There is growing evidence that the earth may have been completely covered by water billions of years ago. Some of the evidence comes from the mantle, the layer of the planet that makes up two thirds of the earth's mass. The minerals down there can hold water, but long ago they weren't able to hold as much water as they do now.  

What they posit is that, eons ago, the Earth's surface used to have a lot more water on it, maybe twice as much as it does now. Water seeping down into cracks in the crust may have weakened the crust, starting plate tectonics for the first time. When one plate slid under another (called subduction) it brought water with it, which was then stored in the mantle. As time went on and the mantle cooled, it was able to hold more and more water (plus as the mantle cools it's easier to form wadsleyite and ringwoodite, so it could soak up even more water). They suppose that over time the mantle sucked down about half the water on the surface, leaving us with what we see today.

The composition of the mantle is not the only evidence for an ancient water world, but it is the focus of an explanation from Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy.

Icelandic photographer Garðar Ólafs has plenty of images of the new volcano at Geldingadalir, but this is spectacular. He got a view from overhead during the eruption with a drone! Sadly, the drone gave its life for this image, but it will always be remembered for its sacrifice.

Ólafs has been at Fagradalsfjall for a couple of weeks now capturing the birth of the new volcano. He says, under another image:

The Eruption 🌋 1100° lava blasting from the earth forming new land, no words can describe how it feels to experience this in person, the sounds, energy and heat from this is on another level! 🇮🇸

-via Fark

Astronomers and data scientists have discovered a 35-year-old fart while poring over the signals sent back by the Voyager 2 space probe as it traveled past Uranus in 1986. We  now know that V-ger flew through a plasmoid, a magnetic bubble that carried a piece of the planet's atmosphere into space.

This data was only just 60 seconds of Voyager 2’s 45-hour fly by. A proverbial needle in a haystack. Gershman added, “But if you plotted it in 3D, it would look like a cylinder…”. Comparing results to other planetary passes, this cylindrical shape is at least 127,000 miles long and 250,000 miles across. They think the plasmoid is made of ionized particles, mostly ionized hydrogen.

While some planets have twisted magnetic fields, Uranus’ field were smooth-closed-magnetic loops. Such loops they say are formed when a spinning planet flings small amounts of it’s atmosphere into space.

You can read more about the discovery here, or just file this away as a nomination for the headline of the year.  -via reddit

(Image credit: NASA)

Zoë Weiner bought a couch at a high-end furniture store last fall, which has not been delivered yet, due to supply line problems caused by the pandemic. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one waiting for a couch. The CEO of the furniture company sent an apologetic email explaining the delay. And he cc’d all 204 waiting customers on the message. It wasn’t long before they started to “reply all” with grumbles about their nonexistent couches.

Weiner seized the moment. “I’d personally like to make the most out of this bonkers thread and throw it out there that I’m a 29-year-old single woman in NYC looking for a Jewish man.” The floodgates opened. “You go Zoe shoot your shot!!” a woman named Tanesha Smith-Wattley responded. “This is legitimately funny and I am grateful for all of you, my new family of complete strangers,” Matt Freeman chimed in. Gus Goldsack: “Looking forward to meeting you all at Zoe’s wedding!” Moe Phillips: “I’d invite you all over but I don’t have a couch.”

Many of the 204 customers kept sending messages until they were their own social media group. They made friends, raised money for charity, and commiserated about their couches -the one thing they all had in common. Read the story of the social group that grew out of an email mistake at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter

Bach's first regular job was as organist for the town of Arnstadt, Germany. Although he was only about 20 years old, he was the most talented musician of the congregation, and eventually he was obliged to lead the church musicians in performing. He was not a patient director.

Bach was used to the musical proficiency of his extended family, or to that of the prestigious Weimar court orchestra (where he had briefly temped as a violinist before coming to Arnstadt, and where he would later return as organist and then concertmaster). Arnstadt’s town musicians were of a much lower skill level, and Bach did not have the experience yet to customize parts to players’ abilities (a skill that is highly evident two decades later, in the educational works he would write for his children and keyboard students).

So the bassoonist — a man named Geyersbach, a few years older than Bach yet still in high school[*] — struggled with the part until an exaggerated Bach threw up his hands and called him a Zippelfagottist. (More about this spicy insult below.)

An offended Geyersbach got together with his busking and drinking buddies, and lay in wait for Bach as he returned from a concert at the castle, accompanied by his cousin Barbara Catherina Bach. Geyersbach demanded an apology, and when that wasn’t forthcoming, cried out “you dirty dog!” and attacked him with his walking stick. Bach defended himself with his rapier until students separated the two, Geyersbach’s jacket having acquired a few ventilation holes.

