Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 18
July 11, 2023
Beyond The Snail: Meet The Mollusks That Race, Conquer, And More
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Did you know there are more than 40,000 species of snails on the planet? Or that they thrive in salt water, fresh water, and on land? Some grow huge, like the Syrinx aruanus, weighing up to 40 pounds and sporting a shell 35 inches long! And others prove tiny enough to slip through a sewing needle’s eye.
As invertebrates, snails don’t have spines. Instead, they tuck their slimy mucus bodies into the makeshift shell homes they carry on their backs. But perhaps the craziest fact about snails is that the garden variety boasts more than 14,000 teeth on their radulae. (Think the snail equivalent of tongues.)
Of course, plenty of stereotypes surround snails, including the notion they’re slow-moving and don’t do much. But what if we told you they race, conquer, and can even be venomous? And that’s just for starters!
Snails That RaceDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, lots of stuff got put on hold. From schooling to weddings, doctor’s appointments to movie showings. And in the pastoral hamlet of Congham, England, the Snail Racing World Championships came to a halt, too. Fast forward three years, however, and the slowest animal race in the world is back on track.
Founded in the 1960s by Tom Elwes, the Englishman took inspiration from snail racing events in France. Fortunately, England’s racing participants don’t face the looming threat of becoming escargot. Held at Grimston Cricket Club, the race involves traveling 13 inches as quickly as possible. In 1995, a shelled fellow named Archie set the world record of 22 seconds. It remains unshattered today.
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Snails That Conquer (by Accident)Considering how slowly snails move, the thought of them conquering land areas sounds downright ridiculous. Don’t tell that to Florida’s giant African land snails (GALS), though. This invasive species has returned to the “,” where it’s doing a number on the environment and local agriculture.
According to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, “The giant African land snail is one of the most damaging snails in the world, consuming at least 500 different types of plants.” GALS attach themselves to the siding of houses, eating paint and stucco walls. And they inadvertently spread diseases like rat lungworm, which causes meningitis in humans.
Stopping them isn’t easy due to their high fertility rates. The brown-shelled mollusks contain both male and female sexual organs. They can reproduce by the thousands (without a partner) after reaching sexual maturity at four months old.
Luckily, they grow to eight inches long and five inches in diameter, making them a cinch to spot and remove as adults. Of course, Florida’s conquering snails aren’t on a power-hungry quest to rule the world.
According to the University of Florida, they entered the state in 1966 when a child smuggled three in from Hawaii. How did the East African natives get to Hawaii before that? Again, it involved people.
Folks transported GALS to the Hawaiian Islands in 1936 to serve as pets and for educational purposes. So, while it’s important for Florida to counteract the spread of this invasive species, you can’t blame GALS for doing what comes naturally — eating, reproducing, and slithering.
Snails That Kill (and Cure)Yes, you read that last heading right. Some snails can be dangerous, and we don’t mean indirectly through disease. Cone snails have some of the loveliest shells in the mollusk world, but certain species contain venom capable of dropping humans. Even more shocking is their poison delivery system. A lightning-fast harpoon-like structure that spears prey and potential threats, including people. Don’t believe us? Check it out for yourself!
Fortunately, only about 100 people have died by cone snail. (You can go back to worrying about more likely scenarios, like lightning or shark attacks.) But scientists are now using their venom molecules to pioneer potential leads for new drugs and medicines.
It all started when researchers successfully raised the deadly mollusk in a laboratory aquarium for the first time. In the process, they shed new light on these elusive creatures and their unique life cycle
Richard Lewis of the University of Queensland explains, “A lot of our success with venom molecules has been in developing pain medications, but depending on the pharmacology, we’ll see if it has therapeutic potential for any of the disease classes.” Put another way, studying deadly cone snails shows great medical promise for the future.
By Engrid Barnett, contributor for Ripleys.com
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON! Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!Source: Beyond The Snail: Meet The Mollusks That Race, Conquer, And More
July 10, 2023
July 9, 2023
July 8, 2023
July 7, 2023
Up Close & Peculiar: Forrest Gump’s Box of Chocolates
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Today: Forrest Gump’s Box of Chocolates
Hello everyone! I am so over the moon excited about this item today because I am such a Tom Hanks fan. My friends literally make fun of me because I reference Big at least once a week but I am not ashamed!
As you can see this is not a Zoltar machine but instead, what I have here, is the box of chocolates from Forrest Gump with Hank’s signature right on the front!
As you can imagine, having a real box of chocolates sitting on your lap all day for filming would probably not go over well. Chocolate boxes are light and it’d probably get melty and gross. But of course the prop masters thought of this and had the genius idea of *shakes box* filling it completely with sand!
Despite it being marked as twenty-three ounces, this box is filled with a massive four pounds of sand!
Forrest Gump made a huge splash when it was released back in 1994. Let’s run through some facts you might not have known about the iconic film:
Although the famous bench itself is currently in a museum on display, the spot where the scene was filmed is still a popular tourist destination in Savannah, Georgia.Tom Hanks made history by winning two Best Actor Oscars back-to-back; the first for his role in Philadelphia in 1994, followed by another for his performance in Forrest Gump in 1995. In fact, he became only the second person ever to accomplish this impressive feat.Screenwriter Eric Roth once said in an interview that in an unproduced sequel to Forrest Gump, Forrest meets Princess Diana and OJ Simpson.There was no real ping pong playing in the ping pong scene! The ball was later added in with special effects.What’s your favorite scene from this classic movie? Tell us down below and I’ll see you next time.
