The fires in Australia continue to burn, driving animals from their homes, scorching the landscape, and covering major cities in smoke. Not only are the fires widespread, but powerful enough to create "pyrocumulonimbus" clouds, a thoroughly scary-sounding term.

Intense fires generate smoke, obviously. But their heat can also create a localized updraft powerful enough to create its own changes in the atmosphere above. As the heat and smoke rise, the cloud plume can cool off, generating a large, puffy cloud full of potential rain. The plume can also scatter embers and hot ash over a wider area.

Eventually, water droplets in the cloud condense, generating a downburst of rain — maybe. But the "front" between the calm air outside the fire zone and a pyrocumulonimbus storm cloud is so sharp that it also generates lightning — and that can start new fires.

Read more about the way fires can generate a snowball effect and make things much worse at Insider. -via Digg  

(Image credit: Bureau of Meteorology, Victoria)

How many movies have you seen in the past ten years? Louis Plamondon, better known as Sleepy Skunk, does an annual end-of-the-year mashup of movie trailer clips. Here he looks back at the best films of the last ten years, wrapping up the 2010s as we head into a new decade. Ten years of movies? That includes 12 Disney live-action remakes, five Star Wars films, five of the nine Fast and Furious movies, and about two dozen Marvel superhero movies. But there were a lot of other notable films, too. Luckily, Sleepy Skunk labeled them right in the video, so we can keep up. -Thanks, Louis!  

Should you get a large pizza or two medium pizzas? Primer magazine has the math to show that one 18-inch large pizza has more pizza in it than two 12-inch medium pizzas.

Area of two 12” pizzas:

12/2 = 6   6×6=36   36xπ = 113.1 in² x 2 = 226.2 in²

Area of one 18” pizza:

18/2=9   9×9=81   81xπ = 254.5 in²

The numbers don’t lie.

The commenters at the Boing Boing blurb brought up a lot of points that might move you in the other direction.

1. There are few pizza parlors that actually serve an 18-inch pizza anymore. They are more likely 14 inches in diameter.
2. On the other hand, sometimes the pricing matters more than total pizza area.
3. An 18-inch pizza won't fit in a home oven, or many restaurant ovens.
4. We eat too much pizza, and should be eating less.
5. If the crust is stuffed, that's more important than total area.
6. If you get two medium pizzas, you don't have to share your anchovy pizza with someone who prefers a pineapple topping.

The numbers don't lie, but there are words that can make those numbers meaningless.

You've probably seen the film clip of NASA's 1960 Mercury-Redstone 1 test launch attempt in compilations of failures. Nothing much happens, but the rocket does not slip the surly bonds of earth. Not by a long shot.

As you can see from the video, the rocket engines fired, but then stopped again very quickly. What followed were several seemingly random events. The first thing to happen was the escape tower disappearing in a cloud of smoke, followed by the release of the recovery parachute that was designed to carry the Mercury capsule safely back to Earth. You will notice that the parachute did not inflate. This is hardly surprising, as the capsule was sat motionless on its launchpad.

The whole rocket had travelled 4 inches. 10 centimetres. Less than the length of your smartphone.

Everything then fell silent but the potential for disaster was still high. Here was a rocket, full of fuel, powered by internal batteries and packed with explosive charges. However, luck was on NASA’s side – the wind was gentle, and the rocket stayed safely upright. What began as a dangerous situation ended as an amusing comedy of errors. But what had gone wrong?

Find out the cause of the failure to launch at DesignSpark. -via Digg

(Image credit: NASA)

This award-winning animation features two characters made of yarn who fall in love. It's not just attraction; they commit to giving of themselves to each other. Yarn, that is. Over time, it causes them to become more connected and more alike. When one of them falls ill, it tests the limits of that connectedness. -via Laughing Squid

Elizabeth Rona received a PhD from the University of Budapest in 1912. She spent her life studying radiation and various radioactive elements and isotopes, contributing greatly to the body of knowledge about those substances. But because of who she was, where she was, and when, she managed to miss out on the accolades that came to those she worked with. During World War I, she worked with German chemist George von Hevesy.

Rona and von Hevesy tracked how radioactive tracers moved in different materials, and used that information to predict the size and behavior of atoms. Long after Rona left his lab, von Hevesy would be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on these tracers, recognizing their importance in studying metabolism and in diagnosing conditions like cancer and heart disease. The collaboration with von Hevesy established Rona as a key figure in the radioactivity community.

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following World War I lead to political upheaval and violence as communists and nationalists fought for control. As a Jewish member of the academy, Elizabeth Rona was an enemy to both sides – the communists hated the notion of an ivory tower, and the nationalists were suspicious of Jews, who they associated with the communist leadership.

In 1921, radiochemist Otto Hahn offered her a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and she soon left for Berlin. Like Rona’s previous mentor, Otto Hahn would also receive a Nobel Prize long after she left the lab, this time for the discovery of nuclear fission, the reaction that fuels the atomic bomb. Hahn’s female colleague in the fission research, Lise Meitner, was snubbed.

Rona's movement from place to place continued throughout her life. It held back recognition, but not her work. Read about Elizabeth Rona, her life, and her research at Massive Science. Scroll down past the article to find links to more stories of the women of science. -via Damn Interesting 

It was an eventful year. Vox reminds us of the news events, culture, trends, media, and memes of 2019, both in America and around the world.

Erstwhile Neatorama author WTM went on a road trip, a pilgrimage you might call it, to the home of fantasy author Robert E. Howard. If you don't recognize the name, you will recognize his creations.

