Get up close and detailed with a kernel of popcorn as it heats up. When the moisture inside turns to steam, the pressure it exerts causes the tough shell to violently burst open, so that the starch inside can freely expand. In this video, the process is seen slower and slower until you have a sequence filmed at 100,000 frames per second, which gives us a long view. We can see how the underside of the kernel is always where the rupture comes, because that's where the heat is. There's enough force to hurtle the kernel into the air as it does its thing. Oh yeah, the popcorn video is only two minutes long. -via Digg
We've often said that the real winners of the California Gold Rush were not the gold prospectors, but those who sold goods and services to the prospectors and miners. That was certainly the case for 14-year-old James Folger, who arrived in California in 1850 with his older brothers Henry and Edward. James was ready to jump at an opportunity, which in his case, took the form of coffee.
By the time they reached the West Coast, they were nearly broke. James agreed to earn money in the city while his older brothers traveled north to pan for gold. James had worked as a carpenter since he was 11, so it was a natural move for him to take a job with William H. Bovee, a 27- year-old transplanted New Yorker who wanted to create a spice and coffee mill. They decided to build it in the heart of San Francisco, just six blocks from the waterfront. James constructed the first wind-powered mill using sails from whaling ships abandoned in the harbor by sailors eager to get to the goldfields. Bovee’s company became the Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills.
Bovee had run a coffee-roasting business in New York; even there, pre-roasted coffee had been a luxury. Since the mining country offered a huge potential market for men desperate to get easy-to-fix coffee, he figured he and young James were the men to supply it. James traveled to the goldfields in 1851, carrying samples of Pioneer Coffee, sealed in tins. He managed to make one major strike, which provided him with enough capital to set up a country store at a camp called Yankee Jim’s.
Four years later, 18-year-old James sold the store for a profit, returned to San Francisco and resumed his role as a partner in Pioneer Mills. In 1859 Bovee sold his interest in the coffee company to James, who bought out the other partners and renamed the firm the James A. Folger Company.
Read the rest of that story, and also how John Arbuckle Jr. made a name for himself providing coffee to cowboys in Texas and the Southwest during the rise of the cattle industry, at HistoryNet. -Thanks, WTM!
(Image credit: JA Folger Co.)
The excitement for Tesla’s Cybertruck has once again reignited as Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the color of the truck’s surface could be changed using heated colors.
This alternative uses different temperatures to affect the metal’s chemical coloring, creating a spectrum of color possibilities from yellow to red and blue.
It is still unclear from Musk's tweets whether the color modifications would be an aftermarket job or whether tesla could offer it themselves. We hope to hear more as the Cybertruck edges closer to production – currently slated to hit the market in late 2021.
Man, that would be so cool to see on the road!
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Twitter)
Nueva Ecija, Philippines — Richmond Perez, along with his girlfriend, Sandra, had been waiting to spot the comet in the night sky for five days. Eventually, the sky cleared out, and they were able to see the comet. And…
As Comet NEOWISE shot across the night sky, Richmond Perez went down on one knee and asked to marry his girlfriend Sandra, and she said yes — for the second time.
When they were taking photos of the comet, Sandra was surprised when her fiance proposed anew during the once in a lifetime opportunity.
"Finally Lord allows us to see this once in a lifetime event. Thank you Lord for these two wonderful creation in front of my eyes," Richmond said.
Now that’s a proposal unlike any other.
(Image Credit: Richmond Perez/ GMA News)
This person believes that he is better than others, he doesn’t take advice from other people, and he doesn’t trust them, too. Aside from that, he also believes that he doesn’t make any mistakes, and so he doesn’t learn from these said mistakes. These traits are true for a narcissistic person.
In refusing to acknowledge that they have made a mistake, narcissists fail to learn from those mistakes, a recent study from Oregon State University – Cascades found.
The mental process of analyzing past actions to see what one should have done differently is called “should counterfactual thinking.” Counterfactual thinking is the mental process of imagining a different outcome or scenario from what actually occurred.
All of us engage in some level of self-protective thinking, said study author Satoris Howes, a researcher at OSU-Cascades with the OSU College of Business. We tend to attribute success to our own efforts, but blame our failures on outside forces — while often blaming other people’s failure on their own deficiencies.
