S.A. Williams built a miniature car for his son Bobbi that proved to be so popular, William's friends encouraged him to market a full-size model. There was quite a market for automobiles after World War II, so Williams hired consultants and designers to produce a $500 car that would travel 50 miles on a gallon of gas. The Bobbi-Kar's odd look was the result of form following function. Its component design meant it could be taken apart and reassembled as needed.

Production models were to be equipped with lightweight plastic body panels in various colors mounted to an inner structural body for easy repair. The one-piece rear deck and fender assembly were hinged at the back and could be raised, unlatched, and removed.

Releasing latches located above the windshield and at the rear deck line permitted the easy removal of the hardtop, which could be stowed away in the package compartment under the flat hood. Inside, the dashboard was covered with thick foam rubber padding and upholstered in leather—a less expensive alternative to applying expensive chrome trim, graining, or decals.

Since you've never heard of the Bobbi-Kar, you might assume that the company went out of business because the car was ugly. That's not what happened at all. Read the surprising story of the Bobbi-Kar at The Old Motor. -via Everlasting Blort

The enormous statue known as Christ the Redeemer was erected on a hilltop overlooking Rio de Janiero in 1931. Its 90th anniversary is an occasion for maintenance and restoration, as the statue becomes worn and damaged by weather. How that’s done is a fascinating story. Workers use ropes to rappel around the surface of the statue, but they get up there from the inside!

British writer Donna Bowater was reporting in Brazil when Christ the Redeemer lost the tip of its finger to lightning and had a rare chance to see the statue from inside while covering the story for the BBC.

“It was really surreal,” she says. “I’d been up to the base several times before as a tourist and with visitors, but going inside was a bit unnerving because it is crypt-like, with about a dozen flights of stairs zig-zagging to the top. Each level is numbered and almost at the top, there’s a heart on the inside that matches the heart in the middle of Cristo’s chest on the outside. At the top, the tunnel into the arm is low and only accessible by crawling along it. At two intervals, there are trapdoors where it’s possible to stand.”

Take a look inside, see closeups of the outside with safety manager Alexsandro Brauna, and learn about the statue’s history and future at Atlas Obscura.

John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, which was fitting, as he was a towering giant of Twentieth Century American literature. Among other novels, he wrote Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. These works, and others by Steinbeck, are widely read and studied. What is not widely read is his unpublished 1930 werewolf novel Murder at Full Moon.

That's because the Steinbeck literary estate has kept it hidden in the archives of University of Texas. Dr. Gavin Jones of Stanford University described this novel and argues for its publication in The Guardian:

Set in a fictional Californian coastal town, Murder at Full Moon tells the story of a community gripped by fear after a series of gruesome murders takes place under a full moon. Investigators fear that a supernatural monster has emerged from the nearby marshes. Its characters include a cub reporter, a mysterious man who runs a local gun club and an eccentric amateur sleuth who sets out to solve the crime using techniques based on his obsession with pulp detective fiction.

The typescript even has two illustrations by Steinbeck. They depict the floorplan of the building where the murders took place, including the victims’ bodies. In the book, these are drawings made by one of the characters trying to solve the murders.

Jones described it as a world away from Steinbeck’s realist representations of the Great Depression, which may explain why he wrote this one under a pen name, Peter Pym. “Even though it is very different from Steinbeck’s other work, in a totally different genre, it actually relates to his interest in violent human transformation – the kind of human-animal connection that you find all over his work; his interest in mob violence and how humans are capable of other states of being, including particularly violent murderers.

-via Slate | Photo: Sonya Noskowiack

The railroad over the infamous 11' 8" underpass in Durham, North Carolina, was raised eight inches in 2019, so now it's called the 11'8"+8 bridge. We thought that might be the end of a years-long string of videos in which unwary truck drivers collided with the bridge or peeled off the top of their trucks. However, the underpass is still claiming victims. Earlier this month, a rental truck was caught on video as it perfectly peeled off the truck roof. The driver didn't even stop -and he barely slowed down! -via Geekologie

Henry Ward Beecher was the pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and a leading abolitionist in the mid-19th century (and the brother of author Harriet Beecher Stowe). He was also widely rumored to have led numerous affairs with the women of his church. Most famous was his relationship with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his friend and assistant, Theodore Tilton. Theodore Tilton found out about it in 1870.

Despite the devastating revelation, Elizabeth, Theodore, and Henry decided to keep the affair private. They had several good reason to do so. It protected Tilton’s pride, avoided moral censure of Elizabeth, and preserved Henry’s good name. Nonetheless, their pact did not last because Elizabeth confessed the affair to her friend Paulina Wright Davis, who then told three people: women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, Henry’s younger half-sister Isabella Beecher Hooker, and the leader of the women’s rights movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had also already heard about the affair from Theodore.

