The traveling zoo show named Dinosaurs Live! ended up on par with the band that named themselves Free Beer. It looks good on a marquee, but some people expect to get exactly what the sign says. According to this newspaper clip from Bad Newspaper, a few folks in Memphis were disappointed that the dinosaurs were not actual, living dinosaurs.
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Quick- think of all the movies you know that feature worms. Those will probably be the movies included in this supercut from Atlas Obscura.
They start out small and cute, but the cuteness goes away pretty quickly. What’s left is an ever-growing menace of slithery, hungry, enormous cinematic worms!
We’re used to seeing giant pumpkins, but look at the size of that cabbage! It look like Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors. Alaska is known for its giant vegetables. You’d think that it would be hard to grow giant crops in such a northerly latitude, but the latitude is exactly what causes the growth.
Alaska typically has a very short growing season, only 105 days, on average. For comparison, California’s growing season lasts nearly 300 days. However, the Alaskan growing season does not have long dark nights. The state is located close to the north pole where it enjoys up to 19 hours of sunshine each day, during summer and at the peak of the growing season. The extra hours of sunlight allows Alaskan crops to just keep growing and growing. Even through the growing season is months shorter than the rest of the country, Alaska’s gardeners grow some of the largest vegetables in the world.
The photosynthetic boost also makes the produce sweeter. Alaskan carrots, for instance, spend nearly 3/4th of the day while the sun is available making sugar, and only the remaining 1/4th of its time is spent turning that sugar into starch. Plants like cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, radishes, turnips, potatoes, beets, carrots, spinach, and lettuce all grow very well here.
A friend of mine moved to Alaska for a few years and told us how the sun came up at 3AM and went down at midnight at the height of the summer. Then in winter, they only had a few hours of daylight. Either would be hard to adjust to, but gardeners who live in Alaska take advantage of the summer sun to go for award-winning giant vegetables. Read about them and see more pictures at Amusing Planet. Incidentally, the cabbage pictured here only won second place. -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Travis)
Webcomic artist Alison Wilgus (previously at Neatorama) drew a tribute to her elderly cat, Julien Bashir. Julien is 22 years old, which is extremely old for a cat. It’s pretty straightforward, because like all creatures, Julien has his own personality and his own individual charms, habits, foibles, and challenges. This is just one panel of Julien’s life story; the rest is at Wilgus’ site. The way she simply appreciates him for who he is will make you want to hug your own kitty. -via Metafilter
Back in the 1940s, people were moving into Idaho, and the new landowners didn’t mix well with beavers. Meanwhile, Idaho's Chamberlain Basin could use some beavers to help maintain the environment. Moving the beavers was the ideal solution, but getting them to Chamberlain Basin was a problem. There weren’t any roads there, and carrying beavers by mule was difficult because mules don’t like beavers. The Idaho department of Fish and Game came up with a different idea: drop the beavers from a plane! They developed a special box for the beavers that would open on impact, and used surplus World War II parachutes. They dropped 76 beavers; 75 of them survived and flourished. Read more about the beaver drop at Boise State Public Radio.
We told you the story a few years ago, but it sure sounded like a tall tale, although a dam interesting one. Then just recently, an educational film that included the 1948 beaver drop was discovered called “Fur for the Future.” It had been mislabeled in the archives. So there's real proof that the beaver drop actually happened.
Screen Junkies dissects the three movies of the Back to the Future trilogy, and comes to the conclusion that they are all the same except for the window dressing. Great Scott!
Of course, it’s never a good idea to deconstruct a time-travel movie (or series of movies) too thoughtfully. You could end up with a headache. Or Primer. -via Gamma Squad
Kevin and Amber Judd of Creative Lighting Displays have once again set up a friend’s house to entertain passers-by for Halloween This year’s show features the songs “Ghostbusters,” Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” “This is Halloween,” and Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash.”
