Botanist Bernabe Moya and his brother, environmental engineer Jose Moya, are tree experts who were studying an experimental forest in Andilla, Spain. In 2012, a fire swept through and destroyed the 50,000-acre plot. That was a heartbreaker.

But amid the devastation, they saw a sign of hope: a stand of 946 Mediterranean cypress trees, each taller than a two story house, that formed a perfectly square patch of green in the scorched landscape.

Bernabe Moya and his brother Jose couldn’t believe their eyes. And when they told their colleagues about the strange phenomenon, they couldn’t believe it either.

“We will have to find out what really happened,” Raúl de la Calle of the Official Association of Technical Forest Engineers told the Madrid-based newspaper El Pais in 2012. “The cypress is not a very combustible species, but to the point that it doesn’t burn at all. … There is no such thing as a fireproof tree.”

It’s true that the Mediterranean cypress can be burned, but it isn’t easy to do. The Moya and other scientists identified several factors that contribute to the cypress’s ability to withstand forest fires. That led to the idea of growing the trees specifically to protect forests. By planting firebreaks, or carefully planned areas of cypress trees among a forest, fires might be contained to small areas instead of spreading wildly. There are pros and cons to the plan, as you can imagine. Read about the unique Mediterranean cypress at the Washington Post. -via Digg  

(Image credit: Bernabe Moya)

Imagine a Google Street View world for creatures only about 12 inches tall. This is Hiroshima Cat Street View, a web application from Hiroshima Prefecture. Imagine you are a cat, just exploring the neighborhood. Turn left or right, and you may see another cat. If you do, click on its little icon to see an introduction with more pictures. Although most of the text is in Japanese, it shouldn’t matter much because here you are a cat, and cats don’t even read. -via the AV Club

Prora is a seaside hotel built by the Nazis as a vacation resort for 20,000 people at a time. The eight massive buildings cover three miles of beachfront on the Baltic Sea. Although it’s been there for almost 80 years, no tourist has ever checked in.    

Construction of this colossal resort began in the year 1936. For anyone with the faintest knowledge of world history, you may suspect that this means the resort was built by the Nazis under the orders of Adolf Hitler (and you would be correct in this suspicion). The resort was designed and built by the Nazis as part of the “Strength through Joy” program, or “Kraft durch Freude” in German, with the intention of making it the “go-to” vacation spot of the National Socialist Party’s tired workers. At least three other similar sites were planned but never built since war broke out in 1939, before construction could even begin on these auxiliary sites. But not before construction of this site was finished. This hotel/resort was to be filled with Nazi propaganda and even include a dock for the “Strength through Joy” cruise line.

The buildings were put to use during wartime, but not for tourists. Except for some military use, it’s been abandoned since then. But in just the last few years. plans are being made to rehabilitate the facility and open it up to investors, tourists, and even permanent residents. Read about the history of Prora and its possibilities for the future, with plenty of pictures, at When on Earth. -via the Presurfer  

(Image credit: Steffen Löwe)

Best trail camera video ever! A bear that ate some mushrooms or fermented fruit perhaps? Whatever caused this young bear to miss the tree twice, made me laugh everytime. #youmebear #trailcamera #kitchinsink

A video posted by _kitchinsink (@_kitchinsink) on Sep 3, 2015 at 1:32pm PDT

What does a bear do in the woods? He makes a fool of himself! Instagram member _kitchinsink speculates that this bear might have eaten some fermented fruit or possibly some magic mushrooms. Whatever the case, he had trouble simply scratching his back against a tree. Back up, miss the tree, back up, miss the tree again! Click the image to watch him in action.  -via Boing Boing

These fellows in Lugansk, Ukraine, have no fear. They live in a war zone, yet they find more dangerous things to do for the sake of YouTube. Adding butane to Coca-Cola? Yeah, we’ll try that.

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What is happening here? Redditor Funktapus gives us some science.

Coca-Cola is filled with dissolved CO2. The CO2 can escape (creating gas) if the partial pressure of CO2 is too low next the liquid. That's why Coke goes flat if you leave it exposed to air.

Next we have butane, which is a nonpolar liquid at low temperatures, but boils at about 0 Celsius. When you add a bunch of butane to the coke bottle, it probably starts to form a liquid on top of the coke (it won't mix), which causes water ice to form, which acts as an insulator.

