Two lions that had just killed a zebra took a break to rehydrate at a watering hole in the MalaMala Private Game Reserve in South Africa. A terrapin swims right up to both of them! Was he curious? Was he trying to run the lions out of his watering hole? Or did he want a taste of that blood on their chins? We don't know, but the lions managed to get a good drink despite the annoyance and left without further violence. -via Metafilter

Right after the Civil War, the US was in flux in many different ways. The country was expanding westward, the transcontinental railroad was being built, and still the Mississippi River remained the easiest route for shipping goods. Meanwhile, Washington, DC, was becoming crowded and plagued by mosquitos. Wouldn't it make sense to move the nation's capital closer to the geographic center? Specifically, that meant St. Louis, where the North, the South, and the Midwest met.   

“They imagined they would move the real buildings themselves,” says Adam Arenson, a historian at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, and author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. “The image is kind of fantastical but also intriguing.”

The idea of numbering the blocks of the Capitol building for reassembly hundreds of miles away was very much of its time.

“The whole thing is only thinkable in the aftermath of the Civil War, when you have had these kinds of massive logistical innovations and when they’ve moved so many people, but also so much stuff, around on the railroads,” says Walter Johnson, historian at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

While moving the actual buildings seems ridiculous in hindsight, there were practical reasons to move the seat of government. Read about the push to move the US government to St. Louis at Smithsonian.

You may have wondered at one time or another just how many surfaces does your cat's butthole touch in your house. It's been a Fark meme since 2004, when someone suggested putting lipstick on the cat to find out. But you don't have to, because this is exactly what Tennessee 6th grader Kaeden Griffin did for a science fair project. He used the family's two cats, neither of which are hairless.

1.  Cats with long and medium hair didn’t make any contact with hard or soft surfaces.

2.  Cats with short hair didn’t make contact with hard surfaces . . . but there were smears of lipstick on soft surfaces like the bed.

Well, that's a relief. Read more about Griffin's experiment at WRAT. -via Metafilter

We associate living in a cave with, well, cavemen from many thousands of years ago. We also know of modern cave dwellers who built homes in existing caves here and there as projects that spanned many years. But the village of Langenstein, near Germany's Harz Mountains, is a completely different story. There, in 1855, ten caves were completely carved out from solid sandstone to make living spaces! Wealthy landowner August Wilhelm Rimpau hired workers who traveled there with their families, but had no place to house them.

“That’s when the local council came across the soft sandstone ridge formation on the outskirts of town. Because they knew about the earlier cave dwellings, the idea emerged of letting the workers reside in caves,” says Scholle. Soon after, the rocks were numbered—one to 10—with chalk, and a lottery was held to determine which families would get a spot. “And then each family got started with carving a home out of solid rock,” he says.

The migrant workers arrived in Langenstein from near and far, says Scholle. In exchange for a little over a month’s salary, they were granted the right to reside in the homes they built for as long as they lived.

“The workers spent all day on the fields, and in the evening they worked on their homes,” he says. On average, each family took a year and a half to complete their dwellings. In the early stages, they slept under makeshift roofs at the entrance. “The sooner you constructed your house, the sooner you were out of the cold.”

Five of the ten cave homes still exist, and are protected as historic sites in Langenstein. See more of them at Atlas Obscura.

Paris is altering its road system to encourage mass transit, bicycles, and pedestrians and discourage car travel. However, this means that unintended problems will emerge during the process. YouTuber The Tim Traveller explains what happens at one intersection.

There is a crossroads in Paris where all four exits have 'No Entry' signs. This is possibly the Frenchest thing ever to have happened. I went to investigate.

So you could go there, but never leave. While the signage has been updated to solve the problem, I realize that I would have to learn an entirely new system of traffic signs if I were to ever drive in Europe. That's probably not going to happen. I like mass transit. -via reddit

Why would a 94-meter (310-foot) yacht try to squeeze through urban canals? It's because Dutch shipyard Feadship, the boat's manufacturer, is quite far from the North Sea. This is a newly-built yacht, called Project 817, although it will be christened Viva when it goes to sea. The journey took around four days for this ship, which was designed with the canals in mind. It couldn't have been a centimeter larger than it is.

