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.

Is it possible to make a phone call across dimensions? A couple on a lonely highway see something strange in the sky. I couldn't see it at first, but it eventually looked to me like an incoming nuclear attack. But the sky phenomena turns out to be a MacGuffin, and director Danny Piñeros tells us he didn't even know what it would look like until the effect was added post production. What's important is that the couple becomes separated and we don't know how -and neither do they. They appear to be in the same space but not together. Or are they in a completely different place? Or maybe "place" isn't even the right word, as subsequent events bend even that idea. 

Be sure to stay for the credits, because the voiceover adds more to the story. The scene sets up a premise that the producers hope to expand into a feature-length film. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Crystal Schenk is a multimedia artist and art professor who lives in Portland, Oregon. One of her earlier works is this 2006 sculpture titled Have and Have Not. It's a work of commentary on wealth, consumerism, and material survival.

-via Contemporary 100

(Image credit: teedpop) 

When the camera came out, redditor teedpop told his cat to smile, but honestly didn't expect that he actually would. That's a first-class grin, or else he's about to sneeze, or maybe it's a warning before an attack. I had a hard time selecting a cat photo, because it was between this one and one with "old man face" that cats get when they have teeth removed. My Tommy looks like that now, even though he's happier without the decayed teeth. But this list of animals making derpy faces isn't just cats. We also get to see iguanas, frogs, hamsters, horses, donkeys, goats, pigs, and all kinds of pets. Even dogs, like this guy who was told not to get dirty outdoors. He's not apologizing, he's just trying to explain that he couldn't help himself. I'm sure the camera around his neck will tell the whole story. 

(Image credit: DecentestMama)   

There are 96 such photos of funny-faced furry friends gleaned from reddit posted at Bored Panda. Better hurry and see them before they cut the list to 50. 

We know honeybees are amazing. They take flower juice and make honey, wax, royal jelly, and more bees. They also spread pollen from plant to plant, enabling us to raise fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Plus they build wax honeycombs where they can efficiently work together to do all that other stuff. How did they ever learn to do that?

Ze Frank takes us through the behavioral evolution of insect architects. Honeybees descended from wasps, who went through many phases on the way to building geometrically efficient nests. Ants and termites build elaborate nests, too, harnessing a new word I just learned: stigmergy. Honeybees are the best at making lovely hexagonal cells to build their combs, but it's not because they are all that smart. Hexagons are just what happens when you cram cylinders together in the most efficient way. In fact, their combs are not made of perfect hexagons all the way through. Still, those imperfections are a way of coping with uneven surfaces, so maybe they are pretty smart. Instead of an ad, there's a mere 30-second promotional message at 4:20. 

As the saying goes, any landing that you can walk away from is a good one. A couple weeks ago, pilot Mike Raicevic performed a good landing when the engine of his Republic RC-3 seaplane (last manufactured in 1947) went out over Phoenix.

NBC 12 News reports that Raicevic had about 10 seconds to decide what to do. He spent those seconds searching for a more or less empty stretch of road and ended on Seventh Street as he nimbly dodged power lines, roadside signs, and traffic lights.

The pilot and all passengers--as well as people on the ground--escaped injury as the plane landed.

This is the Duluth Mushroom House. Sometimes it's called The Flintstones house because of its resemblance to the architecture on The Flintstones. This 5-bedrooom, 3-bathroom architectural wonder is now for sale.

The story of the Space Race as most of us know it is that the Soviet Union was the first to launch a satellite into orbit in 1957 and the first to launch a human into orbit in 1961. The Americans scrambled to catch up, and won the big goal of landing astronauts on the moon in 1969. It was only years later that we learned what else the Soviets did, because they weren't keen on sharing information and they pulled most of their funding for space exploration after the Apollo moon landing. 

The world eventually learned about the Lunokhod program, in which the USSR was the first to land remote-controlled robots on the moon in 1970 and 1973. The US didn't do that until Sojourner landed on Mars in 1997. Lunokhod 1 and 2 were equipped with a reflector that bounced laser signals from earth and back to relay information. The rovers also moved, unlike reflectors left by the Apollo missions. While Lunokhod 2 continued to reflect signals after its mission ended, Lunokhod 1 was lost for almost 40 years. No one knew how far the rover had traveled before its power died. 

Then in 2010, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) determined the exact coordinates of Lunokhod 1, and researchers at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico were able to bounce laser signals off its reflector. The results were better than signals from Lunokhod 2, showing us that the reflector was still in good shape. Read about the lost and found Soviet robot on the moon at Daily Galaxy. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Музей Космонавтики) 

Japanese Instagram user konel_bread creates amazingly realistic baked goods that look like animals and cartoon characters. In the past, we've seen their loaves that look like teddy bears with six pack abs. Now, they show something more sedate but equally charming: bagels prepared to resemble dozing wiener dogs.

A trend on X lately is to share photos of historically significant buildings that have been preserved by being repurposed by modern businesses. Not all of the descriptions are correct. For example, I've verified that a particular Chipotle was not the place where Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense. But this Publix grocery store is indeed an old government printing house.

501 Gervais Street in Columbia, South Carolina is the site of a brick building where the Confederacy printed fiat currency until February of 1865, when General Sherman burned it. It was rebuilt after the war and is now a grocery store.

It's interesting to watch these changes in real time. There's a beautiful historic building in the small town of Marion, Texas. I drive by it a few times a year. It's lately been a coffeshop, but changes every couple of years.

Photo: Ron Cogswell

Every ellipse has two foci. The foci are, Khan Academy tells us, "two points whose sum of distances from any point on the ellipse is always the same."

Let's say that you build a miniature golf course shaped like an ellipse and place the hole at one focus. If you hit the ball from the other focus with a bank shot, the ball will land in the hole. If you hit the ball from any other point with a bank shot, the ball will miss the hole.

That's the premise of this video by YouTuber Constructive Chaos. He build increasingly complex combinations of ellipses to make mathematically predictable miniature golf course.

-via The Awesomer

The latest hypothetical question for the What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) asks how long it would take a bowling ball to fall from the ocean surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The trench is the deepest part of the world's oceans, and the point called Challenger Deep is around 11,000 meters or 36,000 feet deep. A bowling ball would take quite a while to sink that far. 

But wait- the real surprise here is that it might not sink at all. It might float! That depends on how heavy the ball is. Galileo told us that a hammer and a feather will drop at the same rate if you control for air resistance, like doing it on the moon or in a vacuum chamber. Apparently, physics doesn't work like that underwater, so we find out how objects of different weights would fall in the ocean. But let's don't do this, because that would be littering.