Anything that can be created can become an art medium. That includes microbes in a petri dish. And therefore, since people will make a competition out of anything, we have the American Society for Microbiology Agar Art Contest. Scientists take a dish of agar, a nutritious gel made from seaweed, and add invisible germs of different types to just the right spot. When the microbes divide and proliferate, a colorful scene is formed -if the artist knows what they are doing.

Despite its growing popularity over the past five years, microbial art isn't a recent fad. Alexander Fleming, who discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin on an agar plate in 1928, created images using live organisms. Yet, this genre of scientific art didn’t gather much attention from researchers until the last decade, when the American Society of Microbiology brought agar art into the spotlight in 2015 with an annual contest.

Learn how agar art is done, and see more works from the contest, at Smithsonian.

People understood hot and cold a long time before we had what we call temperature, which is the way we measure heat. While other scientists had tinkered with the idea of measuring temperature, it was not until 1714 that Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit gave us a practical and fairly accurate thermometer.

Fahrenheit had based his invention on Danish scientist Ole Roemer's alcohol-based thermometer. Roemer labeled his temperature scale with zero marked at the temperature where brine (salt water) froze and 60 as the point at which water boiled, wrote Ulrich Grigull, the late director of the Institute for Thermodynamics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, in a 1986 conference presentation. Ice melted at 7.5 degrees on the Roemer scale, and a human body registered at 22.5.

Fahrenheit's thermometer, though, was much more accurate. He used the same freezing and boiling reference points as Roemer's scale — referred to in his writings as "Extream Cold" and "Extream Hott" — but roughly multiplied the scale by four to divide each marker on the scale into finer increments. On Fahrenheit's scale, wrote Grigull, the four reference points were: 0 (at the combined freezing temperature of brine), 30 (the freezing point of regular water), 90 (body temperature) and 240 (the boiling point of water).

These points were recalibrated after Fahrenheit's death. But there was room for improvement, so Anders Celsius made a temperature scale that was more math-friendly and Lord Kelvin made another that expanded the scale for scientific use. An article at LiveScience explains how the concept of temperature evolved and how we got our scales. The question of which measurement scale is best still depends on where you are and exactly what you are measuring. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user barbbarbbarb)

In the late 19th century, there was a slew of unexplained maladies among people who were involved in train accidents. After a series of crashes in Britain in 1867, so many victims came forward that the syndrome was dubbed "railway spine." While spinal difficulties were prominent, the effects were varied, from anxiety to hearing loss to paralysis, and some even died. But doctors could find no injury or source for those symptoms.

The problem was, there was no way to really verify these claims, since medical science at the time was limited largely to what doctors could see. And they couldn’t see anything wrong with these victims—there was no obvious spinal injury, and traditional concussion symptoms were known to disappear after a while. But these people were reporting injuries for years.

The railroads called bullshit. They said these people were just malingerers who wanted money. John Eric Erichsen coined the term and wrote a whole book about these people. The craziest part was, some of the folks complaining of physical or mental problems were witnesses. They hadn’t even been in the crash.

Railway spine remained a mystery to those who suffered from it and their doctors, but we have an explanation in the present. Read what we know now at Jalopnik.  -via Damn Interesting

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