“But narcissists do this way more because they think they’re better than others,” Howes said.
Learn more about narcissists, and how to handle them in the workplace, over at Neuroscience News.
(Image Credit: GraphicMama-team/ Pixabay)
Sandra Boynton presents a delightful cat singing in French. The song is about singing in French ("Chanson Profonde" means "Profound Song"). You might enjoy it without reading the captions, but you will enjoy more if you do. The music is performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Michael Ford, and Weird Al Yankovic. -via Metafilter
Would you go down the secret water tunnel? pic.twitter.com/A7gFeNCL03
— J. Motoki (@J_Motoki) July 23, 2020
I feel like gasping for air just watching this terrifying video of a fool going into a water siphon just above a waterfall. Julie Motoki asks us if we would try this fun ride. That will be a no from me. I plan to die in bed at the age of one hundred.
-via Born in Space
Ah, the classic Hippie Wagon. You see, kids, back in the 70s, you could find these things everywhere on the road. The Volkswagen Type 2 microbus was a classic. It lives on now as a fire pit by craftsman Danny Lyons, who owns a shop called Trash Metal Fabrications. He makes many fire pits that look like Daleks, minions, Sauron, and more.
The National Park Service was created in 1916, and one of the first things they did was kill off the wolves that lived in Yellowstone National Park. After all, they preyed on other wildlife in the park, and more importantly, were a danger to visitors and nearby livestock. The wolves were wiped out by 1926, and the elk population exploded. Wolves were re-introduced into Yellowstone in 1995, amid much controversy. So how's that turned out all these years later?
“Eighty percent of wildlife studies are three to five years,” Smith said. “Literally, that’s just scratching the surface, because you might be just getting one phase of a cycle or the animals may be doing something different because of some unique circumstance. You just capture that moment in time. You’ve got to go through the ups and downs, the hard winters, the easy winters, the droughts, the human disturbance that shoots up a pack. You’ve got to get that whole menu of possibilities. It gives you great insight. I think the 25-year thing is just a start.”
So what have scientists learned in 25 years? True to their keystones species role in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the wolves created what ecologist call a trophic cascade. Basically, once they resumed their role as a dominant predator, the effects rippled through the ecosystem. Wolves knocked down the elk population, willows sprung back, and beavers benefitted, which resulted in more beaver ponds that in turn created habitat for other aquatic animals.
In fact, the wolves ate way more elk than scientists had initially predicted. Read about the wolf re-introduction experiment at Earther.
See a video about the many expected and unexpected ways wolves have shaped Yellowstone in a previous post.
(Image credit: Doug Smith/National Park Service)
Do you thump or squeeze avocados in the grocery store to test their freshness? Students at Harvard University have developed a more precise method that examines the fruit chemically. The Harvard Gazette reports:
The device they developed incorporates sensors to measure certain chemical properties of an avocado.
Information from these sensors is incorporated into a machine-learning model the students developed to predict when an avocado will be ripe. The model’s output is displayed through an app that shows the estimated date of ripeness and the number of days until each tested avocado will be ripe for.
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: SEAS Communications
In a swamp outside of St. Petersburg, Russia, there's a shortwave radio transmitter amongst a series of towers that makes no sense to most of us. Someone, somewhere knows exactly what is going on.
It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.
Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.
It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as “the Buzzer”. It joins two similar mystery stations, “the Pip” and the “Squeaky Wheel”. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.
No one knows, but there are theories about the enigmatic broadcast. Read what we know, and what people think they know, about what's going on with MDZhB at BBC Future. -via Strange Company
For the price of a small family home in San Francisco, you can buy a medieval castle with acreage in France. Messy Messy Chic gives us photographic tours of charming and historical homes for sale, some that need extensive restoration or renovation, and some that have been kept up nicely. All are utterly charming.
They include abbeys, towers, chateaus, manors, estates, schools, fortresses, and ruins. See 18 historical French properties that are on the market now. We can dream, can't we?
