Ask a competitive cyclist why he* shaves his legs, and you could get all sorts of answers: it keeps sweat from sticking to you, it makes road rash less painful, it makes bandaging an injury easier. He might have tried to avoid explaining it was for aerodynamics, because what difference would a few legs hairs make? But that would have been before engineer Marc Cote started working for a high-end bicycle company, and talked them into building a wind tunnel specifically for cyclists. The aim was to produce more aerodynamic bicycles, but Cote's research went further. After all, 75% of the drag in a bicycle race is due to the cyclist himself.

When triathlete Jesse Thomas showed up at the lab with his hairy legs in 2014, Cote talked him into cycling in the wind tunnel, shaving his legs, and trying it again. He calculated that Thomas could save 70 seconds over a 40-mile time trial just by shaving! More hairy cyclists were recruited to confirm the results. Further research showed that Laurent Fignon would have won the 1989 Tour de France if he had only cut his ponytail. Now, shaving one's legs is expected among all competitive cyclists, along with other aerodynamic innovations that came from Cote's wind tunnel. Read how cyclists lost their hair at Nautilus.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: TJBlackwell)

* Women cyclists aren't asked this question.

In 1962, British newspaper editor Brendon Grimshaw bought a tiny island in the Republic of Seychelles for £8,000. He moved onto the uninhabited Moyenne Island and went to work. For the next four decades, Grimshaw cleared the island of invasive species and planted thousands of native trees as well as other plants. He carefully maintained a couple of the island's historic sites, like a purported pirate's hideout and a gravesite, as well as the homes of previous owners. He also built a path around the entire island to those sites, which is barely more than a mile long. Grimshaw brought in and raised giant tortoises. Those years of work transformed Moyenne into a tropical paradise of birds, geckos, tortoises, palm trees, and more. The 24-acres island is now Moyenne Island National Park, the smallest national park in the world, but one that people go to great lengths to visit.

To preserve the island's nature, the number of visitors is strictly limited. But you can see its beauty in a post at Moss and Fog. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Camera Eye)

Were you in Dayton, Ohio, recently and saw an early biplane pass overhead? Tom Scott stopped at the Wright “B” Flyer Hangar/Museum in Dayton to see where Orville and Wilbur Wright built planes to sell beginning in 1910. The first commercial airplane was the Wright Model B, of which there are only two surviving examples from that era. But they have been built recently, using the Wright Brothers' design and new and safer materials. This biplane has two propellers driven with a bicycle chain! It's somehow both illuminating and reassuring that the plane designed in 1910 is still a valid design, although anyone in it is exposed to the wild blue yonder, which is an incredible experience. Tom has come a long way from being scared to ride a roller coaster. No, they didn't let him fly the plane, but he got to ride in it. They don't even let pilots fly this plane, with one exception you might be able to guess.

The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is a public museum created by the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its task is to educate the public about the history of medicine. It contains numerous artifacts from medical training programs, including this doll made in the 1930s. Her name is Michelle.

Dr. Chevalier Jackson (1865-1958) invented Michelle in the 1930s to teach doctors non-surgical methods of removing foreign objects trapped in children's throats. The trachea and esophagus are realistically child-sized.

This film shows Dr. Jackson using a probe to remove an object in Michelle's throat. This skill, as well as his ability to keep children calm during a panic-inducing procedure, made him a famous medical educator who directly or indirectly saved thousands of lives.

-via Museum of Curiosities

The National Audubon Society has crowned the winners of its annual photography competition. The Grand Prize went to the photo above by professional nature photographer Liron Gertsman of Vancouver. These are two rock pigeons engaged in allopreening, a new word I learned today that means grooming each other as a courtship gesture. Look how their iridescent feathers stand out against the dark background! Rock pigeons generally mate for life and share child care duties.

The photograph that won in the Professional category is this Atlantic puffin, captured in the Westman Islands off Iceland by Shane Kalyn. Kalyn shot this puffin sitting on a lava formation on a rainy day. It was the first Atlantic puffin that he'd seen!

Other awards were given in categories such as Amateur, Female Bird, Plants for Birds, Fisher, Youth, and Video. You can see all the award winners and honorable mentions at the Audubon contest site. The top 100 photos not making the winner's circle are listed here. -via Kottke

It's August in the year 410. The eternal city of Rome is captured and sacked by the Visigoth warlord Alaric. The Visigoths eventually left the city, but the western Roman Empire never recovered from this blow, triggering a sequence of events that would ensure that it would not survive another century.

