Did you know that the first known primitive greenhouse was built almost 2,000 years ago? Here’s a little history that just might grow on you.
EARLY ROOTS
Ever since humans started cultivating crops—about 12,000 years ago—people have been trying to develop better ways to grow them. At some point, farmers in various places around the world figured out that growing plants indoors, or in some kind of protected space, had potential advantages. In regions that had cold winters, they could grow plants indoors for a much longer period than they could outdoors, and they could grow plants that normally grew in different climates and on different terrain.
We don’t know exactly when indoor gardening started, but we do know that advanced horticulture—the art and science of growing vegetables and ornamental flowers—was being practiced in many parts of the world thousands of years ago, and that it often involved the use of protected gardens. This included small vegetable and flower gardens outside of homes, protected from weather and wildlife by walls, and elaborate multilevel indoor (and outdoor) palace gardens—filled with hundreds of species of plants, often exotic varieties imported from conquered lands—such as the magnificent gardens built in Babylon and Egypt more than 4,000 years ago.
Here’s a piece of Atomic Age history you’ve probably never heard of: the civilian Ground Observer Corps, thousands of volunteers who scanned the skies for incoming Soviet bombers that would have marked the opening battle of World War III.
SHOCK WAVE
In September 1949, a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane flying over the North Pacific from Japan to Alaska detected levels of radioactivity in the atmosphere at least 20 times above normal. Other planes in the Pacific reported similar observations in the days that followed; elevated radiation levels were soon being detected over the British Isles half a world away. It quickly became clear that there could be only one explanation for the spreading cloud of radioactivity: the Soviet Union had secretly detonated its first atomic bomb. The United States had known since the end of World War II that the Soviets would try to build their own nuclear weapon, but the best estimates were that it would take them eight to ten years to do it. They had managed it in less than four.
The Soviet bomb was estimated to be as powerful as the one dropped on Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II. That bomb had killed more than 70,000 people. Making matters worse, the Soviets were also building long-range bombers that could reach the United States. America’s entry into World War II had been precipitated by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, as the Cold War heated up, it seemed possible that the next war might begin with an atomic sneak attack by the Russians. If their target was a major American city like Washington, D.C., or New York, the casualties would be in the millions.
In medieval bestiaries, we are liable to see real but exotic animals illustrated alongside fantastical creatures like unicorns and centaurs. The real beasts are often depicted inaccurately, which we often attribute to the fact that the artist had never seen a real specimen, but worked from descriptions from those who had. However, there were many depictions of elephants that showed the same inaccuracy: a trunk shaped like a trumpet. Could those artists possibly be copying the ideas of earlier artists? Where was the first depiction of an elephant with a trumpet nose?
One of the mysteries of the bestiary form is what the first one looked like. The tradition is usually traced back to the Physiologus, a book that no longer exists. It’s thought that it was written around the 2nd century A.D., in Alexandria, by a scholar working in Greek, and much of what’s known about it is derived from later translations into Latin. It would have contained the descriptions of a selection of animals, perhaps 50 or so, and relied on the standard works of natural history of the time, including Aristotle’s History of Animals and Pliny’s Natural History.
The thing about that book is that the animals weren't just described- they were used as allegories for "the ways of God, of Man and of the Devil.” The story it told of elephants was about sex. While the trunk shape is never fully explained, the search for the answer is quite interesting, as you'll find at Atlas Obscura.
Roses are nice, but they're really only there for looks. On the other hand, you can eat donuts on a stick! Or burgers on a stick! Or chicken nuggets on a stick! All the junk food on a stick! With a Valentines Day gift like this, we could eat ourselves sick. -via Buzzfeed
Gav and Dan, the Slow-Mo Guys, are always looking for something to film with their high-speed cameras. Something that people will find interesting, but more important, things that will look good in a video. Explosions? Yeah! Pretty colors? Yeah! So they gathered bags of paint powder and vehicle airbag devices and headed out to a quarry, far from anyone who would be bothered.
They do it three times! That must've cost a fortune in airbags. The result is not as educational as some of the other videos they'd done, but it sure is pretty! -via Laughing Squid
If you've ever considered joining in an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game), consider the story of these two people. They met playing World of Warcraft in 2010. She was a tank in Canada, he was a healer in the U.S. And they got married exactly seven years later, on January 29, after she got a visa to live in the U.S. It turns out that their story is not exactly unique. Redditor unffligh told us,
LOL I did the opposite. I met my husband playing WoW in 2004. After several visits back and forth I moved from Minnesota to Canada to be with him.