During the first stage of the operation, Viva was moved from the Kaag Island shipyard to Lake Braassemermeer, where it was fitted with pontoons to raise it up, thus ensuring it wasn't too deep to maneuver through the canals.

Tug boats were then attached to the pontoons on either side of the superyacht, which was also wrapped with protective foil, in order to guide the vessel through the water with precision.

By this point, it was ready to be pushed and pulled along the canals, making its way across a small bridge in the tiny village of Woubrugge, as well as Alphen aan den Rijn, a town in the west of Holland, before reaching the Dutch city Gouda, located south of Amsterdam, a few days later.

Feadship will be able to make even bigger ships in the future, as they are building a new factory near the sea, which they should have done in the first place. Read about the painstaking journey and see more pictures at CNN. -via Digg

The taller buildings get, the more difficult they are to build. Their own weight works against them at increasing heights, and the forces of nature are more dangerous at greater heights. The Burj Khalifa, however unnecessary, is a marvel of modern engineering. This TED-Ed video explains how engineering challenges have been met to make ever-taller skyscrapers. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Harriet Tubman's father had a cabin and ten acres on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But the exact location of the cabin, where Tubman herself lived between the ages of 17 and 22, had been lost. The cabin is no more, and the area was privately owned, barred to archaeologists who wanted to search for the site. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service purchased 2600 acres in 2020, opening the area to exploration.  

Last fall, Julie Schablitsky, chief archaeologist at the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration, was running a metal detector over an abandoned road in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge when she found a coin minted in 1808, the year of the Tubman parents’ wedding. Nearby, Schablitsky unearthed ceramic fragments dated to between the 1820s and 1840s. At that point, the archaeologist tells the Times, she knew that she had found the location of Tubman’s one-time home.

“She would’ve spent time here as a child, but also she would’ve come back and been living here with her father in her teenage years, working alongside him,” says Schablitsky in a statement. “This was the opportunity she had to learn about how to navigate and survive in the wetlands and the woods. We believe this experience was able to benefit her when she began to move people to freedom.”

The site is now being thoroughly excavated, and just in time, since it is expected to be underwater by 2100. Read about the discovery and what it could mean at Smithsonian.

A roller coaster got stuck far above the ground in Lithuania. It wasn't clear what the problem was, maybe the track was sticky or something. What to do? Getting out to push was not an option, but the passengers figured out a way to give it push from their seats. -via Digg

Fallout from nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and '60s spread radiocesium (radioactive cesium) into the upper atmosphere, which settled over the eastern United States. That was more than 50 years ago, but it's still around. Geologist James Kaste of William & Mary asked students to bring local foods back from spring break, and was surprised to find a sample of North Carolina honey that had a cesium level 100 times that of other foods.

So Kaste and his colleagues—including one of his undergrads—collected 122 samples of locally produced, raw honey from across the eastern United States and tested them for radiocesium. They detected it in 68 of the samples, at levels above 0.03 becquerels per kilogram—roughly 870,000 radiocesium atoms per tablespoon. The highest levels of radioactivity occurred in a Florida sample—19.1 becquerels per kilogram.

The findings, reported last month in Nature Communications, reveal that, thousands of kilometers from the nearest bomb site and more than 50 years after the bombs fell, radioactive fallout is still cycling through plants and animals.

