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

While you're not likely to study the history of toilets in school, the story of what we don't normally talk about logically follows what we already know about historical eras. Public sanitation systems were sophisticated (if weird) during the Roman Empire, but were lost during the Dark Ages. Later developments led to better hygiene, but only for communities that could afford it, leading to global inequalities that continue today. By the way, this TED-Ed video shows cartoon defecation, in case that bothers you.

We can all agree that cannibalism is horrible, but circumstances distinguish desperation from evil. It's one thing to eat a dead body because there's nothing else to sustain life, but quite another thing to murder someone ...and then eat them. History is full of both kinds of cannibalism, like the survivors of the French frigate Méduse.

In early 1816, after the Napoleonic Wars gave France control of Senegal, the Méduse sailed south to Africa to take the reins of its new territory. But tragedy struck. Fifty miles offshore, the ship ran aground. It quickly dawned on the ship’s 400 passengers and crew that there weren’t enough lifeboats to save everybody.

Instead, those who couldn’t fit into the lifeboats—147 passengers in total—huddled onto a makeshift raft. (Some passengers, meanwhile, opted to stay behind with the frigate.) Initially, the raft was towed by the remaining lifeboats … until someone made the fateful decision to cut the ropes. For 13 days, the raft drifted aimlessly. People died—from murder, from being washed (and tossed) overboard, from starvation. Eventually, the survivors turned to cannibalism (and drank their own urine). By the time the raft was discovered, only 15 people were still alive. The tragedy would later inspire one of the biggest paintings of the 19th century, the 16-by-23-foot The Raft of The Medusa.

Read that story, and those of six other incidents of cannibalism at Mental Floss.

We know that an asteroid hit the earth about 66 million years ago and caused the dinosaurs to die out. But what was it like in the moment? What were the immediate effects? And how did an impact in one place cause death and destruction globally? Kurzgesagt tells us all about it as if it were a dramatic campfire story.

Don't be daunted by the video length- the actual story is less than ten minutes.

Over the weekend, an airliner had to turn back to the gate and the crew summoned authorities because two passengers were fighting over an armrest. Yes, it seems ridiculous to get into it over something so trivial, but these kinds of situations are exactly what etiquette was developed for- so that everyone knows what is expected. Use of the limited armrests in an airplane should be common knowledge, but apparently some people need to be taught. Jason Torchinsky explains how airline armrests should be allocated, and the reasoning behind the unwritten rules at Jalopnik.

(Image credit: Jason Torchinsky)

Since the death of beloved Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, the show has been hosted by a round robin of celebrities and fans. This is in part fun for those who had appearing on the game show on their bucket list, and also part audition for a new host. Nine different people have put in their two weeks (or a month, in the case of Ken Jennings, who stepped in immediately when the show returned). There are seven more people already scheduled to host the show this summer, and there may be more in the wings. So who's done a good job so far? Den of Geek breaks down the performances of the nine who have hosted so far, some of whom would not take the job permanently and others who would jump at the chance. I've only caught a couple of episodes of each, so I don't know how well this ranking will hold up against your opinions, but I completely agree with number one. Still, there's plenty of summer -and plenty of guest hosts- to come.  -via Digg

The China National Space Administration successfully landed a rover on Mars on May 14. Now we have a selfie that shows just how cute the Zhurong Mars rover is! The rover's landing platform is seen to the right.  

The rover took this selfie by dropping a camera attached to its belly about 10 meters (32 feet) away from the landing platform, then positioning itself next to the landing platform, Chinese space officials said. The camera wirelessly transmitted the picture to the rover, which then sent it to Earth via the Tianwen-1 orbiter.

The rover is expected to monitor Mars weather, analyze surface material, and look for evidence of water over the next 90 days. The Tianwen-1 orbiter is designed to orbit above for a couple of years. Read more about the Chinese rover at LiveScience.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: CNSA/Zhurong Mars rover)

Advice about sex has been around forever, some for better and some for worse. In the Victorian age (1837-1901), publicly available advice on sex was often wound up with the ideas of sin and public decency and control of one's animal nature. A list of 11 bits of Victorian advice on sex starts with these gems:

1. Be aware that sex makes you stupid.

Knowledge workers of the world be warned: “The accumulated evidence of the world goes to show that celibacy is a most favorable state for severe mental labor,” according to Eliza Bisbee Duffey.

Though radically progressive on many matters, Duffey held to the ancient notion that sex wasted the body’s vital spirits. She therefore recommended abstinence, by which “the forces of the body are conserved, and are concentrated, and that goes to brain-power which would otherwise be exhausted in sexual union.”

2. Too much hair makes you horny.

Large buns coiled atop the head were all the rage in the 1880s, much to the chagrin of Dr. John Cowan. “This great pressure of hair on the small brain produces great heat in the part,” he warned, increasing blood flow to the brain’s sex center and causing “a chronic desire for its sexual exercise.”

As you may guess, sex within marriage was okay, as long as one didn't engage in it too much. Read the rest of the list of Victorian sex tips at Mental Floss.