This is awesome! I also married an American I met in WoW (I'm Canadian) - in 2006, but we both stopped playing and we moved our friendship to social media. We've always liked each other 'more than friends' but Texas and Vancouver were pretty far, separate countries, and honestly we did both have on-again-off-again relationships (not to mention school) so it seemed unrealistic. In March 2013, we had both found ourselves single, so I visited him in Texas for a week and we shortly after decided to get married! We visited back and forth a handful of times and then I immigrated to the US September 2013 and we were married December 2013. Just passed Anniversary 3 :)
Really liked the UCSIS Interview where the US is trying to determine if our relationship is real and the minute I said World of Warcraft the guy just laughed. Thx budddayyy.
Met my husband in 1999 on a game called Meridian 59. He was from Canada, and I was a transplanted Alaskan. We met in person in 2001, just before September 11 when he flew out to Anchorage. He never left because he was afraid that the travel restrictions that would be coming after that would keep us apart. We married 4 months later, he became a U.S. citizen, and now serves in the Army. We recently celebrated our 15 year anniversary, and we still play video games together and have side by side pc's in our den. There are certainly some happy endings in video game nerd land.
So if you want to improve U.S./Canadian relations, or just want to meet someone, you might consider playing WoW online. It's amazing how many married couples in the reddit thread met playing games.
You've probably hear stories about dogs or other animals that died after eating a toad, and maybe you've heard about animals that learned to lick toads to enjoy the hallucinogenic effects. It's possible that the story of the frog prince came about after someone kissed a frog and started hallucinating. Toads and frogs in the bufonidae family carry strange toxins in their skin.
These chemicals, called bufotoxins, probably evolved to deter predators but they may offer a variety of other uses, including as medicine. Bufo gargarizans, an Asian species of toad, produces a substance that could even prove useful in the treatment of certain cancers. According to one 2011 study, the toad produces a substance that effects "significant antitumor activity, including inhibition of cell proliferation, induction of cell differentiation, induction of apoptosis, disruption of the cell cycle, inhibition of cancer angiogenesis, reversal of multi-drug resistance, and regulation of the immune response."
Other bufotoxins have been used to treat diseases among horses and cattle. Bufotoxins have been individually studied in the past but there was no single compendium of research on them. Roberto Ibáñez, a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, has co-authored a paper in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology that brings together everything currently known to science about bufotoxins. He helped to identify 47 species of frogs and toads which are used in traditional medicines and then narrowed in on the 15 species that are members of the bufonidae family.
But don't you know it, this research is going on while many of these frogs and toads are seriously declining. Read about the current state of frog and toad research at Smithsonian.
Here's what happens when everyone is carrying a camera with them all the time. And then they share their photos on an internet forum. Redditor 0thethethe0 went to the Bruce Springsteen concert in Sydney last week and got the selfie of a lifetime. Redditor kritof was there, too and managed to snap an image at the same time.
But do we have a picture of him taking that picture? Probably not, as he took another without zoom to show us where he was sitting, plus arrows to indicate where the other photos were taken.
One thing you might notice is how many phones were out across the audience. So much for the "no camera" rule printed on the tickets. A good time was had by all, even in the cheap seats. -via reddit
Looks like Simon may have a dinner date for Valentines Day! Or at least he's been shopping, preparing for one. Simon's Cat is curious about all this stuff. Of course.
Any human activity will eventually be made into a competition, and so it is with the common childhood activity of swinging. Remember when you were a kid on the playground and dreamed of swinging so high that you swung completely over the top in a circle? That's what kiiking is. In the nation of Estonia, where "kiik" means swing, tall swings have always been a fun activity for adults and children alike, but the fairly recent sport of kiiking takes it to the extreme. In order to swing entirely over the bar, and new kind of swing was developed with a swivel at the top.
It became clear that the taller the swing got, the more difficult it would be to complete a circuit over the spindle, which meant that there could be competitive accomplishments, and thus, a new sport was born. “We, who are kiikers so to say, like to say that “kiiking” starts when your legs are higher than your head, before that it is just swinging,” says Laansalu.
There is no international competition so far, but Estonia has a league, the Estonian Kiiking Union (Eesti Kiikingi Liit). Even though the sport is in its infancy, it's just a few YouTube videos away from being the next big thing. Read about the sport of kiiking and its history -and see a video- at Atlas Obscura.
