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.
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.
This may look like a facade left over from a demolished building, but no, it was built to look that way. This is the Grudge Building ("al-Ba`sa" in Arabic), the thinnest house in Beirut, Lebanon. The end you see here is only two feet wide, but the other end is 14 feet wide, which you can see in the third picture in the gallery above. Still a very small footprint for a four-story building.
According to a Lebanese urban myth, one man turned sibling pettiness into an extreme sport when he erected the country's thinnest habitable building in front of his brother's property. His intentions were simple: to block his brother's seafront views and devalue the property.
The root of the feud is said to be one brother inheriting a much bigger piece of property than the other. Or that the brother with the property in front lost some area when the road was widened. Either way, we don't know how much truth there is to the tale. No one lives there now, but it does have a history of tenants in its eight apartments. Read more about the Grudge Building at Insider. -via reddit
Speedriding or speed riding is paragliding on skis. We can assume the point is to go as fast as you can. In this video, French speedrider Valentin Delluc shows what he can do while speeding through Avoriaz, a resort town in the French Alps. The resort was closed at the time, so the only one in danger is Delluc himself -and the film crew. Of course, it was Red Bull that talked him into it, as if you couldn't tell by the product placement. The run is only two minutes, then there are making-of clips and outtakes. -via Geekologie
Anything that can be created can become an art medium. That includes microbes in a petri dish. And therefore, since people will make a competition out of anything, we have the American Society for Microbiology Agar Art Contest. Scientists take a dish of agar, a nutritious gel made from seaweed, and add invisible germs of different types to just the right spot. When the microbes divide and proliferate, a colorful scene is formed -if the artist knows what they are doing.
Despite its growing popularity over the past five years, microbial art isn't a recent fad. Alexander Fleming, who discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin on an agar plate in 1928, created images using live organisms. Yet, this genre of scientific art didn’t gather much attention from researchers until the last decade, when the American Society of Microbiology brought agar art into the spotlight in 2015 with an annual contest.
People understood hot and cold a long time before we had what we call temperature, which is the way we measure heat. While other scientists had tinkered with the idea of measuring temperature, it was not until 1714 that Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit gave us a practical and fairly accurate thermometer.
Fahrenheit had based his invention on Danish scientist Ole Roemer's alcohol-based thermometer. Roemer labeled his temperature scale with zero marked at the temperature where brine (salt water) froze and 60 as the point at which water boiled, wrote Ulrich Grigull, the late director of the Institute for Thermodynamics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, in a 1986 conference presentation. Ice melted at 7.5 degrees on the Roemer scale, and a human body registered at 22.5.
Fahrenheit's thermometer, though, was much more accurate. He used the same freezing and boiling reference points as Roemer's scale — referred to in his writings as "Extream Cold" and "Extream Hott" — but roughly multiplied the scale by four to divide each marker on the scale into finer increments. On Fahrenheit's scale, wrote Grigull, the four reference points were: 0 (at the combined freezing temperature of brine), 30 (the freezing point of regular water), 90 (body temperature) and 240 (the boiling point of water).
These points were recalibrated after Fahrenheit's death. But there was room for improvement, so Anders Celsius made a temperature scale that was more math-friendly and Lord Kelvin made another that expanded the scale for scientific use. An article at LiveScience explains how the concept of temperature evolved and how we got our scales. The question of which measurement scale is best still depends on where you are and exactly what you are measuring. -via Digg
In the late 19th century, there was a slew of unexplained maladies among people who were involved in train accidents. After a series of crashes in Britain in 1867, so many victims came forward that the syndrome was dubbed "railway spine." While spinal difficulties were prominent, the effects were varied, from anxiety to hearing loss to paralysis, and some even died. But doctors could find no injury or source for those symptoms.
The problem was, there was no way to really verify these claims, since medical science at the time was limited largely to what doctors could see. And they couldn’t see anything wrong with these victims—there was no obvious spinal injury, and traditional concussion symptoms were known to disappear after a while. But these people were reporting injuries for years.
The railroads called bullshit. They said these people were just malingerers who wanted money. John Eric Erichsen coined the term and wrote a whole book about these people. The craziest part was, some of the folks complaining of physical or mental problems were witnesses. They hadn’t even been in the crash.
Many cities have extensive underground layers for various reasons. These subterranean spaces often begin with separate basements and tunnels that eventually become connected to each other, or possibly the area was once above ground, and was just built over. The capital of Finland is a different story. Helsinki built its underground city in one fell swoop. Underneath the ground level streets, you'll find shopping centers, a church, a museum, sports venues, and more.
Thought to be the world’s only city with an underground master plan, Helsinki began excavating tunnels through bedrock in the 1960s to house power lines, sewers and other utilities. City planners quickly realized that the space could also be home to retail, cultural, and sporting attractions—and that it could shelter the city’s population of 630,000 in the event of another invasion from the East. The building of the tunnels expanded with new purpose.
Tomi Rask, a preparedness instructor for the city of Helsinki’s rescue department, says the alternative purpose of the tunnels is to “save people against the actions of war.” No Finnish government official would ever mention Russia as the reason for such defensive preparations, but they don’t have to.
