The Cold War was cold because the US and the Soviet Union both had nuclear weapons, and neither side wanted to use them. But competition was fierce in other arenas besides the battlefield, the most obvious being the Space Race and the Olympic games. Both were opportunities to to prove which political system was better, but the Olympics were where people from each nation actually got together. There have been quite a few defections from the USSR and communist Eastern Bloc countries during the Olympics, and the US covertly encouraged those as another point for the West in the one-upmanship battle.

The CIA sometimes involved US athletes in engaging Soviet athletes to discuss defecting during the Olympics. We might never know the extent of their efforts, but in 1960, javelin star Al Cantello was approached by a mysterious government agent about arranging the possible defection of Soviet long jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. US sprinter Dave Sime had already been recruited by the CIA to help facilitate such a defection. Cantello, who died earlier this year, told his story decades after the fact, and you can read it at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

The stereotype that other countries have of Americans is that we are all rich, fat, and armed. There are other things the rest of the world finds strange abut Americans, like how loud we speak, how we smile too much, and how we bare our teeth when we smile. British immigrant Laurence Brown looks at another American stereotype- our use of ice cubes. We feel the need to put them in our drinks at all times, even in winter. One reason is because it is much hotter in the US than it ever is in Britain, where it rains a lot and they don't even put screens in their windows because it's too cool for mosquitos. But that isn't the whole story.

The American obsession with ice has to do with our history, from back when ice was one of our biggest exports. It's one of the peculiarities of having a nation that is so big that it covers several climates, and since there was a lot of money to be made, we got used to having ice all the time. But we also need refrigerators and freezers because it's a long way to the supermarket, and we don't want to go there every day. Yes, Laurence gives us a concise history of ice in America in his latest video. There's a 50-second skippable ad at two minutes in.

Heritage Auctions held a two-day auction of Hollywood memorabilia last week and sold that bikini from Return of the Jedi for $175,000. And it wasn't even the costume that was in the final film! This one is authentic from the production, but it was only used for screen tests.

Why did it Princess Leia's bikini fetch such a high price? Because that costume was such a memorable part of the movie series. After two Star Wars films, audiences were shocked at seeing the beloved princess showing so much skin while she was being held in slavery by Jabba the Hut. It was titillating, but also illustrated her humiliation. Viewers were either excited or else scandalized by the costume in a story that was so appealing to children. Actress Carrie Fisher was among those. She didn't feel good about being nearly naked, and counseled Daisy Ridley not to give in if the producers wanted her to wear something she wasn't comfortable with in the sequel series. The upshot is that Star Wars fans have been talking about the bikini for 41 years now. Read more about the impact this costume made at Smithsonian. -via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Michael Barera)

A filmmaker's vision for a movie, the script, the resulting footage, and the finished product are often four very different stories. At any stage of the process, the team may decide that they need to go in a completely different direction.

John Hughes wrote the screenplay for the 1986 movie Ferris Beuller's Day Off in less than a week, and shot the film to follow that first draft. Once the scenes were assembled, the first cut was two hours and 45 minutes long! Even worse, test audiences didn't like it. Enter legendary editor Paul Hirsch to save the movie by re-editing the footage that had been shot. Not only did he shorten it, but most importantly, he rearranged all the sequences. When you see what order they were in originally, you'll see how this made a vast improvement in the pacing and the audience's emotional involvement. CinemaStix fills us in on how that happened to Ferris Beuller's Day Off forty years ago. -via The Awesomer

Let's see how ArtButMakeItSports (previously at Neatorama) is finding the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. We've already seen some wonderful photos, magic moments captured from the athletic competitions, but is it art? It sure is! Let's see US gymnast Frederick Richard on the parallel bars.

Closed by Sorcery, by Luis Felipe Noe, 1963, 📸 by @Dan_Mullan pic.twitter.com/aPudLCtpQA

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 31, 2024

The guy who runs the artbutmakeitsports social media accounts does not use AI to find the artworks that match the photographs. It's all from memory, which fuels speculation that he must be an art history professor or possibly a museum curator. Continue reading to see more of his Olympic/art comparisons.

