Glacial lakes are found everywhere glaciers are found. The water is held in place by dams of glacial ice or by rocky deposits that the glacier itself put in place. With the earth's temperatures rising, these natural dams are more likely to fail. The ice becomes thinner while the amount of water rises until the dam gives way. The floods this causes are larger and more violent than floods caused by excess rain or snow because they dump an enormous amount of water in a short time. There are 15 million people around the world living in the danger zone below these glacial lakes, and thousands have been killed by the outburst floods in the past few years. Their force can inundate towns with water, rocks, and ice for many miles downstream.
Juneau, Alaska, is in the flood plain of the Mendenhall Glacier, but had never experienced an outburst flood before 2011. Now they happen several times a year. The latest flood in August sent 14 billion gallons of water to Juneau, flooding homes that were so far from the Mendenhall River that the residents never expected to be flooded. Read about the new phenomenon of glacial lake outburst floods at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: The National Guard)
Foreverland Farm in Ohio takes in abused, disabled, and abandoned farm animals to give them the care they need. One of their critters is a goat named Champion who was born with only three legs and was rejected by his mother and by the rest of the herd. He was hand-reared and then made his way to the farm, where he could be properly cared for. But he was still lonely. After Champion had surgery for his remaining rear leg, the farm dog Gamora decided he needed to be protected and nursed back to health, so she became his mother figure. Champion recovered indeed, but the relationship between these two best friends remains. You can follow the adventures of Champion and Gamora at Instagram. Be warned that it's full of sad background stories for all kinds of rescued animals.
You might think that birthdays would be distributed along the calendar fairly randomly, but we know human beings don't operate in a random way. There are more babies born on September 9th than any other day of the year. The next most common birthdays are September 19th and September 12th. The rest of the top ten birthdays are also in September, between the 9th and the 20th. February 29th is the least common birth date, for obvious reasons.
Why are these the most common dates? Count back 38 weeks to the conception date for these folks, and it seems obvious: holidays, parties, alcohol, and it's nice to snuggle close to your partner on a cold night. But there may be other reasons, according to scientists, having to do with the changing seasons and temperatures affecting fertility. Mental Floss goes over those for us.
We also know that more babies in the US are born on Tuesday than any other day of the week. This is also not random. Doctors like to golf on Wednesdays.
(Image credit: James Petts)
This is Mad Skills a custom boat and/or truck lovingly crafted by Scott Carder of Delphos, Ohio. Overdrive Online says that it has the cab of a Peterbilt 379 truck mounted on the deck of a 22-foot pontoon boat.
In this video, Carder describes the build process, all of which is, of course, custom. He says that he wasn't entirely sure of his final plan when he began, but, "I thought, well, I'll build it and it will either sink or float. And it floats very nicely." The Mad Skills also lights up impressively at night. It's a party boat with a commanding presence.
-via Andrew Doyle
Sports teams love to have a costumed character on the sidelines, entertaining the crowd and cheering on the team. Stanford University does not have an official sports mascot. Their team name is Cardinal, referring to the color and not the bird. But the school's band has a mascot, the Stanford Tree, shown above. The character is so ridiculous that the entire school claims him/her, although not officially. You can't have a list of "worst mascots" without the Stanford Tree. But it's only one of many mascots that may draw attention for all the wrong reasons. The New Orleans Pelicans basketball team has two mascots, and both made the list. One is, not surprisingly, a pelican, and here is the other.
Just ran into the Pelicans King Cake Baby at @RousesMarkets! Nice to see @lindseypelicans as well. #PelicansKCB pic.twitter.com/4vlnifZN41
— Hank Allen (@HankAllenWX) January 27, 2016
See a list of 12 fear-inducing or just plain ridiculous sports mascots at Cracked.
