Ernest Shackleton led a 1914 expedition to Antarctica, but the crew didn't make it back until 1916 after their ship, the Endurance, was trapped in ice and later crushed by it. The ship hasn't been seen since, although there have been several attempts to find it. This weekend, a science crew is sailing from Cape Town to the Weddell Sea armed with robotic submarines, a helicopter, an ice drill, and other hi-tech equipment to find the remains of the Endurance. They don't know whether the shipwreck is in any way identifiable or if it is a scattering of small pieces. Read about the quest at BBC and keep up with the expedition's progress at the Endurance22 Expedition website.

Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy is most famous for leading the first European contact with Australia in 1770 and with Hawaii in 1778. Cook's ship the HMS Endeavour carried him across the Pacific several times, and was then sunk off the coast of Rhode Island in 1778, although without Cook. Fast forward to the 21st century, and a collaboration between two organizations may have found the wreckage of the Endeavour. The Australian Maritime Museum has been working with the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (Rimap) to locate and identify the ship. On Thursday, Kevin Sumption, director of the Australian museum announced that a shipwreck has been identified as the Endeavour. Dr. Kathy Abbass, head of Rimap, said the announcement was premature and that there was no “indisputable data” to prove it. In addition, Rimap accused the museum of breach of contract in making the announcement. You can read about the dispute at the Guardian.

In October of 1944, 300 American warships pretty much destroyed the Japanese navy in the Battle of Leyte. At the same time, in another area off the coast of the Philippines, a smaller American force fought ferociously against a larger Japanese flotilla. In that smaller battle, the Americans lost five of their 13 ships. One that sunk was the USS Johnston. It sank into the Philippine Trench, which is so deep that the fish living at bottom didn't even bother to develop eyes or muscles. It was thought to be impossible to find the wreck of the USS Johnston until wealthy explorer Victor Vescovo became interested. He assembled a team to develop a submarine that could go that deep and be used again. The result was a sub called The Limiting Factor that found the Johnston in 2021- at a depth of 21,180 ft (6,460 m), making it the deepest shipwreck ever found. Read that story at BBC Future.

Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness tested four algorithms to see if neural networks can generate valentines. Sure they can! For this project, she used the simple, hokey type of valentines that children give their classmates. Since the algorithms already knew English and already knew that Valentines Day is a holiday, she only fed ten examples into their training programs.

The original intent was to have the machines generate both a greeting and an image, but Shane knew from experience that even if these algorithms could handle it (which they couldn't), the images would be illegible and creepy. So she asked for a greeting plus a text description of an image to go with it. While the cards she fed into the learning program had images that supported the pun wording in the greeting, these algorithms didn't quite get it. But they generated a greeting and a description of a random image, which Shane illustrated herself. See a bunch more of these neural network-generated valentines at AI Weirdness.

This visualization of how deep underground structures go will blow your mind. As you go down as deep as Mammoth Cave, the video pauses and you think it might be over, but oh no. That's when the scale can no longer show the surface of the earth, and they switch to a graphic on the right for scale to go much, much deeper. The caves, of course, were formed by the earth itself. The manmade structures are astonishing. It's nice to know that radioactive waste is buried so deep, but the further you go, the more likely they are to be wartime facilities, and even deeper for pure profit. The newer ones were dug by machines, but the older ones were dug by human labor, maybe slave labor or Stalinist prison labor, and who are the people working at the bottom? I looked up a few of the deeper places.

The Mponeng gold mine in South Africa is so deep that the temperature at the bottom is about 151°F (66°C), and they send ice down the shaft to cool it to bearable working conditions.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled over a 19-year period by the Soviets, in Russia near the Norwegian border. It was a scientific project to see how deep a hole could be dug.  

-via Laughing Squid

The game Wordle shows no sign of losing popularity, even as we hear the announcement that it was acquired by the New York Times. The newspaper said the game will still be free ...for now. Better get in the game before it's monetized! And computational biologist Devang Thakkar has developed Wordle  Archive so that you can play previous games or more than once a day. But how does one win at Wordle?

The object is to guess the five-letter word of the day. You have six guesses, and each guess will let you know whether a letter is right and if a right letter is in the right place. It would have never occurred to me to develop a strategy, but Minnesotastan did. While some folks begin with ADIEU to find the vowels, he uses words designed to cover the most common consonants. Those words are BRINK, CADGY, WHELM, and POUTS (although he switched to SPOUT upon learning that Wordle disallows a lot of words ending in "s" because they may be plurals). In the example above, he found the vowels in the right place in two guesses, and discovered all the consonants in three guesses. Read his thinking behind this strategy at TYWKIWDBI, and the strategies of others in the comments. This method won't always ensure that you win in fewer guesses than the next person, but it will help you to get the right word more often. Do you have a strategy for playing Wordle?