Now, you flip the bottle. Not only does the liquid butane come into contact with warm coke, which causes it to boil, creating butane gas... but the newly gaseous butane doesn't contain any CO2. That causes CO2 to rush into the new butane bubbles and expand even more.

The end result: a bunch of new butane gas and CO2 gas, also known as an explosion.

Well alrighty then. See more of kreosan's weird stunts at their YouTube channel. -via reddit

Twenty years ago, the TV show Xena: Warrior Princess debuted, a spinoff of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The two shows were usually shown in tandem in syndication. Eventually, Xena eclipsed Hercules in the ratings. If you grew up watching the show, you may want to learn some behind-the-scenes facts to celebrate it’s anniversary.

1. SHE WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO DIE.

Xena was originally introduced on Hercules to satisfy executive producer Rob Tapert’s wish for a dark, tragic figure to emerge as a counterbalance to the cheerful, completely non-conflicted Hercules. At the conclusion of a three-episode arc, the character was supposed to die. But Tapert and his fellow producers were so impressed with her that the already-planned Hercules spinoff series was remodeled for Xena.  
 
2. LUCY LAWLESS WASN’T THE FIRST CHOICE.

Lawless had already appeared on Hercules twice—in two different roles—when the show began scouring for an actress to fill Xena’s boots. A British actress named Vanessa Angel (who had starred in the television adaptation of Weird Science) was hired, but fell ill before she was able to fly to the set. After some discussion over whether to stick to their original concept of a blonde Amazon, Tapert decided on Lawless, who dyed her hair from blonde to black. (The two married in 1998.)  

But that’s just the beginning. Read the rest of what went into the making of Xena: Warrior Princess at mental_floss.

This happened in 2003, but the unlikely confluence of events and a video of it are something special. The Weather Channel has the footage.  

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First, lightning struck a Jim Beam storage facility. The resulting fire led to a bourbon spill, and 800,000 gallons of the whiskey spilled into a retention lake and burned. The storm wasn’t over, though, and a small tornado swept the flames up into a “firenado,” or a whirlwind of fire. It’s a rare occurrence,and even rarer to catch one on video. A spill of that much bourbon -well, that’s just tragic. -via Fark

If wishes were dollars, we’d all be rich. Except for the cat, who has no use for a dollar and wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway. If we could just be contented like that, we’d suffer less from stress. I’ve always heard there are two ways to have what you want: you can go out and get it, or learn to be happy with what you have. I’ve tried to employ both methods, with rather good results. This observation is from Lunarbaboon. You can also catch comics by Lunarbaboon at Webtoons.

When water goes down a hole in the earth and doesn’t come out anywhere that anyone can find, where does it go? It’s a deep and dangerous hole that no one wants to climb down into. Surely there's some way to test that.  

A few miles south of the U.S.-Canadian border, the Brule River flows through Minnesota’s Judge C. R. Magney State Park, where it drops 800 feet in an 8-mile span, creating several waterfalls. A mile and a half north of the shore of Lake Superior, a thick knuckle of rhyolite rock juts out, dividing the river dramatically at the crest of the falls. To the east, a traditional waterfall carves a downward path, but to the west, a geological conundrum awaits visitors. A giant pothole, the Devil’s Kettle, swallows half of the Brule and no one has any idea where it goes. The consensus is that there must be an exit point somewhere beneath Lake Superior, but over the years, researchers and the curious have poured dye, pingpong balls, even logs into the kettle, then watched the lake for any sign of them. So far, none has ever been found.

The name Devil’s Kettle implies that the water pours straight down to hell for Satan’s tea. You have to wonder why no one has thrown a waterproof GPS tracking device down there. After all, we tags marine animals with them all the time. Or maybe a GoPro on a long string. But it’s a great story, and the mystery may be solved one day. Meanwhile, you can read some of the untested theories at Mother Nature Network. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user Captain Tenneal)

This sidewalk is swarming with ants. Someone must have dropped a lollipop. So what happens if you put an iPhone down among them?

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Nothing at first, but watch what happens when the phone rings! Suddenly, all ants are marching in the same direction, circling the phone. Why do they do that? Of course, there’s that one ant crawling on the phone -he’s always been a bit different, they say. HuffPo offers some speculation on what may cause the circling behavior. I think it's fear. I always get a slight feeling of dread when the phone rings, because it's always someone wanting me to do something for them.

