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

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.

Learn how agar art is done, and see more works from the contest, at Smithsonian.

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

(Image credit: Flickr user barbbarbbarb)

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.

Railway spine remained a mystery to those who suffered from it and their doctors, but we have an explanation in the present. Read what we know now at Jalopnik.  -via Damn Interesting

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.

Read about both sides of Helsinki's underground at Atlas Obscura.

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.

https://t.co/yerueeyiut

— Arinbjörn (@arinbjornkol) March 21, 2021

-via Metafilter

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

(Image credit: The Gloucester Citizen)  

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.

Read the sequence of events that led to the photo, and how it became so universal afterward, at DW. -via Damn Interesting

It's strange how less testosterone makes one desire pink things, at least in the minds of advertising copy writers. This picture is from a collection gleaned from the subreddit pointlessly gendered products. See more of the 17 Sexist Designs Guaranteed To Boil Your Blood at Buzzfeed.

(Image source: sausageliver)