Welsh miners used to make their own fireworks to celebrate important occasions, which mainly consisted of sticking gunpowder into holes. These were called rock cannons. Tom Scott shows us how they worked. What could possibly go wrong? Please don't try detonating a rock cannon yourself, unless you have a test range and an expert explosive engineer. Also, be sure not to surprise your local law enforcement agency, because they could easily surprise you back.

As kids, we learned that our solar system is made up of nine planets (now eight) and the sun. Oh yeah, there's the asteroid belt. And the moons of other planets. And solar winds, comets, and the Oort cloud. But even as we learn about exoplanets and other galaxies, our own solar system hides a lot more mysterious objects that are too small and far away to know much about. One such object, designated 2014 UN271, revolves in a manner that brings it close enough to study only once every 600,000 years! What's more, that time is coming soon. But what is it? Astronomers call it either a tiny planet or a really big comet.     

But by far the most intriguing thing about 2014 UN271 is its orbit around the Sun. This thing is extremely eccentric, journeying between the inner solar system and the Oort cloud that marks the boundary of interstellar space over a period of 612,190 years.

And it turns out, astronomers are about to witness the closest pass of this incredible round trip. Currently, 2014 UN271 is about 22 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun (for reference, Earth is 1 AU from the Sun). That means it’s already closer than Neptune, at 29.7 AU. And it’s not stopping there – it’s already traveled 7 AU in the last seven years, and at its closest in 2031, it’s expected to pass within 10.9 AU of the Sun, almost reaching the orbit of Saturn.

Considering the relatively short time that mankind has studied the stars with telescopes, you have to wonder how many other distant objects are orbiting the sun without us ever getting the chance to see them. Read more about 2014 UN271 at New Atlas.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: JPL Solar System Dynamics)

The tiny animal known as the hydra is the closest thing we've seen to an immortal being. They don't have a lot of organs, and the ones they have stay young because the cells are completely replenished regularly. Cut it in half, and it doesn't die -rather it reproduces. Put it in a blender and separate all its cells? It will just reform itself! The secret is stem cells, which the hydra has plenty of. -via Aeon 

When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Clark Gable was at the height of his Hollywood fame. He called Franklin Delano Roosevelt to offer his services for the war effort, which FDR took him up on, but it was to be in a Hollywood role. Gable was 41 and in a position to publicize whatever the president needed -safely in California. But that was to change.

Gable had success, Gable had power, and for the first time in his four decades on this earth, Gable had something approaching peace thanks to his marriage to Carole Lombard, the firecracker screwball star. Yet in less than a year, all of those things turned to ash following Lombard’s violent death. When her plane went down in a fiery blaze, it was treated as a national tragedy around the country, and for her husband it was the beginning of the end.

The King became broken, despondent, and finally disillusioned enough to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. To this day, some say he went to Europe with a death wish, and on at least one bombing raid, Capt. Gable almost had it granted as a Luftwaffe shell passed right between his feet.

Lombard was decorated after her death, since she had been on a mission to raise war funds. Despite Gable's fear of flying, he became an officer and a gunner with the 351st Bombardment Group. It was rumored that he did not care whether or not he survived the war. Read about Clark Gable's military service at Den of Geek.

Highway 65 in Minnesota has a ditch with its own ducks. These aren't the kinds of ducks that come and go, though. They are decoys, in a rainbow of colors. Is it a joke, an art installation, a local tradition, or a crowdsourced project? It's kind of all the above. The story of how they came to be there is pretty neat. These ducks even have their own Facebook page. -via TYWKIWDBI

Namaqualand is an area that extends 600 miles along South Africa's western coast. It is a protected area, home to myriad species of flowers that draw visitors from around the world, despite the fact that there are no tourist accommodations. These flowers have evolved in unique ways because Namaqualand is quite arid, classified as a semidesert!  

There are more bulb flora here than in any other arid region on earth.  Over three and a half thousand plant species live here and it is thought that more than a thousand of those are found nowhere else on the planet. Little wonder that the insect life goes in to something of a breeding frenzy during the time of the daisies.

It certainly does not happen every year. The rains must not only fall but fall in the right way.  Soaking winter rains in early May and June are vital.  This must then be followed up with plenty of showers, at least one each week, through July and August. It is in the later part of that month that the explosion of life happens.

Namaqualand is in the Southern Hemisphere, so late August is at the end of winter. See more gorgeous photographs of the rare yet abundant blooms of Namaqualand at Kuriositas. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Flickr user Malcolm Manners)

As the US did, Canada also forced people of Japanese ancestry away from the west coast and put them in internment camps during World War II. These camps were isolated in the forests of British Columbia, where supply lines were few and unreliable, and the food rations were meager. Inmates in the know turned to a reliable plant called fuki, or Japanese butterbur. It wasn't easy to get, but once established, it's hard to kill.    

