Five-year-old don Filippino’s abnormally swollen skull. Photo: Giuffra et al, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology

Money can’t buy happiness or—if you’re a wealthy, 16th-century Tuscan—health. The Medicis, known as the “first family” during the Italian Renaissance, could afford to fund Galileo and da Vinci, but their privilege ultimately damaged their children’s well being, Nature reports. A new study of the Medici’s nine children shows that they suffered from rickets, or the bone-softening affliction caused by a lack of vitamin D from sunlight or food.

An examination of the bones, both visually and by X-ray, showed that six of the nine children bore convincing signs of rickets, including curved arm and leg bones — the result of trying to crawl or walk on abnormally soft bones. One of the children, Filippo (1577–1582), known as don Filippino, had a slightly deformed skull.

Rickets tends to be a disease of the poor, caused by malnutrition and a life spent in crowded, polluted urban centers. The Medici kids obviously did not have this problem, so the researchers turned to nitrogen isotopes left in their bones to figure out what was to blame for the disease. The kids, they found, were not weaned until they were about 2 years old, and breast milk contains little vitamin D.

Sixteenth-century thinking also dictated that infants be heavily swaddled. The Medici children, wrapped in many heavy layers and cocooned in large, grand houses, probably didn’t get the same amount of sunlight as their less fortunate peers.

The Medici infants, too, showed low levels of vitamin D, Nature reports, indicating that their mothers probably didn’t spend much time in the sun, either, or else were depleting their own vitamin levels due to frequent child bearing.

In recent years, rickets have been on the rise in cloudy Great Britain, where everything from an excess of sunscreen use, a lack of outdoor play and malnutrition have been blamed for the disease’s recurrence.

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A maternity care package provided by Finland. Photo: Visa Kopu

Finnish mothers can look forward not only to the arrival of their baby, but also to a special maternity care package issued by their country’s government. For 75 years, the BBC reports, mothers receive a box, which can also double as a temporary crib, filled with essential items such as a snowsuit, teething toys, nappy cream, nail clippers, mittens, box-sized mattress and a blanket. (Condoms are also tossed in.)

Aside from being a nice welcome-to-the-family gesture from Finland, the boxes are meant to give each and every child an equal start in life, writes the BBC. Finland started as a scheme to lift low-income families out of poverty in 1938, but the boxes were offered to all Finnish mothers-to-be by 1949. Claiming the box meant visiting the doctor, so more women began getting pre-natal checkups as a result.

In the 1930s Finland was a poor country and infant mortality was high – 65 out of 1,000 babies died. But the figures improved rapidly in the decades that followed.

Mika Gissler, a professor at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki, gives several reasons for this – the maternity box and pre-natal care for all women in the 1940s, followed in the 60s by a national health insurance system and the central hospital network.

The box’s contents have evolved over the years. In the 1930s, the government supplied fabric since most moms made their own clothes.

But during World War II, flannel and plain-weave cotton were needed by the Defence Ministry, so some of the material was replaced by paper bed sheets and swaddling cloth.

The 50s saw an increase in the number of ready-made clothes, and in the 60s and 70s these began to be made from new stretchy fabrics.

Now, the state-provided baby clothes change annually, representing the fashion of the day. Mothers can see other infants at the grocery store or day care and immediately know whether that child was born the same year as theirs, the BBC writes. The colors of the baby jumpsuits, mittens, hats and leggings are always gender-neutral.

Today, the BBC describes the box as a “right of passage” for expectant mothers. Pregnant women can forgo the box in favor of a 140 euro check, but most choose to take the box, the BBC reports. It’s worth more.  And who doesn’t enjoy ripping into a goodie bag of free clothes, toys and blankies?

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Photo: leodelrosa

French winemakers first learned the trade from the Etruscans, an ancient Italian civilization, kicking off domestic production around 525 B.C., according to new research by a team of scientists lead by Patrick McGovern. Archaeologists have long thought that the Etruscans brought wine and winemaking to southern France. But in their new study, McGovern and his team firmed up that assumption. They tested the residue found at the bottom of ancient Etruscan amphoras collected from a site in southern France. At the time, amphoras were used as shipping containers, carrying wine and olive oil and other products around the Mediterranean.

