The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920, giving women the right to vote nationwide. Previously, women's suffrage had been a mishmash of state laws. Then suddenly, women were faced with the prospect of voting in a presidential election, and needed to be registered. That process varied widely.  

“The 1920 election is a good moment to remember how much elections are handled at the state level,” says Christina Wolbrecht, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame. “… The 19th Amendment is ratified, but it’s up to the states to change their entire electoral administration.”

Consider the four Southern states in which women had been barred from voting booths entirely: As Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder, a political scientist at Western Michigan University, explain in A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage, officials in Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina decreed that individuals who had failed to register six months prior to the general election were ineligible to vote—a line of reasoning that conveniently overlooked the fact that women only won suffrage some three months after local registration deadlines had passed.

Blocking women from voting was a deliberate choice made by state lawmakers, says Wolbrecht. She adds, “[These states] are dominated by the Democratic Party, and the entire system is designed to minimize participation in elections,” particularly by African American men and women but also by women more broadly.

In fact, only one woman in the entire state of Georgia was able to vote in the 1920 election. Other states were more welcoming. Read how the first election after women's suffrage was handled at Smithsonian.

It’s not like animals are allowed inside the Australian pub. This pub in Queensland has placed a notice on its door that emus are no longer welcome in their establishment. The owners of the pub even instructed their patrons to go through the “emu barrier”! But what made The Yaraka Hotel go through such measures? The answer comes in the form of two particular emus, named Carol and Kevin, as Oddee details: 

It’s too bad then that Carol and Kevin seem unable to behave themselves at the local watering hole. Gerry Gimblett, owner of the Yaraka Hotel, said that she was left no other choice but to banish the birds.

“They’ve been stealing things from the guests, especially their food. They’d stick their heads in and pinch toast out of the toaster,” Gimblett bemoaned to the Guardian.

But the main reason the birds are no longer welcome is their leavings.

“They’re enormous, very large and very smelly, and they created great stains,” said Gimblett. “We love them as part of the Yaraka community, but they’re not welcome inside anymore.”

image via Oddee

A long, thin cloud was spotted by the Visual Monitoring Camera attached to Mars Express, a satellite that’s been orbiting Mars since 2004. The appearance of the cloud isn’t a surprise to scientists, as it is a recurrent feature on the planet. The cloud is composed of water ice, as Gizmodo detailed: 

The cloud is a recurrent feature on Mars, appearing annually above Arsia Mons, a 12.4-mile-high (20-kilometer) volcano located near the Martian equator. The cloud resembles a volcanic plume, but it’s not associated with any kind of volcanic activity. Composed of water ice, the cloud arises along the volcano’s leeward slope, that is, the side not facing the prevailing winds.

The Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud, or AMEC, as it’s called, can reach about 1,110 miles (1,800 km) in length. Incredibly, it can get big enough to be spotted by telescopes on Earth, according to the ESA.

image via Gizmodo

Now that children operate smartphones and computers long before they learn to read, we have a new phenomenon: pre-literate children communicating digitally with the language of emoji. Parents of children ages 2-5 report that their kids send all-emoji texts to family members quite often. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch took a closer look at these texts to see how emoji characters help children to develop their digital communication skills.  

When kids use emoji it may seem random—a bunch of silly pictures on a screen. But kids start out learning spoken and signed languages in a similar way: by babbling nonsense syllables, which teaches them the rhythm of conversation and trains them to make fine articulatory movements. The silly strings of emoji that young kids send could serve a similar purpose. By exposing kids to the rhythm of electronic conversations, emoji may be a useful precursor to reading—a way of acclimating kids to the digital reality of using symbols to communicate with people they care about.

McCulloch takes us through the stages of learning communication with emoji, which children use in a profoundly different way from adults. Read what she's learned at Wired.

