Eric posts videos about his hobby of restoring rusty antique tools, and has built quite a following over the years. However, the latest video on his channel Hand Tool Rescue, months in the making, veered off into left field. He had found a free packet of seeds distributed in a seed catalog issued in 1926 (so the seeds were actually formed from 1925 tomatoes). Could he get them to germinate? His regular viewers were shocked when he revealed early in the video that he has a PhD in plant science, sparking comments about this being the worst tool restoration video yet.
The video is long, 24 minutes, but often funny and you can skip through if you don't want to learn all about his experiments with different germination media and his various failures and successes. But if you watch the whole thing, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat rooting for the survival of a (spoiler alert) single tomato seedling. -via Metafilter
The USS Constitution--one of the original six frigates commissioned for the nascent United States Navy--is technically still in active service. "Old Ironsides" earned her name during an engagement of the War of 1812 when British cannonballs bounced off her hull, leading one sailor to suggest that her sides were made of iron, not wood.
But they are indeed made of wood. Specifically, the Constitution consists primarily of White Oak. To ensure that the frigate remains in suitable condition should the Royal Navy ever again need a a good thrashing, the US Navy maintains a forest with mature White Oaks.
The Naval Support Activity of Crane, Indiana consists of 64,000 acres of forest, including the finest White Oak in the United States. The White Oak preserve is appropriately named "Constitution Grove."
-via J&L Historical | Photos: US Navy
When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, it was delivered by a Boeing B-29 Superfortress named the Enola Gay. Strangely, the development of the airplane cost way more than the entire Manhattan Project that gave us the bomb. That's because the B-29 bomber was so different from planes that came before.
Modern long distance air travel is a matter of enduring hours in a crowded fuselage. But at the beginning of World War II, bomber crews flying at 30,000 feet had to wear oxygen masks and heated suits to survive at that altitude. The US needed a long-range bomber to reach the Asian theater and cover the great distances from our Pacific bases to Japan and other targets. That meant developing a pressurized cabin to mitigate the dangers of high-altitude flight. Other innovations in the B-29 included remote control bombing and three-point landing gear. While these features seem commonsense today, starting from scratch and getting them to work at wartime speed involved four factories, thousands of workers, and competition between companies and engineers. Read the story of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that laid the groundwork for modern airlines at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: wallycacsabre)
Yesterday, The Ohio State University Buckeyes played the Texas Longhorns, and we have the opportunity to enjoy the halftime show without having to watch the game. That may sound weird to sports fans, but some of us care little for football. The Best Damn Band in the Land is all brass and percussion, with a saxophone, keyboard, bass guitar, and drums supplementing on a stage in the middle. They are known for their musical ability and clever formations that illustrate the song lyrics or the theme of the show, as we have seen before.
The university held five days of tryouts for TBDBITL only a couple of weeks ago, and the band received their first new uniforms since 2006. In the short time since then, they have practised diligently and put together a new show featuring familiar uptempo Gospel songs that work surprisingly well for a marching band.
Incidentally, Ohio State beat Texas 14-7.
The Long Walk is a film adaptation of an early novel by Stephen King. The depicts a contest in which people must walk continuously along a road at a speed of at least three miles per hour. Anyone who stops is killed. The last walker and sole survivor of the contest gets anything he wants as a reward.
Entertainment Weekly reports that the Culver Theater in Los Angeles is holding a special screening. Each audience member walks on a treadmill for the full duration of the film. Anyone who stops for any reason during the movie will be "removed" by theater staff.
-via @coopercooperco
By area, Canada is the second largest country on earth (after Russia and discounting Antarctica), but it's 37th in population. A population map of Canada shows where the people are concentrated, right near the southern border. Most of that border between the US and Canada is at the 49th parallel, yet the majority of Canadians live south of that parallel in the east. Why don't more people live in the north? Duh- because it's cold up there. But honestly, there's a lot more to it.
