Goussainville is a village just north of Paris with a peculiar history. Once it was a perfectly normal small French town -up until just 40 years ago. It is now a group of abandoned homes showing some signs of decay, along with relatively modern touches that show it was not long ago that child grew up here. What happened? The short answer is that the Charles de Gaulle Airport was built.
Goussainville-Vieux Pays was once a postcard perfect town, but less than a year before CDG opened in 1974 a plane crashed into it, destroying several houses and killing six crew and eight locals. The destruction caused many of the townspeople to evacuate immediately, with others following over the course of the subsequent year as the sound traffic from the airport and sorrow for the devastation of their town became too much. Now only a few residents remain.
The result of this recent abandonment is a scene that resembles a post-apocalyptic movie set. See a collection of pictures of Goussainville as you take a short tour at Atlas Obscura.
The city of Berlin had a particularly gruesome 20th century: World War I, the Holocaust, World War II, the Berlin Wall. And within the city you’ll see plenty of remembrance, memorials, and reminders that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Even if you skip major tourist destinations like the Berlin Wall Memorial or the Holocaust monuments near the Brandenburg Gate, it’s nearly impossible to visit Berlin without feeling the city’s pain. You might hop a train at Nollendorf Platz, encountering the lone column erected for German transit workers killed during World War I, or the triangle-shaped plaque dedicated to LGBTQ people executed by the Nazi regime. Perhaps you’re shopping along Kurfürstendamm, passing by the ruined steeple of Kaiser Wilhelm Church, whose bombed-out shell has been preserved as a memorial after it was destroyed in 1943. Maybe you head to an art exhibition at Martin Gropius Bau, a few steps from the Topography of Terror, where the excavated basement of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters serves as the backing for a timeline of Nazi persecution. Or you opt for a walk along the city’s quieter residential streets, and come upon small markers placed into the sidewalk denoting the names and dates of those deported and murdered by the Third Reich.
And those are just a few of the many memorials. But other countries have gruesome histories as well, expanded over time. Even the United States, a relatively young nation, has dark spots, but we don’t have daily reminders as we go about our business. Those who live in Berlin cannot escape the meaning of the markers, the monuments, and the preserved ruins of the past. Learn more about them, and what they mean to Berlin’s residents today, at Collectors Weekly.
When Nuseir Yassin graduated from college, he wanted to travel the world, as many graduates do. He also wanted to chronicle his adventures of video, like many travelers do. To make his different, Yassin took along a Rubik’s cube, and asked people along the way to help him solve it by giving it one move each. Eleven countries and 84 movies later, the Rubik’s cube is solved, and the video is ready. The result is like some combination of Flat Stanley, and Where In The Hell Is Matt? -via Time
It’s your brain’s fault! Maybe if we could turn off that troublemaking brain of yours, we wouldn’t have all these overweight fees and you might even have some room for souvenirs in that bag! This is the latest from Doghouse Diaries.
The third annual Internet Cat Video Festival took place last night in Minneapolis. A huge crowd gathered to watch cat vieos and meet some feline internet stars. Here are all the featured videos. The winner of the Golden Kitty Award was 8 Signs of Addiction featuring Shorty and Kodi. Learn more about the event with many links at Metafilter.
A UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch report revealed an incident in February in which a pilot was landing a small commuter jet in Belfast when his arm fell off.
The 46-year-old pilot, described byFlybe as among is “most experienced and trusted” pilots, wears a prosthetic limb and said that he believed he had securely fixed the arm in place earlier, but with heavy winds, once he deactivated the Dash 8 aircraft’s autopilot as he prepared to land the plane that’s when the arm troubles began.
Asked why a pilot with only one arm was flying a plane in the first place, Flybe’s safety director, Captain Ian Baston, said that the budget airline had a policy of equal opportunity employment and therefore “in common with most airlines, we do employ staff with reduced physical abilities.”
The pilot lost control of the plane only briefly and still guided it to a safe and bumpy landing using one arm. He promised to secure his arm better in the future.