In a nutshell, Robert E. Howard was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the ‘pulp’ magazine writers/authors of the 1920’s and 1930’s. ‘Pulp’ magazines were so-called because they were printed on cheap pulp paper, paper that was not intended to last for any length of time. That, plus wartime paper drives of the 1940’s, are the main reasons why original Weird Tales and other of the famous pulp magazines such as Doc Savage Magazine are today so rare and valuable.

Robert created far more characters, and more diverse characters, in multiple genres, than any of the other pulp writers, and his most famous character creation is Conan the Cimmerian, or, for the pop culturists among us, Conan the Barbarian.

Take a trip, not only to a different place, but a different time to see where Howard came up with his fantasy worlds at Miss Cellania.

(Image credit: ©WTM)

Wildfires are out of control in Australia, the Amazon forest is still burning, and California wildfires return every year. We send professionals to battle these blazes, but there are fires that no one fights, because it's a futile task. When ignition meets a vast reserve of fuel, you can get a fire that can't be extinguished. There are ten places on earth that have been burning for decades and longer, up to 6,000 years, and we have no idea how much longer they will continue. Some of these places you can even visit! Each of the ten have a history, so you may want to bookmark the list. Or maybe you'll be so fascinated you'll want to read them all at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: flydime)

The 1999 film Galaxy Quest had a lot going for it: comedy, action, science fiction, and a stellar cast. We know from the recent Honest Trailer that it's not just you who thinks it's an excellent movie. So why wasn't it a big hit? The movie opened in seventh place over the Christmas holiday twenty years ago. Producer Mark Johnson and star Sigourney Weaver explain how the studio pulled the film out from under them.  

“DreamWorks didn’t know what to make of the film,” Johnson says. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say they didn’t believe in it, but it wasn’t what they felt like they ordered.” For Weaver, she’d had a similar feeling for much longer.

“To me, they didn’t seem particularly interested in what we were doing, which gave us more freedom during the shoot,” Weaver says. “But at the last minute DreamWorks decided it needed a movie to go up against Stuart Little, the mouse movie. So, they chose this one and started making cuts to the film.”

Weaver notes that along with an F-bomb she shot, several of Rickman’s scenes were cut because they were a little kinky for a family audience.

“That all had to go so they could make it a kids movie, which is such a shame,” Weaver says. “I would buy Galaxy Quest with the cut scenes added back just to see Alan doing some of those scenes. This was a very sophisticated picture, and they could have had a wider audience with the more adult-take on the Star Trek of it.”

Now that Galaxy Quest is 20 years old, Hollywood Reporter tells the story of how the movie came about and tracks down what went wrong with its marketing, straight from those who were there. -via Metafilter

This time of year, we become a bit obsessed with daylight, days, and calendars. The new year is just a manmade concept, an arbitrary place to start a new calendar, while the revolution of the earth around the sun is a concrete amount of time we can measure. However, when the days, weeks, months, and years don't line up with each other for a variety of reasons, people tend to "fix" the calendar to be more useful. That leads us to the different calendars used for different purposes. One of them is based on weeks for financial uses, and it has also been appropriated for computer coding, which leads to some weird anomalies. Tom Scott explains. Keep in mind this video was posted on December 30.  

The way that temperature records have been constantly breaking over the last few years, the question of the hottest place on earth may all depend on what day it is. However, many of those records are averages for areas or periods of time. Most folks agree that Death Valley, California, is the hottest location you can visit. In July of 2013, the air temperature there registered 134 degrees, and it stays fairly hot most of the time.   

Here’s how Death Valley reaches these sweltering temperatures: Hot air in Death Valley rises and trapped by the surrounding mountain ranges. It cools and falls back into the valley, where it is compressed and heated by air pressure found at such low elevations. Death Valley may have the hottest recorded air temperature on Earth, but there are other hot spots on Earth.

Read about some of those other spots at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg

(Image credit: Finetooth)

What's the most annoying trend from 2019 that you recall? Think carefully, eating Tide Pods was completely over sometime in 2018. Still, there are plenty of things that were all over the internet in 2019 that we can do without going into the new year. So let's say goodbye to them. Even if they began several years ago, we've had enough by now.

Oh, there are more than you think. See 28 things that we need to leave behind at Cracked.

A cockatiel named Peanut just wants to help out. Watch him bob his head as his human stirs his morning coffee. When he stops, Peanut stops, too. Just trying to be helpful. -via Laughing Squid

First off, what follows is something we don't have to worry about. Our sun will someday go supernova, but it will have to grow an awful lot first, and that will take billions of years. There are many other ways to wipe out humanity that will take less time. So the scenario for experiencing a supernova explosion is a thought experiment, but a fascinating one.

As far as raw explosive power goes, no other cataclysm in the Universe is both as common and as destructive as a core-collapse supernova. In one brief event lasting only seconds, a runaway reaction causes a star to give off as much energy as our Sun will emit over its entire 10-12 billion year lifetime. While many supernovae have been observed both historically and since the invention of the telescope, humanity has never witnessed one up close.

Recently, the nearby red supergiant star, Betelgeuse, has started exhibiting interesting signs of dimming, leading some to suspect that it might be on the verge of going supernova. While our Sun isn't massive enough to experience that same fate, it's a fun and macabre thought experiment to imagine what would happen if it did. Yes, we'd all die in short order, but not from either the blast wave or from radiation. Instead, the neutrinos would get us first.

What follows is a detailed explanation of the carnage, which we would never see coming. Get the story at Forbes, but reassure yourself that it won't happen in your lifetime. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Judy Schmidt)