The New Zealand parrot called a kea has been known to steal interesting objects from humans. In this case, a family visiting Fiordland National Park were recording a kea when the bird decided to take that GoPro camera. It flew off and got some nice footage of the scenery. Away from the people, the kea decided to eat the camera, but had some difficulty snapping off a small piece. It probably didn't like the way the plastic tasted, either. But how was the camera found? The bird's flight was not as far as it appeared to us, and the family followed it visually and then heard the commotion as he tried to tear the GoPro apart. -via Boing Boing

Addison Del Mastro was intrigued by the building you see here. Yes, it's a Pizza Hut, but it is somewhat different from the iconic architectural style of the pizza chain. We've seen plenty of buildings with that style that used to be Pizza Huts, but this is the opposite- a Pizza Hut that apparently used to be something else. So Del Mastro started researching the location's history. It wasn't easy.

While the story behind the building is quite a ride, the greater story is the way record-keeping is changing and and how fragile digital records really are. Digitizing books, photos, historical records, and newspapers seems like a wonderful idea, because it saves physical storage space and makes searching easier, but it also relies on changing technology. Think of all the digital files that are lost when a storage system becomes obsolete. Online digital files depend on servers, which depend on power, which depends on money. Many historic document files will only be kept as long as they are profitable. A lot of what Del Mastro found was crowdsourced from people's memories, and those people and their memories won't be around forever. Read about this particular architectural history project and the roadblocks thrown up at The Deleted Scenes. -via Metafilter

You've heard that goods are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them. British Airways was getting rid of some of their older planes, and offered a Negus 747 for the low, low price of £1 ($1.30). After all, the pool of potential buyers was limited, because where would you park this plane? Cotswold Airport bought the airliner, as they had a place to put it. But instead of trying to refurbish and fly it, they turned it into an event space.



After 14 months of renovations, the Negus is ready to book parties, weddings, and other events- for £1000 ($1,300) an hour. That's some return on investment! But the makeover was expensive at about £500,000 ($671,000). And that doesn't include upgrading the restrooms, which still hasn't been done. See, toilets for planes are designed to work at altitude, and must be completely replumbed to work on the ground. But at $1300 per hour, they might be able to bring in some porta-potties. Read more about the Negus party plane at CNN, and see more pictures at Instagram. -via Jalopnik

The "adorable blob" above is a White's tree frog named Cousin, in a picture taken around the time Cousin came into the care of Be Wild Reptile Rescue in Durham, North Carolina. He had lived in several homes and weighed 144 grams. A large tree frog should weigh around 40 to 50 grams. Here's a picture of Cousin taken a year later.



As you can see, Cousin has lost weight, but still has to deal with the large amount of skin that comes with obesity. And he has some physical impairments from his former size. But he is much healthier now, at 120 grams. Here's his story.  



We don't know how old Cousin is, but we're glad he has a home at the shelter where he will be permanently cared for. -via Laughing Squid

Bill Watterson drew the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes from 1985 to 1995. During that time, Watterson fought tirelessly to elevate the art of the comic strip, and resisted lucrative merchandising deals. Then he retired the comic and withdrew from public life at the end of 1995. He refused to allow old Calvin and Hobbes strips to be syndicated, and forbids all licensed merchandising of the characters.

That's why the only sign you see of Calvin for sale today is the common sticker you see of the 6-year-old peeing. It is a sign of disdain, and varies according to what the sticker shows he's peeing on- a brand, a sports team mascot, a political figure, you name it. Why anyone would want to use a bootleg image of a beloved character to call attention to what one hates is a question for another day, but manufacturers have made money off Watterson's art this way since around 1995. Those under 30 are more familiar with the peeing Calvin and his evil smile than they are with the child who talked to his tiger. Read about the rise of the peeing Calvin and its continuing profitability at Mel magazine. -via Digg

In case you haven't been paying attention, the Winter Olympics are about to begin in Beijing. They officially run from February 4th to the 20th, but some events, such as curling, are already running qualification rounds. The coverage has been pretty low key because of covid restrictions and the fact that we just had Olympic Games last year. But they are the Winter Games, and every time they come around, we have to confront the fact that we mainly watch them to see people slip and slide on snow and ice, waiting for someone to fall.