Canada's population is not just limited to the south- it's concentrated in three areas that are widely separated from each other. Tomas Pueyo at Uncharted Territories breaks down the historical, geological, and meteorological reasons that the St. Lawrence River, the Palliser Triangle, and Vancouver have so many people while the rest of the country is wide open spaces. He has an awful lot of interesting maps in the explanation. -via Nag on the Lake
It's been said, often, that the US and Britain are two countries forever divided by a common language. And there are folks who will tell you that the language is not at all common, that it's two languages, and that you can only understand the other if you've been exposed to it quite a bit. I recall trying to share Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my kids, who refused to watch because they couldn't understand what was being said. Their loss.
There's a big ocean between the two countries, so it's no wonder that the pronunciation has diverged. But the United States is such a big country that Americans pronounce words differently depending on the area they are from. Laurence Brown has spent the last ten years contrasting Britain with America. In this video, he tells us about the American words that are not only pronounced differently from the British version, but also differently from other Americans. I'm sure there are some here that you (if you are American) pronounce in your own way. There's a 75-second skippable ad at 3:19.
The story of Macquarie Island, halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, is the go-to tale illustrating the devastating effects of invasive species. Before 1810, the island was uninhabited, but an amazing variety of sea birds flourished there. Several species of penguins used it as a mating ground because there were no land predators. Then Macquarie Island was claimed as a base for British sealing ships, and both seals and penguins were hunted to near extinction. The ships brought rats, who settled in and ate seabird eggs. The rats became so numerous that cats were brought in for rat control. However, the cats found seabirds easier to catch, and the cats multiplied while seabirds died out.
At the same time, rabbits were introduced to Macquarie Island so that sailors would have something to eat besides penguins, and they took over the island as well, damaging the grassland and native vegetation. Seabirds suffered further, and some species went extinct. By the 1980s, conservationists were ready to do something about Macquarie Island. Read up on the measures they took, some more successful than others, at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Hullwarren)
When my kids were young and complaining about being bored, I would always tell them that it was their own fault and they needed to figure it out themselves. The complaining eventually stopped. The truth is that we've all managed to eliminate boredom with a device in our pockets that can fill even the smallest amount of downtime with information or entertainment.
We hear a lot about the epidemics of depression and loneliness in the modern world, and that could be explained by the lack of real-life social interaction, or maybe it's the lack of introspection. When the dishwasher was invented, housewives didn't want one because washing the dishes was the only time of the day they could be alone with their thoughts. Being alone with your thoughts has value, so why do we find ourselves avoiding it? Some of it is FOMO, the fear of missing out, and some of it is the fear of wasting time. We are lucky to have the time to be bored. Professor Arthur C. Brooks explains why we should let ourselves be bored sometimes, and how we can find the time to do it.
Today, I found on reddit an interesting thread in which Trekkies share odd facts about Star Trek.* One of them is that the late physicist Stephen Hawking is the only person to depict himself on any Star Trek series. This was in a holodeck scene in the Next Generation episode "Descent."
Arguably, though, Hawking was not portraying himself, but a holographic version of himself. The Deep Space Nine character Vic Fontaine, who was a hologram, as distinguished from his Mirror Universe counterpart, who corporeal. So although Vic Fontaine is not a person, there is, in established canon, a distinction between a person and a holographic variant of that person.
The Voyager episode "Future's End," in which selected crew members travel to 1996, or the film The Voyage Home, in which the original cast travel to 1986, would have given Hawking the best opportunity for him to actually portray himself within the Star Trek universe.
*I will not, of course, share information from such a list without doing some basic fact-checking. Memory Alpha, which is a tightly-edited wiki, confirms that Stephen Hawking is the only person to portray himself on Star Trek. And I'm at a loss to think of who else, outside of stock footage, would qualify.