As word spread and some of the more influential parishioners within the Plymouth Church congregation learned of the affair. Henry became concerned and prompted Elizabeth to retract her confession. When she did Theodore became upset and demanded that his wife retract her retraction, which she did the same evening. Still, everyone thought news of the affair would go no further. However, that was not the case because Stanton repeated the story.

Another women’s rights leader, Victoria Woodhull, heard it. She was a proponent of free love, a social movement whose goal was to separate the state from sexual matters and the idea of free love.

Woodhull did not disapprove of the affair, but was offended by Beecher’s hypocrisy in that he preached against her philosophy of free love. When Woodhull published news of the affair in her newspaper, it lit the fuse of a widely-publicized and salacious scandal. There was a criminal trial, a church investigation, an excommunication, and a lawsuit. But Beecher was not the one who suffered. Rather, it was Victoria Woodhull and Theodore Tilton who paid the price for the affair. Read the whole story of the Beecher-Tilton scandal at Geri Walton’s blog. -via Strange Company

(Image source: Library of Congress)

At first glance, electric vehicles (EVs) seem to be environment-friendly vehicles because they could reduce emissions that contribute to climate change. However, electric vehicles could prove to be harmful to our environment as well when their batteries die. In the possibility that these batteries end up in a landfill,

[their] cells can release problematic toxins, including heavy metals. And recycling the battery can be a hazardous business, warns materials scientist Dana Thompson of the University of Leicester…

That’s just one of the many problems confronting researchers, including Thompson, who are trying to tackle an emerging problem: how to recycle the millions of electric vehicle (EV) batteries that manufacturers expect to produce over the next few decades. Current EV batteries “are really not designed to be recycled,” says Thompson, a research fellow at the Faraday Institution, a research center focused on battery issues in the United Kingdom.

That wasn’t much of a problem when EVs were rare. But now the technology is taking off. Several carmakers have said they plan to phase out combustion engines within a few decades, and industry analysts predict at least 145 million EVs will be on the road by 2030, up from just 11 million last year. “People are starting to realize this is an issue,” Thompson says.

In response to this growing concern, governments are now leaning towards requiring some kind of recycling of these dead batteries. However, recycling dead batteries will be a challenge.

Batteries differ widely in chemistry and construction, which makes it difficult to create efficient recycling systems. And the cells are often held together with tough glues that make them difficult to take apart. That has contributed to an economic obstacle: It’s often cheaper for batterymakers to buy freshly mined metals than to use recycled materials.

And so, government institutions, such as the U.S Department of Energy are now investing in research about recycling EV batteries.

More details about this over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: Wolfgang Rattay/ Reuters/ Science Magazine)

Compared to what we see in the movies, archaeology is boring work. There are no mummies or action-packed shootouts against other “treasure hunters”. To be honest, there aren’t even that many treasures to hunt to begin with, unless you consider good ol’ pottery fragments as treasures. And yes, those are what archaeologists usually encounter on sites, and they collect thousands of these fragments and sort them out painstakingly. Tedious work, but at least no one dies, so I guess there’s a happy ending for everyone at the end of the day.

Potsherds are ubiquitous at archaeological sites, and that's true for pretty much every culture since people invented pottery. In the US Southwest in particular, museums have collected sherds by the tens of thousands.

Although all those broken bits may not look like much at first glance, they’re often the key to piecing together the past.

“[Potsherds] provide archaeologists with critical information about the time a site was occupied, the cultural group with which it was associated, and other groups with whom they interacted,” said Northern Arizona University archaeologist Chris Downum, who co-authored a new study with Leszek Pawlowicz.

Thinking of a way to expedite the potsherd sorting process, Pawlowicz and Downum decided to turn to machine-learning.

For now, Pawlowicz and Downum’s recent study is a proof of concept. They chose a pottery type, Tusayan White Ware, that is especially easy for a computer to sort based on photos, because its patterns contrast so strongly with the background. A neural network would likely do reasonably well at sorting other types of decorated pottery, but so-called plainware—ceramics without any visible decoration or markings—would probably be a bridge too far.

Now that’s a brilliant idea.

Go over at Ars Technica to know more about this topic.

(Image Credit: Pawlowicz and Downum 2021/ Ars Technica)

After Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821, his autopsy was witnessed by eight physicians and nine other people. There was a lot of cutting and study, but 200 years later there are still arguments and theories as to what caused the French emperor's death. When the autopsy was over, several body parts were missing, most notably his penis. The organ was taken away by Napoleon's priest Ange-Paul Vignali. From there it changed hands numerous times, and was first seen by the public over a hundred years later.  