Chemical analyses of ancient organic compounds absorbed into the pottery fabrics of imported Etruscan amphoras (ca. 500–475 B.C.) and into a limestone pressing platform (ca. 425–400 B.C.) at the ancient coastal port site of Lattara in southern France provide the earliest biomolecular archaeological evidence for grape wine and viniculture from this country, which is crucial to the later history of wine in Europe and the rest of the world.

But the history of winemaking stretches back much, much further. The civilizations of the ancient Near East had been producing wine since at least as early as the Neolithic era, from around 10,000 to 2,000 B.C. In archaeology, understanding when and how ancient cultures met and collaborated is a difficult challenge. But the flow of wine, say the scientists in their study, can be used to track these connections.

The wine trade was one of the principal incentives for the Canaanites and Phoenicians, followed by the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans, to expand their influence in the Mediterranean Sea. Where wine went, so other cultural elements eventually followed. Technologies of all kinds and new social and religious customs took hold in regions where another fermented beverage made from different natural products had long held sway.

According to the authors, the rise of wine making in southern France suggests not just trade of goods between the ancient Celtic French and the Etruscans, but the flow of ideas and technology.

Similarly to the transfer of winemaking by the Canaanites to the Egyptian Nile Delta millennia earlier, the native Celts at Lattara would have needed the expertise and knowledge of the Etruscans to plant their own vineyards and begin making wine.

Though the French were latecomers to the winemaking industry they’ve quickly made up for lost time. France is now the world’s largest producer of wine, account for 16% of world production.

If you wanted a taste of the old world, say the authors in their study, the closest modern approximation of the ancient wines would be a nice Greek retsina—a wine that bears the taste of pine resin, a material that was used to seal the amphoras during shipping.

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Photo: sAeroZar

There is a long list of long German words. Sometimes, they even show up in the real world. The longest word in the German language—the 63-letter-long Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz—was created to represent a law about beef regulation. But a local parliament decided to repeal the law, making Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz obsolete, the Los Angeles Times reports.

In German, complex ideas are frequently captured by bolting together short nouns. At its best, that brings a degree of simplicity to the language. For example, Germans say platzangst – literally, space fear — rather than the borrowed Greek of “claustrophobia,” or the word dreirad – three wheel — when an English speaker would say “tricycle.”

Sometimes, however, this system gets out of control. Mark Twain, a student of German, called such words “alphabetical processions,” the LA Times reports.

The language’s lengthy compound nouns have, inevitably, acquired their own compound noun: They are known as bandwurmwörter, or “tapeworm words.”

To make such words more manageable, they’re often abbreviated. Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz became RkReÜAÜG, for example. This, one hopes, is reassuring to people who have a fear of long words, or
hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

Though Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz was considered an official word, it never entered the dictionary. As the LA Times reports, the longest German word with a dictionary entry currently is Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, or motor vehicle liability insurance. Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, or an insurance company that provides legal protection, is the language’s longest non-dictionary appearing word. As the Atlantic points out, however, English has got it beat.  Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosi, or “a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust,” trumps Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften by six letters. 

Here’s a pronunciation guide to the fallen Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz: 

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An endangered fin whale. Photo: Sea to Shore Alliance

Consumption of whale in countries like Japan and Iceland was already a contentious issue, before a coalition of NGOs revealed that a Tokyo-based company is selling endangered whale meat marketed as doggie treats. The meat, supplied by a whaling company in Iceland, comes from North Atlantic fin whales, an endangered species, according to Japanese environmental group IKAN. IKAN reports:

Icelandic fin whale has been sold in Japan for human consumption since 2008, but its use in pet food suggests that new markets are being explored. As Iceland prepares to hunt over 180 fin whales in 2013 for this export market, NGOs question the environmental and economic logic of using meat from an endangered species for the manufacture of dog treats.