(Top image credit: Daniel Hartwig)
Science fiction is full of time travelers, because going to another era is a wonderful opportunity for adventure. Some stories try to make it plausible, which is difficult and technical and often boring for an audience. Why not just skip all those details and get where (or when) you are going so the adventure can commence? That requires shortcuts in the writing, and a suspension of disbelief among the audience. Giant Freakin Robot just goes to the heart of the matter and calls these methods "time travel for the lazy," as if the characters have anything to do with it. But when you are sitting in the audience, it does appear that these travelers are either too smart to bother explaining it to us, or too dumb to realize they've just lucked into time travel. They go over ten methods that make time travel easy in movies. They've been used over and over, because it really doesn't matter how it happens as long as the story is good. We know time travel is impossible, so why quibble about the technical details? A phone booth is just as good as an accelerometer bending the space-time continuum when it's on the big screen. -via Laughing Squid
How fast can a person on a bicycle go without the aid of a motor? You might be surprised and terrified to learn. In 1962, French cyclist José Meiffret pedaled down the Autobahn at 127 miles per hour, or 204 km/h. He had been working to break the 200 km/h barrier for years. How he did it was the real story.
Meiffret loved competitive cycling, but he wasn't successful at distance races. Then he tried motor-paced racing. See, when I said "without the aid of a motor," I meant a motor on the bicycle. In motor-paced racing, the cyclist rides in the slipstream behind a motorcycle or a car equipped with a wind screen on the back to avoid air resistance. This means staying within 18 inches of the vehicle without touching it. The driver has to avoid any bumps or sudden movement. Any variation from those parameters would mean disaster, and the sport had plenty of those. It's even more dangerous when several cyclists are racing at the same time. Meiffret himself was injured badly in 1952 and suffered five skull fractures at once. Quite a few racers died.
For his record-breaking ride, Meiffret used a ridiculously-geared bike you can see above, specially designed for breaking records. He had a communication system set up with his team. But the race itself was a real nail-biter for the man whose life was on the line. The record Meiffret set that day would stand for 34 years, because there are still people doing this. Read about Meiffret's accomplishment at Amusing Planet.
Canalside Studio, an architecture and furnishings design house in Hong Kong, offers this innovative bench design that can bring people together and keep conversation flowing. It's made entirely of pine and medium density fiberboard. Between the two halves are a set of ball bearings that allow users to spin.
It appears to move a bit roughly at first, but with more speed and probably more people, the ride gets smoother.
-via Toxel
Yes, Parmesan ice cream used to be a thing. It was actually popular, especially in the time of the American Revolution. George Washington himself enjoyed it and you can, too, because there's a recipe preserved in a 1789 cookbook. Why was Parmesan ice cream such a hit? Perhaps because the cheese was one of the few European ingredients that could survive the trans-Atlantic passage to the New World.
This is only one of 7 once-popular ice cream flavors featured by the food blog The Takeout. They include teaberry, which is still found in Pennsylvania, and butter brickle, which is a kind of toffee flavoring.
Photo of non-Parmesan ice cream by PickPik
Warning: this video may not be appropriate for sensitive souls, and is not recommended for pregnant women. It's about postmortem fetal expulsion, or coffin birth. That's when a pregnant woman dies, and her body still manages to expel the fetus. In the modern era, if a woman dies during labor or in the final stages of pregnancy, the baby will be delivered by cesarian section and may survive. If the fetus dies along with the mother, which is inevitable when the pregnancy is not far enough along, modern embalming procedures will prevent coffin birth. The only time it might happen these days is when a deceased pregnant woman's body is not discovered for some time. Before modern medicine, it was a rare but horrifying event we only know about from a few documented accounts from morticians and some ancient exhumed graves with evidence. So all in all, it's not something you should be worried about, but a grim reality from the past. If you desire, you can read more about coffin birth here.
How can you meet a potential partner if you don't go to church or bars, and you've become disenchanted with online dating? The grocery store has emerged as an alternative meeting place. After all, everyone needs groceries. In Spain, the supermarket chain Mercadona had become ground zero for such meetups. The craze was sparked by a TikTok video, and others followed, directing lonely people to shop between 7 and 8 PM, and place a pineapple upside down in your cart. Then go to the wine section and see if anyone responds. What could possibly go wrong?
