Ross McSweeney built this lovely hand-cranked wooden kinetic sculpture of a boat being tossed by ocean waves. It also includes fish jumping around it. It's just one of his kinetic sculptures you can see at YouTube or Instagram. McSweeney is working on making plans for his automatons available so that you can try them yourself. -via Laughing Squid

The abyssal plain of the South Pacific Gyre is a particularly dreary place. Not only is it deep under the ocean, it contains little organic matter to feed on. The sediment at the bottom accumulates very slowly, so that oxygen permeates deep into the ocean subfloor. Scientists from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and partner organizations retrieved cores from the sea floor 100 meters deep and nearly 6000 meters below the ocean surface. They found the cores contained oxygen throughout -and ancient microbes that may have been lying dormant for millions of years. Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island explains. 

When they were first buried, D’Hondt says, these sediments would have contained about one million cells per cubic centimetre. “What’s left are about 1000 cells per cubic centimetre, but they’ve been living under very challenging conditions for up to 100 million years.”

He continues: “Basically, they’re only getting enough energy to repair their molecules as they break”, with none left over to grow and divide.

When brought into the lab and given more nutrient-rich diets, however, these bacteria prove to be not just alive, but able to revive, grow and multiply, exactly like normal bacteria.

How they can do that, D’Hondt says, is a mystery. Either the individual cells are somehow surviving for “ridiculous lengths of time” or they “are reproducing with less energy than we thought possible”. But one way or another “they are starvation artists”.

The discovery may have implications for the search for life on Mars and other planets. Then we have the questions of what could possibly go wrong with resurrecting ancient microbes, why this had to be done in 2020, and will hand sanitizer kill them? Read about the research at Cosmos magazine.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: JAMSTEC)

A list of scary but not gory horror movies will draw the attention of 1. people who like the thrill of horror, but become ill at the sight of blood and gore, 2. those of us who decry the cheap tactics of blood-and-guts movies and long for the days of carefully-crafted suspense and dread, and 3. people who have spent months binge-watching TV series at home and want to try something different. That's probably most of us, in one category or another. The list was compiled by Beth Elderkin, who has a condition that makes her pass out at the sight of blood. Yet she is a movie buff, and keeps watching so that you don't have to.

I used to faint a couple of times per year until I learned to mitigate it, although it can still happen (the latest episode was in January). Since then, I’ve gotten to the point where I can watch an episode of Game of Thrones or Westworld, but I have to close my eyes occasionally. And don’t even get me started on scary movies. Some of the best horror films and franchises of our time, like Get Out, The Witch, American Horror Story, and Crimson Peak are pretty much off the table. I can sometimes work my way around them if I close my eyes a bunch, but what’s the fun in that? Sometimes I want to be free to be scared, without worrying if it’s going to make me keel over.

Check out the ten films at io9.

The image above is of a painting called Tree Roots. Vincent van Gogh was working on it on July 27, 1890. That evening he shot himself in the chest, and he died the next day. The exact location of the real-life tree roots has recently been discovered, about 150 metres from where van Gogh was staying. The discovery came from examining an old postcard.

The scene in Tree Roots, a painting of trunks and roots growing on a hillside near the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, was first spotted on a card dating from 1900 to 1910 by Wouter van der Veen, the scientific director of the Institut Van Gogh.

Following a comparative study of the painting, the postcard and the current condition of the hillside, researchers at the Van Gogh Museum and Bert Maes, a dendrologist specialising in historical vegetation, concluded that it was “highly plausible” that the place where Van Gogh made his final brushstrokes had been unearthed.

Although it no longer looks the same, the site was located, and a wooden fence was erected around it Tuesday for protection. Read more about the tree roots that inspired van Gogh at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

We were charmed by the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It's such a universally-loved film that Screen Junkies had a bit of a problem coming up with enough snarky material for an Honest Trailer. So they did something different: they combined an Honest Trailer for E.T. with an Honest Trailer for another movie that tried to be E.T. The comparison is spot-on, while the contrast is the joke.

In the fall of 1940, the German army rounded up Jewish people in Warsaw, Poland, and restricted them to a scant 1.3 square mile area. This become known as the Warsaw Ghetto, where 400,000 people were forced to live in a density more than ten times that of New York City. How does one fight disease in such conditions?  

