The Grumman F6F Hellcat was used in many dogfights in World war II, but afterward was considered obsolete. The US Navy made use of them, as drones to serve as targets for testing new battle aircraft and weapons. On August 16, 1956, a Hellcat equipped to be controlled by radio launched for just such a test. But the drone took matters into its own hands, or wings, and stopped responding to the RC pilot's commands. Instead of heading out to sea, it circled back to Southern California. The Air Force dispatched two pilots in F-89D Scorpions loaded with missiles to shoot it down. Their equipment, while thoroughly modern, did not cooperate either, and one failure led to another. It was a comedy of errors in the sky, but on the ground below, residents of Palmdale and Santa Clarita were dodging missiles.

The drone managed to avoid all 204 missiles fired at it, but was eventually brought down. The missiles on the ground started fires that burned hundreds of acres and involved around a thousand firefighters. It was only luck and coincidence that no one was killed. Read about the drone that embarrassed both the US Navy and the Air Force at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: US Navy) 

Jeff Letendre encountered a fawn who was too young to be away from her mother, but there was no sign of a mother, and the fawn was very hungry. So he provided her with milk and named her Fairy. These cases are sometimes pretty sad because a baby wild animal adopted by humans often has to live in captivity for the rest of their life. But Jeff was well aware of that and kept Fairy outside and encouraged her to meet other deer once she was weaned. Fairy lucked out and met a deer family with a mother that had enough maternal instinct to let a strange fawn join the family. Now Jeff has the best of both worlds, knowing that Fairy is happy and healthy living in the woods, but coming back to see him every once in a while. That makes him a Disney princess. You can see more of Jeff and his woodland friends at Instagram.

People somehow get the idea that America's national parks are safe places. If they weren't, why would they encourage people to visit? But that's not the philosophy of the parks. They operate under the idea that people should see and experience the wonders of nature, and they have set up rules, guidelines, and warnings to keep people safe. It's up to us to heed those warnings. Yellowstone National Park has two million acres of natural wonders, and some of them can kill you, but that mainly happens when people disregard the rules and the warnings.

The most dangerous things at Yellowstone are not the bears, nor the bison, although people have been killed by them. The thermal vents have killed more people than all animal attacks combined. And the difference is even more stark when you consider serious injuries. Just last week, a woman fell into near-boiling water when the ground gave way, because she was hiking off the marked trails. Read up on the history of injuries and deaths due to disregarding the guidelines near Yellowstone's hot springs and thermal vents at Outside Online. Keep in mind those deaths and injuries are still rare. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory)

The word "we" in the post title doesn't mean me or you, because I haven't got a clue, but rather scientists who know what temperature many species of dinosaur had when they were alive. I didn't even know those had been discovered at all, much less how they did it. All we have left of those dinosaurs are fossilized bones and a few impressions from skin, feathers, and footprints. But chemical analysis has detected a chemical called bioapatite, which sounds like something that makes you hungry. The study of this molecule tells us that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, or at least many dinosaurs that we know about. That makes them very different from the reptiles we studied in grade school, and more like the birds we barely studied at all. Minute Earth explains the importance of molecular chemistry to the study of paleontology and how some scientists took the temperatures of long-extinxt diosaurs.   

Chinese archaeologists have been excavating an ancient cemetery in northwestern China since the year 2000. They've unearthed 167 graves, some reaching back as far as 3,600 years. Some of the oldest mummies recovered had a substance sprinkled on their heads and necks. Modern chemical analysis and DNA tests have revealed that this is cheese.

The origins of cheese have always been murky, but it is assumed that it was developed on the Eurasian steppes, where livestock farming always did better than agricultural crops. The ancient cheese is kefir, made by introducing bacteria and yeasts from kefir grains into milk. They've found that the burial cheese contains Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Pichia kudriavzevii, which are still used to make kefir today. The milk was from both cows and goats. What does it taste like? So far, no one has admitted to trying 3,000-year-old cheese from a grave, but if it weren't good, they wouldn't have put in the work to make it. Read about the oldest cheese yet found at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: 罗布泊)  

The Peruvian desert has massive geoglyphs that aren't visible from the ground. These 2,000-year-old drawings, called the Nazca Lines, were only discovered after the airplane was developed, and we still don't know their purpose. But we now have a lot more of them. Around 430 of them were discovered by flying overhead over the last hundred years, but a new study by scientists from Yamagata University in Japan using artificial intelligence software has revealed 303 more. The computer programs can detect older, more blurry lines than human eyesight can, and much faster, too. Some of the new images were investigated, and slowly they were confirmed by scientists who spent 2,600 hours studying the sites on the ground.