You’ve read about parasites that take over an animal and change its behavior for its own purposes. It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. But humans aren’t as immune to these shenanigans as you may think. Carl Zimmer tells us about research into how the trillions of bacteria and other microbes we carry around with us every day may be influencing our behavior -and we’d never know it. Germs in our guts that help us digest food can manufacture chemicals that communicate with each other, and these chemical signals may influence the brain. Studies of mice show that it’s possible.
A number of recent studies have shown that gut bacteria can use these signals to alter the biochemistry of the brain. Compared with ordinary mice, those raised free of germs behave differently in a number of ways. They are more anxious, for example, and have impaired memory.
Adding certain species of bacteria to a normal mouse’s microbiome can reveal other ways in which they can influence behavior. Some bacteria lower stress levels in the mouse. When scientists sever the nerve relaying signals from the gut to the brain, this stress-reducing effect disappears.
Some experiments suggest that bacteria also can influence the way their hosts eat. Germ-free mice develop more receptors for sweet flavors in their intestines, for example. They also prefer to drink sweeter drinks than normal mice do.
Scientists have also found that bacteria can alter levels of hormones that govern appetite in mice.
So far, it sounds pretty benign. After all, microbes who live in us depend on our continued well-being, right? So far, research shows that behavior that benefits microbes doesn’t always benefit the host, but when they harm us, we go full-throttle after them. However, knowing about this mechanism may one day lead to humans being able to control what microbes do in our bodies to our benefit. Read more at the New York Times.
(Image credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
I’ve never dealt with IKEA furniture, but I know for a fact that building furniture, whether it’s from scratch or a kit, is a one-person job. Only ask for help if you need someone to hold something for a minute. I also know that if you buy furniture in a kit, you should add extra reinforcement of some sort. Man, that is one ugly desk these people built.
The other advice I would give about furniture is that you should buy it used, the older the better. You’ll get better quality pieces for the same money. However, you’ll have to pay for it up front and haul it yourself. It’s worth the effort. -via Buzzfeed
Duke is a 7-year-old Great Pyrenees who lives in Cormorant, Minnesota. He was elected mayor of the town by a landslide over his opponent, store owner Richard Sherbrook. The exact vote count was not revealed, but Duke got the vast majority of the twelve votes cast, each backed by a one dollar fee. Sherbrook even voted for Duke.
“I’m going to back the dog 100 percent,” said Sherbrook. “He’s a sportsman and he likes to hunt. He’ll really protect the town.”
Sherbrook, who voted for Duke, himself, admitted that the town thought it would be “pretty cool” to have its first mayor be a dog.
The tiny town was established in 1874, but has never had a mayor before. The new mayor will be sworn in Saturday. As for his salary, he will be paid in dog food, a year’s supply donated by Tuffy’s Pet Food. -via Warming Glow
Science fiction stories, books, and movies can inspire as well as entertain, and everyone wants to see a movie pertaining to their own expertise, don’t they? And such books and movies are more enjoyable if you don’t hold them to the high standards of real-life science. But some books will amaze even specialists.
Dr. Chris Stringer, anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London: "Brazil -- quirky, with humour and horror juxtaposed, and full of little details about the alternative world that Terry Gilliam creates. And Michael Palin outstanding as a nice man turned into a torturer by the system."
Dr. Jack Horner, paleontologist at Montana State University and consultant for Jurassic Park films: "Jurassic Park is my favorite movie because the paleontologist Alan Grant says all the things I would have said if it had not been a movie!! And bringing back dinosaurs is a goal."
Here’s a great list that will give you something to astound the people you watch movies with. Or even yourself. How impressive will it be when you point out a prop from a movie and name off the others it appeared in? To be honest, many of the same props get recycled over and over. No use in wasting them, right? But I bet you didn’t know the flying car from Blade Runner later showed up in Back to the Future II.
At the end of filming Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott wanted all of the prop vehicles destroyed so that no other movie production could use them in the future. However, the Spinner, the flying police car, wasn't destroyed—in fact, it was re-painted and re-purposed for Back To The Future Part II. Blade Runner's automotive concept designer Gene Winfield, who designed the Spinner, also worked on Back To The Future Part II to give the sequel a futuristic look and feel.
