Eighty years ago today, the first nuclear bomb was deployed over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb was dropped by the B-29 named Enola Gay, piloted by 30-year-old Col. Paul W. Tibbets. Six other planes participated for reconaissance, escort, scientific analysis, and photography. The mission commander was William Sterling Parsons, who worked with the Manhattan Project under Robert Oppenheimer. Parsons decided to join the mission on the Enola Gay to arm the nuclear bomb after takeoff to protect the US base on Tinian Island in the event of a crash during takeoff. 

The crew members of the various planes later described what the mission was like and their impressions of the nuclear explosion. Despite being miles away by the time the bomb detonated, they were rendered speechless. One crew member thought they had missed their target, because he couldn't see any city remaining. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, leading to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II.   

Although none of the Americans who participated in the mission are alive today, Garrett M. Graff compiled quotes from military archives, memoirs, speeches, and other sources for his new book The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. Read an excerpt published today in the Washington Post.    -via Damn Interesting 

The small hamlet of Torrington, Alberta, (population 239) is proud of their history. You can learn about it at the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, which boasts 82 dioramas illustrating events in Torrington history, populated by taxidermied gophers. The museum is operated by volunteers and is open daily in the summer and on weekends the rest of the year. Admission is by donation, because "We will never let finances get in your way of the joy of seeing dead gophers!"

The origin of the museum is quite a story. In the 1990s, Torrington received a small grant from the province to create a tourist attraction. At a brainstorming meeting, one woman suggested a museum of stuffed gophers. It was a joke, but it became real. Five people volunteered to learn taxidermy, and the whole town got involved in making the displays. PETA heard about it, so by the time the museum opened in 1996 it had become world famous. You can see a short video about the museum here, and see more pictures here. -via Fark 

Remote control LEGO vehicles can do some amazing stuff. Can they climb walls? You have to design them specifically for the task. In this video, the guys at Brick Technology start small, but then attempt to climb ever taller walls. For each LEGO wall, they begin with failure. But we see how they quickly identify the problem, and redesign the vehicle to fix it. Bigger wheels. Lower axles. Greater length. Adjustable weigh distribution. Success comes only when the vehicle climbs to the top and manages to land on the other side without toppling over, and be able to drive away. For each extra layer in the wall, the vehicle gets bigger and more elaborate, until the later models look more like robots than vehicles. The last version, challenged to climb a wall 40 bricks tall, might remind you of a medieval war machine. They had to pull out all the stops for that one! -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Pics or it didn't happen! It's always been that people tend not to believe something until they see it for themselves. In the 19th century, thousands of New York residents lived in overcrowded tenement slums with crumbling walls, dangerous staircases, and no plumbing. They did piece work in their homes, took in boarders for extra money, and raised so many children some had to sleep outside. Jacob Riis arrived in New York from Denmark in 1870 and had to deal with crushing poverty until he got a job as a journalist with for The New York Tribune. He covered the police beat, and described the conditions in the tenements as best he could, but reading about it wasn't nearly as effective as seeing it. That's why Riis incorporated photography into his reporting. He was a pioneer in flash photography because the tenement apartments were so dark inside. In 1890 he published his book How The Other Half Lives, full of pictures of the poor people of New York. 

The book made an impression on the public, but more importantly, on the city's Police Commissioner, a man named Theodore Roosevelt. That's when housing standards began to rise. Read about Jacob Riis and the photographs that brought poverty to light at Danny Dutch.  

Ekstremsportveko (Extreme Sports Week) 2025 was held in June in Voss, Norway. It is the world's largest extreme sports festival, taking advantage of the region's snowy mountains, wild rivers, lakes, and the high cliffs that loom over the fjords. Those cliffs are perfect for extreme BASE jumping. These adrenaline junkies had looked forward to Ekstremsportveko all year for the chance to soar through this beautiful natural world. Lifted by helicopter, they eagerly jumped off a cliff that you and I would be afraid to approach the edge of. I think there was a rule that they all had to have cameras attached. Some used parachutes, others used wing suits, and one guy did his jump suspended under another guy using a wing suit! I kept thinking "Don't let go! Don't let go!" And then he let go. But no one was hurt, and a good time was had by all. -via Kuriositas 

About 30 years ago, Hello Kitty rose from Japan and took over the world. But she was just one of a long line of pop culture cats from Japan. Japanese legends and folklore are full of cats, such as Maneki Neko, the lucky waving cat. And to our delight, Japanese art going back hundreds of years documents these folklore cats. Bakeneko are cats that change into human form, or they can remain cats but speak like humans. They can even kill and take the identity of their owner! Nekomata are cats who live to be very old, and then split their tails in two and walk around on two legs. 