The new images show llamas, orcas, fantasy creatures, and humans, including a beheading. It will take years to investigate them all, but we have a preview in images posted at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Masato Sakai et al./PNAS, 2024)

Today we have an unlimited number of colors at our fingertips thanks to modern chemistry. But it was once very difficult to find, isolate, and use pigments for paints, dyes, and ceramic glazes. Each pigment has a story behind it, and some of those stories are pretty interesting.

Egyptian blue was the first synthetic pigment we know about, used as far back as the 3rd millennium BCE. It was made by baking quartz, copper, alkali, and lime at very high temperatures, but the formula was lost until it was reverse-engineered in the 19th century. Egyptian blue turns out to have unique properties that the Egyptians who made it had no concept of, but are now being used in communication technology.

The story of Egyptian blue and nine other historical pigments are told in an excerpt from the book The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature, just released today, at Mental Floss.    

(Image credit: Djehouty)

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

As far as I know, flipping tables doesn't happen all that much in real life, even when people are very angry. The most well-known example is Jesus flipping the tables of the moneychangers at the temple, which is a great display of anger. In modern times, someone is more liable to punch a wall, if not a person. But the sight of a table flipping over is perfect for movies. It's easy to do, since tables are not as heavy as they are big, and spilling the contents makes for a messy, colorful visual. Much more spectacular than punching a wall. It's also surprising, telegraphs the idea of sudden anger quite successfully, and can be cathartic for the audience. 

Yoni Wagner made a supercut of table flips in movies to show us how often it's done, and frankly, to entertain us. This video contains NSFW language. As you'd expect, there are at least a half-dozen clips of Jesus flipping tables. Now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can put things right again. ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) -Thanks, Brother Bill!

When someone makes a tense encounter worse, we say they have escalated the situation. When we ride on an escalator, we could say that we escalated to the second floor (but we don't, because that just sounds pretentious). You might think that both actions use the same word because it means going one level up. The word might mean that now, but the word "escalate" didn't exist until 1900 when "Escalator" was trademarked for a moving staircase device. Yes, it's a brand name. See, we already had a term for going higher, and it was "elevate." But you don't see charges of a provocateur or police elevating a situation because that sounds like they are making it better.  

This is just one of several words for things that you think are named for another thing, but it's actually the other way around. Read about escalate and six other examples of names of things that didn't come from where you thought at Cracked.
 
(Image source: Know Your Meme)

In this episode of of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama), we get classically literal. The old saying is that an optimist looks at a glass of water and sees it as half-full, while a pessimist looks and sees the same glass as half-empty. Meanwhile, a pedant looks at the same glass and says that it contains a combination of 50% drinkable liquid and 50% air. That's pretty much when a logical discussion shuts down and people try to change the subject. We all know what an empty glass means; we've washed a lot of them. But if you are going to get really literal, you can forget all about optimists and pessimists. What does a physicist (Henry Reich) and an engineer (Randall Munroe) make of a glass that is only 50% full, and the rest is ...nothing? That means a vacuum, and a glass in that situation can get violent. Strangely, the effect can be recreated in real life, but be sure to have a broom and some paper towels handy.

In previous centuries, some people were buried with extra precautions in case they may want to climb back out of the ground and cause trouble, in eastern Europe and most often in Poland. Now archaeologists have found a similar grave in Germany, but the entire graveyard tells a chilling tale.

This burial place was at a gallows near Quedlinburg, where prisoners were executed by hanging from the 1660s to the 1800s. They found 16 intact graves so far, most without coffins. These were people who died without confession or absolution, and were found on their sides or face down, as if they were dumped in their graves after execution. There were also two bone pits with mixed-up skeletons that were most likely older and had been moved to make room for newer graves.

