Many cities have extensive underground layers for various reasons. These subterranean spaces often begin with separate basements and tunnels that eventually become connected to each other, or possibly the area was once above ground, and was just built over. The capital of Finland is a different story. Helsinki built its underground city in one fell swoop. Underneath the ground level streets, you'll find shopping centers, a church, a museum, sports venues, and more.    

Thought to be the world’s only city with an underground master plan, Helsinki began excavating tunnels through bedrock in the 1960s to house power lines, sewers and other utilities. City planners quickly realized that the space could also be home to retail, cultural, and sporting attractions—and that it could shelter the city’s population of 630,000 in the event of another invasion from the East. The building of the tunnels expanded with new purpose.

Tomi Rask, a preparedness instructor for the city of Helsinki’s rescue department, says the alternative purpose of the tunnels is to “save people against the actions of war.” No Finnish government official would ever mention Russia as the reason for such defensive preparations, but they don’t have to.

Read about both sides of Helsinki's underground at Atlas Obscura.

The YouTuber who goes by EverywhereMax has been to all 92 places named in the Johnny Cash song "I've been Everywhere." He's been a lot of other places, too, as you'll see in the video he constructed around the song.

As far as I know, only two people including me have been to all 92 places. The other person is with me in the ''Nebraska'' picture.

This footage was compiled between 2016 and 2019. Now that Max has conquered the Western Hemisphere, we he venture out into the other continents? -via Digg

Fagradalsfjall is a volcano about 25 kilometres from Reykjavík, Iceland, which has been dormant for 6,000 years. On Friday, a new vent opened up just to the south at Geldingadalir, which is forming a new volcano right now. This is the first eruption on Iceland’s Southern Peninsula in 800 years. And we can watch it happening! RÚV has set up a live webcam to monitor and record the eruption, and give people around the world a bird’s eye view of the volcano. If you pull up the videostream to full size, you can see people walking around in the edges of the video, giving you a sense of scale. If you are just joining in, here’s a time-lapse of eruption recorded on Saturday, daytime and nighttime.

https://t.co/yerueeyiut

— Arinbjörn (@arinbjornkol) March 21, 2021

-via Metafilter

Jane M. Haining was an outstanding student at Dumfries Academy who spent ten years as a secretary before she decided to become a missionary. After training, she went to the Church of Scotland mission in Budapest, Hungary, where she headed a school for girls. She was in charge of around 400 students, both Christian and Jewish. When World War II broke out in 1939, Haining refused to leave her post, even as the mission's pastor returned to Scotland. She protected her students as best she could as restrictions tightened around Jews in the years to come. In August of 1944, word of her status got back to Scotland, although months late. From the August 12 edition of The Scotsman:

Through official sources the Church of Scotland Overseas Department recently received word that Miss Jane M. Haining, superintendent of the Girls’ Home in the Church of Scotland Mission, Budapest, Hungary, had been arrested. This action was taken early in May, following the taking over of Hungary by the Germans. Further news has now been received that Miss Haining has been sent to an internment camp for women at Auschwitz.

The word "Auschwitz" meant nothing to the people of Scotland at the time. It was only after the war that the horrors of the concentration camp system were revealed to the world. Read the story of Jane Haining at the British Newspaper Archive. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: The Gloucester Citizen)  

The picture we all know so well of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out was taken on his 72nd birthday. He was in the back of a limousine, leaving an event in his honor, sitting between Frank and Marie Aydelotte. Annoyed by the paparazzi, he gave them a funny face.

However, it was not the photographer who helped the photo achieve worldwide fame, but Einstein himself. He ordered numerous prints and cropped it so the Aydelotte couple could no longer be seen. He sent dozens of the photos to colleagues, friends and acquaintances. "The outstretched tongue reflects my political views," he wrote to his friend Johanna Fantova. In 2009, an original signed copy was sold for $74,324 (€62,677) at auction, making it the most expensive photo of the genius ever.

Read the sequence of events that led to the photo, and how it became so universal afterward, at DW. -via Damn Interesting

It's strange how less testosterone makes one desire pink things, at least in the minds of advertising copy writers. This picture is from a collection gleaned from the subreddit pointlessly gendered products. See more of the 17 Sexist Designs Guaranteed To Boil Your Blood at Buzzfeed.

(Image source: sausageliver)

The Egyptian pyramids at Giza are ancient, breathtaking, and mysterious. Despite centuries of study, there's a lot we still don't know about them. How did the people of ancient Egypt carve the stones so precisely, transport them, lift them, and keep such a massive structure level? Yeah, some say it was aliens from outer space, but French materials scientist Joseph Davidovits came up with a more plausible idea.

