The more we learn about top secret Cold War weapons, the more insane they seem. The race to build bigger nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union was furious, until we had the capability of destroying the entire world many times over. The ultimate step was to design a weapon that would annihilate the earth and everyone in it in one fell swoop. Why would we do that? Just to have a bigger nuke than the Soviets.

Project Sundial was a project to develop just such a bomb. It, of course, could never be tested. And it didn't even have to be built, because the rumor of such a weapon was all we really needed. See, the arms race itself was based on fear of the terrifying weapons of the other side. Once we achieved weapons that assured suicide as well as offensive power, those in charge started to think that maybe we'd gone too far. Ya think? But while we don't have a one-bomb apocalypse ready to go, we still have enough nuclear weapons to do the same thing if we used them all at once.

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In 1945, defeated Germany was divided between the Allied countries of the Unites States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Berlin was also divided, although it was deep within the Soviet sector. By 1949, the countries of East Germany and West Germany were established, with East Germany under communist control. Barriers were put up to keep East Germans from leaving. The West German sector of Berlin was enclosed by a wall in 1962. In most places, this Berlin Wall was 100-300 feet wide, marking a "no man's land" where East Germans could be shot trying to cross over to the West. The wall finally came down in 1989, and the two Germanys were reunited in 1990.  

The people who rose up to bring the wall down destroyed much of it quickly, and authorities were keen on obliterating it entirely. West German legislator Michael Cramer wanted to preserve parts of the wall as a memorial to its history, but only a few small sections remain today. They do not indicate the wall's route, nor its size -wrapped completely around West Berlin, it was 100 miles long! Cramer spearheaded a project to make the former site of the wall into something to benefit the city and still mark that period of history. The result is Mauerpark, a public space with a 100-mile bicycle and pedestrian trail called Berliner Mauerweg, or Berlin Wall Trail. It winds through city streets, forests, and green space, with historical markers and memorials along the way. Read how Mauerpark came about and what it means to a united Germany at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Karen Mardahl)

Randall Munroe of xkcd and Henry Reich of MinutePhysics have made a cottage industry of answering stupid questions in a way that makes them ridiculously interesting. This is the What If? series. The question this week is whether we could change the color of the moon by shining a laser pointer on it if everyone on earth participated at once. The short answer is "no." But from there, these guys looked at the question as a challenge: what kind of light would actually make it to the moon? So they go through the various kinds of powerful lights we have, starting with a one-watt laser, which is already dangerous. Then we learn about all kinds of powerful lights we have developed but don't use that much because they suck up so much energy and can be deadly. Too much light isn't good for us, anyway. But certain powerful lights can actually reach the moon if we use enough of them! Sure, it's a dumb scenario, but I learned quite a bit about light technology in this video.

The celebration of Christmas is a blend of very old winter solstice traditions and the celebration of Jesus' birth, plus all the music, rich food, parties, and fun that people need in the darkness of winter. Either the fun or the religion have caused the whole thing to be banned in six countries and one well-known community. When Stalin banned the celebration of Christmas in the Soviet Union, he aimed to obliterate the Christian part, but the rest was too much fun, so people moved those traditions to New Year's Day, which continues today. In Germany, the land that gave us the Christmas tree, Adolf Hitler was okay with celebrating Christmas, but it couldn't be about Jesus, because, well, he was Jewish.

Several other countries, at one time or another, were okay with keeping the religious observation, but wanted to do away with the parties and fun and a day off work because those things were either too decadent or too Catholic. Workers in Scotland didn't get December 25th off for hundreds of years -until 1958! Read about seven historic Christmas bans and the reasons behind them at Mental Floss.

Did you go see Joker: Folie à Deux? If so, that makes you special, because not that many people did. It was a sequel to the critically acclaimed 2019 hit movie Joker. Director Todd Phillips decided to make it a love story and a musical since they got Lady Gaga to sign on, but that wasn't what Joker fans for waiting for. Or anyone else. However, Screen Junkies managed to find a lot more to dislike about Joker: Folie à Deux. Namely, it's boring, depressing, and the most exciting shots from the trailers aren't even in the movie. No wonder it was a box office bomb. The film opened in the US a month ago and was on home video three weeks later after making less than half its expenses back at the box office. But if you still want to see it, be warned that there are spoilers in this Honest Trailer.  

