Former NASA engineer Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) was asked to charge a very powerful battery for an electric Volkswagen. He decided to make lemonade- a really serious lemon-powered battery, using 1232 lemons. After having as much fun with that many lemons as they could think of, he and William Osman got down to business. Lemons were not the only creative idea he had for charging the huge car battery. The Volkswagen supercar ended up winning the Pike's Peak Challenge, and set a world record, too! -via The Kid Should See This
Sam Houston was a Tennessee congressman, then Tennessee governor, then president of Texas (twice), then a Texas senator, then Texas governor. His retirement was due to the Civil War, because he expressed a serious foreboding about the United States splitting apart.
Houston, a bafflingly complex man, owned slaves but fought against reviving the slave trade (the importation of slaves had been outlawed in 1807) and opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the way for slavery to expand north and west. He also supported the Compromise of 1850, admitting California as a free state. Houston backed the measure “because it was good for the Union,” says Robert Wooster, professor of history at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. Plus, the compromise contained provisions allowing Texas to “pay off its public debts,” even though the 1850 agreement — and Houston’s opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act — proved unpopular among most Southerners.
On Nov. 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. Houston’s prickly relationship with slavery, love for Texas and loyalty to the Union crashed into one another. “Houston saw Lincoln not as a radical, but as a moderate,” Wooster says, and he took seriously Lincoln’s campaign promise not to interfere with slavery where already in practice, believing Lincoln’s election was not a legitimate cause for secession. Furthermore, Houston foresaw the grisly horrors an internecine conflict would visit upon Texas. “He basically argued that Fire-Eaters [pro-slavery Southern secessionists] were leading the South down a path of destruction,” Howell adds.
After all the battles Houston won as a war hero, and all the offices he won, Houston's political end came about when he tried to keep Texas in the Union. Read the story of Houston's approach to the Civil War at Ozy.
Huck is pretty good at counting by twenties, for a 6-year-old. Still, he has some innocent ideas of what to do with a thousand dollars. He has to spend it in one day, so he hires a limousine the very first thing. After a trip to the toy store, he runs out of ideas, but the guys from Yes Theory explain VR to him. Then he remembers the candy store! You'll love the way this video ends. -via reddit
This critter got himself into a predicament, didn't he? A crab boat crew saw a fox stranded on an iceberg about seven kilometers off the coast of Labrador. Alan Russell of St. Lewis talked to the CBC about the fox on an ice shelf.
"We seen something on the ice. Wasn't sure what it was," Russell told CBC's Labrador Morning. "So we got up closer to it. It was a little fox, Arctic fox. And he wasn't very big. He was soaking wet, and the gulls was trying to pick at him."
The crew tried to pull him from the mushroom-shaped iceberg tip, but the skittish fox wouldn't let them close. So they used the boat to knock the ice pan down and fished the fox from the water with a net.
The crew put the fox in a bin with wood shavings, brought him to port, fed him for a couple of days, and then released him. See more pictures at CBC. -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: Alan Russell)
Remember the video called Super Fabulous Powers that mixed He-Man and the Masters of the Universe with "What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes? Of course you do. If you don't, refresh your memory here. After all this time, we finally get an action figure based on that video, which is Prince Adam with that goofy smile and a fabulous pink sword.
Anyway, laughing Prince Adam—who comes encased in an appropriately rainbow-glitter covered box—will be available only at Super7's pop-up event during Comic-Con 2018: a recreation of Hordak’s Lair from He-Man and She-Ra that’ll be outside of the convention on 8th Avenue in San Diego. It’s a lair worth braving for such a delightful reward.
Comic Con San Diego will be July 19-21. See the full figure at io9.