According to Davidovits’ theory, the blocks were not quarried and transported to Giza but rather cast in place in wooden molds. This would account for the extreme precision of the pyramid’s construction, as the initial liquid state of the limestone concrete would have made the blocks self-levelling and allowed for extremely thin seams between blocks. This technique was also ideal for use on the Giza plateau, which has abundant supplies of soft, crumbly limestone otherwise unsuited to large-scale construction.

Davidovits tested his idea by making blocks out of materials that would have been available to the pyramid builders. He presented his theory to the public in 1988, and immediately encountered the wrath of Egyptologists. So are the building blocks of the Great Pyramid made of stone or some composite material? Read the tale of Davidovits’ theory at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: L-BBE)

Ida Holdgreve answered an ad in a Dayton, Ohio, newspaper that said "plain sewing wanted." But it was a typo that should have said "plane" sewing. That's how the dressmaker ended up sewing airplane parts for the Wright Brothers.

In 1910 and 1911, two odd buildings began to rise a mile-and-a-half west of the Wright brothers’ West Dayton home. Bowed parapets bookended the long one-story structures, their midsections arching like the crooks of serpents’ spines; wide windows reflected the pastoral world outside. This was the Wright Company factory, the first American airplane factory, and behind the buildings’ painted brick walls, Holdgreve sewed surfaces for some of the world’s first airplanes, making her a pioneer in the aviation industry.

“As far as I know, she was the only woman who worked on the Wright Company factory floor,” says aviation writer Timothy R. Gaffney, author of The Dayton Flight Factory: The Wright Brothers & The Birth of Aviation. “And she was earning her living making airplane parts. Since I haven’t found a woman working in this capacity any earlier, as far as I know, Ida Holdgreve was the first female American aerospace worker.”

Holdgreve learned to build airplanes, stretching countless yards of muslin over their frames. As the industry grew, her expertise was recognized, and in World War I, Holgreve supervised a crew of seamstresses turning out more advanced airplanes for the war effort. Yet strangely, she never flew in an airplane herself until 1969! Read the story of Ida Holgreve at Smithsonian.

(Image source: Wright State University Libraries' Special Collections & Archives)

Photographer Kendra Smith sent pictures and a video of a white raccoon to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. This is not an albino raccoon, which would be white with a pink nose and paws. This one has black paws and a black nose, so it's not completely devoid of coloring. It is instead a leucistic raccoon, meaning it lacks pigment from the parts we would expect color. Like its mask. Which makes it hard for us to recognize as a raccoon at all, but apparently other raccoons know.

So, how rare is this? It’s difficult to say. There are probably many leucistic raccoons, but with this type of coloration, few would make it to adulthood. But enough do to keep it popping up in raccoon populations from time to time. No, really, how rare is this? In short, nobody at ODFW has seen a nearly completely white raccoon in the wild before.

The Department calls this particular raccoon Moby Rick. Click to the right on the image above to see the other pictures; the last image is a video. -via Laughing Squid

In the grand scheme of things, it hasn't been all that long that Western women were "allowed" to wear pants. It was only in 2013 that a French law forbidding women to wear trousers was repealed! (True, it hadn't been enforced for a long time.) A women wearing pants was scandalous until the 20th century, but the desire for practical clothing was always there. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went to Constantinople in 1716 as her husband was the British ambassador, and was struck by the trousers worn by Turkish women.  

Lady Mary returned from her trip with trunks of clothing worn by the Muslim women she encountered, sharing them with members of her social circle, even posing for public portraits modelling the garments.

She wrote about her experiences and observations, creating intrigue amongst the fashionable elite. Her letters and firsthand accounts invoked honest conversations about freedom of dress, property rights, and other social, economic, legal, and marital freedoms that women were denied in Europe. As more women began to travel and discovering foreign cultures, it seemed Western society, which held a strong Eurocentric bias, was falling behind the East regarding women’s rights issues.

It was a couple of hundred years after Montague's travels before women in pants became common in the West. Read the ups and downs of the fashion at Messy Nessy Chic.

Ze Frank has now established himself as a person that people will listen to when he talks about animals. This video, which you might assume is about bats, is really about Batman. His name is Dr. Merlin Tuttle, which you have to admit is a much better name than Bruce Wayne, or at least more suitable for a comic book. But Merlin Tuttle is a real life superhero, going the extra mile to protect the bats who need him. Ze Frank explains, while gently poking fun at Tuttle's mustache. Find out more about Tuttle's work at Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation site.

The three young ducklings you see in some Donald Duck cartoons are Huey, Dewey, and Louie in English-speaking countries, but they are adapted to work in other languages in different ways. In some places they are given alliterative or rhyming names that are real names in the local language, and in others they are labeled with nonsense words that sound funny. In a few places, they are named with some variant of "quack."

This map (which you can see much bigger here), along with others that deal with cartoon names, comes from the delightful blog Mapologies, where you'll find maps that answer all kinds of language questions, like how to say "banana" in Latin America, how other countries refer to the Milky Way, and the origins of color words in different languages.  

