Floating high above our world, there's a network of satellites that are watching us. They relay information from and to earth, and to each other. They enable our global phone, TV, and internet systems. They geolocate us and allow GPS to send us on our way. And since they appear to stay in the same place all the time, they must have very specific orbits. Geosynchronous orbits and geostationary orbits are not exactly the same, but they are both rather weird. They would not be possible if our planet were the slightest bit different from the way it is. In other words, if we lived on Jupiter or Venus, we couldn't have satellite TV. Imagine that. Minute Physics tells us why.
Every year, many classical creative works enter the public domain on January 1st under US copyright law. Most are forgotten and forgettable, but some still draw in audiences. Smithsonian magazine has a roundup of some of the more famous works that will no longer pay royalties to the estates of their creators. Among them are the original Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, who died in 1930.
Another is, appropriately, the song “The Best Things in Life are Free,” written by Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson in 1927. This song, which revived in popularity due to film performances in the 1950s, is still commanding popular attention—it was recently featured in the TV series White Lotus.
Some classic films are also entering the public domain, including Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Learn about them and more at Smithsonian.
-via Amanda Brennan | Photo: Kim Traynor
Experts have found tombs and two lead sarcophagi underneath the floor slabs of the church’s transept crossing three years after a fire burned the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. This was when a team of archeologists from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) was doing the preparatory dig for rebuilding the cathedral’s spire.
One might think that the fire, while devastating the structure, also gave way to new findings for archeologists. It still doesn’t erase the fact that the building got destroyed, though.
Obtaining the bodies in the tomb for analysis, Paul Sabatier of the forensic research faculty from the University of Toulouse III finally identified one of the bodies. They’ve determined the corpse to be Antoine de la Porte, an 83-year-old religious dignitary. It was also found that he had good teeth, apparently.
The other body in the second lead tomb had no name yet but was found to be a young, aristocratic cavalier.
Image credit: DR UT3 via HyperAllergic
Alright, who had the “a rare fossil creature appears in a city” in their 2022 bingo card? Nobody? Well, we didn’t have it either, but it did happen.
Yahoo! News reported that a creepy, prehistoric-looking “dinosaur shrimp” has shown up in Arizona. These creatures were discovered on December 23, 2022, by a tourist in The Wave, a sandstone rock formation and tourist spot.
The visitors found a pool of water in the area and noticed some tadpole-like shrimps that were the living fossils we were talking about. According to experts, these beings dated all the way back to the Jurassic age. Talk about ancient!
These creatures are called Triops and are described as looking like little mini-horseshoe crabs with three eyes. While it’s nice to find that some ancient crustaceans are still alive and kicking, we have to ask, why are they appearing now?
According to Central Michigan University, the shrimp eggs can lie dormant for many decades until enough rain comes to create lakes. So the pool of water must have formed recently for the tadpoles to hatch from the eggs. It is perfectly natural, so don’t worry that their appearance is a sign of an impending apocalypse or something. It isn’t!
Image credit: wikimedia commons
A holiday miracle. After more than a decade of mourning her son, a Scottish woman has discovered that her child was alive in a different country all along. The woman, named Joyce Curtis, filed a missing person report in 2009 after not hearing from her son, Nicholas, for a period of time.
Her son left their Glasgow home to travel to Europe to find work. The last thing she knew before she filed the report was that Nicholas was hitchhiking along France and Spain. Her family was contacted in 2010 by the British Consulate in Paris to tell them that their son was in a hospital.
Joyce and her husband flew to Paris to meet their child, and that was the last time they ever saw him. He was supposed to board a plane back to the UK, but it never happened. "I was expecting him home at Glasgow at a certain time," she explained. "I worked at the Southern General Hospital at the time. I was waiting on him coming home and there was no sign."
Now, decades after that incident, Joyce received another call from the Consulate informing her that Nicholas was actually alive, but was again in a hospital. While overjoyed to learn about her son, she does not want to build her hopes up until he finally returns home.
Image credit: SWNS
With the year coming to a close, we think that it’s the right time for listing all the highlights we had in the year. While we can talk about pop culture and other topics that went on the news, there’s also another thing that we should highlight for 2022: exploration and discovery.
