In 1957, Marjorie “Hiddy” Spock, the younger sister of famed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, was living on Long Island and growing vegetables. Her partner Polly was wasting away from a mysterious malady suspected to be connected with DDT. Long Island was being treated with DDT dropped from planes to combat the invasive gypsy moth caterpillar, which had devastating forests in the US for over half a century by then. One day, an unannounced plane made 14 passes over Spock's property, dropping DDT. Her garden wilted. It became infested with garden pests she'd never seen before. A neighbor lost all the fish he was raising. Bird species disappeared from the neighborhood. Spock decided to sue the government. More than a dozen homeowners, farmers, and wildlife enthusiasts joined her.
Their case against the government was based on the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the government from taking property and lives without due process, and from taking land without compensation. It also involved the Fourteenth Amendment, which barred trespassing on private property.
The case reached the Supreme Court, where it was dismissed on a technicality. But it had drawn the interest of Rachel Carson, who used the information collected by the plaintiffs to write her 1962 book Silent Spring, which led congress to ban the use of DDT and also inspired the modern environmental movement. Read an excerpt from the new book How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT by Elena Conis telling the story of how this important lawsuit came about at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Xanthis)
Is it an Easter miracle? The cargo ship Ever Forward was finally freed from land this morning. It was more than a month ago that the cargo ship became stuck in Chesapeake Bay. The incident harked back to the calamity of the Ever Given, which clogged up the Suez Canal for a week. The Ever Given made global news because of the traffic backup, but the Ever Forward was stuck much longer. Both ships are under the control of the Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen.
Workers spent the past week removing 500 of the ship's 5,000 containers with cranes, hoping to lighten the load. The effort raised the ship six inches, which isn't a lot when a ship needs 42 feet to float, but every inch counts. Sunday morning's spring tide under a full moon was just high enough for two pulling barges and five tugboats to drag the Ever Forward from the muddy banks. Read about the operation at the Baltimore Sun. -via Metafilter
How much do you know about professional jump rope? If you're like me, nothing at all. For most of us, it's a kid's game or a workout exercise. And often, it's an opportunity for humiliation or injury. But jump rope is also a niche sport that has its own culture, tournaments, and world records. Professional jump rope expert Tori Boggs is the best in the world in many different jump rope skills, and holds several world records. Boggs has been doing this since she was five years old. Watching some of the things she can do makes you appreciate her amazing power, timing, and endurance, deployed all at the same time. Lucky for us, this video shows what she can do in slow-motion a lot of the time, otherwise we wouldn't even know what's really going on. Besides that, the joy and enthusiasm she has for what she does is great to watch. -via Kottke
Fans of astronomy had their world rocked, so to speak, in 2006 when the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto is not a planet, or no longer a planet, as it seemed. We went from "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" to "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos." The call is still controversial in some circles. But it wasn't the first time our planets have been upgraded or downgraded.
At one time or another, the planets of the solar system included Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta. The designation depends on how much we know about these celestial bodies and how we define "planet." The definition of a planet has changed considerably over time, and even today astronomers are arguing about that definition, as well as Pluto's rightful place in the heavens. Read about the ups and downs of planetary status at Salon. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi)
I was 17 and decided with some friends to hold an Easter egg hunt geared to the handful of other teens we hung out with. It was weirdly wholesome of us considering we mostly drank Mad Dog and loitered at Waffle House.
— 🇺🇦 David Griner 🇺🇦 (@griner) April 15, 2022
David Griner tells us the story of that time he and a few friends decided to have a private Easter egg hunt. They only had a couple dozen eggs, but they hid them in the most inaccessible places they could find among the trees and boulders of Monte Sano Park in Huntsville, Alabama, right before the hunt was supposed to begin.
That night, the weather man asks if he has Easter plans. “Just going to an egg hunt at Monte Sano in the morning.”