We know that truth is stranger than fiction, and fiction is often influenced by real-world events, because otherwise all our stories would be a simple fight between good and evil where a random farm boy kills the evil emperor or else a prince saves a pretty girl from the the big bad wolf. Some of the most beloved fictional worlds capture our imaginations with strange places, characters, and customs, but also follow some events from history. In a couple, the author admits being influenced by world events, while others are argued over to the point where we don't know if the analogy is intentional or coincidence. And those tie-ins have faded with time.  

Five of those novels are: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, Dune by Frank Herbert, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. The story of Dorothy visiting Oz is very involved, and may be an analogy for the "free silver" debate of 1896. There are an awful lot of clues that tie Oz to this obscure piece of American history, but it could be a matter of attaching meaning to a series of coincidences, like a conspiracy theorist with a wall full of pictures. Or Baum really could have used "free silver" as an inspiration. Read how all of these stories reflect real world events at Big Think.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

A couple of years ago, we told you about a 17th-century grave unearthed in Poland that was explicitly rigged to prevent a vampire from coming back to life. The burial of a young woman saw her foot shackled and a sickle placed across her neck, ready to cut upon the slightest raising of her head.

But those efforts were eventually proved to be in vain. In the two years since, she has risen from her grave, with the help of archaeologists, and her face has been brought back to life by forensic artists. While her name has been lost, she is called Zosia by locals and scientists. DNA analysis and the objects she was buried with tell us a little about her status. While she appears to be from a well-to-do family, she suffered from one or more physical conditions that may had led to her vampire reputation. -via Boing Boing

The properties of a solid include its consistent volume and shape. A liquid, on the other hand, has a consistent volume, but takes on the shape of its container. A gas takes both the shape and volume of its container. As you can see from the image above, cats take the shape of their container, whether it's a box or a fish bowl, so therefore cats are liquid. It's been proven in an Ig Nobel prize-winning study.

But why are cats this way? What makes them so flexible that they can flow through fenceposts and floor cracks, and curl up in an impossibly small serving dish? It's all in their bones. A cat's skeleton, whether it's a house cat or a cheetah, has several anomalies that make it different from other mammals. Read about a cat's weirdly flexible skeleton at Inverse, and you'll wonder why other animal species haven't developed these keys to flexibility. Cats may be more alien than liquid. -via Damn Interesting

During the space race of the mid-20th century, the US and the Soviet Union were in a hurry to launch rockets into space, and eventually human pilots. The US sent up fruit flies, then mice and monkeys to test whether such a trip would be survivable. The Soviets sent dogs. But it wasn't just a Cold War project. The French wanted to go to space, too. In 1963, a cat named Félicette became the first and only cat in space, launched in a French rocket for a 10-minute suborbital flight, which she survived.

Not that Félicette was thrilled by the experience. She underwent all the unpleasant tasks that astronauts later went through to be chosen for space flight, without understanding the purpose. She was fitted with brain electrodes for the trip. She sustained more than 9Gs at launch. And that wasn't the worst of it. But Félicette was a hero to scientists studying the possibilities of space travel. Stefan Chin tells her story for SciShow.

There was a time when Americans didn't find out about the crazy things going on in our government until many years afterward, because everyone involved wanted to present a veneer of respectability. But we know that government officials are only human, and Hollywood has always been willing to fill in the blanks to entertain us. Political movies have been with us as long as movies themselves, and the comedies are the ones we remember best. If you want to decompress from reality before voting, or after voting, for that matter, you might want to check out a list of the twenty greatest political comedies at Cracked, and then watch one or two.

These movies go back as far as 1933, and include foreign films, musicals, rom-coms, satires, and even a documentary while still tickling your funny bone. Some I had forgotten about, and there are a couple I haven't even seen. I'll always have a soft spot for the 1993 movie Dave, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. And Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator from 1940 was very moving while still making us laugh. Check out the list and let us know which one is your favorite.