There are also cat witches and cats who may steal a corpse from a funeral. Don't miss the very charming story of the boy who drew cats. A post at Hanashi by Curious Ordinary also has recommendations for books and movies if you want to explore more on Japanese cats. And it has lots of lovely artworks. -via Everlasting Blort 

I saw this Honest Trailer for Freaky Friday posted today, and couldn't figure out why Screen Junkies would do an Honest Trailer for a YA movie from 2003. It turns out that a sequel called Freakier Friday opens this weekend, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, and Mark Harmon playing the same characters 22 years later. I guess there's an audience for this, since it's become an entire franchise.

Anyway, if you are going to see the new movie, you might want to go back to the original and refresh your memory first. Did I say original? There have actually been four movies with the title Freaky Friday, from 1976, 1995, 2003 and 2018. The Jamie Lee Curtis version was the biggest hit the the four, and the only one to warrant a sequel. The verdict from Screen Junkies: it's kind of dumb, and surprisingly racist for its time. Let's hope the geriatric version does better. 

Communication between pilots and air traffic control for international flights is almost always conducted in English. It makes sense to use the most common second language for communication. But it doesn't always work, especially when no one involved speaks English as their first language. A TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon to Nice crossed into France with a little problem on board- all the toilets were non-functional. Aware of the passengers' potential for distress, the pilots contacted air traffic control in Nice to request expedited landing. They didn't want to circle waiting for earlier planes to land if they could get permission to skip the line. 

However, this divergence from protocol involved several messages among quite a few people. In a radio transmission, the word "toilet" got confused for the word "pilot." The pilot's not working? It must be a medical emergency. What, you have no pilots? Then when the plane's crew tried to clarify, the control tower crew got the idea that the auto-pilot was non-functional. They put Nice Airport in a state of alert for the jet landing. Read an edited transcript or listen to a video to hear what went down in Nice.  We assume that the plane was able to land and let the passengers do their business. 

(Image credit: Siyuan He) 

English has a lot of words that people rarely use in general conversation, but they flourish in text. You may know a word for years and never hear it pronounced. One such word is "biopic," a movie that's the story of one person. Do you pronounce it BY-oh-pic or by-AH-pic? The word is short for biographical picture. Mental Floss argues that it is pronounced BY-oh-pic, and I have heard movie critics pronounce it that way, so I guess they are right. It used to be spelled with a hyphen: bio-pic. Still, the pronunciation by-AH-pic is what I've always heard in my head, and maybe you did, too.  

Then they go into why we mispronounce the word in our heads. It's an example of a misle, or a word with a spelling that doesn't make the pronunciation clear. English is full of them! When we encounter new words in print, we have a tendency to pronounce them like similarly spelled words that may have nothing to do with the word you are seeing. Read some common examples, and the varied reasons we hear them incorrectly in our heads at Mental Floss.

(Image generated with PhotoFunia) 

Millions of years ago, the grassland of North America was a brutal place. There were huge animals like rhinos, camels, horses, and elephants. And there were predators that evolved to take them down. These were canid borophagines, bone-crushing dogs. Borophagine species ranged from the size of a large coyote to larger than the biggest wolves, up to more than 300 pounds! They had short muzzles and massive teeth, and may have resembled hyenas. The borophagines consumed plenty of bone, but evidence from fossil feces show they weren't great at digesting them. Tearing through bones, however, was an efficient way for a pack to get its fill of a mastodon.  