During the Second World War, it became crucial: In 1942, racist federal policies dispossessed thousands of Japanese Canadians of their homes, boats, and property and forced them into remote internment camps. Fuki seeds and roots were one of the few items sympathetic—and usually white—former neighbors could mail or deliver to the camps without government interception.

“A lot of [interned] Japanese Canadians wrote back to their [former] white neighbors and asked them: ‘Would you do us a huge favor and send fuki roots or fuki seeds?’ And neighbors or friends would [then] either drive up or ship out the fuki seeds,” says Ryan Ellan, curator at the Tashme Museum in Sunshine Valley, roughly 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) southeast of Hope, B.C., at the site of the former Tashme Internment Camp.

Almost 80 years later, the camps have crumbled, but fuki remains -and still grows as a testament to the history of the camps. The existence of the plant led to the founding of the Tashme Museum. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.

The SCAN-MED corridor runs the length of Europe, mostly in straight lines except for a sticky issue of getting traffic over the Alps. Trains must go slowly due to the inclines and necessary hairpin curves that accommodate those inclines. To save time, a lot of cargo is shipped by truck, which causes traffic jams along highway inclines and hairpins. But a 20-year project called the Brenner Base Tunnel is taking shape underneath the mountains. The tunnel will be 64 kilometers long when it's finished in 2028, and will cut travel time significantly. Watch the video to get an idea of how massive this project is, or read a transcript at The B1M. -via Laughing Squid

Finland's allegiance in the second world war was complicated, as they fought for both sides at one time or another, mainly because they opposed the incursions of the Soviet Union. During the time they were allied with the Nazis, a Finnish soldier named Aimo Koivunen was on ski patrol with his unit when they were attacked by Soviets. They escaped, and led the Red Army unit on a ski chase.

The patrol had been equipped with a stockpile of methamphetamine pills to keep their energy up in the heat of battle. Ironically, Koivunen had always strongly disapproved of these drugs, which was why he was considered trustworthy enough to carry the whole stash. Now, with his life on the line, he reached for the meth. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to get a lone pill out of the bottle with his clumsy winter mittens. And taking them off would have slowed him down, plus made his fingers cold. So he just dumped out the entire bottle and swallowed all 30 pills. Which was supposed to be enough to last an entire patrol for weeks. And that's when things got weird.

Weird indeed. Koivunen skied ahead so fast that he was separated from his unit and became lost. Over the next couple of weeks he suffered delusions, injuries, starvation, and the kind of bad luck you'd recognize from a Looney Tunes short. Yet remarkably, he survived it all. Read Koivunen's story told in the colorful hyperbolic language of Cracked.

(Image credit: Komischn)

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— Lau (@lauravieitez) June 17, 2021

The Foo Fighters have been dabbling in disco, and will release an album called Hail Satin that pays tribute to the Bee Gees. The band's name for this project is the Dee Gees, as in Dave Grohl's initials.

Hail Satin will see the Foos take on the Gibb brothers' 1970s disco classics Night Fever, Tragedy, You Should Be Dancing and More Than a Woman.

It will be released on vinyl for US Record Store Day on 17 July.

Side one of the LP will also include their version of Andy Gibb's Shadow Dancing, which spent seven weeks at number one in the US in 1978.

Side two will feature five live versions of songs from their last album Medicine at Midnight.

Read more of how the Foo Fighters have embraced disco music at BBC. -via reddit

When you think of polar bears, you think of Canada, Greenland, or other Arctic locales. But then we must remember Knut, the polar bear born at the Berlin Zoo in 2006 that became an internet sensation. It wasn't the first time that Germany went wild for polar bears.

As the story goes, some time in the early 1920s, two (actual) polar bears arrived at the Berlin Zoo and became the talk of the town. Families came from all over the country to see the bears and to get their pictures taken with the zoo’s mascots (a couple of guys in costumes who stood outside the gates to welcome tourists). The trend took off from there and gave rise to a nationwide phenomenon which lasted until the 1970s, spanning a whole period from pre-war to to post-war Germany. It’s safe to say that vacation photo albums of the era just weren’t complete without a snap with a fake polar bear.

French collector Jean-Marie Donat has procured thousands of pictures of these polar bear characters since 1980. They were published in a limited-edition book called TeddyBär, which is sold out, but you can see a sampling of the images that illustrate the odd German craze at Messy Nessy Chic.