Sometimes science just happens when you're not prepared for it. Researchers Delphine Farmer and Mj Riches were in the woods of Colorado studying the leaf-level photosynthesis of Ponderosa pines in 2020. Or as we non-scientists would call it, pine needle-level photosynthesis. The pores in a tree's leaves (or needles) take in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen and other materials. But there was smoke from wildfires in the area, and they found that the trees' pores had essentially shut down and were not doing their usual life-sustaining actions. The trees had detected the smoke.

This defense mechanism led the two scientists to look into the effects of wildfire smoke and other pollutants on a tree's health. There's not much a tree can do to defend itself from fire, but they can reject poor quality air -at least for a short time. Read about how trees breathe, until they refuse to, at the Conversation.

(Image credit: Matt Lavin)

In 1752, Benjamin Franklin famously flew a kite in a thunderstorm and literally caught lightning in his hand. In 1753, Russian physicist Georg Wilhelm Richmann tried to do the same with a metal rod and was killed by lightning. Meanwhile in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), a priest named Prokop Diviš wanted to build a machine to control the weather, specifically the electricity in the atmosphere. In 1754, he erected his weather machine atop a 40-meter pole in order to extract the natural electricity from the air and prevent thunderstorms. Scientists thought he was nuts. The local villagers believed in his machine, and tore it down when there was a drought.  

The "weather machine" worked, but not in the way Diviš wanted, and for reasons he didn't quite anticipate. For a long time, people thought Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, but Diviš' tower preceded Franklin's. Read how Diviš came up with the lightning rod at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Bohemianroots)

Government laboratories run by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) do research on virulent and deadly diseases like smallpox, ebola, and Marburg virus in order to keep us all safe. But what about the people who work in those labs? The safety protocols have to be on the level of The Andromeda Strain. And just like that story, the strictness of the different levels correspond with the danger of the virus being studied. Unlike the movie, the different levels are in different labs in different places. The first level is on par with what hospitals require of visitors to an infectious patient with, say, flesh-eating bacteria. Don't ask me how I know. Above that, the protocols get very serious. The most serious of these virus labs is one that hasn't even been built yet, but will cover a big chunk of ground in Atlanta. This video from Half as Interesting is only seven minutes long; the rest is an ad.  -via Digg

William and Margaret Patterson owned a photo supply shop in El Paso, Texas. There was evidence that their marriage was not always happy, but they were otherwise upstanding and well-liked in the community. Then on March 6, 1957, a store employee was awakened by a call from William Patterson saying the couple were going away. That didn't seem all that suspicious, but later events would. Nine days later, a telegram arrived at the store directing employees to lease out the Patterson's home for nine months and make other odd arrangements. At the home, they found the Pattersons had not taken their luggage, and Margaret's beloved cat was wandering the neighborhood, which was very suspicious. By August, employees involved the police.

While the Pattersons were never seen again in El Paso, a cryptic letter came from Laredo about distributing the Patterson's assets, and witnesses had seen the couple in Valle de Bravo, near Mexico City. As the years passed, the clues became more infrequent, but still stranger than before. Read about the mysterious disappearance of William and Margaret Patterson at Mental Floss.   

(Image credit: WhisperToMe)

While the original Star Wars trilogy left us with the idea that the Jedi were good and the Sith were bad, the prequels made us doubt the Jedi were all that ethical, and the sequel trilogy further tarnished their reputation. However, the Sith remain ridiculously evil. The latest Star Wars TV series, The Acolyte, further muddies the waters with Jedi who have plenty of questionable motivations and deeds. The streaming series concluded a couple of weeks ago, and received generally favorable reviews, after an initial review-bombing. There is no word yet on whether there will be a season two. Meanwhile, Screen Junkies has plenty to say about the series in an Honest Trailer that makes me feel as if I have seen the entire run of Star Wars: The Acolyte, yet I'm still confused as to what it's all about. The whole idea of space witches has me longing for a simple trench run.

behind the scenes of iconic album covers, a thread: pic.twitter.com/KOFKwvltaL

— pop culture (@gagasyuyi) July 16, 2024

Some album covers are works of art, while others are nonsensical, but all are designed to get our attention and a lot of thought goes into them (with some exceptions).