The last of the borophagine species died out 1.8 million years ago, and were replaced by true canines that didn't crush bones, like coyotes. Wolves came even later. Saber-toothed cats hung around until about 10,000 years ago. So what happened to the borophagines? Read what we know about these ancient dogs at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Ghedoghedo) 

When Batman debuted in comics in 1939, his alter-ego Bruce Wayne was made a billionaire to explain how he had the remote location Batcave, the Batmobile, all kinds of technological wonders at his disposal, and the free time to fight crime in Gotham City. Readers had no real concept of a billionaire back then, except that they were rich. Now we have plenty of real billionaires in the news, sucking up resources and exerting power over our everyday lives. They give rich people a bad name, which just gets worse when we learn how they came to have more money than many national economies. That knowledge kind of puts a different light on Batman, don't you think? In this short video from Dorkly, Batman's usual nemeses -the Joker, the Riddler, Two-Face, and Mister Freeze- realize who the real villain is. The story is only 2:40; the rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Jim Ashworth-Beaumont is an orthotist at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital in London. He builds and fits prosthetic limbs and cares for patients using the devices, as he has since the 1990s. In a cruel twist of fate, he was riding his bicycle and was struck by a truck in 2020. The truck wheels sliced through his body and ripped his right arm off. Ashworth-Beaumont spent six weeks in a medically-induced coma as doctors saved his life by repairing his lungs and liver. The loss of an arm was a lower priority at the time. However, in another twist of fate, Ashworth-Beaumont's surgeon, Edmund Fitzgerald O’Connor, is a plastic surgeon who had been on the lookout for a patient to try a new type of prosthetic limb. 

Osseointegration is the process of implanting a titanium rod into an amputee's stump that can be attached to a prosthetic. The process is commonly used to implant teeth, and we have seen it used in animals. It has been used in people, but now bionics has progressed to allow osseointegration to be combined with electronic sensors to control a limb's movements with the patient's brain. Ashworth-Beaumont received his implant last October. Read his story at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting 

Children love to play with their food. Tula-Tu is no exception. The Asian elephant calf at the Oregon Zoo celebrated her 6-month birthday on Friday- or would you call that a half birthday? Either way, Tula-Tu would rather play than eat, so she kicked a birthday watermelon around as if she were training for the World Cup. It's all fun and games until Mom steps in to show her what a watermelon is really for. Tula-Tu is still nursing, but trying out regular foods one at a time. Watermelon may have to wait, at least until she is hungry enough to stop playing. She's already tripled her birth weight and is now 650 pounds. For a six-month-old, she's more accomplished than most of us, having appeared on national television more than once and serving as the Grand Marshall of the Rose Festival’s Grand Floral Parade. See more videos of Tula-Tu at Laughing Squid. 

A Chinese surgeon named Hua Tuo was born around 140 CE and became famous for his talents in compounding natural herbs into medicine. The most amazing of his creations was called mafeisan, a plant-based anesthetic. Administered as a drink, mafeisan would render a patient unconscious and numb enough to undergo serious surgery, such as resecting damaged intestines. The patient would awaken after 24 hours or so, and recover from the anesthetic in a few days. We don't know how accurate that is, since all accounts of Hua Tuo's work are from later, secondhand writing. Unfortunately, Hua Tuo fell out of favor with a warlord he had previously saved. The doctor's mafeisan recipe was lost when he was executed, and surgery in general fell out of favor in China. 

Much later in Japan, surgeon Hanaoka Seishū was inspired by Hua Tuo and spent decades developing an anesthetic called tsūsensan. In 1804, he performed a mastectomy on a cancer patient which is credited as the first documented surgery using general anesthesia. He went on to perform hundreds of surgical operations using tsūsensan, and taught his methods to medical students. Read about the development of surgical anesthesia before ether and chloroform at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Nat Krause) 

Tell us what you hate most about television shows these days, and Ryan George has that covered, plus a whole list of other annoyances that infest our screens. TV shows can exist on network TV, premium cable, streaming services, or just plain YouTube, and there's no way you can keep up with them all. And if someone convinces you their favorite show is worth a watch, you discover it's on a service you're not yet paying for. If it's a show that's been going awhile, you have to catch up. How long can you stay with it hoping it gets better? Or if you jump into a popular show in season three or four, you may notice that the writers have run out of ideas and the cast is getting bored -or getting hired away. Let's take a look at Plinker Donkle, the TV series that stands in for all of them.