-via Kottke

Rufus Weaver was an anatomist of the late 19th century. His specialty was preparing anatomical samples, that is, preserving human body parts and organs for medical classes at Hahnemann Medical Collage. Weaver's most famous project was the retrieval, preservation, and display of an entire human nervous system, which had never been done before. In 1888, Weaver dissected a body and separated out the nervous system: nerves, brain, and eyeballs, and preserved it in the preparation you see here. The specimen is unnerving to anyone who sees it, and you have to wonder who this was in life. It wasn't until 1915 that she was identified as "Harriet Cole," a black woman who worked at the college, and was said to have willed her body to science.    

When another Hahnemann physician, George Geckeler, restored the mounted model in 1960, LIFE magazine devoted a splashy photo spread to the effort. The writer recounted how a scrubwoman who had been ignored by everyone in the laboratory “stared in fascination at cadavers” and “eavesdropp[ed]” on lectures. She osmosed the chatter, the author continued; Harriet supposedly “took to heart [Weaver’s] complaints about a shortage of corpses” and “willed her body to him.” There’s no indication of how the writer gleaned this information—this supposedly intimate understanding of a long-dead woman’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It seems that “no one went back to fact-check” the basic story, Herbison says. “Whoever said it first, that’s the thing that you use.” Details carry over from one story to another like sprawling arithmetic.

One photograph accompanying the LIFE story shows Geckeler stooping so his eyes align with the ones on the preparation. He scrunches his own, like someone puzzling over a painting, studying the canvas as if trying to decipher genius suspended between the fibers. By this point, the myth of “Harriet Cole” had grown to include not just Weaver’s work, but the woman herself—a lowly person made spectacular, in every sense. A fascinating object never quite or fully human, but almost looking the part.

That story is hard to believe, considering that willing one's body to science was not a thing in 1888. Cadavers for medical specimens at the time came from grave robbing and claiming bodies that would otherwise be buried by the state. Alaina McNaughton, Matt Herbison, and Brandon Zimmerman have been trying to track down the mystery of Harriet Cole. Was she a real person, and was she the owner of this nervous system? Weaver left few clues as to how he prepared the specimen, and the identity of the donor was not in his records. Read what the team found out about Weaver's work and the person whose nerves are still on display 130 years later at Atlas Obscura. 

When you're feeding the opossum in the window some tasty jam, you may as well sing a song about it. Eric Stix adapted the tune of "The Wellermen" sea shanty to fit the occasion. The clever lyrics are enhanced by the animal's pleasure and Stix's obvious affection for his visitor. -via Digg

Crochet has had a bit of a renaissance lately, with crafters making adorable amigurumi figures and Halloween costumes and sharing them online. Before that, crochet was seen as something to keep a woman's hands busy while her husband flipped through the channels (I've been there), slightly less useful than knitting, because knitting produces clothing. However, there was a time during the late 1960s in the early '70s when colorful crocheted clothing became quite popular with the young, hip crowd. And it was all because of a Swedish crochet artist named Birgitta Bjerke.

On December 11, 1968, Eric Clapton stepped onto a low stage inside Intertel (V.T.R. Services) Studio north of London to play a few tunes with John Lennon and Keith Richards; the occasion was the taping of “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” for the BBC. At the time, Clapton was the most revered electric guitarist in rock, even amid the incendiary ascendancy of Jimi Hendrix. A few weeks earlier, Clapton had performed his last two shows as a member of Cream at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall, and by the summer of 1969, he would team up with Steve Winwood of Traffic to form a “supergroup” called Blind Faith.

Normally, none of this would have anything to do with crochet, but on that particular December day, Clapton was wearing a brightly colored, predominantly orange crocheted jacket, in which grids of traditional granny squares on the garment’s front, back, and cuffs were paired with bold stripes of alternating colors circling up the sleeves; Clapton’s red tennis shoes and cherry-red Gibson ES-335 completed his ensemble.

Handmade for him by a 27-year-old Stockholm native named Birgitta Bjerke—who was recently arrived in London from New York via Athens, and sold her fashions under the label “100% Birgitta”—Clapton’s jacket reflected the anything-goes fashion ethos of London’s trendy King’s Road. That’s where Bjerke worked, hung out, and was introduced to the city’s music and fashion scenes by another Swede, Ulla Larsson, who dressed some of the biggest names in British rock from a vintage-clothing stall she managed in the Chelsea Antique Market, across the street from Carlyle Square.

“It wasn’t a store per se,” Bjerke tells me over the phone, “more like a booth. It was like being in an Aladdin’s cave draped in magnificent textiles. It was fabulous.”

Bjerke dressed other rock stars in her crocheted creations as well. Her life and her art took her across Europe and to the United States. Read about the fabulous life and art of Birgitta Bjerke in an interview at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: Karl Ferris)