If you were an accidental time traveler to Rome during this terrible time, how could you survive making best use of current knowledge of the event? Author Cody Cassidy has advice. His newly published book, How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History's Deadliest Catastrophes, has specific, detailed advice with a focus on European history.

Cassidy has published a summary in Smithsonian magazine, including helpful tips for living through the 410 sack of Rome (there were numerous sacks of Rome, so it's important be specific). Your best option is to flee the city toward the south and hide in the hills. You'll need to do so for only a few days because the Visigoths left the city quickly. If you're unable to get out of the city, hide in a church, as many of them were spared by the invaders.

Other calamities listed in Cassidy's article include the 1453 fall of Constantinople and the famine of 536. How can we escape a Tyrannosaurus Rex? We'll probably have to read the complete book to find out.

-via Nag on the Lake | Image: Andre Durenceau

YouTuber luisengineering likes to ramp up the power of ordinary household devices. In the past, he's modified a robot vacuum so that can move up to 37 MPH and adapted a Nerf Blaster to fire tampons.

In a similarly practical vein, he wants to deal with a roommate problem. His video is in German, but I gather that our hero lives with three other men and all four like to use electric toothbrushes. There aren't enough electrical outlets in the bathroom to keep all four toothbrushes juiced, so he has built an off-grid solution.

Luisengineering bought a 2-cyclinder 4-stroke gasoline engine with a 7 cc displacement. After designing and 3D printing new parts, he was able to drive this power to his toothbrush.

Hearing protection is advised while using this powerful and loud tool.

-via Hack a Day

You've probably seen it a million times, but never thought much about it. The stock photos of women lying on their stomachs while typing on a laptop or writing in a journal are really common, yet just as physically impossible as that movie poster pose. To see what's in front of you while lying this way, a woman must prop herself up on her elbows, which makes using her hands for typing too difficult. It's not comfortable, either. These photos never show men doing it, because that would be ridiculous. This pose happens in movies and TV shows as well. No one does this in real life.  

Why this pose? Most likely it's an opportunity to show both boobs and butt, and also hint at the behavior of a teenage girl in her bedroom. Merrill Markoe is a writer, and those images got under her skin, so she wrote a funny and relatable essay about these women in stock photos who not only appear to be writing while on their stomachs, but also drinking coffee, talking on the phone, and otherwise multitasking in bed. -via Boing Boing

The assignment - do not need the ER this #July4th pic.twitter.com/wUa0Ye9HEX

— US Consumer Product Safety Commission (@USCPSC) July 1, 2023

After a three-year absence due to the pandemic, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission returned to the National Mall in Washington last week to put on a demonstration of how not to use fireworks. They used styrofoam mannequins to show us the most common ways people get injured during the Fourth of July (and then they picked up all the pieces before they left). Last year, eleven people were killed by fireworks, and 10,200 people were injured badly enough to go to the emergency room. If Elon Musk's latest tweaks to the algorithm prevent you from seeing the video, you can watch the carnage here.

USCPSC coming through solid on this July weekend.

— Kenny_Blankenship (@Blank3nship89) July 1, 2023

Lifehacker has a list of the latest fireworks safety tips, including warnings about how to supervise children and pets. Besides all that, the the USCPSC Twitter feed is a pretty handy reference for the latest product recalls, and they can be quite funny at times, too. -Thanks WTM!  

In 1961, Forrest Ackerman, editor of  Spacemen magazine, received the above letter from a writer named Stephen King. But King was only 14 at the time, and not quite the household name he would become some years later. You can see hints of the horror master he would eventually be, in the declaration that the obituary section was his favorite part of the magazine.

Ackerman declined to publish the story accompanied by this letter, titled "The Killer." You can read a synopsis of it at Wikipedia. Despite this and other rejections, King kept writing and submitting stories until he finally got one of his tales published in another magazine in 1967. He also wrote full-length novels, and his fourth book was the first to be published: Carrie, in 1970. Persistence pays off!