One burial was different in that there was a coffin, and the body was laid on its back. Speculation is that this may have been a suicide, so the body was buried there instead of in a church cemetery. Another person was found to have been laid on his back, with large rocks carefully piled on his chest. This is a sign that he might have been suspected of being a revenant or a vampire, and the rocks were there to keep him from rising from the grave. Read more about the discoveries at the gallows cemetery at LiveScience.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Jörg Orschiedt/State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt )

The things we re afraid of killing us are not the things we should really be afraid of. We hear about shark attacks in the news, and they are scary. Then we hear the shockingly small odds of a shark attack happening to us, and yet we are still afraid. But if you don't live or vacation near the ocean, you have no reason to worry at all. Similarly, I'm not afraid of flying because I haven't been on a plane in 15 years. But even if I did take a flight, the odds of dying are greater in driving to the airport. This video is all about statistics. Right off the bat, I found out that I'm not in the normal demographic to watch Kurzgesagt videos, but if you are, it's a good idea to know what's most likely to kill you, and maybe you can lower the odds. Despite the posted length, this video is only 10:30; the rest is promotional.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

In 1993, the Walt Disney Company began quietly buying up land in northern Virginia near Manassas under the names of shell companies. When that happened in thee 1960s, we got Disney World. This time the plan was to open a theme park called Disney's America near Washington, DC. It would be dedicated to American history, with sections that followed eras in our country's history, such as a colonial square, a Civil War fort, and Ellis Island.

One might think that such a theme park might take away from the family activities of the nation's capital, where you can already see history displayed at the Smithsonian, the mall with its memorials, various museums, and the actual seat of government. And how would if affect the real battlefield of Manassas? As soon as the park was announced, historians expressed concerns over the Disneyfication of American history. There were plans to present Ellis Island with the Muppets! Under pressure, Disney changed its plans and decided to make the park more like its other theme parks, under the name Disney’s American Celebration. Then the whole project disappeared completely. Read about Disney's America, the theme park that never was, at the Conversation. 

(Image credit: Mliu92)

This picture was posted at reddit with the honest question: "For purpose or looks?" As you might expect, people were throwing around guesses while having no idea what the real answer is. It's a scheme to deter skateboarders, roller skaters, or bikes. It's a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's to keep homeless people from sleeping there. It's to deter speeders.

Then folks realized this is not a horizontal surface at all, but a vertical one. It's the side of a building, which the poster assumed was obvious. Okay, now it's an old-fashioned fire escape. Or a ladder for Spider-Man. But Toronto Tom knows. He explained it is for looks, to make a change in the brick color look less like an accident, if they couldn't hide the transition in a corner. In Copenhagen in the early 20th century, they built the front facade from expensive red bricks, then transitioned to cheaper yellow bricks toward the rear. Others have seen this pattern used to delineate the size of different properties in row houses. It can also be used when adding on to an existing house, to blur the line between old brick and newer brick.

(Image credit: Rodutchi_i)

Have you ever heard of the TV show The Queen's Messenger? Probably not, since it aired in 1928. But wait! We didn't have TV until after the second World War! Well, we did, but no one had a TV set to watch it on. The Queen's Messenger was an experimental production, a radio play transferred to a visual format for broadcast on station W2XAD (also known as WGY) in Schenectady, New York. It is considered the first TV drama. Too bad no one saw it. Oh, the broadcast station set up television receivers around the city, with three-inch screens, so maybe a few lucky people saw it, most WGY employees.

Television was still in its infancy when World War II put aside its development, but afterward, programming became more plentiful and people started buying TV sets, which made all the difference. In this video, The Historian introduces us to five groundbreaking series that made television something everyone wanted to see. I would put one thing differently, though. I Love Lucy was certainly groundbreaking in its humor and quality, but its real impact was that it was the first TV show that was recorded so it could be replayed, and therefore introduced the rerun. That's why we can still watch I Love Lucy, but not the earlier shows.