The dog food company, Michinoku, sells packages of dried whale fins starting at around $6 for 2.1 ounces, up to about $37 for 17.6 ounces. The labeling clearly identifies the treats as belonging to fin whales from Iceland.

Japan insists that it whales only for scientific purposes, The Age points out, while Iceland is more transparent about its activities and openly defies an international ban on whaling. 

While whale meat is declining in popularity in Japan, many Japanese see the campaign against whaling as a symbol of cultural imperialism from the West and argue that it is a long-standing tradition.

But as IKAN writes, feeding endangered whale meat to rich people’s dogs can hardly be argued as preserving age-old cultural traditions. “The most likely reason for shops to sell the whale meat dog treat is to target affluent Japanese who want to show off their wealth with something different,” IKAN’s executive director, Nanami Kurasawa, commented in the release.  ”Similarly, there are also pet foods with shark fins and foie gras available in Japan. Buying such pet food is purely human-centric and hardly considers the animals’ point of view.”

Luckily, it seems many Tokyoites aren’t buying into the endangered treats. According to IKAN, one Tokyo pet store put their fin whale snacks on sale as “bargain articles,” and the large e-commerce site Rakuten also followed suite and discounted the pet treats in April.

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A Better Place electric car. Photo: Rosenfeld Media

Better Place, an electric car startup backed by $850 million in private funding, has filed for bankruptcy. The company aimed to have 100,000 electric vehicles on the road in Israel and Denmark by 2010, but had deployed fewer than 1,000 of the Renault Fluence Z.E. cars in Israel and just 200 in Denmark to date. IEEE Spectrum reports:

Better Place’s bankruptcy filing this last weekend is a blow not merely to the company itself and its influential backers, but to the vision of an electrified automotive future. This is because Better Place had what seemed an extremely persuasive business model and a sensible plan for developing the plan in the marketplace.

Israel and Denmark were the first testing grounds, and Better Place had already built 21 battery swapping stations in Israel, which is about the size of New Jersey. With Israel’s small size, high gas prices and start-up friendly atmosphere, the country seemed like the perfect testing grounds for introducing Better Place, the New York Times writes. But while Better Place did contend with some delays, ultimately it seems that people simply were not interested in buying the cars.

The company filed for liquidation on Sunday, citing financial difficulties. Better Place’s chief executive, Dan Cohen, spoke with the Times: 

Mr. Cohen said on Sunday that the vision and the model had been right, but that the pace of market penetration had not lived up to expectations. Without a large injection of cash, he said, Better Place was unable to continue its operations.

Meanwhile, Fisker Automotive, another significant player in electric car ventures that received significant U.S. federal backing, appears to be on the edge of collapse. The Times reports, in a separate story:

On the surface, Fisker had all the trappings of a potential player in the emerging electric car industry.

Serious problems emerged almost as soon as the car hit the market.

Fisker, with its technical problems, management turmoil and mounting losses, offers a cautionary tale in the fiercely competitive arena of alternative-fuel vehicles and of government subsidies for start-up businesses.

Bankruptcy now appears unavoidable, and a political reckoning is coming.

Not every electric car is crashing, however. Tesla, whose Model S won MotorTrend’s 2013 Car of the Year award, continues to shine. The company recently paid off its Department of Energy loans nearly 10 years early, had its first profitable quarter and is enjoying skyrocketing stock prices.

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Image: Pink Moose

On Monday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said she wasn’t going to worry about ridding Tumblr of porn. “It’s just the nature of user-generated content,” she said.

In other words: Welcome to the Internet, there will be porn.

And Mayer is right. The numbers about just how much of the Internet is dedicated to porn are wildly variable, but they’re there. Some estimates put porn at 30 percent of all Internet traffic. Other places claim the percentage is far higher. Forbes put the question to neuroscientist Ogi Ogas, who studies our consumption of all things wicked, and heard that, in 2010, about 4 percent of websites were dedicated to porn and, between July 2009 to July 2010, about 13 percent of web searches were for some sort of erotica.