In this video from Monster Truck Ninja, digitally-animated Batman and Robin dance to the Batman theme. Then they are joined by all the other characters, including villains that Adam West never encountered! It takes a real bat fan to recognize them all. Just wait until you see Alfred twerking! -via Geeks Are Sexy
The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was the world's only remaining carnivorous marsupial when English settlers came to Tasmania. They were hunted to protect livestock; in fact, the government paid for every tiger killed up until 1909. The last known thylacine in the wild was shot in 1930, and the last one in a zoo died in 1936 -just two months after Australia designated it as a protected species.
But then something unexpected happened. Long after the accepted date of extinction, Tasmanians kept reporting that they’d seen the animal. There were hundreds of officially recorded sightings, plus many more that remained unofficial, spanning decades. Tigers were said to dart across roads, hopping “like a dog with sore feet,” or to follow people walking in the bush, yipping. A hotel housekeeper named Deb Flowers told me that, as a child, in the nineteen-sixties, she spent a day by the Arm River watching a whole den of striped animals with her grandfather, learning only later, in school, that they were considered extinct. In 1982, an experienced park ranger, doing surveys near the northwest coast, reported seeing a tiger in the beam of his flashlight; he even had time to count the stripes (there were twelve). “10 A.M. in the morning in broad daylight in short grass,” a man remembered, describing how he and his brother startled a tiger in the nineteen-eighties while hunting rabbits. “We were just sitting there with our guns down and our mouths open.” Once, two separate carloads of people, eight witnesses in all, said that they’d got a close look at a tiger so reluctant to clear the road that they eventually had to drive around it. Another man recalled the time, in 1996, when his wife came home white-faced and wide-eyed. “I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have seen,” she said.
“Did you see a murder?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “I’ve seen a tiger.”
The Tasmanian tiger became a legend, as there have been plenty of sightings with no evidence, just like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. But the thylacine is different in that the species was once very real. Other species have been found after we considered them extinct, so why not the Tasmanian tiger? Read the history of the thylacine, and the search for survivors, at the New Yorker. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Bene Rohlmann)
What are the odds that you'll ever be hit by a meteor? Pretty darn small, since most burn up completely in the atmosphere, and there are very few accounts of meteorites coming near people. But those few accounts do exist.
On June 21, 1994, a Spanish man by the name of Jose Martin was out for a drive with his wife when he got definitive proof that the Universe doesn’t like him, or, at least, doesn’t like his car. How? Well, it dropped a nearly 2 kilo hunk of space rock that just moments ago had been travelling at several thousand miles per hour through his windshield….
Fortunately for Martin and his wife, the meteorite hit the dashboard instead of them and then ricocheted into the backseat. Amazingly, the only significant injury to the humans present was nothing more than a broken finger suffered by Martin- an injury we speculate he sustained while flipping off the sky as hard as humanly possible.
While the damage can be horrific, the upside of a meteorite encounter is that you might be able to sell the rock for a pretty penny. Martin wasn't the only one to have his car ruined by a meteorite, nor the only one to be injured by one. Read stories of other people who came too close for comfort at Today I Found Out.
(Image credit: Joachim Huber)
We all know the United States is strange, but there are some geographic oddities in this video that you might not have already known. RealLifeLore picked out some interesting facts that just don't seem like they make any sense, unless you live in the area they're talking about. Or if you learned geography from a globe instead of a Mercator map -which is the way geography should be learned, but it doesn't happen much. -via Digg
The question at reddit's AskMen forum was "Alrighty, what's the most depressing, single man meal you've made?" The answers are sad, very sad, so sad that you can't help but laugh. The questioner admitted his was peanut butter toast with cheddar cheese with fries. Others were worse.
One man recounts stuffing his face with cereal and washing it down with milk because he was too lazy to do the dishes and fashion a clean bowl.
Another’s meal: “Sliced cheddar cheese and Lays potato chips substituted as crackers.”
Some insane doofus made a Bloody Mary with vodka and SpaghettiOs.
“Spaghetti but with ramen noodles, ketchup and chopped hot dogs.”