In a town of 1200 people, you can guess that everyone knows almost everyone else, and their lives are quite interconnected. However, when someone in the town of Lonaconing, Maryland, bought a lottery ticket worth $731 million, they decided to keep the news to themself. See, Maryland is one of the few states where a lottery winner can choose to remain anonymous, but the store where the ticket was sold is known. Determining the identity of the winner(s) has become the town's main activity.

Gold diggers poured into town. People showed up from Georgia and Ohio and Arkansas, asking for a piece of the prize to care for an ailing relative, or to save their struggling farm, or to pay for that European trip they’ve yearned to take.

A woman in Georgia wrote to the owner of Coney Market asking him to buy her a couple of chain saws for her farm. Another supplicant wanted a piece of the lottery winnings to get her driveway paved.

“They say, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get,’ ” said the guy being asked, Richard Ravenscroft, who owns the market. “People don’t know the winner’s name. I’m the person whose name they do know, so they ask me.”

People from thousands of miles away have sent money in envelopes asking the market staff to send them lottery tickets from the lucky shop. (Lottery sales at the market, usually a modest $4,000 a week, briefly soared, then returned to earth, Ravenscroft said.)

Lonaconing itself, with a 24% poverty rate, would also like to ask for a donation. The winners, said to be a group called the Power Pack, claimed the award in May and since then are laying low. Read how a windfall turned the community upside-down at US News. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Tony Webster)

Saqqara is an ancient Egyptian burial ground just 20 miles south of Cairo that never received nearly as much attention as the grand pyramids of Luxor. Tombs at Saqqara had been raided for generations. In 1850, the director of Egypt’s Antiquities Service called it “a spectacle of utter devastation,” due to its ruinous condition. Nevertheless, archaeologists began exploring Saqqara, not realizing that it was much more extensive than it appeared. The further you dig, the more you find, and the further you go, the more pristine the burial conditions are.  

One scorching day last fall, Mohammad Youssef, an archaeologist, clung to a rope inside a shaft that had been closed for more than 2,000 years. At the bottom, he shined his flashlight through a gap in the limestone wall and was greeted by a god’s gleaming eyes: a small, painted statue of the composite funerary deity Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, with a golden face and plumed crown. It was Youssef’s first glimpse of a large chamber that was guarded by a heap of figurines, carved wooden chests and piles of blackened linen. Inside, Youssef and his colleagues found signs that the people buried here had wealth and privilege: gilded masks, a finely carved falcon and a painted scarab beetle rolling the sun across the sky. Yet this was no luxurious family tomb, as might have been expected. Instead, the archaeologists were astonished to discover dozens of expensive coffins jammed together, piled to the ceiling as if in a warehouse. Beautifully painted, human-shaped boxes were stacked roughly on top of heavy limestone sarcophagi. Gilded coffins were packed into niches around the walls. The floor itself was covered in rags and bones.

This eerie chamber is one of several “megatombs,” as the archaeologists describe them, discovered last year at Saqqara, the sprawling necropolis that once served the nearby Egyptian capital of Memphis.

The Saqqara burials spanned 3,000 years, and are just beginning to reveal long-buried secrets. Read about the discoveries at Saqqara at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Carole Raddato)

Rémy Vicarini has an intense bond with his cat Cathode. As he explains their life together, things get more and more bizarre, but you'll enjoy every minute. See more of Cathode at YouTube and Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake

After expending massive manpower and resources into developing a nuclear bomb to end World War II, the US was pretty proud of the scientific breakthrough. But once the war was over, what could we do with this amazing ability besides killing people and flattening cities? The sunk cost was way too much to abandon. So how could we harness nuclear energy for something good?

What has to be the most spectacularly violent infrastructure proposal in American history came out of the federal government's Project Plowshare, conceived in 1951 as a way of, well, "beating atomic arms into plowshares." It was our exploration of constructive uses for nuclear weaponry. Bombs detonated underground, officials theorized, could make for cheap ways of moving large volumes of earth—be it for mining, hollowing out caverns to store natural gas, or prepping for other kinds of infrastructure. Dams and reservoirs could be created with single bombs, while dozens-long chains of detonations could carve new canals or even entire harbors.

Project Plowshare was running alongside another massive federal effort in the 1950s and '60s: the birth and rapid expansion of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System. Really, it was a matter of time before the those twin ambitious would collide. And collide they did, in a rugged stretch of the Bristol Mountains in southeast California through which highway planners hoped to route the yet-to-be-completed I-40 as one of America's major east-west corridors and a replacement for dinky old Route 66.

It sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but progress often takes dead end turns along the way. Read the story of the nuclear highway project called Carryall at The Drive. -via Damn Interesting