The fallout from the incident led to Bach leaving Arnstadt, although for a better job. Read more on the incident, including a look at what "Zippelfagottist" might mean at Spin, Strangeness, and Charm. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Mazbln)

CGP Grey begins by talking about A4 metric paper (which is pretty neat) and then quickly spirals out of control into la-la land. This video becomes a bit like an infinite zoom until we meet “quantum madness at the very floor of the universe.” Then it goes in the opposite direction. Grey is talking about the magic of halving and doubling. It makes sense, but it’s existentially (and exponentially) weird. -via Metafilter

A new LEGO Master Builders Series set recreates the cantina from the original Star Wars movie! The wretched hive of scum and villainy comes in a 3,187 piece kit that includes 21 minifigs you’ll recall from the classic Star Wars scene -including the band. The finished building opens up to expose the interior, and the roof is removable.

There are two downsides: you have to build it yourself from more than 3,000 pieces (which is the point, I guess), and the least expensive one is $475. However, if you are willing to spend that much on a Star Wars fan you love, at least you’ll know that they don’t already have this one. -via Boing Boing

We’ve seen lists of weird or badly-designed stairs, so you may have seen some of these before. However, the real fun in seeing illogical staircases is trying to figure out how they got that way. Often, it’s a matter of a renovation that didn’t quite fit, or adding a handrail after the fact. But what was going on in the minds of the folks who built the extra stairs above? And the list has more than one example of Soviet staircases that look as if they were designed by MC Escher.

They go up, they go down, and then they go up again. Not exactly the model of efficiency. See 45 examples of stairs that turned out bad, no matter what the original intent was, at Bored Panda.

Human beings almost always have a dominant side, a preference for using one hand over the other, which we call handedness. No other animal, even apes, prefers a consistent hand as much us humans do, and it turns out that started way back in our lineage. This video from PBS Eons shows how scientists figured that out, and offers some theories of why it happened. The video is only 8:30, the rest is an ad. -via Damn Interesting

Dasia Taylor is only 17, but she is not only a finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, she may soon own a patent for color-changing sutures she has developed over the past year and a half.

As any science fair veteran knows, at the core of a successful project is a problem in need of solving. Taylor had read about sutures coated with a conductive material that can sense the status of a wound by changes in electrical resistance, and relay that information to the smartphones or computers of patients and doctors. While these “smart” sutures could help in the United States, the expensive tool might be less applicable to people in developing countries, where internet access and mobile technology is sometimes lacking. And yet the need is there; on average, 11 percent of surgical wounds develop an infection in low- and middle-incoming countries, according to the World Health Organization, compared to between 2 and 4 percent of surgeries in the U.S.

Sutures that detect infection would need to be low-tech to be useful in developing countries, so Taylor went to work looking for an infection indicator anyone could read. Read how she developed surgical stitches that turn purple when an incision is infected at Smithsonian.

Where a highway goes down a mountain, you'll see emergency ramps for trucks with brake failure -which happens more often than you think. There are plenty of these in my neck of the woods, but they aren't nearly as fancy and well-maintained as this one in Brazil. Check out that crane! -via reddit

You could spend years studying Martin Luther and the effect he had upon the Christian world, or you could spend four and a half minutes watching this animated short, which only hits the highlights. The character drawings are delightful! -via Boing Boing

A global war can make for strange bedfellows. Such was the case when the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) needed eyes and ears to find out what was going on with East Coast shipping and Axis movements on the sea.

Just months after entering World War II, the U.S. Navy was already feeling vulnerable. Enemy submarines were picking off vessels along the East Coast with alarming ease, and many believed that German saboteurs had set the massive fire that sank a French ocean liner, the SS Normandie, that was being converted into a warship in the Hudson River on February 9, 1942. The ONI suspected that longshoremen must be ferrying supplies to Axis watercraft stationed in the Atlantic, and they were desperate to root them out. Not only did the Mafia pretty much run the docks, but they were also Italian—and therefore more likely to know which Italians might sympathize with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

So the military enlisted New York mobsters and some who were Mafia-adjacent to find out what they could in an operation called Operation Underworld. Their participation was approved by Lucky Luciano (shown above) from prison, where he was serving a 30-50 year sentence. The plan was kept secret from the public for more than twenty years, but you can read about it at Mental Floss.

You know how Pokémons go through a three-stage evolution? You have the initial form, which is like a baby, then the adult form, and then the final form, which can be frightening. Digital artist Ry-Spirit imagined Star Wars characters going through that evolution. The form we are familiar with from the movies is in the middle. The "baby" forms are fairly cute, and follows the kind of thing we've seen with Muppet Babies and Young Sheldon. The final form is pure invention, but always badass.    

See 13 Star Wars characters and their Pokémon-style evolution at Geeks Are Sexy. 

These creations were compiled from Ry-Spirit's Art Facebook feed. You can see more of Ry-Spirits creations at Deviant Art.

Our World in Data compiled a chart showing who we spent our time with at different stages of our lives. Altogether, we spend more time alone than with anyone else. And as we grow older, we tend to spend more and more time alone. But that doesn't mean we are necessarily lonely.

Spending time alone is not the same as feeling lonely. This is a point that is well recognised by researchers, and one which has been confirmed empirically across countries. Surveys that ask people about living arrangements, time use, and feelings of loneliness find that solitude, by itself, is not a good predictor of loneliness.

The chart is interactive at the site, so you can look up any age and see who Americans are spending their time with.  -via Digg