Now, some of that comes from the changing demographics of who uses the Internet, says Ogas. When the web was first formed, it was largely populated by dudes. “I think in 1999 that 4 or 5 of the top 10 searches on the Web were for porn,” he told Forbes. But now the uses and users of the Internet have increased dramatically. And while Internet users are still looking for porn, it’s not the only thing or even the most common thing they’re after.

But it is there. It’s there, and it’s easy to find. Which is why parents and lawmakers are still talking about it. In the UK, David Cameron announced that all porn sites would be blocked from public places, striving to create “good, clean WiFi.” Mirror News writes that the Prime Minister “stressed the importance of parents having confidence in public internet systems and that their children ‘are not going to see things they shouldn’t’.” And the UK isn’t the only place to talk about cracking down on porn. In Iceland, they’ve proposed to ban all online pornography—a curious turn for a generally liberal country.

Now, actually carrying these bans out is hard. You can’t just flip a switch and change the content of the Internet. The Economist explains why Iceland’s ban in particular would be hard, but the reasons stand for most porn bans:

Banning online pornography would be tricky. The definition of violent or degrading pornography would have to be clearly enshrined in law. Iceland would then have to police the internet, a difficult thing to do. When Denmark and Australia introduced online blacklists in an effort to block porn sites, some innocuous websites crept on to the lists by mistake.

Basically, actually rooting out which sites are porn and which aren’t isn’t as easy as it might sound. And, ban or no ban, porn will always be on the Internet for those who choose to seek it out.

This is why some places are arguing that rather than ban or regulate or stamp out porn, children and adults should simply be educated on the pros and cons of pornography. In the UK, where they want to ban porn from public wifi, 83 percent of parents felt that students should learn about pornography in sex education classes. In the United States, one class at Pasadena College takes porn head on. The course, Navigating Pornography, has students watch and discuss porn, and tries to debunk the myth that people should learn about sexuality through porn. “Students today live in a porn-saturated culture and very rarely get a chance to learn about it in a safe, non-judgmental, intellectually thoughtful way,” professor Hugo Schwyzer told the Huffington Post.

Buzzfeed visited Schwyzer’s class to see just what a course in porn might be like:

But in many places, where even regular sex education is hard to come by, the chances that students will learn about porn are slim to none. The National Children’s Bureau says that teaching about porn is crucial to giving children a well-rounded education about sex and relationships. Lucy Emmerson, Co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum for the NCB, says that teachers are too scared to mention porn in class.  “Given the ease with which children are able to access explicit sexual content on the Internet,  it is vital that teachers can respond to this reality appropriately,” she says. “Whilst in some cases children find this material by accident, there are instances when they come across pornography whilst looking for answers to sex education questions; it is therefore wholly appropriate that pornography and the issues it reveals are addressed in school SRE.”

Basically, the reality is that ban or not, young people are going to encounter pornography on the Internet. Whether or not they’re ready for it seems to be up to their parents and teachers.

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King Richard III, the leader of England from 1483 to 1485, was the last English king killed in battle—struck by an arrow during a fight for the throne. His body was buried in a church, the Greyfriars in Leicester, but as centuries passed his burial grounds were lost. In September, word came from a team at the University of Leicester that they may have found the dead king’s body, buried beneath a parking lot.

Follow up work, including genetic testing, doubled-down on the assessment, an the question became what to do with the late king’s recently-exhumed remains. Some want him re-buried in Leicester, where he fell. His family wants his body brought to York, to be buried alongside his relatives. But wherever Richard III’s real skull goes, forensic artists working with the Richard III Society in Leicester are trying to make sure his visage is not lost again. They’ve created a bust of Richard III’s head, which will go on tour around England over the next few years.

The reconstructed face of Richard III. Photo: Leicester Arts & Museums

The forensic art team, says the Atlantic, tried to “ determine what the king’s face would have looked like in person (well, “in person”).”

