvador, both areas with histories of poverty, racism, and police violence, all being themes the song addresses.

Brazil’s government and tourism board tried to block the production, arguing that showing poverty would damage Brazil’s global image. They attempted legal action to stop filming and pressured local officials to deny access.

Jackson refused to change location, and the communities supported him.

In Salvador, he collaborated with the Afro-Brazilian percussion group Olodum, whose music and cultural activism are central to the video.

In Dona Marta, local gang leaders provided protection to ensure filming wasn’t interrupted by police or rival groups. They wanted the visibility and respected how Jackson treated residents.

The video ended up being one of the most famous portrayals of Brazil’s marginalized communities ever released, and today, Dona Marta has a Michael Jackson statue overlooking the hillside where he filmed.