Spongebob Squarepants hosts this little educational video from Nickelodeon and the BBC. What’s the most important creature on earth? Don’t say humans. That would be too easy, and egocentric at that.

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Sheldon J. Plankton makes a good case for calling plankton the most important living thing on earth. And you haven’t even seen plankton lately have you? -via Tastefully Offensive

Surely you recognize Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. president from 1963 until 1969. But it’s not him in the picture, it’s a publicity still from an upcoming HBO movie called All the Way. Who is the actor under all that makeup? You might already know, but if you don’t, take a good look, make your best guess, and then jump over to Uproxx for the answer. That's a darn good makeup job.

Okay, see if you recognize the plot of this story. It all takes place in the Death Row section of a prison.

Like in the movie, it's revealed that the prisoner is magic, and he uses his powers to cure the ailments of a guard with whom he has formed an unlikely friendship…

Despite being treated like some sort of criminal or something, the inmate continues helping those within the prison through the magic of making shit glow.

Eventually, everyone recognizes that the inmate has a miraculous gift and should be spared from his impending execution. In order to prove this point, he heals an otherwise incurable condition within one of the warden's family members.

The warden does everything in his power to stop the magic inmate's execution, but it all proves fruitless because, at the end of the day, he still was convicted of murdering people, and the criminal justice system frowns on that.

If you said The Green Mile (1999), you’d be right. That’s the plot line, but it also is the plot of an episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, a TV anthology series that ran over a decade earlier. That’s just one of five movies that are amazingly similar to tales that appeared on Amazing Stories. Was Spielberg that prescient? Read about all five movies described in colorful language at Cracked. -via mental_floss

H.P. Lovecraft keeps getting name-checked in pop culture. Here's why he matters.

(Image credit: Rafal Badan for Pardes publishing house)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was having a bad summer. Like many newcomers to New York City, the aspiring writer from Rhode Island felt overwhelmed and out of place. He was unemployed, living in a mouse-infested one-room apartment in Brooklyn, and steadily losing weight on a paltry diet of cold canned beans and spaghetti. To make matters worse, his wife, for whom he’d moved to New York in the first place, had taken a job in another city and left him to fend for himself.

It was the first time Lovecraft had ever lived alone— and he was spectacularly homesick. Born in Providence in 1890, he viewed his hometown—with its scholarly atmosphere and dilapidated 18th-century mansions—as an essential piece of his identity. “Providence is me—I am Providence,” he wrote his aunt from his New York exile, inspiring the title of S. T. Joshi’s authoritative biography, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. The city suited Lovecraft—a self-taught antiquarian obsessed with the contrasts of New England—in ways that New York could not.

Lovecraft grew up with a neurotic and stifling mother, Susie, and two aunts. (His father had died, probably of syphilis, after a stint in a mental institution.) The family had little of the capital but all the prejudices associated with old New England pedigree, and Lovecraft was never trained for any gainful employment. Nervous illnesses kept him isolated at home for long stretches, during which he joined up with “amateur journalist” groups: organizations of unpaid pamphleteers who—with their in-fighting, trolling, and political ranting that no one would ever hear—would likely feel at home in online forums today.

It was at a convention for such writers in Boston in 1921 that Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene, an energetic and attractive Eastern European Jewish widow from New York City, seven years his senior. Lovecraft, still reeling from the death of his mother six weeks prior, was not exactly a catch. He had no income besides a dwindling family inheritance and occasional checks from editorial temp work. He had the frame of a scarecrow, a protruding lower jaw, and a squeaky voice. He was also averse to sex, which he blamed on having read a scientific book as a child. “The whole matter was reduced to prosaic mechanism,” he wrote later, “a mechanism which I rather despised.” Not to mention, he was a virulent racial purist, outwardly disgusted by immigrants, tending to become “livid with anger” when he encountered foreign workers.

Jeremy Bentham was well-respected philosopher in life, but he became even more famous in death. Dylan Thuras has his story.

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Bentham’s odd plans for his body’s disposition after his death makes plenty of sense when you learn a little about the man. Learn the story of one of the world’s most famous corpses in this episode of the 100 Wonders series from Atlas Obscura. -Thanks, Dylan!

See more in the 100 Wonders series.