Thousands of color-changing LED lights are accompanied by strobe lights, flood lights, and two Matrix boards, as well as tombstones and hand-carved pumpkins. My favorite new feature is the flames in the windows. If you can get to Riverside, California, here are the particulars for the show. -via HuffPo
After 21 years of publishing paper magazines, The Annals of Improbable Research (the folks who bring us the Ig Nobel prizes every year) is converting to digital. The November-December 2015 issue will be the final on printed paper. To celebrate the big changeover, Marc Abrahams tells us that new subscriptions can be had for only $15 a year, if you sign up before the end of October (they will be $25 a year after that). Also, get back issues on paper while they last!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
The most high-tech advances in genetic research are happening in the most unexpected place- the heart of Quiet Amish country.
(Image credit: Clinic for Special Children at Facebook)
Holmes Morton was wrapped up in a medical mystery.
It was spring 1988, and Morton, a fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, had recently opened the case of Danny Lapp, a 6-year-old Amish boy with a condition that baffled doctors. Danny was born healthy, but at 14 months, he caught what seemed to be a routine stomach bug. It wasn’t: The illness had left him paralyzed and brain-damaged so badly that his limbs flailed uncontrollably and he could communicate only by rolling his eyes. The doctors chalked it up to cerebral palsy and moved on.
But another doctor Danny saw had been skeptical. Something about that diagnosis didn’t fit, so he sent a urine sample to Morton, a specialist in pediatrics and biochemical genetics. Now the results were in, and Morton drove through the quilted patchwork of farmland surrounding Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to meet with Danny’s parents.
The Lapps suspected their son’s condition might be permanent, but they were glad to hear what Morton had to say. They were relieved to have a real diagnosis. But as they talked, the Lapps revealed something shocking, something that would shed light on a rare disease and change the course of genetic research for years to come. Danny, they said, wasn’t the only one.
The son of a West Virginia coal mine engineer, Morton was a high school dropout working on a Great Lakes freighter when he first became intrigued by genetic disorders after reading an article in a scientific journal. Before long, he’d move from working in a boiler room to an independent study program at Trinity College and then on to Harvard Medical School.
Dr. D. Holmes Morton (Image credit: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation/CC-BY)
Morton’s specialty included genetic conditions caused by dangerous enzyme deficiencies, so when he tested Danny’s urine, he looked for enzyme irregularities. What he found was so unusual that, at first, he didn’t believe it. But the results did not lie: Danny’s urine was laced with glutaric acid.
Everyone’s body produces glutaric acid, but in healthy people’s urine, it’s undetectable. The fact that it showed up in Danny’s sample indicated that he didn’t have cerebral palsy at all: He had a gene mutation called glutaric aciduria type 1 (GA1), a disorder that prevented his body from properly processing certain organic acids.
While healthy kidneys can flush glutaric acid from the brain and other organs, routine illnesses—like chicken pox, the flu, or, in Danny’s case, a simple bout of diarrhea—can interfere with this process. In children, it triggers stroke-like episodes that irreparably damage the brain. “I was hopeful that by discovering his problem and treating him we would see some improvement,” Morton remembers. But Danny’s brain damage was too severe. “Once the damage is done, you lose the opportunity to change the outcome.”
Morton had solved the mystery: Danny was a textbook case of GA1. But the thing was, there was no textbook. At the time, the scientific literature noted only eight known cases of GA1. Doctors, even those dealing with the rarest diseases, barely knew about the condition. No one at Children’s Hospital had ever seen it.
The fact that there were other Amish children like Danny was alarming. Morton’s mind raced. Was it possible that this disease—a condition so rare it existed only in the margins of medical literature—was rampant among the Amish?
Morton spent that summer driving around Lancaster County, knocking on farmhouse doors, asking about the health of each household’s children. By the end of August 1989, he had identified more than 20 Amish children with what appeared to be GA1—all of them disabled like Danny.
Brandon Hodge collects gadgets and devices that were used in different times to communicate with the dead. He has what is probably the biggest private collection of planchettes ever. Hodge explains some of the history behind the use of these devices in seances.