The visible spectrum of light that humans can detect is relatively limited. Ultraviolet light waves are too short and infrared waves are too long for our perception, although some animals have developed signal detection outside of humans' natural ability. But scientists in China have been experimenting with "upconversion nanoparticles" that can convert infrared light in the environment into colors that we can detect. After seeing success when injecting these nanoparticles into the retinas of mice, they looked for a non-invasive way to use this technology in humans. The answer is soft contact lenses embedded with these nanoparticles.
These lenses enable the wearer to see near-infrared signals. They can see these signals even with their eyes closed, because eyelids are only good at blocking visible light. The lenses do not detect far-infrared signals, which would be thermal vision, an ability some animals have already. Read about this ocular breakthrough at the Guardian. -via kottke
(Image credit: איתן טל)
Mateo Niclas was kayaking off the coast of Alaska when he spotted a beluga whale mired in the mud. He called over his buddies, eight men in all, to see what they could do. First, they provided buckets of water to keep its skin moist. It was big for a beluga- they estimated that the whale was about 3,500 pounds. That's way more than a kayak could pull. But there were eight guys and a rope, and the mud was just slick enough to allow them to pull together and free the whale. That beluga is going to have a real story to tell his beluga buddies, although they will not believe him.
A situation like this could be dangerous for amateur rescuers. GoPro recommends that if you see a stranded marine animal, call the professionals. NOAA Fisheries has a website that lists the closest organization staffed with experienced rescuers who will come to help. -via Born in Space
During World War II, the Nazis confiscated thousands of artworks owned by Jewish artists and collectors. These included works from Dutch art collector Jacques Goudstikker confiscated by the German government after his death and sold cheap to Nazi officials. Some of those paintings have been found, others are still missing.
Fast forward 80 years, and the Argentine home of former SS officer Friedrich Kadgien is put on the market by his daughters. The listing had a picture of the living room, with a painting on the wall that looked suspiciously like Portrait of a Lady by Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi, which had been owned by Goudstikker. It was not a famous painting, but was known to be in Kadgien’s possession in 1946. The image, and all interior photos, were removed from the real estate listing after the news got out. A police raid on the house found that the artwork was gone. One of Kadgien's daughters told a newspaper that she didn't know what painting they were talking about. It might have been a simple matter for the daughters to have claimed ignorance about the painting's provenance and repatriated it to Dutch authorities, but as it is, the story is far from over. -via Metafilter
Update: Police in Argentina put Patricia Kadgien and her husband under house arrest, and have since found and confiscated this painting and other stolen artworks.
(Image credit: Robles Casas & Campos)
Spot can do a lot of things, and now he can do backflips. I don't think Simone Biles has anything to worry about just yet, but it's a breakthrough in robotics.
Why would a robot dog need to do gymnastics? Their clients don't need it. People who watch videos on the internet do, but that's not worth the research dollars. Robotics engineer Arun Kumar explains that a backflip requires precise abilities that are useful in the robot being able to recover when it trips or someone collides with it, and also tests the limits of its many motors. As you can see, doing a backflip takes lots of practice for a robot, just like it does for humans. The eeriest part is how practice makes perfect for a robot. They didn't have to tweak the hardware or software after every unsuccessful attempt. Instead, the artificial intelligence inside Spot learned by positive reinforcement, meaning it gets a reward when it performs well. Just like training a real dog. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Thousands of people in New Orleans have no baby pictures. They were lost in the flood 20 years ago. On August 29, 2005, hurricane Katrina ripped through the South, creating havoc everywhere. But New Orleans was changed forever when the levees, holding back water from the city that lies below sea level, failed. An evacuation order had gone out the day before, and thousands of people fled the city. But even more had no transportation, or no money at the end of the month, or stayed with the sick and elderly who couldn't leave. Flood waters covered 80% of the city. More than 1,300 people died, and more than 200,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.
The Louisiana State Museum today opened their new, expanded exhibit on Katrina and its aftermath. The exhibit includes artifacts gathered after the storm, photographs, and accounts from those who lived through it. Read some of those accounts, and see plenty of images, at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: NOAA)