German officials knew enough about the spread of typhus to know that by overcrowding, starving and depriving the Jewish residents of basic necessities, the ghetto would become a breeding ground for infection. Additional food supplies were blocked until May 1941, at which point rations provided by authorities amounted to no more than 200 calories per day, per person. The starvation made fighting any disease that did emerge near impossible, and louse vectors spread easily due to a lack of adequate sanitation and an abundance of hosts.

More than 100,000 Jews were infected by typhus and at least 25,000 died directly from it. But, just before the winter of 1941, as an epidemic in the ghetto was breaking out, something remarkable happened: cases dropped exponentially when they should have continued to rise.

A new study of data from health records, diaries, and other archives from the ghetto show how Jewish doctors led a public health campaign that used what little they had to combat typhus: information. That included not only managing the inhabitants of the ghetto, but also running a clandestine medical school and lying to the Germans. Read about the fight against typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto at Smithsonian.

Regarding the title, one could argue that no one in Britain knows what an inch is now, because they use meters and centimeters. But that's not what this is about. Any measurement must have standards. While measurements are now defined by physics and can be accurately recreated, those standards were once physical. So what happens when the standard prototype is destroyed? That happened when the British Parliament building burned down in 1834. Tom Scott tells the story, and a short history of measuring standards.

We've often said that the real winners of the California Gold Rush were not the gold prospectors, but those who sold goods and services to the prospectors and miners. That was certainly the case for 14-year-old James Folger, who arrived in California in 1850 with his older brothers Henry and Edward. James was ready to jump at an opportunity, which in his case, took the form of coffee.  

By the time they reached the West Coast, they were nearly broke. James agreed to earn money in the city while his older brothers traveled north to pan for gold. James had worked as a carpenter since he was 11, so it was a natural move for him to take a job with William H. Bovee, a 27- year-old transplanted New Yorker who wanted to create a spice and coffee mill. They decided to build it in the heart of San Francisco, just six blocks from the waterfront. James constructed the first wind-powered mill using sails from whaling ships abandoned in the harbor by sailors eager to get to the goldfields. Bovee’s company became the Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills.

Bovee had run a coffee-roasting business in New York; even there, pre-roasted coffee had been a luxury. Since the mining country offered a huge potential market for men desperate to get easy-to-fix coffee, he figured he and young James were the men to supply it. James traveled to the goldfields in 1851, carrying samples of Pioneer Coffee, sealed in tins. He managed to make one major strike, which provided him with enough capital to set up a country store at a camp called Yankee Jim’s.

Four years later, 18-year-old James sold the store for a profit, returned to San Francisco and resumed his role as a partner in Pioneer Mills. In 1859 Bovee sold his interest in the coffee company to James, who bought out the other partners and renamed the firm the James A. Folger Company.

Read the rest of that story, and also how John Arbuckle Jr. made a name for himself providing coffee to cowboys in Texas and the Southwest during the rise of the cattle industry, at HistoryNet.  -Thanks, WTM!

(Image credit: JA Folger Co.)

Ramesses II of Egypt left many architectural wonders behind, including two temples built into rock cliffs near the village of Abu Simbel. The problem was that these 3,300-year-old Egyptian treasures lay in what would become Lake Nasser when the Aswan High Dam was built. Egyptian authorities approached UNESCO for a plan to save the temples by moving them to a new location. Moving the massive solid-rock temples would not be simple.  

Work began in November 1963. First, a cofferdam was erected around Abu Simbel in order to gain additional time in which to work on the temples while water was collecting in the Aswan dam’s reservoir. The greatest care was needed while cutting up the stones. Power saws could not be used because they made the cuts too wide—anything wider than 8 millimeters would have been visible when the blocks were put back together. Instead, hand saws and steel wires were used to slice up the rocks into blocks each 20 to 30 tons in weight. In the end, the larger temple yielded 807 blocks and the smaller one 235. Once cut, each block was coated to protect it against splitting and fracturing during transport.

The new site was located about 200 meters further inland and 65 meters higher up. Before reassembly could begin, an artificial hill was created using some 330,000 cubic meters of rock to resemble the natural stony hill against which the temples stood at the original site. Then the blocks were put back together with extreme precision, secured to one another with reinforcement bars and the joints filled with an artificial material. Care was taken to maintain the temple’s original alignment to the cardinal directions, so that the rays of the sun would continue to penetrate the sanctuary and illuminate the sculptures on the back wall during certain hours of the spring and autumn.   