A Virtual Exhibition : the cat in the History of Art https://t.co/jJAyaFSYDx The place of the #cat (#kedi) in the history of art, such is the virtual exhibition the Universal Museum of Art has been offering online for a while and… free of charge. pic.twitter.com/tFBFpUODqL
— KEDISTAN (@KEDISTAN) April 24, 2020
The Universal Museum of Art grants us a virtual tour highlighting one of our favorite things -cats!
For the first time ever, 75 works of art from Ancient Egypt to today are reunited around the subject of cats! Big cats, small cats, cuddly cats or playful cats, tiger-cats or kittens; all are waiting for you in an eighteenth century mansion decor. Come and let yourself be swayed by the furry friends and discover: cats hidden in every painting, waiting to be found; moments of pure tenderness captured by artists; cats who have snuck into domestic or even religious scenes; and fabulous accounts of felines with extraordinary powers.
Use your mouse to move around the museum to see various artworks featuring cats, and click on the painting or sculpture to bring up information about it, and from there you can take a closer look. Some art is all about cats, while others contain a cat somewhere, but you have to look for it. The museum gives us clues. Begin your virtual tour here. -via Nag on the Lake
For a long time, paleontologists assumed that dinosaurs laid hard-shelled eggs in nests that they often buried to protect them from predators. But more recent evidence shows that dinosaur eggs varied as much as the animals themselves, and some were soft-shelled -although those often don't keep their shape long enough to fossilize. Parenting strategies varied from dino to dino as well.
For example, consider the parrot-like dinosaurs called oviraptorids. Paleontologists have found the gorgeous skeletons preserved in a position where they seem to be sitting over nests of eggs. “It’s tempting to call this brooding, like living birds,” says San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist Ashley Poust, “but we’re still unsure if that was part of their behavior.” Still, the details would indicate that the dinosaurs constructed their nests with care. Scientists know from previous finds that oviraptorids laid two eggs at a time in a clutch of 30 or more. “This means that the mother would have to stay with or at least return to the nest, lay her pair of eggs, arrange them carefully in the circle, and bury them appropriately every day for two weeks to a month,” Poust says.
Those eggs would have taken months to hatch. While experts are still searching for definitive evidence, parent dinosaurs may have sat with these nests until the hatchling babies pushed their way out of the shells. Also, Zelenitsky notes, researchers have found a large number of oviraptorosaur nests with adult dinosaur skeletons nearby. “These dinosaurs were completely obsessed with their eggs,” she says.
Each species had to balance the danger of staying with their nests against the odds of their young surviving without them, and developed different egg architecture, nests, and parenting strategies to maximize the chances of survival and successful reproduction, with varying results. Read how different dinosaurs dealth with their young, as far as we know now, at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Emőke Dénes)
The summer of 1817 was peculiar in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as that's when the sea serpent was spotted. But today it is an afterthought to those who serve the tourist trade in this seaside town. Unless the locals near Loch Ness or Area 51 or any other mysterious sighting in history, they just don't talk about the sea serpent that might have become the town's legacy.
Most cryptid sightings are one‐on‐one occurrences: someone alone at night, on a backcountry road or in an isolated woods. Sometimes it’s a small group. Maybe there’s a fuzzy photograph, but soon enough the creature vanishes, never to return. But the Gloucester sea serpent was different. Scores of people saw it—people came from all over, gathered on the shore to gawk, and there it was.
Visible from shore or from a boat, exactly as expected. Different people on different days, all independently, all with more or less the same basic descriptions. No other cryptid in the long history of such beasts can boast such visibility—not Bigfoot, not Nessie.
Whatever it was, it was not a hoax or a hallucination. The Gloucester sea serpent faded from memory because the New England Linnaean Society got it wrong, creating a new species based on a snake plagued by rickets. When their error was exposed, the original sightings, it seems, were forgotten. But while Jacob Bigelow’s analysis of the rickety snake disproved the holotype specimen, Bigelow didn’t disprove the sightings themselves. The people who saw the sea serpent all agreed it was much bigger than a normal snake anyway.
The story of the Gloucester sea serpent is explained here, in which scientists erroneously declared it a new species and then were disproven. That let the wind out of the sails as far as the town of Gloucester was concerned. Yet other cryptids remain popular, including a couple that were thought to be legendary and then were found alive. Read about them and what makes a cryptid spark the public's imagination at LitHub. -via Digg