When we think about animal camouflage, it's about the animal's appearance looking like its background so that it blends in. But there's a lot more to it than that. Camouflage effects, or nature's illusions, work as a combination of the way an animal looks and the way it is perceived by whatever it's hiding from. We might see a tiger and say, how is that camouflage? But if the cat's prey doesn't perceive colors the way we do, well, that just means we aren't a tiger's natural prey.

The science of perception is uncovering many different methods we use to sort and interpret the signals coming into our eyes and brain by studying the ways we can be fooled by those signals. Perception is an amazingly complex process that we use surprisingly well without understanding it. Animals think about it even less, but use it to survive. That's the way of natural selection- whatever works, in both perception and appearance, will become more common for those creatures who survive long enough to pass on their genes. It's only humans who survived and thrived long enough to study the details. This video is eleven minutes long; the rest is promotional. -via Laughing Squid

There are certain things you can say that can be a blessing or a curse at the same time, like when I would tell my kids, "May you have children just like you!" usually when I was angry. It's the same with the phrase "May you live in interesting times." I hadn't thought much of it, but in the back of my mind I thought that was something Mr. Spock said on Star Trek. In that I may have been a victim of the Mandela effect. It was said in the Star Trek Universe, but by Harry Kim on the show Voyager, in the episode "The Cloud" from 1995. So where did I know it from, and where did the saying originally come from?

Robert F. Kennedy used the phrase in a speech in 1966, and attributed it to an old Chinese curse. From there, it was quoted by many memorable people. But Kennedy was not the first documented use of the phrase, and it may be much older -and it's not an old Chinese curse. Read what we know about the history of "May you live in interesting times" at Mental Floss.

Over the Garden Wall is a beloved animated miniseries that aired on The Cartoon Network in 2014. The ten episodes concern two half-brothers, Wirt and Greg, who negotiate their way through an enchanted forest accompanied by a bluebird named Beatrice and encounter various supernatural adventures. The show captured the imagination of children and their parents with its stunning visuals and playful storytelling, won several awards, and today has a 94% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The miniseries first played November third through the tenth in 2014, making it ten years old today.

For the show's 10th anniversary, the network has released a new stop-motion video by Aardman Animations featuring the original voice actors: Elijah Wood, Collin Dean, and Melanie Lynskey. Welcome back to the Unknown! If you haven't seen Over the Garden Wall, The Cartoon Network is live-streaming it at YouTube. To start from the beginning, hit the >| button.  -via Metafilter

There is a building on Philpot Lane in London that has two mice attached to an outside ledge, both nibbling on, or fighting over, a piece of cheese. The structure was built in 1862, but no one knows when the mice were added. The two rodents have quite a story behind them. It is said that two workers got into a fight during the building's construction, when one accused the other of stealing his lunch. A shoving match led to one of the workers falling to his death, although some versions of the story have both workers dying. During the commotion afterward, someone saw what happened to the lunch in question- it was taken away by two mice.

Is there any truth to the story? Ian Mansfield looked into the tale's history, and found that the first documented account was in 1975, but also found reasons why contemporary accounts might not exist. What he didn't find is any information about who installed the sculpture. Still, the veracity of the story now matters less than the fact that the sculpture and the story have become a part of Philpot Lane's culture. Read up on the two mice and the cheese at Ian Visits. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Loco Steve)

Do you recall the adventures of hitchBOT? The little robot hitchhiked its way through several European countries, but when it came to the US, it only lasted a couple of weeks before vandals destroyed it. Humans have a tendency to take their frustrations out on technological innovations, none more so than robots, from factory robots to hitchBOT to Waymo autonomous cars. Every time Boston Dynamics came out with a new robot, they showed us how they tested them by hitting them, tripping them, or thwarting their tasks, and those are the parts of the videos that people enjoyed the most. Viewers had a lot more sympathy for Spot, the robot dog, than for the Atlas humanoid robot.

It's easy to vent our frustrations on a machine, knowing that they cannot feel pain or die in the conventional sense. They may represent technology taking away human jobs, or the surveillance state, or vanity toys for rich people. There are plenty of reasons to hate robots, but how can we change this behavior? Recent experiments have had some success by triggering feelings of empathy for robots under attack. Read how that's done, and what it tells us about human nature, at Popular Science. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Boston Dynamics)