Some of us barely have knowledge of the sinking of the Titanic aside from what we get from pop culture or movies. One of the mysteries in the tragedy was the identity of a young boy who died. In the new Smithsonian Channel documentary, “The Curious Life and Death of…,” London-based historian Lindsey Fitzharris examines the story of the unidentified child, as The New York Post details: 

“He came floating toward us with a little upturned face,” John Snow Jr., an embalmer aboard the Mackay-Bennett, told a reporter from the Halifax Herald after the telegraph-cable ship returned to port with more than 200 bodies in late April, 1912. Dozens of the dead they found were so disfigured they had to be buried at sea, he said.

Unable to identify the toddler, the sailors were so moved that they held a funeral service and buried him in a Halifax cemetery with a headstone dedicated to the “memory of the unknown child.”

The identity of the boy remained a mystery for nearly a century until a group of forensic experts gradually pieced it together, using breakthroughs in DNA technology and the discovery of a pair of tiny shoes, which had been kept by a Halifax police sergeant tasked with burning all the victims’ clothing in 1912. He just couldn’t bring himself to destroy what remained of the youngest victim recovered by the sailors.

image via The New York Post

A group of researchers from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville hypothesized that a blast of nutrients can change the color of a tree’s leaves. If the nutrients flowing out of a corpse can change the color and reflectance of plants, then the authorities could use a drone to scan a forest to look for the changes in the trees in order to find deceased missing people. Take note that this is still theoretical, but a floating idea nonetheless among researchers, as Ars Technica details: 

"What we're proposing is to use plants as indicators of human decomposition, to hopefully be able to use individual trees within the forest to help pinpoint where someone has died, to help in body recovery," says UT Knoxville plant biologist Neal Stewart, coauthor on the new paper.

As a large mammal like a human decomposes in a forest, its breakdown transforms the soil in a number of ways. The body's "necrobiome"—all the bacteria that was already in it when it was alive—replicates like crazy in the absence of an immune system. This necrobiome mixes with the microbes in the dirt. "The soil microbiome will change and, of course, the plant roots will also sense some changes," says Stewart. But, he adds, "we don't really know what those changes are."

Image via Ars Technica

PJ Brewer-Laye was out with his grandmother Angela. He was riding his go-kart while his grandma walked. Suddenly, Angela felt shaky and noticed that she was seeing spots in her vision. Noticing what was happening, PJ immediately sped back towards his grandma’s house, which was about a mile and a half away. A few minutes later, Angela saw her Mercedes-Benz coming towards her. The driver was none other than the 11-year old boy.

PJ of course doesn't have a driver's license, but he has prior experience of driving having moved cars around for his grandad in their yard before - as well as owning a dirt bike, four-wheeler and his toy go-kart, of course.

However, the youngster didn't let his inexperience get the better of him and drove his grandmother to get medical help.

Apparently choosing the Mercedes-Benz because the keys were the easiest to reach, PJ was 'calm and collected' behind the wheel, said Angela.

She added: "He did not go up the curb, in the grass or nothing. Pulled down in the driveway and into the garage."

An act worthy of praise, indeed.

What do you think?

(Image Credit: 11Alive/ LADBible)

The fashion industry, whether we like it or not, is one of the major industries that inflict harm upon the environment. According to a UNEP report in 2018, the fashion industry produces 10% of our annual global carbon emissions, which is greater than the carbon emission of all international flights and maritime shipping combined. It gets worse, as the fashion industry also contributes to both land and water pollution. Tons of textile waste end up in landfills, while plastic microfibers end up in the ocean.

The question is, how do we fix the fashion industry? The answer is, there is no quick fix, but at the very least, we might be able to reduce our respective fashion footprints.

… shopping less and buying with a mindset toward longevity -- keeping your clothes for as long as possible -- is one of the easiest and most effective ways to reduce your own contribution. According to a 2017 report from the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a UK charity that helps companies and communities act more sustainably, wearing a garment for just nine months longer can substantially reduce its carbon footprint.

More details about this over at CNN.

(Image Credit: markusspiske/ Pixabay)

Have you heard of the Calabi-Yau manifold in string theory? It is “a compact, complex Kähler manifold with a trivial first Chern class.”

Notice that before you understand this definition, you should be able to understand first the Kähler manifold, which is “a Hermitian manifold for which the Hermitian form is closed.”

But before you understand the Kähler manifold, you should be able to know what a Hermitian manifold is first. And before you understand a Hermitian manifold, you should know what a Riemannian manifold is first.

And you’re down the rabbit hole. When everything is named for its discoverer, it can be impossible even to track the outline of a debate without months of rote memorization. The discoverer’s name doesn’t tell you anything about what the landscape is like…

This nesting of proper nouns helps to make higher math impenetrable not just to outsiders, but also to working mathematicians trying to read their way from one subfield into another. The venerable Bill Thurston was known to complain about the perversity which, by the end of his career, had produced Thurston’s theorem, which says that Thurston maps are Thurston-equivalent to polynomials, unless they have Thurston obstructions. Every field has terms of art, but when those terms are descriptive, they are easier to memorize. Imagine how much steeper the learning curve would be in medicine or law if they used the same naming conventions, with the same number of layers to peel back...