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON! Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!Source: Up Close & Peculiar: Forrest Gump’s Box of Chocolates
New Research Flips Women’s Role In Hunter And Gatherer Societies On Its Head
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
You may have learned in school that prehistoric men hunted while the women gathered in early hunter and gatherer cultures, but new research shows that females also captured game—including deer and moose—and played a significant role when it came to hunting.
Groundbreaking ResearchResearchers analyzed data spanning 100 years from more than 60 hunter-gatherer societies. They also examined the burials of female hunters in Africa, Asia, Australia, and North America, publishing the results in the journal PLOS One. The study suggests that “females represented up to fifty percent of big game hunters from the Americas prehistorically.”
The international team found that 79 percent of foraging communities included female hunters. In addition, these women continued to hunt even after giving birth.
“The women would go out with many different tools — they had a very diverse tool kit all around the world — and if they saw an animal, they would kill it,” study co-author Cara Wall-Scheffler, a professor and co-chair of biology at Seattle Pacific University, told Live Science. “We were surprised by how the majority of groups showed women hunting, and there was no explicit taboo against that.”
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Even more interesting is that female hunters tracked big game, not just small birds and rabbits. The researchers examined big-game burials in North and South America and found that men and women equally hunted large animals, including deer and moose. These burials featured people with tools alongside animal bones. They demonstrated that women and men were equally big-game hunters.
Misguided Gender RolesThe researchers hypothesized that, “the majority (i.e., more than half) of hunter-gatherer communities do expect females to contribute to hunting strategies. Such findings would continue the challenge to long-held perceptions of sex-specific gender roles within foraging subsistence labor.”
The assertation that men hunted while women gathered can be traced back to two books, according to Wall-Scheffler: 1968’s “Man the Hunter,” compiled from an ethnographer symposium, and the 1983 book “Woman the Gatherer.”
According to “Woman the Gatherer,” hunting was inconsistent and not a great way to guarantee proper calorie input. The males hunted but did not necessarily provide for the women, who were providing for themselves by hunting as well as gathering.
Wall-Scheffler noted that the books generated “more rigid gender roles in which men were hunting and women were gathering and never the twain shall meet — and that has stuck around.”
She added, “It doesn’t make sense that if something like hunting for animals would help feed their community, that women would ignore it. Having these rigid divisions of labor wouldn’t make sense.”
By Noelle Talmon, contributor for Ripleys.com
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON! Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!Source: New Research Flips Women’s Role In Hunter And Gatherer Societies On Its Head
July 6, 2023
Caviar Craze: People Have Dined On Caviar Since Prehistory
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
From 1960 through 1966, Americans fell in love with Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones. Set in the Modern Stone Age city of Bedrock, the cartoon included many fun plays on contemporary technologies and amenities. We’re talking lawnmowers powered by grass-hungry dinos. And the Octopusaurus, which hung out at the local bowling alley, automatically resetting the pins with its tentacles.
Betty’s “typewriter” relied on a bird to tap her messages into stone tablets, and a long-beaked bird and turtle managed the record playing. Another fun fave? The Rabbitosaurus, whose “rabbit ears” literally acted as TV antennae. These fun shoutouts to 20th-century tech made prehistory look mighty convenient.
Of course, archaeologists have yet to uncover Octopusauruses or Rabbitosauruses at Stone Age human settlements. But they recently stumbled upon the presence of one food that’s downright posh — caviar.
An Egg-Cellent Meal for Prehistoric PeepsToday, champagne and caviar are markers of wealth, savored by some of the most affluent people in the world. Caviar goes for roughly $90 per ounce, but prices vary based on the reserve.
At the highest end, you’ll find Strottarga Bianco, also known as White Gold caviar. How much does it cost? A whopping $568 per teaspoon! Clearly, caviar is a sophisticated item that requires LOTS of money to savor.
Perhaps this is why it’s easy to assume caviar is a fairly recent addition to the human menu. But an archaeological site in Brandenburg, Germany, is upturning everything we know about the history of gastronomy (the practice of cooking and eating food) and, more specifically, indulging in fish eggs.
Proteomics Shed New Light on Ancient EatsGermany’s Friesack 4 archaeological site dates to at least 6,000 years old. So far, scientists have recovered roughly 150,000 artifacts for study from the site. These artifacts include 4,000-year-old ceramic cooking vessels.
A new technique for analysis, proteomics, is now permitting researchers a window into what may have cooked in these pots. Proteomics lets scientists study protein sets to determine how old they are and which animals they come from.
Stone Age Humans Feasted on Caviar https://t.co/0ZQMCf4yvf pic.twitter.com/abZvEUNvcT
— Cloudshill Press (@cloudshillpress) November 29, 2018
This approach allows for “a higher level of detail than most archaeological assessments of historical food substances.” And it also ensures that cross contamination from later periods doesn’t get calculated into the mix.
For the research into caviar, researchers isolated more than 300 proteins. They compared these with fresh fish tissue and roe, confirming the presence of these ingredients.
The History of Gastronomy RevisitedSo far, proteomics has yielded surprising results when it comes to the proteins found in prehistoric cooking pots. In turn, these findings continue to rewrite the history of gastronomy. Moreover, they’re also adding important pages to humanity’s prehistoric cookbook.
For example, some refined foods, considered recent inventions, actually boast deep, Stone Age roots. Which ones are we talking about? Everything from salad dressing to cheese and bone broth. Now, we can add caviar to the tasting tray!
Maybe the real Fred and Wilma couldn’t fall back on lawnmower dinos and bird typewriters, but they had a thing or two figured out when it came to upscale cuisine.
By Engrid Barnett, contributor for Ripleys.com
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON! Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!Source: Caviar Craze: People Have Dined On Caviar Since Prehistory
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