You’ll also see a “spiritoscope,” a spirit trumpet, ouija boards, and more in this video from the Morbid Anatomy Museum. -via Digg
Many of us grew up reading the remembrances of Laura Ingalls Willder, author of the Little House books. Wilder was elderly when she wrote them, and many details are fiction. So how closely did the account follow her actual life? There’s been a lot of research done into the documents of the time: newspaper accounts, deeds, historical records. And now scientists are getting into the act. For example, the volume The Long Winter described a particularly blizzardy year in which people began to starve to death. Was it really that bad? Meteorologist Barb Boustead set out to determine the real weather of 1880-81.
Those in other scientific disciplines have looked into Wilder’s life story. Read about a a medical student who investigated why Mary Ingalls went blind, and a physics teacher who measured Wilder’s family’s journeys by a horse’s footsteps, at Smithsonian.The winter of 1880-81 was relatively well documented for the time. Compiling records on temperature, precipitation and snow depth from 1950 through 2013, she developed a tool to assign a relative “badness” score to the weather recorded at one or more stations in a geographic area. The Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index (AWSSI, rhymes with “bossy”) assigns an absolute severity grade for how the weather compares with the entire country, and a relative severity grade for comparing regional weather. It can also track year-over-year trends.
Boustead applied the tool to records at weather stations from the 1800s. Every site Boustead investigated in Laura’s region in that year falls into the “extreme” category rating on the AWSSI scale, marking it as a record year for snowfall and temperature lows. The season covered in The Long Winter still ranks in the top 10 worst winters on record for South Dakota, as well as other regions of the country.
A Frenchman in a small yacht was caught in rough seas off the coast of Alaska Tuesday. The Coast Guard responded to a distress call call following a location beacon. Royal Dutch Shell had boats in the area, and send their support ship the Tor Viking to rescue the man. The disabled boat was found in rough seas with 20-foot waves. A video was captured by the C-130 Hercules airplane that pinpointed the yacht’s location. Look closely: the man is hanging on to a rigging pole at front of the boat.
Before he made his leap, the man tucked his cat inside his coat. -via Arbroath
I always thought the most common fears were of dying and public speaking. But we have more things to worry about in the 21st century. Chapman University surveyed a random sample of 1,541 adults in America about their fears. They even provided a list of possible things people could be afraid of, and asked them to rank their anxiety from 1 (not afraid) to 4 (very afraid). The percentage of people who responded to a topic as “afraid” or “very afraid” is reflected in the graphic above. It’s right below the top ten that things get really weird. Here are the next ten.
Although everything outside of government corruption is feared by a minority of respondents, some of those are large minorities. Fear of heights and of public speaking are way down on the list, and fear of dying only plagues 21.9% of those surveyed. I guess we’ve come up with too many other things to worry about. You can read about the survey and see the full list at Chapman University’s website. -via mental_floss
Marc Evan and Chris Soria have been best friends since 6th grade. They bonded over horror movies, once designed a haunted house at their school, and went to art school together. They worked their way through school at restaurants and bars, where they had opportunity to carve pumpkins and put their design skills to work. Over time, they became really good at it.
Around Halloween of 2007, Marc and Chris began taking photos of their pumpkins and posting them to a Flickr account. Fortuitously, an editor at Wired Magazine came across one of the images and published a short write-up on them.
The results of this tiny feature could not have been forecasted: almost immediately, Marc and Chris were flooded with inquiries and orders -- including a massive request from the New York Yankees. Marc recalls:
“It was right around the World Series, and Yankee Stadium called us to make fifty pumpkins for their skybox seats, each with this intricate logo design. At that point, we figured it was probably time to start a business.”
With little experience in the business world, the two artists charged the Yankees $50 per pumpkin, and ended up taking a loss on the deal.
That first professional experience was the beginning of what became Maniac Pumpkin Carvers. Marc and Chris now employ several other carvers and work 18 hours a day during the eight-week pumpkin season. One of their works will run you between $150 to $700 or even more, depending on the job. Read about their business, their technique, and their tips for making your carved pumpkin last, at Pricenomics.
How do you light a Jack O’Lantern under water? Nature has its ways, as we see in this comic from Liz Climo. The Jack O’Lantern instantly gets not only a light, but scary teeth, too! Only Liz Climo could make Mr. Blobby and an anglerfish look cute. She has several new comics in which the animals try out new Halloween costumes. See them at her Tumblr blog.
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