Let's hope these guys have learned something about stocking a kitchen since then. You can read the highlights at Mel magazine, or peruse the entire thread at reddit.
(Image credit: Charles Brooking)
Who ever heard of a ferret with a job? That's exactly what's happening here. James Mckay runs the National Ferret School in Chesterfield, England, where they train ferrets to lay cable. If you've ever seen a pet ferret run through a piece of flexipipe for fun, you know they'd be good at this. -via Tastefully Offensive
Zanzibar, a group of islands off the coast of Tanzania, was home to a particularly unique women's clothing style in the 19th century. While Muslim women were expected to be completely covered, the Zanzibar pantsuit allowed for greater freedom of movement than dresses, with trousers underneath a shorter dress. The distinctive ruffles at the hem set them apart from other styles.
As far back as the 8th century, Persian, Indian, and Arab traders used Zanzibar as a base for voyages between the Middle East, India, and Africa. Swahili people became intermediaries and facilitators to local, Arab, Persian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Indian, and Chinese merchants.
It does look like these outfits could be a result of mixing all these cultures together to create a unique style for the Swahilis of Zanzibar. The flares and ruffles may have had a practical purpose for the locals.
Fascinated by the look, spotted at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, Messy Messy Chic assembled a collection of images of the Swahili women's fashions of yore.
Warning: infectious laughter. These guys were trying to find their way around what I think might be the city of Fortaleza in Brazil. Commenters believe the trouble may be because they didn't switch the language of their app to Portuguese. They have stories of using map apps in languages that don't work well in the location they are driving through. At any rate, what came out was not only the road they should turn on, but all the other roads and shopping plazas it leads to. InappropriateSurname jotted them all down.
Turn left onto Avenida Almirante Barroso / Avenida Antonio Justa / Avenida da Abolição / Avenida Desembargador Moreira / Rua Frei Mansueto / Avenida Pessoa Anta / Rua Ana Bilhar / Rua Barbalha / Rua Barbosa de Freitas / Rua José Napoleão / Rua Juazeiro do Norte / Rua Júlio Ibiapina / Av. Senador Virgílio Távora
Then turn right onto Rua José Napoleão
The video was uploaded yesterday. You have to wonder if they're still driving around, trying to find their destination. -via reddit
For too long, city design centered on buildings and roads, which makes sense until you think about what a city should really be designed around: the people who live and work there. And visitors, too. Buildings can be beautiful, density and efficiency look good on paper, but what good are those things if living there isn't filling the needs of the residents? Ingrid Gehl is a behavioral scientist who married Danish architect Jan Gehl.
“Why are you architects not interested in people?” Ingrid Gehl asked her new husband, Jan. “What do you think about the fact that your architecture professors take their photos at four o’clock in the morning . . . without the distraction of people in the photos?”
In the early 1960s, and in many cases still today, these were forbidden questions, particularly among those we think of as designers–architects, city planners, and engineers. Then and now, designers consider human needs for health, survival, safety, and comfort through building codes and best practices. Psychological needs are only an afterthought–at best.
When professionals in different fields marry each other, the result can be magic for more than just those two people. The Gehls collaborated with each other on ideas for making cities more than just buildings and roads, by making them workable for the people who inhabited them. Read about their influence on city planning at Co. Design. -via Metafilter, where you'll find more links on the subject.
(Image credit: Flickr user Miguel Bernas)
The team from Senegal has been charming World Cup crowds and spectators around the world with their dancing skills. Their joyful dance is part of their training, and no doubt is a great team building exercise. Although the video above was taken in an empty stadium, the Senegalese got the crowd involved when they danced to celebrate their win over Poland last week.
With this music many can now understand the dance performed by Senegal team after their win against Poland. #worldcup,#Russia2018. Congratulations #Senegal . pic.twitter.com/RTOP96UPic
— Lamoussa Gama (@LGama) June 20, 2018
Their next game will be against Colombia on Thursday. -via Mashable