A Hobart, Tasmania, resident gave a thief a good talking-to via a neighborhood sign after he was ripped off …of one boot. And a backpack. I think he was darn lucky to get the boot back, but then tries to negotiate for the return of the backpack, too. Although to be fair, he did offer some beer. A commenter from Tasmania said this was all a true story; that it was a pretty famous incident in Tasmania. See the image somewhat larger here. -via reddit
This is a crew cabin on a cargo ship. It's bigger and nicer than one would imagine. But then the sea intervenes. You don't see the ship rocking, because the camera is fixed to the wall, but what you see looks like a poltergeist is coming through.
Sometimes it appears that Mother Nature is out to get us. California earthquakes, Louisiana floods, Oklahoma tornados, Florida hurricanes, Hawaiian volcanos, oh my! But the deadliest places on earth, as far as natural disasters go, are not in the U.S. Where are they?
Often described as "the cruellest place on Earth", the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is the meeting point of three plates. It has possibly the most volcanic activity in the world.
The average annual temperature here is reportedly 34.4C, making it one of the hottest places on Earth. With low rainfall and a landscape dotted by volcanic ruptures, hydrothermal fields and salt pans, you would be forgiven for thinking nobody could survive here. But the Afar people call this place home.
Cat owners know how it is: when you want to snuggle with your cat, they won't have anything to do with you. But when a cat wants your attention and love, they can be pretty demanding. If you aren't in the employment of a cat yourself, watch this and see how it is.
A cat knows what it wants, and they want it now, no matter what else you have going on. As someone once told me, a cat has never seen a downside to asking for what they want. And they get it, too! Who could say no to that adorable little fuzzy face? -via Tastefully Offensive
For 191 years, the United States Supreme Court was an all-boys' club -until an Arizona cowgirl stepped in and became themost powerful woman in the country.
Sandra Day O’Connor’s desk was a mess. The day before, on September 25, 1981, she had been sworn in as the first woman on the Supreme Court. Her new office was already littered with briefs and cert requests. Not to mention nearly 10,000 missives from citizens across the nation—packages of hand-knit socks, family pictures, homemade fudge. Then there was the hate mail. “Back to your kitchen and home female!” read one letter. “This is a job for a man and only he can make rough decisions.”
The insults didn’t faze her. Neither did more pragmatic concerns, including the fact that nobody had ever thought to place a women’s restroom near the courtroom—because for 191 years, only men had sat on the Supreme Court. The closest ladies’ room required O’Connor to walk down an endless hallway. So she commandeered a nearby restroom instead.
O’Connor also took ownership of another boys’ room: the basketball court above the courtroom, jokingly called “the highest court in the land.” She wanted to exercise, and after she heard that other women in the building—secretaries and a few lone female clerks—did too, she reserved the gym and asked the local YWCA to send an aerobics teacher. She even ordered custom T-shirts that read Women Work Out at the Supreme Court. The class became a daily ritual.
By the end of her first month, Sandra Day O’Connor had done more than break the Supreme Court’s glass ceiling—she’d stolen its spotlight. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, she wrote opinions that shaped major social and political issues, making decisions that led Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court expert and founder of SCOTUSblog, to call her “one of the five most influential justices of the century.” The fact that this Arizona cowgirl was the first woman on the court, he says, is “more of an asterisk.”
How she got there, however, is another story.
It was a hot day on the Lazy B ranch when 15-year-old Sandra Day learned how to change a tire. Her father, H.A. Day, and his ranch hands were tending to cattle far from home, where Sandra was loading a pickup truck with the crew’s supplies and lunch. She left at 7 in the morning—plenty of time to reach the cowboys by mealtime—and drove into the desert alone.
The sun was rising. Sandra’s grandfather had bought this 250-square-mile stretch of windswept desert straddling the Arizona–New Mexico border in 1880. Fifty years later, when Sandra was born, the family lived in a one-bedroom house with no running water, eking out a living repairing wells and raising cattle. Their closest neighbor was 25 miles away. (Image credit: Flickr user Fairfax Library Foundation)
Driving over dirt and sand, the Chevy was more rickety than usual. Sandra stopped, hopped out, and noticed that a rear tire had pancaked. She figured out how to jack up the car, grabbed a lug wrench, and twisted the lug nuts as hard as she could. They wouldn’t budge. Rusted. Watching the sun rise higher in the sky, she propped her foot on the wrench and began jumping until the rust cracked.
Sandra reached the roundup well past lunchtime, and the men were branding cattle. She explained that she had woken up early, that she’d had a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, that the lug nuts were rusted tight, that she was lucky to be there at all.
It sounds like a triumph, but her father was unimpressed. “You should have started a lot earlier,” he said. That was the end of their conversation. No excuses.
