Spanning the entire country, Hungary’s National Blue Trail took off in 1952 after it “gamified” the trail by introducing its stamp collection system. Acting as a fantastic marketing program, the stamps, which were collected at various points along the trail, were proof that a hiker had traversed the area. But collecting stamps wasn’t easy; the stamps, being in such high demand, were often stolen from their vendors, challenging hikers to aid in their retrieval. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