Ackerman reconsidered his rejection many years later, and finally published "The Killer"in the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, in 1994. -via Nag on the Lake

When we think of a saber-tooth, we imagine Smilodon, once called the saber-tooth tiger, that roamed America thousands of years ago and left remains in the La Brea tar pits. There were actually three species of the Smilodon genus. But not all saber-tooth animals were cats. They weren't even all carnivores! Terrifyingly long canine teeth evolved separately in mammals from the very beginning of mammals. Tiarajudens eccentricus was a proto-mammal that lived in Brazil 260 million years ago. It didn't eat meat, but had long canines that were possibly used to fight others of their species. The genus Inostrancevia was a ten-foot-long proto-mammal with species found in both Russia and South Africa, indicating they migrated over time before the continents split apart. Get a short course in saber-toothed creatures in a roundup of eight very different toothy animals that lived millions of years apart at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Momotarou2012)

The United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, is the elite college for army officer candidates. It has at least 4,000 cadets, all who go through both academic and physical training at the same time. Feeding these students and the faculty means preparing around 13,000 meals a day. That much food requires huge vats and advance planning. But what makes the West Point food service notable is its efficiency. All the cadets arrive for meals in formation at the same time, and must finish eating within 25 minutes. The schedule allows for no lags or screwups, and every member of the kitchen staff and the cadets themselves have specific duties to get it all accomplished in time. The plan goes off like clockwork, three times a day.     

The dietician said that they provide between 1,200 and 1,500 calories a day to each student. That will certainly keep them on the skinny side, as the average American adult consumes more than 3,000 calories a day! But most likely she actually meant for each meal, since they are eating hearty portions.

People ask why the cadets don't clean up their own tables. There are several reasons: that would be inefficient, they don't have time before their next class, and perhaps most importantly, they are officer candidates learning to be officers.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in theaters this weekend. The fifth Indiana Jones film has so far garnered so-so reviews. So let's look back at the one that started it all: Raiders of the Lost Ark. The extended opening scene set up the character of Indiana Jones so well, it grabbed us and wouldn't let go. Jones being pursued by a giant boulder rolling straight for him is unforgettable even more than 40 years later, and that first chase scene has been recreated and parodied endlessly. Cracked looked back and resurrected six of the best parodies of the boulder scene, from Weird Al Yankovic, The Simpsons, Robot Chicken, The Muppets, and more. Even if you've seen them all before, you'll probably enjoy them at least as much as the new Indiana Jones film.  

You might have never heard of Brigadier General James Wilkinson, because he never accomplished anything great, and he was also never held accountable for his many failures. But a chronicle of his military career is a long list of corrupt escapades.

1. Wilkinson was involved in a conspiracy to remove General George Washington from command during the Revolutionary War, yet Washington still appointed him to lead the Second Infantry Regiment in 1791.

2. During the Northwest Indian War, Wilkinson spent his time undermining his superiors in order to be promoted in their place.

3. In 1803, he was sent to New Orleans to receive the Louisiana Purchase from France. While there, he gave the US's plans for exploration of the new territory to the Spanish in exchange for cash.

4. Wilkinson conspired with Aaron Burr to grab some land for themselves to start a new country, then sold out Burr to President Jefferson.

5. He took the US Army to Louisiana in 1809 to defend it from the British, but in a series of bribes and kickbacks, lodged his army in a place where almost half of the 2,000-man army died, and another couple hundred deserted or resigned. It was the deadliest peacetime military disaster in US history.

Wilkinson survived court martial or any discipline in these incidents because there was incompetence from others involved, and the various governing authorities wanted to avoid a public scandal. Wilkinson racked up more shenanigans later in his career, but this list is already depressingly long. Read about the astonishing career of General James Wilkinson at Military History Now. -via Strange Company

We who live in the Northern Hemisphere (and that's most of us) don't think much about the Southern Hemisphere until we point out some incongruences like how Australians carve watermelons for Halloween.

The truth is that the earth's Southern Hemisphere is really different from the Northern Hemisphere. In the north, we have a lot more land, but the pole has none, while the south has more sea but the pole is covered with a land mass. That, and other factors, make a distinct difference in the atmosphere, the pollutants, and the weather of the two hemispheres. There's even a sort of barrier around the middle where the earth spins the fastest that keeps the two halves of the earth distinct from each other. Hank Green explains the geological, astronomical, and cultural factors that make the Southern Hemisphere cooler, stormier, and cleaner.