Video game characters often look impossibly extreme, with bodybuilder physiques and perfect hair. They are supposedly drawn that way because the players want to be those guys, you know, identify with them. But when does identification and admiration go just a little further than you might be comfortable with? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. After all, female game characters are also a fantasy, but there’s no pretense that they aren’t drawn to be attractive to the game player. The Warp Zone had fun with that idea in this parody of “She Looks So Perfect” by 5 Seconds Of Summer. -via Geeks Are Sexy
This 2005 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope image of Crab Nebula shows the remnant of star's supernova explosion.
July 4th was a significant day long before America started celebrating it. It also marks the first time on record that a new object appeared in the constellation Taurus -- an object so bright it could be seen in the daytime sky. Not surprisingly, people around the world couldn't help but take notice. Chinese astronomers labeled it a "guest star" and noted that, at night, it shone almost four times brighter than Venus. They soon began speculating that its appearance heralded the Emperor at the time, Jen Tsung.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the Anasazi Indians of western North America may also have noticed the star. Archeologists believe images carved into Arizona rocks from that era depict the same mysterious phenomenon. But one group of people left no record of having witnessed the "guest star" -- the Europeans. It's speculated they considered it heretical to suggest that anything in the night sky was not eternal.
The Chinese astronomers were right about the object being a star. More specifically, however, it was a star in the process of exploding, otherwise known as a supernova. When stars burst, they are momentarily as bright as a billion stars, so even though the phenomenon had occurred so far away from Earth, its brightness was still immense.
Now known as the Crab Nebula, this supernova remnant is hardly a distant memory. Today, it consists of an expanding shell of gas that's 10 light years across and is moving outward at about 700 miles per second. At its center is a dense remnant called a neutron star, which is about the size of Manhattan in radius and rotates roughly 30 times per second. As a result, the Crab Nebula sends out pulses of radiation that reach the Earth at that same rate. Scientists wondered about the source of this mysterious pulsing when it was first detected in 1968, but they quickly pinned it on the ancient Crab and not, say, alien civilizations trying to contact us.
2. November 11, 1572 -- The Day that Launched Tycho Brahe's Career
It's safe to say that Danish nobleman and amateur astronomer Tycho Brahe was familiar with the night sky. So it's no small deal that, on this date, he noticed "a new and unusual star, surpassing the other stars in brilliancy ... shining almost directly above [his] head." What Brahe was observing was a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia, about 10,000 light years from Earth. Brahe's discovery catapulted him to astronomy fame. King Frederick II of Denmark was so impressed that he donated the entire island of Hven to Brahe, in order for Brahe to build an observatory. There, using carefully calibrated instruments (telescopes had yet to be invented), Brahe spent years observing the positions of the planets in the sky. Eventually, however, Brahe lost his privileged position on Hven and had to move to Prague when a new king took the throne. (Brahe spent so much time with his head in the skies that he ended up being a crummy feudal lord, and his peasants were vocally unhappy.)
His legacy hasn't suffered, though. Brahe's data provided the groundwork for the research of his assistant, Johannes Kepler, who used it to formulate his famous three laws of planetary motion -- which, in turn, allowed Isaac Newton to derive his Universal Law of Gravity. We should consider ourselves lucky for that new arrival in the sky on November 11, 1572. If it hadn't shown up, Brahe might have gotten bored and switched hobbies.
3. March 12, 1610 -- THe Day Galileo Revealed All His Secrets
Thomas Leveritt showed people what they looked like on video shot in ultraviolet (UV) light. You can see the changes your skin goes through by contrasting young children with adults. But UV light does not see through sunscreen, which is sunscreen’s entire purpose. In UV light, it looks black! But you can see how it protects your skin from the damaging sun’s rays. And it looks pretty funny, too. Want some sunscreen? -via Bad Astronomy
When you keep your expectations low enough, you’ll never be disappointed. According to redditor xdrtypopx, this cake was for an intern who completed the term. Judging from the Batman logo and the Hannah Montana decoration, it was probably a fairly young intern. Best of luck in the future, kid!