Read how the stone temples of Abu Simbel were cut, moved, and reassembled at their new home at Amusing Planet.  

(Image credit: Per-Olow Anderson)

Get up close and detailed with a kernel of popcorn as it heats up. When the moisture inside turns to steam, the pressure it exerts causes the tough shell to violently burst open, so that the starch inside can freely expand. In this video, the process is seen slower and slower until you have a sequence filmed at 100,000 frames per second, which gives us a long view. We can see how the underside of the kernel is always where the rupture comes, because that's where the heat is. There's enough force to hurtle the kernel into the air as it does its thing. Oh yeah, the popcorn video is only two minutes long. -via Digg

The National Park Service was created in 1916, and one of the first things they did was kill off the wolves that lived in Yellowstone National Park. After all, they preyed on other wildlife in the park, and more importantly, were a danger to visitors and nearby livestock. The wolves were wiped out by 1926, and the elk population exploded. Wolves were re-introduced into Yellowstone in 1995, amid much controversy. So how's that turned out all these years later?

“Eighty percent of wildlife studies are three to five years,” Smith said. “Literally, that’s just scratching the surface, because you might be just getting one phase of a cycle or the animals may be doing something different because of some unique circumstance. You just capture that moment in time. You’ve got to go through the ups and downs, the hard winters, the easy winters, the droughts, the human disturbance that shoots up a pack. You’ve got to get that whole menu of possibilities. It gives you great insight. I think the 25-year thing is just a start.”

So what have scientists learned in 25 years? True to their keystones species role in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the wolves created what ecologist call a trophic cascade. Basically, once they resumed their role as a dominant predator, the effects rippled through the ecosystem. Wolves knocked down the elk population, willows sprung back, and beavers benefitted, which resulted in more beaver ponds that in turn created habitat for other aquatic animals.

In fact, the wolves ate way more elk than scientists had initially predicted. Read about the wolf re-introduction experiment at Earther.

See a video about the many expected and unexpected ways wolves have shaped Yellowstone in a previous post. 

(Image credit: Doug Smith/National Park Service)

Sandra Boynton presents a delightful cat singing in French. The song is about singing in French ("Chanson Profonde" means "Profound Song"). You might enjoy it without reading the captions, but you will enjoy more if you do. The music is performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Michael Ford, and Weird Al Yankovic. -via Metafilter

In a swamp outside of St. Petersburg, Russia, there's a shortwave radio transmitter amongst a series of towers that makes no sense to most of us. Someone, somewhere knows exactly what is going on.

It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.

Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.

It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as “the Buzzer”. It joins two similar mystery stations, “the Pip” and the “Squeaky Wheel”. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.

No one knows, but there are theories about the enigmatic broadcast. Read what we know, and what people think they know, about what's going on with MDZhB at BBC Future.  -via Strange Company

For the price of a small family home in San Francisco, you can buy a medieval castle with acreage in France. Messy Messy Chic gives us photographic tours of charming and historical homes for sale, some that need extensive restoration or renovation, and some that have been kept up nicely. All are utterly charming.

They include abbeys, towers, chateaus, manors, estates, schools, fortresses, and ruins. See 18 historical French properties that are on the market now. We can dream, can't we?

A Virtual Exhibition : the cat in the History of Art https://t.co/jJAyaFSYDx The place of the #cat (#kedi) in the history of art, such is the virtual exhibition the Universal Museum of Art has been offering online for a while and… free of charge. pic.twitter.com/tFBFpUODqL

— KEDISTAN (@KEDISTAN) April 24, 2020

The Universal Museum of Art grants us a virtual tour highlighting one of our favorite things -cats!

For the first time ever, 75 works of art from Ancient Egypt to today are reunited around the subject of cats! Big cats, small cats, cuddly cats or playful cats, tiger-cats or kittens; all are waiting for you in an eighteenth century mansion decor. Come and let yourself be swayed by the furry friends and discover: cats hidden in every painting, waiting to be found; moments of pure tenderness captured by artists; cats who have snuck into domestic or even religious scenes; and fabulous accounts of felines with extraordinary powers.

Use your mouse to move around the museum to see various artworks featuring cats, and click on the painting or sculpture to bring up information about it, and from there you can take a closer look. Some art is all about cats, while others contain a cat somewhere, but you have to look for it. The museum gives us clues. Begin your virtual tour here.  -via Nag on the Lake