They say the level of cesium in honey is not dangerous, but just think about what the levels may have been like in decades past. How much East Coast honey did you eat back in the day? Read about the findings at Science magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: aussiegall)

The Japanese company Kandeko gives us a lovely ad for its Smart X electro-conductive thread, in which we see a miniature city light up with tiny LEDs. While I would never have the patience to create something on this scale, the idea of electricity-conducting thread is intriguing. Is it hard to work with? Can it shock you? What if it gets cut while the lights are on? How fire safe is it? I'd like to know more, but the product page is in Japanese.  -via Laughing Squid

how do you have huge stacks of books *and* a cat. i gotta know the secret

— tea ☕️ (@ahumblebunnie) April 19, 2021

Over the past year, we've developed a habit of judging people's chosen backgrounds when they appear on TV from their homes. This is not limited to television, however. Susan Sarandon, who you may know from movies such as Thelma and Louise and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, posted a picture on Twitter featuring her cat. But what got everyone's attention was the books stacked vertically with hats on top. How does she retrieve a book that's not near the top? And how do they stay stacked with a cat in the house? My cats would've launched themselves at the hats at first sight, toppling the stacks. The replies came in, exhibiting a lot of anxiety among book lovers and cat lovers. At least one person offered to buy her a bookcase. How does this work? Continue reading to find out.  

The latest on the designer gene front has scientists figuring out how to control cell replication in order to make synthetic cells produce divisions that are consistent with the original cell.

Five years ago, scientists created a single-celled synthetic organism that, with only 473 genes, was the simplest living cell ever known. However, this bacteria-like organism behaved strangely when growing and dividing, producing cells with wildly different shapes and sizes.

Now, scientists have identified seven genes that can be added to tame the cells’ unruly nature, causing them to neatly divide into uniform orbs.

Now, this may seem like burying the lede, since you most likely had the same reaction I did: "Scientists created synthetic cells that reproduce? What?" But no, they did NOT create life in the lab. The synthetic cells were made from existing living microorganisms. Scientists removed the DNA and replaced it with completely new genes. So we can see that while DNA may be the basis for our identity, it is not the basis for life. At any rate, these synthetic cells do not have the functionality to exist outside the lab, which is reassuring. An article at NIST explains the value in this research.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jerome Walker)

Remember back in the late 1960s, when it seemed like every week or two someone would hijack an airliner and demand to be flown to Cuba? Those incidents gave us the term "skyjacking" and were the subject of many jokes on late night television. While concerning, the public didn't consider them all that serious as they were mostly cases of someone wanting a ride to a country that didn't take scheduled arrivals from the US, and the other passengers were routinely returned. The Cuban skyjackings had faded out by the mid-70s, but you might not know why.

Initially, Cubans greeted the planes generously. As Latner writes, “Stranded crew and passengers alike often received extravagant treatment: live Cuban bands, steak and shrimp dinners, or a night in one of Havana’s best hotels; others were given cigars or photos of Che Guevara while they waited on the tarmac, and the bill was often sent to the airlines.”

But in September 1969 Cuba instituted an anti-hijacking law, which allowed immigration officials to make decisions about what to do with hijackers. Since it was almost impossible to tell whether a hijacker was a spy, the officials who dealt with them could interrogate them and throw them in prison for months.

Read what led to the Cuban skyjackings and how stopping them brought the two countries closer together at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: clipperarctic)

The way we deploy satellites is pretty much just throwing them into space, after calculating the specific orbit needed. However, almost all these deployments are done mechanically, from a rocket launch. At the very end of the 20th century, the Russians developed a method that appeared much simpler -tossing them into orbit by hand.

On November 3, 1997, cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and Anatoly Solovyov were spacewalking outside the Mir space station to remove an old solar panel that was to be replaced three days later during another outing. The solar panel was retracted on command, removed from the Kvant module, and stowed on the exterior of the core module. Before returning inside, Vinogradov took hold of a small satellite named Sputnik 40 and waited until the station had oriented itself to give a clear view of the satellite’s intended flight path. Then giving it a good toss, Vinogradov launched the satellite into orbit. As the little satellite drifted away, it became satellite number 24958 in NASA's catalog and the first satellite to be launched by hand.

That satellite, nicknamed Sputnik Jr, was only eight inches in diameter and didn't do much besides transmitting a tracking radio signal to earth. An experiment, in other words. The Russians launched two more satellites by tossing them manually from Mir. The third one, launched in 1999, generated a scandal due to its fundraising problems and a novel sponsorship deal. Read about the hand-tossed satellites at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: NASA/Crew of STS-81)