It may seem that we’re pandering to academia more, but we believe that it’s always nice to acknowledge what mankind found out this year about our past or the very planet we’re living on. From random discoveries of rings, while using a metal detector, to discovering a Byzantine-era mosaic artwork on somebody’s farm, CNN has compiled its list of the top art and archaeological discoveries in 2022.
One of the most bizarre and unexpected discoveries featured in the list was experts finding a secret tunnel that leads to what potentially could be Cleopatra’s tomb. You know, the one place that eluded archaeologists for decades.
If you’re intrigued to learn more, check CNN’s full piece here.
Image credit: Wikimedia commons
Here’s something to warm your hearts in the cold months!
A new animal video posted on the Internet has gone viral for how adorable it is. With over 5 million views on the content-sharing platform, Twitter user Buitengebieden has successfully gained traction (and a bit of popularity) for how adorable their pupper is.
The video features a tiny pup slowly crawling toward a man (whom we assume to be the original poster). From the look on its face, the animal wants a lot of affection and kisses from its dad. As it crawls towards the man, he finally gets to kiss the animal, and viewers can see how happy it is– in fact, the pupper looks unsatisfied and asks for more!
It’s always lovely seeing videos of how close an animal is to its human companion. Additional cuteness and goodness in the world are always a welcome sight.
Image credit: Buitengebieden
Sneaking in for kisses.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/pBnAqQ8d1y
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 4, 2022
If you've got some free time between holidays, you might want to read, or at least skim through, a list of some things we learned in 2022 on a wide-ranging number of subjects, like animals, artificial intelligence, art, archaeology (wait, is this list in alphabetical order?), music, space, celebrities, health (I guess not), pets, chemistry, food, history, and more. You need to know about how a new Guinness World record was set for a mass gathering of vampires, how monkeys use tools for masturbation, and how a poll to name a Uranus probe didn't result in "Uranus Probe."
Mental Floss has put together a mega-list recapping the tidbits of knowledge that crawled across the internet in 2022. You can listen to it the Mental Floss List Show video, but it's 52 minutes long. Lucky for us, they also give us the text version, so you can skip the stuff you already know, if that's what you prefer.
A bristlecone pine in California is the oldest living thing on earth. The tree named Methuselah is estimated to be around 5,000 years old! How in the world does a tree last that long? It comes down to adaptation to environmental stresses, plus luck in the extremity of those environmental stresses. Minute Earth explains how Methuselah is perfectly adapted to deal with the things that normally kill trees. Then there are humans, like the one who killed Methuselah's neighbor Prometheus. In that case, Methuselah was defenseless, but also just plain lucky. This video is only two and a half minutes long, the rest is a promotion.
There are plenty of lists detailing the events of 2022, and ranking the movies, albums, celebrities, and other things that made a splash during the year. If you happen to cover, or be an expert in, something that's a bit off the beaten path, there's no reason you can't make your own year-end list of what you know. And so we have a list of 2022's most memorable public latrines offered by Canada's national parks and historic sites. The federal agency Parks Canada puts in a lot of work to make sure visitors are able to go when they need to go. The facilities are designed to serve while blending in with the natural world.
Canadian travel writer Jennifer Bain has visited all the parks, which are large and natural, meaning there isn't modern plumbing available everywhere. The particular benefits of each outhouse is honestly described. They are all functional, which is most important, but they all have something that makes them interesting, like a clever design, a wonderful view, or surprising features like motion-sensor lights. The roundup is a lot more interesting than you would imagine, and it may even entice you to visit some of these parks. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Jennifer Bain)
These feline creatures are honestly, amazing. They express beauty, grace, and elegance. In cartoons and other forms of media, cats are usually associated with extravagance and opulence as well. Additionally, they are also portrayed as being sneaky, witty, and capable of hunting swiftly– for example, in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, cat races (the Tabaxi) are known for being agile and fast. Their claws are also capable of dealing a lot of damage.
However, in real life, these animals aren’t so serious all the time. They’re also not graceful or elegant. Just like us, humble and clumsy humans, they can be goofballs and make people laugh at how adorable they are. Cuteness compiles a list of different instances where these felines can be weirdly adorable. From sitting oddly on a couch to making silly but cute faces in front of a fan, these images can be a good healing moment for our souls!