There is more insight in the discussion at Metafilter, where Foci for Analysis shared a real emoji message sent by their niece,

🤡🤓😻🖤😼🙀😾🤝👁️👀🤝👏🤝🤜🤚👌👊🤵🤶🧙🦹👩‍⚕️👩‍🏭👩‍✈️👩‍🔧🤶🤵🤵👩‍👩‍👦‍👦👩‍👩‍👧‍👦👨‍👩‍👦👩‍👩‍👧‍👧👨‍👩‍👧👩‍👩‍👦‍👦👨‍👨‍👧‍👦🌃🌍🌟☄️🌗🌥️🌙🌦️⛈️💧🌘🌔🌘🐆🦖🐮🦛🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄

and Eyebrows McGee posted her observations about texting and how it makes students exceedingly more comfortable with writing than previous generations.   

Natural disasters have always been with us, ever since the formation of our planet. Countless times have they shaped the landscape, and countless times have they helped change the course of history. It is said that “divine winds” were what saved Japan from the Mongol invasion under Kublai Khan.

The United States has had its own share of natural disasters, in the form of hurricanes, that helped shape the course of its history. David Kindy tells us of these instances over at his article at Smithsonian Magazine.

The history of Atlantic hurricanes is inextricably linked with the history of this country, from its colonial founding through independence and into modern times. A new book coming out later this summer, A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes by bestselling author Eric Jay Dolin, delves into the storms that shaped our society in ways we may not realize.

More about this over at the site.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

With candies, sprinkles, spoonfuls of gummy bears, and some scoops of ice cream, all wrapped up in cotton candy, this food, called a “cotton candy burrito”, would surely make a person’s tooth ache just by looking at it. Some commenters even remarked that he felt the need to brush their teeth just by looking at this food.

Would you eat one?

(Image Credit: u/boriswong/ Reddit)

David Bamberger made a fortune in the fried chicken business. When the company sold, he became rich. In 1969, he chose to use that fortune to buy the worst piece of scrub land in Texas that he could find--5,500 acres of overgrazed territory in central Texas. Then he began the long, slow process of rehabilitating nature there.

It's now a nature preserve called Selah. Drawing water out of the earth to grow grass and trees for wildlife to thrive in has been Bamberger's life's work. In an interview last year with Texas Monthly, Bamberger offers his advice to all of us:

I’ve made the statement many times that I learned more in my seventeen years as a door-to-door peddler than I did at university. The biggest thing I learned was how to handle rejection. When you’re selling door-to-door, you’ve got to knock on a lot of doors and talk to a lot of people, and you’re going to get turned down. It applies to your health, your economics, your family, everything. You have to be a positive thinker. You have to make the best of the worst. You don’t need to take everything as a personal affront. It means you go to the next door and knock with a positive attitude. That one simple thing transposed into all the other things I’ve done in my life. Fifty years ago, this ranch had the reputation of being the worst piece of real estate in Blanco County. I had to look at it as a positive, and to me it was the greatest opportunity I ever had.

-via Nag on the Lake

Michal Navrátil married Marcelle Caretto in 1907. The couple lived in France, had two sons, and separated in 1912. The boys, named Michel and Edmond, stayed with their father over Easter weekend that year, but Navrátil never planned to return them to their mother. Instead he bought tickets on an ocean liner under the name Louis M. Hoffman and registered his sons as Louis and Lola. The liner, named Titanic, was headed to America.   

You can read the short version of the story in pictofacts form at Cracked, or get more detailed information at the Wikipedia entry on Michel Marcel Navratil, Jr.

It’s like the International Space Station, but underwater. PROTEUS, introduced as “the world’s most advanced underwater scientific research station and habitat to address humanity’s most critical concerns,” is designed by Yves Behar and fuseproject. The station will have state-of-the-art labs and a livable space for scientists who will work there for long periods of time, as ArchDaily details: 

Designed by Yves Behar and his team at fuseproject, the project is a permanent underwater station that will advance scientific and oceanic research. In fact, PROTEUS enables the discovery of new species of marine life, creating a better understanding of how climate change affects the Ocean and allowing for testing of advanced technologies for green power, aquaculture, and robotic exploration.

At 4,000 square feet, PROTEUS will be three or four times the size of any previously built submarine habitats. Open to hosting academics, private companies, scientists, and NGOs that are involved in ocean exploration and research and development, PROTEUS can hold up to 12 people at the same time, for a 30-day period, more than any underwater station ever built.

image via ArchDaily

Look, there are certain game mechanics that seem cute at the beginning of your playthrough, but it gets annoying the longer you play a game. Personally, Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ (ACNH) crafting mechanic is one of them. Watch CK Production’s reenactment of this gameplay in real life, and be the judge. Listen, ACNH devs, I just want to craft in bulk. Is that too much to ask? 