— 🇺🇦 David Griner 🇺🇦 (@griner) April 15, 2022
And that's why Griner found 100 or so families waiting for the Easter egg hunt to start when he emerged from the woods after hiding the eggs. You can read the whole story in this Twitter thread, or at Threadreader. It might even be true, but that doesn't really matter, because you'll be glad you read it. -via Metafilter
PS: There's another great 8-Tweet Easter egg hunt story in the comments.
(Image credit: Laslovarga)
Stay with me, this gets a bit complicated. A couple of weeks ago, we brought you a post about an 1898 novel that uncannily foretold the Titanic disaster. The Titanic sunk on April 14, 1912. Another work of fiction had been published in the May 1912 issue of Popular magazine (which was already on newsstands in early April) about a huge and supposedly unsinkable ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank. “The White Ghost of Disaster” was written by Captain Mayn Clew Garnett, a name that hid an ugly story that had nothing to do with ships. Was Garnett a prophet? No, as we saw in the previous post, the Titanic sinking was a disaster that more people should have seen coming. Not only was Garnett not a prophet, he wasn't even Garnett.
The author's real name was Thornton Jenkins Hains, and he was writing under a pseudonym to hide his real identity, as Hains was extremely unpopular after his second murder trial. After the first murder trial in 1891, Hains managed to relocate and build a career as a writer. But after the second trial in 1908, he could only get published by changing his pen name. “The White Ghost of Disaster” became a sensation, though, because of the eerie timing, and was reprinted in newspapers across the country. It wasn't long before Hains' detractors figured out who the author was. Read about Thornton Jenkins Hains, the two murders, and the sea story that blew his cover at Smithsonian.
(Illustration: Meilan Solly)
Frito-Lay cannot legally sell Cheetos in Germany. It's a copyright issue, as the big German snack maker Intersnack Group filed an injunction in 1980 that Cheetos infringes on their copyright of a snack chip named Chitos. Brand confusion may result, you know. The thing is, while Intersnack sells a chip called Chios, you cannot find a product called Chitos in Germany. A rival company says Intersnack sells about ten bags of Chitos a year. Doesn't matter, they still have the copyright. However, you can easily buy a cheese-coated corn snack called Cornchos. If you find yourself in Berlin with a Cheeto craving, you might try them and let us know how they hold up. Americans in Germany have found a couple of ways to get around the injunction against Cheetos, though, involving suitcases and stickers, which you can read about at The Takeout. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Scott Ehardt)
Trinity Thomas, a senior at the University of Florida, scored a perfect ten in the floor exercise at the NCAA tournament in Ft. Worth yesterday. Her score confirmed Thomas as the all-around champion of the event and took Florida into the final team round. Thomas also won in the uneven bars.
Thomas edged out Olympic gymnast Suni Lee for the title. Lee enrolled at Auburn after she won the gold as the all-around champion in Tokyo last summer. You can see more highlights from the NCAA semifinals in this video. Teams from Florida, Auburn, Oklahoma, and Utah will compete in the team championship round on Saturday. -via Digg
The Manuscript Writing Cafe is a unique shop in Tokyo set aside exclusively for writers facing deadlines.
When they enter, customers report a writing goal to the manager. Specifically, they have to state a number of words that must be completed. There's a consequence for failing to finish the goal: they don't get to leave.
After paying an entrance fee, the writers can order coffee with unlimited refills. The cafe has WiFi and each writing station has a USB charger and a PC cooling stand.
About every hour, the manager stops by each writer and asks if they're making progress. The customer chooses whether the manager asks that question in a "mild", "normal", or "hard" manner.
"Hard" is, presumably, a vigorous application of the query.
-via Super Punch | Photo: Manuscript Writing Cafe
World events have been rather boring for the past two years, so what's the worst that could happen?
The Guardian reports that archaeologists working in the ruins of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris during its reconstruction discovered a human-shaped sarcophagus made of lead. At some point during the 1300s, people in Paris decided that it was very important to bury whatever is inside the sarcophagus beneath the floor of the transept of the cathedral.