The Ancient Greeks were better about this. Euclid’s Elements is full of common, descriptive names, even though he was drawing on discoveries made by many different people. If he needs a term for something like a triangle with two sides of the same length, he calls it “isosceles,” literally “equal-legged” in Greek. A triangle with sides of all different lengths is “scalene,” or “unequal.” Euclid doesn’t even name the Pythagorean Theorem we all learn in school after Pythagoras, preferring just to state it plainly. In ancient Greece, it was polite for students to attribute their work to their teachers rather than themselves, if attribution was needed at all, so in the same way that Plato credited his own insights to Socrates, the eight or more objects now named after Pythagoras on Wolfram MathWorld might well be due to his students.

So what went wrong? How did this naming practice become uncontrollable to the point that even mathematicians are overwhelmed?

More details about this over at Nautilus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Pexels/ Pixabay)

England, 2003. A team of archaeologists led by Phil Amery were recording hundreds of old burials on the St. Pancras old church graveyard, when suddenly they came across a coffin which contained remains of human dissection, like skulls and a part of the spine. Amery believed that these were works of an anatomist or a surgeon. But it wasn’t these things that got the team’s attention. It was the other bones that were stuffed alongside these human remains: the remains of a very large walrus. Who put these walrus remains here?

Watch this mini-documentary over at BBC Reel to find out who did this.

(Image Credit: Joel Garlich-Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/ Wikimedia Commons)

“Durgs ruin lifes,” and that’s a fact whether we like it or not. So whenever you feel like doing durgs, always remember this sign created by an unknown person.

Image via Engrish.com

Melk, Austria — A small group of people gathered around a glass box filled with ice. Inside the ice-filled box was a man wearing nothing but swim trunks. The man inside was Josef Koeberl, an ice swimmer. 

Last year, Koeberl was able to set the record for the longest full body contact with ice cubes with a time of 2 hours, 8 minutes, and 47 seconds. 

Last Saturday, Koeberl broke that record by more than 20 minutes, with a time of 2 hours, 30 minutes, and 57 seconds.

In order to fight the “wave of pain” caused by the freezing temperatures, Koeberl says he was trying to focus on positive emotions.

“I’m fighting the pain by visualizing and drawing on positive emotions so I can dampen this wave of pain,” Koeberl told reporters. “That way I can endure.”

But Koeberl isn’t finished yet, as he plans on beating his own record once more next year in Los Angeles.

What a guy!

(Image Credit: AP Photo/ Ronald Zak)

Tom Scott really waded into the deep end when he decided to run a poll of the best things. First, he had to define "thing," which eliminated a lot of choices, but there was way more work to get the choices down to a manageable number. Then he had to figure out how to rank the things in an automated fashion. Then he got over a million votes in just a few hours. Now, since there's no way to get everyone in the world to participate, you must realize that the final list is from the opinions of "English-speaking extremely online nerds." The list appears at almost seven minutes into the video. We only get the top ten, plus some other interesting tidbits.

(For the folks asking: I'm not planning to release the ranked list -- partly because "ranked list of major world religions" sounds like the sort of thing that'll cause trouble, and partly because I can't guarantee there aren't some other nasty things still in the list. Apologies!)

Yeah, it's a dumb question, and you won't agree with the answers. "Kittens" did not make the top ten.

WRR in Dallas is Texas' oldest radio station. It was the first station licensed in Texas and the second one licensed in the US, so the fact that it is still in business is a wonder. And it all started in 1921 as a response to a disaster. After a fire destroyed the telephone lines that the city relied on to dispatch police and firefighters, Henry “Dad” Garrett (who had quite an amazing history himself) had the bright idea to launch a wireless radio system to do the job.  

In theory, you could have sat in your living room, listening to the soothing sounds of urgent crises on your radio. In practice, however, you didn’t have a radio unless you made it yourself. The golden age of radio, which by 1947 would turn 82 percent of Americans into broadcast listeners, wouldn’t really take off until the 1930s; WRR was a decade ahead of its time.

“There were only amateur radio stations up at the time,” Slate explains. “There were also no commercially produced receivers, so people were making radios out of anything you can find. There are accounts in the Dallas Morning News of people using things like old box springs, mattress springs, as antennas.”

There was ample free time between dispatch calls, so Dallas’s firefighters started to air their own banter. Garrett spun his classical records and even lugged a piano to the station so his teenage daughter, Letitia, could give a live concert.

“The dispatchers were almost like the original disc jockeys,” says Amy Bishop, host of WRR’s midday show. “During the time when they didn’t have emergency communication, someone said, ‘Why don’t we start playing music?’ People started coming on telling jokes. Some enterprising person thought ‘Hey, we’re starting to reach more people, what if we could sell this time?’”