Check more odd-orable cat moments here.
Image credit: Marko Blazevic
The city of Hampi, India, is a Unesco World Heritage site. It is mostly known for the terrain of granite rocks in grey, ocher, and pink. Also, tourists go to the area for the many ruins of temples and palaces that have existed for centuries.
The area is filled to brim with history and archaeological wonder, as the city started as the capital of the South Indian Hindu Vijayanagara kingdom from the 14th to 16th century. The kings during that time period focused and spent a lot on culture, religion, and the arts, which in turn produced the temples and palaces we see today.
One of them is the Vijaya Vithala temple, dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. This location is an architectural marvel, with its highly-intricate and detailed columns, gateways, and walls. Aside from that, the temple features stone pillars that produce music. "These were the only musical instruments used here," Manjunath, a guide for the temple shared with BBC’s Malavika Bhattacharya.
These pillars have baffled people for centuries. How in the world were these pillars capable of producing music? The guide explains that musicians in the olden days play the columns with sandalwood sticks or their fingers. When struck, these structures can create different musical notes as well as the sounds of various Indian instruments like the ghanta (a bell), the damaru (a small handheld drum), and the mrindangam (an oblong double-sided drum).
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Society has different standards for men and women. From what they should wear to how they should look like, these qualities are implemented in pop culture, such as younger girls and boys being taught that looking suitable means they should dream of looking like actors, singers, and influencers that follow modern standards (eg. skinny, straight hair, etc.).
Another way how these societal norms are implemented is through consumption. Brands do their best to sell a specific body type or image so that you will use their products.
Illustrator Lainey Molnar gives her take on gender norms by showing how our society treats men and women differently. In a series of images that went viral on Instagram, the artist shows how we deem it “normal” when men don’t shave, but for women, it is “unhygienic” or “disgusting.”
One of the images in the series had a caption from Molnar, stating “the math is not mathing,” with the hashtag “you do you.”
Here’s our take on all of this: what’s best is that you do what makes you happy and comfortable. Also, remember: different people have varying choices in how they present themselves to the world. Try to understand them a little bit!
Image credit: Azra Tuba Demir
So dishwasher pods actually exist. Forget the Tide pods that people joke around putting in their mouths because there’s a new pod discourse in town. Fortunately enough, it’s less about the eating and more about where you should put them inside the dishwashing machine.
This discourse started with a TikTok video posted by an appliance repair tech Renae (@renduh on TikTok) initially stating that since these pods were covered by a type of PVA (polyvinyl alcohol) gel casing, they would be best placed in the machine’s silverware caddy. This is because PVA casing can dissolve prematurely and can gunk up people’s dishwashers.
After an email and a tour of their factory from Cascade, a dishwasher pod manufacturer, the TikTok creator went back on the platform to share what she learned about dishwasher pods and their proper placement in general.
According to the company, the PVA coating can cause clogs if they get wet before the washing starts. However, they insist that the pods should go into the detergent compartment of the dishwasher. To account for the gel coating in these products, Cascade advised keeping them as dry as possible before you start the washing process.
Make sure to handle the pods with dry hands and make sure that the detergent compartment in your dishwasher is dry. Part of ensuring that the coating will not dissolve prematurely is to store them in a cool, dry place.
Image credit: Castorly Stock
It seems that this gigantic attraction exploded under pressure.
A popular attraction in the Radisson Collection Hotel in Berlin has just exploded right in front of guests. The attraction, called the AquaDom, is a massive aquarium that is around 82 feet high. The 265,000-gallon aquarium holds over 1,500 tropical fish from more than 100 various species.
Meant to be for the Radisson’s guests and outsiders as well, the new installation was created to also offer visitors the view of the big fish tank from its center via a glass elevator that travels through that small space. Unfortunately, the AquaDom exploded during the early morning hours and was able to flood the hotel lobby and nearby streets. While no one died from the incident, two people were reported to be injured by the glass shards from the aquarium.
The cause of the explosion remains unknown, and an investigation will be launched into this incident.
Image credit: The Straits Times
