Making a mix of love songs for your special someone? Looking for something lively to slip in between Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and The Temptations’ “My Girl”? I highly recommend a little number called “Chirp-Buzz-Buzz” by…a group of Brazilian free-tailed bats.

Turns out that bats are quite the romantic crooners, using “love song” vocalizations to attract females (and in some cases, to scare away intruding males). According to a new study*, their love songs are more complex than previously thought and have a number of musical rules. The researchers—from the Department of Biology at Texas A&M University, the Section of Neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin and Bat World, a bat sanctuary and rehabilitation center in Mineral Wells, Texas—spent close to four years recording and analyzing the songs of two populations of Brazilian free-tailed bats (also known as Mexican free-tailed, scientific name Tadarida brasiliensis). The first group was a captive colony of about 60 bats in Austin, maintained by one of the study’s authors. The second group was a wild colony of approximately 100,000 to 250,000 bats within Texas A&M’s athletic complex in College Station.

After examining a total of 412 songs from 33 bats and comparing song variation within and across individuals and between the two different colonies, the researchers determined the male bats use several types of syllables with  individual sounds to create three easily recognizable phrases: (more…)

The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana bills itself as “One of America’s Most Haunted Homes”. It operates as a bed and breakfast, so for as little as $115 a night (plus tax), you can stay there and see for yourself how haunted it really is.

The Myrtles Plantation house was built by David Bradford, who had been a respected lawyer in Pennsylvania until he took part in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Wanted for arrest, he fled to Louisiana, leaving his family behind, and bought 600 acres of land on which he built a house called “Laurel Grove”.  After a pardon in 1799, he brought his wife and children to live there.

The property passed to Bradford’s son-in-law Clark Woodruff who lost his wife and two of his three children to yellow fever. Legend has it that during Woodruff’s reign at the plantation, he had a relationship with a slave girl named Chloe while his wife was pregnant. Chloe became paranoid when Woodruff ended the affair, and he allegedly cut her ear off as punishment for eavesdropping. From that point, Chloe always wore a turban to cover the scar. Image by Flickr user stevesheriw.
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Welcome to the Brain Game, a five-days-a-week feature here on www.mentalfloss.com.

By adding one letter at a time (and rearranging the letters as necessary) to form new words, convert the word “I” into the word “ERSTWHILE.” Good luck!

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E R S T W H I L E

In case you’re not familiar with the Turnip, it’s a whimsical Google search, wherein I type a random phrase and we see what kind of interesting pages “turn-up.” As always with this feature, the _floss is not responsible for accuracy. If you know one of the below statements/links to be untrue, by all means, let the world know in the comments below.

Today I typed “the widest” into Google, unearthing the following:

Turnip #1

With an internal diameter of 13.7 m the tunnel under the river Yangzi in Shanghai is the widest in the world. Connecting Shanghai to the Changxing island, the tunnel is 16.63 km long.

Turnip #2

The widest tornado (defined as damage path, not condensation/debris cloud or radar measurements) on record is the Wilber – Hallam, Nebraska tornado during the outbreak of May 22, 2004, with a width of 2.5 miles (4 km) at its peak.

Turnip #3

Nine lanes wide, with gardened medians between the opposing flow of traffic, [in downtown Buenos Aires 9 de Julio] is the widest street in the world.

Turnip #4

The Amazon is the widest river in the world. Many kilometers from its mouth it can be as wide as 11 kilometers, and 40 kilometers in the wet season.

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Van Gogh often added sketches or paintings to his letters, to illustrate what he wrote about. Some people were lucky enough to be his pen pals and recipients of personal art.
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If scientists and police investigators can reconstruct a face from a skull, why can’t we figure out what Skeletor looked like before he was a skeleton? We can, so Manuel Calavera and Jack Skellington get the treatment as well. (via Laughing Squid)
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Homeless at age 97, Bessie Mae Berger and her two sons live in an SUV in Venice, California. They prefer this arrangement to being separated. (via YesButNoButYes)
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Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major performed by a Korean orchestra with scratching, beatboxing, and breakdancing. If that’s not enough of a cultural mashup for you, I don’t know what is.
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The Pixar Lamp: the whole story. A much more sordid tale than the film studio would have you believe.
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The Blue Beanie. This point and click adventure game can eat up all your available time and more if you let it!
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5 Winter Sports The Olympics Are Missing. If there’s an opportunity for someone to crash spectacularly, they might someday be included.

With hundreds of local news broadcasts reporting live across the country each day, it’s inevitable that there would be all manner of embarrassing flubs caught on tape. Now, with the magic of the internet, a worldwide audience can enjoy those local news mistakes.