From there, the team used stereolithography – yep, 3D printing — to convert that rendering into a physical model of the king’s face. They extrapolated details like hair color and clothing style from portraits painted during Richard’s time.

The results of this endeavor are fairly creepily Tussaudian: The twisted-spined king, in the form of a 3D-printed bust, looks essentially like a decapitated wax figure. But it’s a high-tech wax figure. The forensics-based model — which, yes, will now be going on a tour throughout England — offers a new perspective on an old story: It brings a new dimension, quite literally, to ancient history.

The first stop of that tour begins today, at the Leicester Guildhall.

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Heavy metal singer Chino Moreno. Photo: Focka

Looking to get that all-important college degree but care more about double-kicks and shredding than valence electrons or iambic pentameter? According to the Telegraph, Nottingham Trent University in England may have just what you’re after: a degree in Heavy Metal Music Performance.

The course will encourage students to explore how the actions of heavy metal figures have been censored throughout history, as well as to study how famous heavy metal bands came into being and the relationship of heavy metal to religion and philosophy.

The degree is a two-year focus that you’ll need to round out with another year of studies. In the end, you’ll be sent home with a nice artium baccalaureus. In England, says the Telegraph, the school is facing flak for offering what many are criticizing as a useless degree, one that sets students back professionally (on top of taking their tuition money.)

‘Education campaigners have criticised the course as something that could put students at a disadvantage with future employers.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “The problem is I don’t think this will have credibility in the marketplace.

“I’m not against heavy metal at all, I just don’t think it will impress an employer to find a youngster has a degree in heavy metal. It could become a ‘disqualification.’”

A degree in Heavy Metal joins the fray of odd college degrees, such as packaging, comic book art or poultry science (which, if you think about it, are all actually quite useful). More than an interesting alternative educational avenue, Nottingham’s Heavy Metal degree touches on the ideological debate over what, exactly, college is for.

As a venue for securing employment, sure, maybe it’s not the most straightforward approach. Then again, according to Forbes, a whole host of college degrees, from film and art to philosophy and history, are pretty much pointless if your whole goal is to secure a high-paying wage. But as an intellectual pursuit, how is studying the history and cultural force of heavy metal music any different than studying, say, the societal impact of Renaissance era French poets?

For many, college is a time to expand your horizons, to think weird thoughts and to absorb knowledge you’d probably never encounter otherwise. Rock on, Nottingham, \m/.

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Photo: sewitsforyou

Drop an S-bomb today in polite conversation, and heads will likely turn. But back in the ninth century, “shit” referred to excrement in a matter-of-fact, not a vulgar, way. In the new book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, author Melissa Mohr explores how our opinion of this and other curse words have shifted over the years. In an interview with NPR, she delves into the history of “shit”:

It only really started to become obscene, I would say, during the Renaissance. … It basically involves increasing privacy. In the Middle Ages … when that word wasn’t obscene, people lived very differently. The way their houses were set up, there wasn’t space to perform a lot of bodily functions in private. So they would defecate in public, they had privies with many seats, and it was thought to be a social activity. That you would all get together on the privy and talk while you did this. … As the actual act became more taboo because you could do it in private now … the direct word became taboo.

The word itself likely arose from one or all of the Old English terms scite (dung), scitte (diarrhea) or scitan (to defecate). Middle English introduced schitte (excrement), schyt (diarrhea) and shiten (to defecate). Similar terms for the same thing eventually found their way into other languages as well, such as Sheisse (german), schijt (Dutch), skit (Swedish), skitur (Icelandic) and skitt (Norwgian).

As the Online Etymology Dictionary details, “shit” as a term related to excrement dates to at least the 1580s, though people had already adopted the term in reference for an “obnoxious person” by at least 1508.

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Dunwich beach, across which storms pulled the ancient city. Image: modagoo

In 1066, the town of Dunwich began its march into the sea. After storms swept the farmland out for twenty years, the houses and buildings went in 1328. By 1570, nearly a quarter of the town had been swallowed, and in 1919 the All Saints church disappeared over the cliff. Dunwich is often called Britain’s Atlantis, a medieval town accessible only to divers, sitting quietly at the bottom of the ocean off the British Coast.