The US Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado is as grand as the history it holds. The structure is wrapped in a steel structure that is almost like an Olympic athlete’s costume stretched over the museum. The steel structure is composed of 9,000 diamond-shaped panels! Not only is the outside beautiful and well-thought of, but so its interior. The galleries of the museum are built around a spiralling ramp to make it accessible to everyone, as Dezeen detailed: 

Located in downtown Colorado Springs, the museum is composed of four steel-covered volumes arranged in a pinwheel formation that contain the galleries, an auditorium and events space.

The metalwork is composed of 9,000 diamond-shaped panels that are marked in the middle and lift up in the centre to create a play of light and shadow across the facade

"The folding of the diamond into triangles was just the initial idea," Gilmartin continued.

"But then we played with the shaping, we did a lot of model testing, digital studies and things like that and found that it has a really nice reaction to light. The kind of fold in the panels makes a kind of highlight with the upper part that's tilted towards the sky, and a kind of a shadow to where it tilts down on the lower half," he added.

"We saw [the] possibility for the kind of diamond scales or elements across the surface to really animate the surface as the light changes in Colorado Springs throughout the day."

image via Dezeen

De Castilla 23 is a building complex in Milan that has special special self-cleaning, anti-odor, anti-pollution and antibacterial surfaces  that can counteract nitrogen oxide. It’s “not” a literal building that chomps the smog in the atmosphere. The structure is a new project from Fiandre Architectural Surfaces that combines sustainability, innovation and functionality, as World Architecture News details: 

Fiandre Architectural Surfaces designed customised solutions including the use of active photocatalytic ceramics from the Core Shade collection, in the Cloudy Core Active and Sharp Core Active textures.

The Chemistry Department of the University of Milan has estimated that the 16,088 square metres of special active tiles, installed for this project, can counteract 59 kg/year of nitrogen oxide, equivalent to more than 200,000 square metres of green space.

These numbers are the reason why De Castillia 23 is referred to as the “smog-eating” building.

image via Architecture News

There are specific places readied for different kinds of structures. But some will go outside the box and build houses in unorthodox (not to mention dangerous) locations, such as cliffs and steep mountain slopes! If you’re interested in browsing through some of the most unusual locations where structures are built, check out Edgy Architecture: Architecture in the Most Impossible Places! The book contains 60 case studies, all carefully curated by the authors. 

image via The Independent

Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers popularized the notion that a person could become an expert at a task if he or she spent ten thousand hours practicing it. I cannot say that the man in this video spent that long. Maybe it took longer. But greatness only comes through sacrifice.

-via Born in Space

United States. 1800s. Tuberculosis is plaguing the land, and people didn’t know how to deal with it. At this time, the disease, which primarily attacks the lungs, was incurable, as antibiotics were yet to be discovered.

The only treatment physicians could recommend was going to the mountains, where the dry and fresh air was believed to help draw out moisture from the lungs and alleviate sufferings. Tuberculosis patients flocked to arid climates looking for cures and, if not, at least a good death. The assumption was, that while the disease surely destroyed the body, the mind grew sharp and imagination more vivid. This notion grew from the fact that so many literary figures succumbed to the disease, including Samuel Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Keats. So enticing the disease was that Lord Byron himself admitted, “I should like to die from consumption,” and novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, best known by her pen name George Sand, said of her lover, the composer Frédéric Chopin, that he “coughs with infinite grace.”

With this recommendation given by the physicians at that time, people went to dry regions across the United States, and the city that benefited the most from this sudden “tuberculosis rush” was a young city called “Colorado Springs”.

Colorado Springs was founded in 1871. Located on the High Plains just east of the Rocky Mountains, the city enjoys comfortably cool and dry winters, with hot and sunny summers, while falls are pleasant and dry. The city has abundant sunshine year-round, averaging more than 250 sunny days per year. It was the [perfect] location to heal.

Learn more about the city made famous by tuberculosis, and how patients were treated there, over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum/ Amusing Planet)