This video highlights the importance of careful segues between introductions and stories. Especially stories about horrific murders.

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I live just across the street from a cemetery, and this time of year it’s certainly not hard to creep myself out a little bit when walking the dogs after work – especially in the evening when the sun is sinking below the horizon, giving everything an eerie glow. But despite scaring myself, I can’t say that I’ve heard of any actual hauntings or sightings that have happened there. That’s not the case for these 10 cemeteries, which are considered to be some of the spookiest sites in the U.S. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. St. Louis Cemetery #1, New Orleans. There are three St. Louis Cemeteries in the Big Easy, but #1 is said to be the most haunted. It’s the oldest, for sure, opening in 1789 to replace St. Peter Cemetery, which burned in 1788. It’s no wonder the cemetery holds some haunts – with more than 100,000 people buried in a section of land about the size of a block, you’d expect that a few of them might have a little unfinished business. The tomb that tends to attract the most attention is that of Marie Laveau, the famous voodoo priestess. People mark three “X”es on her tomb, believing that doing so will cause her to grant them a wish.
2. Stull Cemetery, Kansas – the Gates to Hell. OK, probably not, but you have to admit that a church reduced to rubble does spark the imagination. And the fact that the crumbling church finally fell down on Good Friday – also good fodder. Rumor has it that if you go up and knock on a rock in the rubble pile as if you were knocking on a door, the Devil himself will rise up and answer.

3. Western Burial Ground, Westminster Presbyterian Churchyard, Baltimore, Maryland. It’s fitting that the cemetery Edgar Allan Poe now calls home is considered one of the scariest in America. Poe’s ghost has been spotted, of course, but another freaky story is that of the Cambridge Skull. A minister was murdered, you see, but his head never stopped screaming, even after he died. The murderers finally gagged the skull and buried it in a block of cement to attempt to muffle it, but if you listen closely, it can still be heard. If you’re one of the lucky ones to hear it, the story goes, you’ll never get the sound out of your head and will likely be driven insane. (more…)

I live in Cleveland, which doesn’t seem like a town where a bottle of water could go for $1,701. There’s no Rodeo Drive here, no Hollywood sign, no posh salons promising the perfect poodle pedicure.

On the theory that there had to be something else in the water for it to cost $1701, the supplement search started with Beluga caviar and skipped through the alphabet past gold and saffron. Nothing. No clues whatsoever to explain how something so common could cost so much.

Had the label read, “Nectar of the Gods,” maybe. But not a bottle of H₂0 sitting next to an ice bucket on top of an armoire in a hotel room occupied by a Cleveland Browns player during a preseason trip.

(Note to non-sports fans: The Cleveland Browns are an institution in my town and, on rare occasions, a pro football team.)

With the trip finished and the bill now in the hands of organizational number crunchers, Browns’ head coach Eric Mangini learned that one of his players had checked out without paying for the water.

Mangini’s next move fell right in line with all the control-freak, single-minded, my-way-or-the-highway football coaches of legend. He didn’t tell payroll to subtract $3 from the player’s next check. He levied a $1,701 fine—the maximum allowed under the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

That was my most recent reminder that football coaches—the driven, paranoid, contradictory lot of them—do (and say) the darndest things.

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It’s not always easy to identify some of our former presidents by their portraits. It seems they all have those dour expressions, long hair, and heavy wrinkles. In this evening’s quiz, you’ll try to match 10 former commanders-in-chief with their images. Good luck!

Take the quiz: Presidential Portraits

The Heene family’s Balloon Boy hoax is still lingering in the news this week. Will charges be filed? Is a reality show in the works? Do you really care? We’re guessing you don’t. So instead, let’s look back at four historical hoaxes.

1. The “Computer” That Outsmarted Napoléon

Centuries before Deep Blue started whuppin’ on Russian grand masters, a chess-playing automaton nicknamed “the Turk” was thrashing all manner of chess players. Atop a wheeled wooden cabinet was a seated, life-sized mannequin made of wood and dressed in Turkish garb. The Turk held a chessboard in his wooden lap, and he beat ’most all comers—including Napoléon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Premiering in the 1770s, the creation of Wolfgang von Kempelen moved its wooden arms, seemingly without human assistance, around the board. The secret? The Turk’s arms were operated by a diminutive chess expert crouched inside the cabinet, who operated gears and pulleys to move the Turk’s arms. After traveling the world for almost a century, the Turk ended up mothballed in Philadelphia—where it was destroyed in a fire in 1854. [Photo is of John Gaughan's reconstruction of "The Turk."]

2. Microsoft Buys the Catholic Church!

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