Now, researchers have created a 3D visualization of Dunwich using acoustic imaging. David Sear, a professor at the University of Southampton, where the work was done, described the process:

Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site. We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.

Using this technology gives them a good picture of what the town actually looks like. Ars Technica writes:

We can now see where the local churches stood, and crumbling walls pinpoint the ancient town’s remits. A one kilometer (0.6 mile) square stronghold stood in the center of the 1.8km2space (about 0.7 square miles), with what looks like the remains of Blackfriars Friary, three churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine standing within it. The northern region looks like the commercial hub with lots of smaller buildings largely made of wood. It’s thought that the stronghold, as well as its buildings and a possible town hall, may date back to Saxon times.

Professor Sears sees this project as not just one of historical and archaeological importance, but also as a forecast of the fate of seaside cities. “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants. Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.”

So, in a million years, when aliens come to look at our planet, it might look a lot like Dunwich.

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Photo: Brennaval

Imagine the unimaginable: Your newborn baby is born with a severe, deadly birth defect or contracts a fatal illness. The baby will die and is in tremendous pain. In this case, is it justified, perhaps even humane, to euthanize the child?

In Holland, some doctors and parents say the answer is yes. Back in 2005, the Netherlands adopted the Groningen Protocol, which is designed to help doctors end the suffering of very sick newborns through euthanasia. The rule requires that five criteria must be met before taking the decision to end the child’s life: beyond-a-doubt diagnosis; presence of unbearable suffering; a second expert medical opinion to verify the child’s condition; consent of both parents; and compliance with medical standards.

Some critics feared that this would create a “slippery slope” of infanticide, but new research published in the Journal of Medical Ethics contends that that has not been the case. The authors reviewed all reported case of infant euthanasia between 2001 and 2010 (doctors sometimes covertly practiced infanticide before the protocol was passed) and found that in 95 percent of cases the mode of euthanasia was withholding or withdrawing treatment. In 60 percent of those cases, this was because the infant would soon die from an incurable disease. For the remaining 40 percent, quality of life prompted the decision. 

However, since 2007, doctors reported euthanizing just two babies. The authors of the new paper suspect that an increase in abortions when fatal problems are detected in the womb may explain this. Alternatively, doctors may be confused about what constitutes euthanasia–such as withholding treatment, food or water—and may be underreporting it. Either way, the authors write, there has not been a detectable snowballing of euthanized babies in Holland as a result of the new protocol.

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Whether burning coal, pulling kinetic energy from the wind, or harnessing the power of the atom, every fuel source has its resource, the thing it uses to make electricity and heat. In Oslo, Norway, the thing they use is garbage. The city runs a pair of huge incinerators which supply around 1.5 terawatt hours of power.

“A significant share of Oslo’s district heating comes from waste incineration, biofuel facilities and heat pumps that extract heat from sewage,” says the Hafslund Group, a Norwegian power company.

These are resources that would otherwise be lost or considered waste. Today’s investment in district heating saves Oslo from annual GHG emissions corresponding to more than 100,000 cars each driving 15,000 km. The goal is to replace all fossil fuels for peak loads by 2016. This will make a substantial contribution to Oslo’s environment and cut carbon emissions.

But Oslo has run into a bit of an issue, says the New York Times: the city’s running out of garbage. Waste incinerators are sort of common across Europe, and the competition is driving this odd problem.

“The fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons,” says the Times. To get around the shortage, they’re looking to import trash. They’re even considering shipping it in from the U.S.

“For some, it might seem bizarre that Oslo would resort to importing garbage to produce energy. Norway ranks among the world’s 10 largest exporters of oil and gas, and has abundant coal reserves and a network of more than 1,100 hydroelectric plants in its water-rich mountains. Yet Mr. Mikkelsen said garbage burning was “a game of renewable energy, to reduce the use of fossil fuels.”