That was the beginning of the long and colorful history of WRR, which is still owned by the city of Dallas almost 100 years later. You can read some of the highlights of that story at Texas Monthly. -Thanks, WTM!

(Image credit: Michael Barera)

I tried zooming in and turning up the in-game gamma a bit, so you can see what's going on slightly better.
(It's a 128x32 pixel monochrome display, it's never gonna be great) pic.twitter.com/dAU7LZ1pkT

— foone (@Foone) September 7, 2020

Geeks love to hack into all kinds of devices and enable them to play the first-person-shooter game Doom. You may have seen it played on a microwave, an ATM, or piano. But programmer Foone Turing has taken his miniaturization experiments to the max by playing Doom in the tiny display of a digital pregnancy test!

How is that possible, you ask? Well, it’s not, technically. As Foone explained, they had to completely replace the device’s existing CPU, which can’t be reprogrammed, and switch out its LCD screen for an OLED display capable of showing more than a few lines for “pregnant” or “not pregnant.”

In short, Foone isn’t playing Doom on an electronic pregnancy test per se, rather they’re playing Doom on the disemboweled husk of one—a fact they made clear early on:

“To clarify what I’m doing here: this is a replacement display AND a replacement micro-controller. I’m not using any of the original tester other than the shell,” Foone wrote Saturday.

Of course, people are still impressed. The first joke is "What happens when you pee on it?" Foone has spent the last day experimenting with just that, as you can see at his Twitter account.

On December 10, 1993, id Software introduced to us a game that would help define the first-person shooter (FPS) genre of video games. That game was Doom. Throughout the years, the game became a series, spawning sequels, spin-offs, and two films. After almost three decades, the love for this franchise hasn’t died yet.

Last year, the video game publisher which acquired id Software, Bethesda, re-released Doom I, II, and 3. Now…

After adding 60fps support and community-made add-ons in January, the re-released Doom and Doom II are now getting official 16:9 widescreen support as well.

More details about this over at The Verge.

(Image Credit: id Software/ Wikimedia Commons)

If you’ve tried to record a conversation using the iPhone’s screen recording feature, you’ll realize that it won't allow you to record the phone call. Some of us might want to keep phone call recordings for work, or to help us remember the important details in a conversation we weren’t able to jot down. It’s actually illegal to record phone conversations in some areas, and it would be too difficult for Apple to regulate a call recording system into the IOS, as Reader’s Digest details: 

“While it is not illegal in every state to record phone conversations, Apple wants to make sure that everyone stays compliant by not automatically adding the feature in its smartphones,” says Burton Kelso, a Technology Expert at Integral Computer Service, a computer repair company in Kansas City. “Also, Apple wants to ensure its user’s privacy when it comes to smartphone use.”

In addition to not having a call record feature built-in, Apple doesn’t allow apps access to the microphone and Phone app directly so it can be tricky to get around that limitation, but there are ways to do it

Image via Reader’s Digest

When the newfangled “automobile” was widely adopted at the turn of the 20th century, there were few rules and no infrastructure for the meteoric rise of driving. An entire system for managing traffic was implemented one piece at a time in different cities to accommodate ever-more cars, in the short period of about twenty years. And so it was with the question of parking. Where will we put these vehicles, whether parked, chauffeured, or horse-driven, while people went about their business? It became clear that streets couldn’t hold them, and they would have to go somewhere.

On April 10, 1920, the Los Angeles City Council decided that “since ninety percent of those who entered the downtown area did so by streetcar, the best solution to overcrowding on the streets was to ban private automobile parking downtown.” Almost immediately, downtown merchants were negatively affected by the ban. By the third day, “an advertising manager for Jacoby Brothers, a [major department] store in the area covered by the ban, reported that business was down 15 percent,” reasoning that “there are many more women who use automobiles for shopping in Los Angeles than any other place in the country.” And by the ninth day, “another merchant claimed downtown business was down 40 percent.”

The ban did not stop women drivers from getting their shopping done; they simply took their business elsewhere. A rumor in a Los Angeles Record article on April 20 reported that a woman drove with her car to Pasadena and bought $23,000 worth of furniture “because the police made her remove her car from the vicinity of Barker Bros. store a few days ago when she was inspecting goods there.” The result — the parking ban was overturned just 17 days after the regulation went into effect.

Read about the development of parking and parking lots at the MIT Press Reader. -via Digg

(Image credit: iMahesh)

/r/SonicShowerThoughts is a subreddit filled with the off-the-bulkhead ideas that have occurred to Trekkies when their minds are empty of more important issues. It's a collection of shower thoughts that don't get you wet.

Data's first job would indeed have been a data entry level position. His supervisor, likely a lieutenant, would have worked in data management.

There's great stuff in this subreddit. My favorite is about Barclay and The A-Team.