The transcept is the center of the cross of a crucifix-shaped cathedral. It is thus at the very heart of this consecrated ground.
The archaeologists are, as you might expect, doing this during the Easter season when, as historian Steven Van Impe points out, "people are known to come back from the dead."
The sarcophogus is made of lead. Why? I cannot find any lore about the properties of lead that would suggest why the people who buried it 700 years ago would use it as a construction material.
-via John Overholt | Photo: Drew de F Fawkes
The four corners of the natural calendar for our planet are the two solstices and the two equinoxes. Ancient pagan folks also divided the seasons between these points in half to create four other calendar points, and the Gaels designated them as Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain, and Imbolc. Samhain became associated with Halloween, Imbolc became Groundhog Day, and Lughnasadh is ignored because it's hard to pronounce and there seems to be a law against having holidays in August. That leaves Beltane, which is coming up and is often associated with May Day.
Beltane begins at sunset on April 30 and continues through May first. It is supposed to be the beginning of summer, which seems a little early considering that our calendars place it on June 21, and many of us use Memorial Day as the marker in reality. But when you are planting a garden, May starts the crop season. You'll learn a lot about the ancient and mostly forgotten pagan holiday of Beltane at Mental Floss.
Studies show that on any day, about 16% of all adults are experiencing a headache. Headaches are quite a problem because they affect the way we function in the world around us. And the real kicker is that twice as many woman suffer from migraines and frequent headaches as men. Now, why would that be? Any woman will tell you it's easily explained by stress and tension, and can probably give you an awful lot of reasons for that stress and tension. But that's only part of the explanation. Hormonal changes appear to be part of it, as migraines increase for girls as they go through puberty, and the incidence of migraines decrease after menopause. Posture issues appear to play a part. And sleep deprivation, a known source of headaches, is higher in women. Read about the prevalence of headaches and what we can do to alleviate the problem at Today. -via Digg
Passover 2022 begins Friday evening and continues through April 23. The traditional festivities include the annual Passover song from the a cappella group Six13. This year, they tell the story of Passover and the modern Seder to the tunes of four Billy Joel hits: "Piano Man," "Moving Out," "We Didn't Start the Fire," and "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." Chag Pesach Sameach! -via Metafilter
See more holiday songs by Six13 in previous Neatorama posts. My favorite for Passover is The Lion King Passover, but we can never forget the Thanksgivukkah Anthem. It was a one-time holiday, but the song will remain in your memory for the moment the goat joins in.
The Dodo introduces us to Patrick Seligman, a diver in Hawaii. On his occasional dives, he visits an animal dental office beneath the surface of the water. It's a section of reef inhabited by Pacific cleaner shrimp (Lysmata amboinesis), a species known for eating parasites and dead tissue from other fish. This symbiotic relationship allows the shrimp to eat and other fish to get clean.
Seligman opens his mouth near a shrimp and allows it approach him. Although some shrimp are skittish around the big human, others are willing to clean his teeth and pick up a free meal. After repeat visits, Seligman began bringing his friends for dental hygiene services.
It happens all the time. You, an employer, hire someone based on a stellar resume, and eventually find out that they aren't as good at their job as they were expected to be. You sever ties with them and never think about it again. It might not occur to you that the resume was completely fabricated and that employee was a criminal fraudster who'd done the same at workplaces all over. The career of Brigitte Cleroux continued for 30 years because her jobs were like jigsaw puzzle pieces that didn't come in the same box. Cleroux worked as a teacher and a hair stylist despite having no credentials, but mostly found positions as a nurse, with forged licenses, all across Canada and in the United States. She was only occasionally caught, but was able to start all over again by leaving for a new location with a new name and new forged documents. Decades of fraud finally caught up with Cleroux in 2021, but the harm she left behind is just beginning to be noticed.
Cleroux was able to get away with this because so few employers cross-checked her credentials with schools or licensing agencies. And even if they did, she would just change her name and move on. Read the story of nurse imposter Brigitte Cleroux at Maclean's. -via Damn Interesting