The quandary, says the Times, is leading some to fret about an even weirder concern: that people might feel pressured to make more garbage to feed the waste-to-energy beast.

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The Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, was Hitler’s bunker outside of Rastenburg, Germany. Photo: Steve

Margot Woelk, now 95, is the last surviving member of a team tasked with keeping Hitler alive as he hunkered down in the Wolf’s Lair in the final chapters of World War II. For nearly all her life, says the Associated Press, Woelk kept quiet about her wartime activities. But now, in her old age, she wants to talk, and her stories are filled with details of life in Hitler’s fortress and about living a life of “constant fear.”

Woelk was the sole survivor of the Nazi leader’s poison paranoia. In her mid-20s, she was swept away from her home in Ratensburg (now Ketrzyn, Poland), “drafted into civilian service” to join 14 other women in the dictator’s wartime bunker where she and the others were charged with taste-testing the leader’s meals.

As the war dragged on, food supplies in much of German-occupied territory suffered. Within the Wolf’s Lair, however, “the food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine. And always with a side of rice or pasta,” said Woelk.

“He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there,” Woelk said of the Nazi leader. “And Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him — that’s why he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself.”

But each meal brought fear, says Woelk. “We knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal.”

Nearing the end of the war, after tensions mounted following an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life from within the bunker, Woelk fled. When Soviet troops took the Wolf’s Lair a year later, the other taste testers were all shot. But the end of the war was not the end of Woelk’s ordeal, according to the AP. She suffered abuse at the hands of Russian troops long after the war ended, she says:

“For decades, I tried to shake off those memories,” she said. “But they always came back to haunt me at night.”

…Only now in the sunset of her life has she been willing to relate her experiences, which she had buried because of shame and the fear of prosecution for having worked with the Nazis, although she insists she was never a party member.

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Image: Richard Herrmann

California authorities are trying to crack down on smugglers shipping fish bladders across the border. That’s right, fish bladders are a thing that people smuggle.

In fact, they’re worth a ton of money. One bladder from the Totoaba macdonaldi fish can garner $5,000 in the United States and over $10,000 in Asia. The bladders are mainly used in Chinese food, like soups. Often the fish are simply stripped of their bladders and left on the beach, meat and all, since the traders don’t care about the meat, and being caught with it would be a liability.

Now, we’re not talking about the same kind of bladder that a human has. The prized organ on the totoaba isn’t full of urine. It’s the fish’s swim bladder, an organ that fills with gas to change the buoyancy of the fish, allowing it to ascend and descend in the water.

From the outside, the Totoaba macdonaldi isn’t a particularly striking fish. They’re big, weighing up to 220 pounds and getting up to 6.5 feet long. The species is endangered throughout its range, which spans the California coast, says NOAA, mostly because of fishing for this prized bladder. And the Chinese species of the same fish was eaten to extinction, which is why suppliers are turning to the U.S. population.

Scientific American reports that trade in U.S. totoaba bladders is heating up:

In the latest case that led to criminal charges, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer inspecting a car at the Calexico-Mexicali port of entry, about 130 miles east of San Diego, found 27 totoaba bladders hidden under floor mats in the back seat of a car, U.S. prosecutors said in a statement.

The Washington Post chronicles several other cases:

Jason Xie, 49, of Sacramento was accused of taking delivery of 169 bladders on March 30 in a hotel parking lot in Calexico, about 120 miles east of San Diego. Xie told investigators he was paid $1,500 to $1,800 for each of 100 bladders in February.

Anthony Sanchez Bueno, 34, of Imperial was charged with the same crime after authorities said he drove the 169 bladders across the downtown Calexico border crossing in three coolers. He told investigators he was to be paid $700.

Song Zhen, 73, was accused of storing 214 dried totoaba bladders in his Calexico home.

“These were rooms that didn’t have furnishings,” U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said. “In every room, fish bladders were dried out over cardboard and papers.”

The bladders found in Zhen’s house could be worth over $3.6 million on the black market.

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