The trend is causing chaos in some Mercadona locations, with police responding to unruly crowds. At one store, a man dressed as a pineapple brought his bachelor party to the grocery. Employees, tired of returning pineapples to the produce department, have been seen hiding the fruit before seven o'clock. Read up on the viral trend and its real-world consequences at BBC. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Laoficina24)
Today is Star Trek Day, designated as September 8th because that was the date in 1966 when the first episode of the TV series Star Trek premiered. The holiday grew organically over the years as Star Trek and its spinoff series gathered more and more fans. Since fans were already celebrating, Paramount made the day official in 2020. Time to engage.
How does one celebrate Star Trek Day? The franchise suggests public service, as the original series imagined a better world in the future. Star Trek challenges fans to select between three missions to help educational and activist organizations. Make it so.
The natural thing to do would be to watch Star Trek TV episodes, movies, and related videos. Paramount is making a selection of media available for free on various streaming services and at YouTube through September 13, including the premiere episodes of the TV series. See a list of those here. And may you live long and prosper.
Kidney stones form when salts in the urine begin crystallizing. They can eventually move through one's ureter, or get stuck trying to, which may require surgery. Usually, the patient doesn't know they have a kidney stone before it causes pain, but it could have been forming over many years. Doctors can estimate when a kidney stone began to form by counting its growth rings like a tree, but that isn't reliably accurate.
In 2011, Vladimir Levchenko underwent surgery to remove a kidney stone, and requested that he be given the stone. See, Levchenko is a scientist with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. He specializes in carbon dating, and he wanted to carbon date the stone to see how long it had been forming in his body.
We are familiar with carbon dating telling us how many millions of years ago dinosaurs roamed the earth. But the accuracy of the method becomes more precise in more recent samples. Specimens that formed after 1950 can be tagged down to the month, thanks to nuclear tests that doubled the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. Read what Levchenko found and what it means for kidney stone research, plus how to prevent your own kidney stones. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Vladimir Levchenko/ANSTO)
Te Land, Ter Zee En In De Lucht is a Dutch TV show that ran from 1973 until 2011, and then was revived in 2024. It translates to On land, at sea and in the air. It's a game show featuring wacky competitions. The competition you see above is called Tobbedansen. The literal translation is "tub dance," and the term is used for inflatable water slides you can rent. The TV show has turned it into a more complicated recurring sport. You can read the rules, if you know Dutch. From the video, we can deduce that the goals are to 1. design a wacky boat, 2. survive launch, and 3. to travel far enough to ring a bell. It takes a while for any team to get far enough to show us the bell-ringing. The sport is not easy, but you have to admit it's entertaining. This event for the TV show took place in May at the amusement park Efteling. A good time was had by all. -via TYWKIWDBI
Mary Ann Bevan was born in 1874 and worked as a nurse in London. She married and had four children. Then she began to change. Her hands grew bigger, her face started to elongate, and she developed headaches and poor eyesight. Bevan's appearance caused her to lose her nursing job. Then her husband died suddenly in 1914. Bevan took odd jobs to support her children, but even that became difficult. A farmer who hired her told her, “all [she was] fit for [was] the ugly woman competition.”
We know now that Bevan had acromegaly, a pituitary condition that can strike at any time. All she knew was that she needed to support her family, so she indeed entered an ugly woman competition, and won. The publicity led to a career in sideshows, at Coney Island, and with Ringling Brothers. That may seem strange to us today, because she wasn't really ugly, but at the time people with deformities or disabilities were hidden away at home. Bevan's willingness to show herself made her wealthy enough to send all her kids to college, the equivalent of $1.6 million dollars today. Read the story of Mary Ann Bevan at All That's Interesting.
The story was posted today at reddit, but the "before" picture there is not Bevan. Here is a picture of Bevan before she developed acromegaly.