The YouTuber who goes by EverywhereMax has been to all 92 places named in the Johnny Cash song "I've been Everywhere." He's been a lot of other places, too, as you'll see in the video he constructed around the song.
As far as I know, only two people including me have been to all 92 places. The other person is with me in the ''Nebraska'' picture.
This footage was compiled between 2016 and 2019. Now that Max has conquered the Western Hemisphere, we he venture out into the other continents? -via Digg
Fagradalsfjall is a volcano about 25 kilometres from Reykjavík, Iceland, which has been dormant for 6,000 years. On Friday, a new vent opened up just to the south at Geldingadalir, which is forming a new volcano right now. This is the first eruption on Iceland’s Southern Peninsula in 800 years. And we can watch it happening! RÚV has set up a live webcam to monitor and record the eruption, and give people around the world a bird’s eye view of the volcano. If you pull up the videostream to full size, you can see people walking around in the edges of the video, giving you a sense of scale. If you are just joining in, here’s a time-lapse of eruption recorded on Saturday, daytime and nighttime.
Jane M. Haining was an outstanding student at Dumfries Academy who spent ten years as a secretary before she decided to become a missionary. After training, she went to the Church of Scotland mission in Budapest, Hungary, where she headed a school for girls. She was in charge of around 400 students, both Christian and Jewish. When World War II broke out in 1939, Haining refused to leave her post, even as the mission's pastor returned to Scotland. She protected her students as best she could as restrictions tightened around Jews in the years to come. In August of 1944, word of her status got back to Scotland, although months late. From the August 12 edition of The Scotsman:
Through official sources the Church of Scotland Overseas Department recently received word that Miss Jane M. Haining, superintendent of the Girls’ Home in the Church of Scotland Mission, Budapest, Hungary, had been arrested. This action was taken early in May, following the taking over of Hungary by the Germans. Further news has now been received that Miss Haining has been sent to an internment camp for women at Auschwitz.
The word "Auschwitz" meant nothing to the people of Scotland at the time. It was only after the war that the horrors of the concentration camp system were revealed to the world. Read the story of Jane Haining at the British Newspaper Archive. -via Strange Company
The picture we all know so well of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out was taken on his 72nd birthday. He was in the back of a limousine, leaving an event in his honor, sitting between Frank and Marie Aydelotte. Annoyed by the paparazzi, he gave them a funny face.
However, it was not the photographer who helped the photo achieve worldwide fame, but Einstein himself. He ordered numerous prints and cropped it so the Aydelotte couple could no longer be seen. He sent dozens of the photos to colleagues, friends and acquaintances. "The outstretched tongue reflects my political views," he wrote to his friend Johanna Fantova. In 2009, an original signed copy was sold for $74,324 (€62,677) at auction, making it the most expensive photo of the genius ever.
The Egyptian pyramids at Giza are ancient, breathtaking, and mysterious. Despite centuries of study, there's a lot we still don't know about them. How did the people of ancient Egypt carve the stones so precisely, transport them, lift them, and keep such a massive structure level? Yeah, some say it was aliens from outer space, but French materials scientist Joseph Davidovits came up with a more plausible idea.
According to Davidovits’ theory, the blocks were not quarried and transported to Giza but rather cast in place in wooden molds. This would account for the extreme precision of the pyramid’s construction, as the initial liquid state of the limestone concrete would have made the blocks self-levelling and allowed for extremely thin seams between blocks. This technique was also ideal for use on the Giza plateau, which has abundant supplies of soft, crumbly limestone otherwise unsuited to large-scale construction.
Davidovits tested his idea by making blocks out of materials that would have been available to the pyramid builders. He presented his theory to the public in 1988, and immediately encountered the wrath of Egyptologists. So are the building blocks of the Great Pyramid made of stone or some composite material? Read the tale of Davidovits’ theory at Today I Found Out.
Ida Holdgreve answered an ad in a Dayton, Ohio, newspaper that said "plain sewing wanted." But it was a typo that should have said "plane" sewing. That's how the dressmaker ended up sewing airplane parts for the Wright Brothers.
In 1910 and 1911, two odd buildings began to rise a mile-and-a-half west of the Wright brothers’ West Dayton home. Bowed parapets bookended the long one-story structures, their midsections arching like the crooks of serpents’ spines; wide windows reflected the pastoral world outside. This was the Wright Company factory, the first American airplane factory, and behind the buildings’ painted brick walls, Holdgreve sewed surfaces for some of the world’s first airplanes, making her a pioneer in the aviation industry.
“As far as I know, she was the only woman who worked on the Wright Company factory floor,” says aviation writer Timothy R. Gaffney, author of The Dayton Flight Factory: The Wright Brothers & The Birth of Aviation. “And she was earning her living making airplane parts. Since I haven’t found a woman working in this capacity any earlier, as far as I know, Ida Holdgreve was the first female American aerospace worker.”
Holdgreve learned to build airplanes, stretching countless yards of muslin over their frames. As the industry grew, her expertise was recognized, and in World War I, Holgreve supervised a crew of seamstresses turning out more advanced airplanes for the war effort. Yet strangely, she never flew in an airplane herself until 1969! Read the story of Ida Holgreve at Smithsonian.
(Image source: Wright State University Libraries' Special Collections & Archives)