So to plan your television engagement with the games, The Ringer has a list of 30 events, ranked by how terrified you would be to try them yourself. There's no doubt that curling doesn't seem too dangerous, even if it is fascinatingly silly. Singles figure skating? Well, you might fall, but rarely does someone break a leg doing it. That's not the case with downhill skiing, speed skating, and luge. How about the biathlon? That's cross-country skiing and shooting, which is only dangerous if someone shoots at you. See where your favorite winter sport lands in the ranking, and read up on what's involved in all of them at The Ringer. -via Digg

(Image credit: Martin Rulsch)

Wait. You're saying that while each and every one of us has their simple names like Linda or Matt misspelled, they actually spelled yours right, as a historical first?

— Roland Venesz (@steerio) January 8, 2022

In this modern world, people who already have the names Alexis or Siri get some grief. Having your name associated with a meme is troublesome; just ask any woman named Karen. But imagine if your name was Kovid! Just writing that sentence is difficult, because spellcheck wants to change it to covid. Kovid is a not-all-that-uncommon name in India, and has been for a long time. Kovid Kapoor has been hearing the same jokes for two years now.  

Kapoor has largely turned to humor, telling his Twitter followers he’s been “kovid positive since 1990” – when he was born – and he could only laugh with the airport employees carefully reviewing his passport on his recent trip to Sri Lanka, his first time leaving the country during the pandemic. Or at Google’s assumption his own name must be spelled wrong.

Similar stories can be told by women named Rona, Delta airlines, and of course, Corona beer. Read the stories of several Kovids, both men and women, and what they've had to put up with these last two years. -via Metafilter

In World war II, the Walt Disney Company contributed a lot of propaganda to the war effort. Well, "contributed" might not be the best word, because they were paid well. Donald Duck was the cartoon character that emerged as the most patriotic of them all. The fact that he was often angry contributed to his popularity, but there was more to it than that. Phil Edwards explains how soldiers were able to relate to Donald Duck so much more than Mickey Mouse or any other Disney character. And when you think about it, things haven't really changed much since then. -via reddit

Until recently, scientists thought that Arctic hares traveled up to 22 miles in their lifetimes. But in 2018, a young female hare was tagged near Alert, Nunavut, and named BBYY. The name comes from the colors of her tags: blue, blue, yellow, yellow. That and the tracking device around her neck -plus the white fur- make her look like she's ready for a night out on the town.

The dozens of hares tagged in this study showed that Arctic hares travel much further than other lagomorphs, but BBYY still turned out to be an outlier. She traveled more than 240 miles in one 49-day period! Small herbivores just don't do that. Wildlife biologist Sandra Lai led the study tracking the hares.

Lai had previously done research on Arctic foxes, but had come to Alert with colleagues to track, for the first time ever, the movements of individual Arctic hares. Nearly four years later, Lai still grins recalling her first meeting with BBYY. “She is very special to me,” Lai says.

While BBYY's travels may be a record for her species, the research hints at how animals are adapting to changing environmental conditions. Read about the research project that put one hare in the spotlight at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Charline Couchoux)

Today is the Lunar New Year, and in China that means we are welcoming in the year of the tiger. In honor of the occasion, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin, known as the thepieous (previously at Neatorama), baked a cherry pomegranate pie with a tiger on top! Isn't it gorgeous?

But notice the Instagram photo is a gallery. Click to the right and see how this crust was made. Clark-Bojin begins by making a template, then cuts the crust dough to fit, separately from the rest of the pie. She sculpts the tiger, adding layers as needed. The flowers (made with a cookie cutter) are added, then she paints the tiger with food coloring. The top crust isn't added to the pie until it is perfect, and then it is baked. And finally... she cuts a piece out of it to eat. This is always the heartbreaking part of Clark-Bojin's masterpieces, but when you are this talented, you can always make another pie. And who can resist a piece of cherry pomegranate pie? -via reddit

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: "Ten German scientists walk into a bar..." But instead, they walked into a house, and not by their own choice. In July of 1945, when Allied forces were working their way across Germany, ten of Germany's most prominent scientists were arrested and taken to Farm Hall in Godmanchester, UK. They were all suspected of working on Germany's nuclear weapons program. But instead of being interrogated or prosecuted, they were mostly left to their own devices during their six-month internment. However, the house was riddled with listening devices. The theory was that the ten would not be able to resist discussing their research, which would inform British intelligence about the progress of Germany's quest to develop nuclear bombs.

The ten included Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Karl Wirtz, and others you may be familiar with. The plan turned out to be quite beneficial, because there was little else for the men to do besides talk. While they had differing views on the war and the ethics of nuclear weapons, they couldn't help but discuss the science. A month into their incarceration, the internees heard the news that the Americans had dropped the world's first nuclear bombs on Japan. They were astonished, as they believed such weapons were years away from viability. Read about the ten German scientists locked up together and what happened to them afterward at Amusing Planet.