In 1927, the shriveled body part went on display for the first time at the Museum of French Art in New York. A New York newspaper covering the event observed observed that “Maudlin sentimentalizers sniffled; shallow women giggled and pointed. In a glass case they saw something looking like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or shriveled eel.”

Two decades later, Dr. Rosenbach sold the appendage to Donald Hyde, a collector of the books and letters. When Hyde died, his wife returned the desiccated tendon to Rosenbach's successor, John Fleming. Some time later, a wealthy collector named Bruce Gimelson acquired the Vignali collection for a reported $35,000.

The relic changed hands several more times over the years. Read the incredible journey of Napoleon's penis, which still doesn't rest in peace, at Amusing Planet.

You probably have a favorite television series in your memory that had a character you never saw. Maybe they were only a voice, or maybe it was someone who got talked about so much that you got to know them. I immediately thought of Carlton the Doorman.



Whichever unseen character is most memorable to you, you'll be surprised at how many shows have used this device. Cracked looks at 14 of them, and Carlton didn't even make the list, which makes me feel old.

Finished another zoetrope. This time I wanted to make a tribute to one of the greatest animators, Hayao Miyazaki. #StudioGhibli #totoro #catbus #stopmotionanimation #vfx pic.twitter.com/viMGhFVsEZ

— marvelous media engine (@EngineMarvelous) May 19, 2021

Twitter user Marvelous Media Engine made this astonishing zoetrope that shows the Catbus from My Neighbor Totoro. When activated, it shows a vividly lit Catbus dashing through the fields at night.

Some people in the Twitter thread insist that this video is fake--that this is CGI, not a physical zoetrope. I'm not sure.

-via Super Punch

(Chris Hallbeck/Maximumble)

I remember when I had to explain this phenomenon to my kids, as well as that, once upon a time, you couldn't watch movies on your phone.

Now TV shows are often written with the assumption that they will be binged all at once, which greatly changes their narrative structures.

And there are practical considerations, too. Broadcast television doesn't have a pause button.

The pig just wants to get some sleep, but local humans insist on running the noise making machine, which serves no apparent purpose aside from making noise. It's necessary to disable it. If the humans don't learn, it may be necessary to disable the machine permanently.

-via Born in Space

Some days you hate your computer, and some days your computer hates you. They are fragile little creatures, and if you don't treat them just right, they will turn on you and exact revenge- by forcing an update! -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Panspermia Hypothesis is the idea that life on earth was originally transported here from somewhere else by microbes riding through space on asteroids. To survive such a journey, any life form would have to be pretty tough. The toughest critters we know of are tardigrades, or water bears, which have proven they can survive being frozen and the vacuum of space. But could they survive the impact of colliding with a planet? A team led by Alejandra Traspas at Queen Mary University in London tested how impact-resistant tardigrades are by shooting them from a gun.    

For the experiment, Traspas, along with co-author Mark Burchell, took 20 tardigrades of the species Hypsibius dujardini and fed them a (potentially) last meal of mineral water and moss. The well-fed microbes were then put into hibernation—a frozen state in which their metabolism dropped to a mere 0.1% of normal. Groups of two to three individuals were put inside water-filled shafts that were in turn placed inside a nylon cylinder. A two-stage light gas gun was used to fire these cylinders, along with their hibernating passengers, at sand targets inside a vacuum chamber. Six shots were fired at speeds from 1,244 to 2,237 miles per hour (556 to 1,000 m/s), which the scientists measured with laser light stations.

While the experience of tardigrades shot from a gun doesn't prove anything about billion-year-old single-cell organisms in space, it may be a step in that direction. Read how that experiment turned out at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Schokraie E, Warnken U, Hotz-Wagenblatt A, Grohme MA, Hengherr S, et al. (2012))

The townsfolk are not so pleased about the change. The local council of Walsall in the British Midlands decided to bring a spice of life to the area by bringing a number of familiar-looking, oversized, bright-green plant pots. The resemblance of the pots to Super Mario’s warp pipes had the residents complaining that the new additions make their town look like it was part of the game: 

Birmingham Live reports that Walsall Council's decision to install the pots has put them under fire from locals. Fifteen of the planters are currently in place, but residents have called them an eyesore, and complained that they represent a waste of public money.

Local florist Andrea Loveridge is quoted as considering them "garish monstrosities", adding: "It beggars belief. It makes the place look more like something from Super Mario Brothers. They look like those warp pipes Mario jumps down." And yes, they do, a bit.

You can see the plant pots in, um, action I guess, in the video below (or watch on YouTube).

Another local interviewed by Birmingham Live calls the pots "a garish eyesore and a complete waste of taxpayer's money". But surely not everyone in Walsall is down on these green newcomers to the town's centre? If you're a local, why not let us know if you approve of these quite-pipe-like additions.

Image via the Gaming Bible