Twitter user @gagasyuyi collected a list of 34 album covers paired with a photo taken during the photoshoot that gives us an idea of what went into designing it. Most are from the 21st century, although they do go back as far as Abbey Road. You might be surprised by the things you thought were Photoshopped that turn out to be real, and the things you thought were real that were anything but. And we find out that they really did set a guy on fire for the cover of the 1975 Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here.

Check out the entire collection at Twitter or at Threadreader. -via Kottke

This shot of Gabriel Medina is ABSOLUTELY UNREAL 🤯 😱

( 📸: Jerome Brouillet) pic.twitter.com/4JQNI4olsi

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) July 29, 2024

Here we see Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina celebrating after riding a perfect wave, scoring a 9.9 during the qualifying round of the 2024 Olympics. The surfing events are happening in Tahiti, 15,700 kilometers (8400 miles) from Paris. Medina is so happy he's levitating above the water, along with his tethered surfboard!

The full, uncropped photo shows even more. This picture has not been Photoshopped. It was taken by surf photographer Jerome Brouillet, who knows how to capture a moment in time, but this borders on magical. To understand how serendipitous this image is, here is the video sequence showing when it was caught.

Now picture where Brouillet had to be positioned to get the picture. The shot is one in a million, or maybe even one in a billion. Medina may well go on to achieve a gold medal, but he is already a star for posing while flying through the air with a surfboard. -via reddit

This story has nothing to do with underwear. Jenny Nguyen envisioned a sports bar that only showed women's sports on the TVs. It would be more of a pub than a bar, welcoming families with children, maybe with some sports memorabilia. She would offer food and drinks from companies run by women. In 2022, she opened The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon.

On opening night, the line to get in was long. In the first nine months, the bar pulled in a million dollars. Athletes and teams donated memorabilia from women's sports that line the walls. Other people took the idea and ran with it, like Jillian Hiscock, who opened A Bar of Their Own in Minneapolis. And most importantly, young girls saw athletes they could look up to on the TVs and on the walls. Read about the meteoric rise of The Sports Bra and women's sports in general at The 19th. -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Another Believer)

Storm chasing is quite a peculiar occupation, whether one is a professional or a hobbyist. When we first took notice of these folks, they seem tailor-made for exciting action movies and reality TV. The new movie Twisters opened ten days ago and scored a record box office for a natural disaster movie. But is it anything like a real storm chaser's life? Just the more exciting parts. Oh yeah, it takes a special person to even consider heading toward a tornado instead of away from one, but you can't just decide to do it and think you'll be okay. The real labor that storm chasers put in to learn the ropes and find tornados to get relatively intimate with while staying safe is a lot of work, but not all that exciting onscreen. Still, learning the story behind the story is always interesting. Accomplished storm chasers have varied motivations, but some of them have ultimately made the rest of us safer.

The biggest and the best entertainment extravaganzas were staged by Roman emperors who had the power and the wealth to do so. And the audiences were fairly bloodthirsty. The spectacles included chariot races, animal killing, executions, and gladiator fights. For around 200 years, women participated in those fights, and their bouts were often highlighted as the main event.

We don't have a lot of documentation on these female gladiators, and there's not even a Latin word for them, but we know they existed. Most were probably slaves, but there is some evidence that upper class women also participated, which was an even bigger draw. People disapproved of such behavior among higher-status women, but they also went to watch them fight each other. A woman who voluntarily became a gladiator was essentially throwing her reputation away, and that was worth watching, especially since they often fought topless and without a helmet to prove that they were indeed women. Read what little we know about the women gladiators of ancient Rome at Atlas Obscura.