Alchemists worked for centuries to achieve the production of gold, in order to enrich themselves and their sponsors. It finally happened in 1980, but didn't change the world much at all. Glenn T. Seaborg was a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project, ran the Atomic Energy Commission, and discovered ten new elements and more than 100 isotopes.  

In 1980, the Seaborg and a group of other scientists used a particle accelerator to propel beams of carbon and neon nuclei at nearly light speed into foils of the heavy metal bismuth- you know, the stuff you find in relatively large quantities in Peptol-Bismol, used for shotgun pellets, and a variety of other applications.

Why bismuth, rather than the originally planned lead? It is simply easier to isolate gold from bismuth than it is from lead. However, producing gold from lead would have been no more difficult.

As for the result, when they were rifling through the carnage that was the result of the high speed collision between neon, carbon, and bismuth, the physicists discovered the they had successfully made several isotopes of gold.

Was it worth the effort? Certainly not financially. Running a particle accelerator isn't cheap. But the experiment showed that it could be done, and considering the other work at such facilities, doesn't need to be done again. Read the story of the alchemist dream come true at Today I Found Out. 

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Does life really look better in a movie shot on Super 8? It appears to. Maybe that's because it has an old, nostalgic look, since Super 8 film ruled for several decades starting in 1965. I think it's more likely because when you shot motion pictures -or even still pictures- on film instead of a digital format, you only shot the good parts. It was way too expensive to film anything or everything like we can today. This short film is brought to you by the Royal Ocean Film Society.  -via Digg

"How much is that in dog years?" We are used to assuming that for every calendar year, a dog will age the way a human will in seven years. That makes some sort of sense according to a dog's expected life span, but it doesn't tell the whole story. For example, the dog in this picture has one candle on her birthday cake, but she's old enough to have puppies. Veterinary professor Jesse Grady explains the life stages of dogs and cats.

Dogs and cats age differently not just from people but also from each other, based partly on breed characteristics and size. Bigger animals tend to have shorter life spans than smaller ones do. While cats vary little in size, the size and life expectancy of dogs can vary greatly – think a Chihuahua versus a Great Dane.

Human life expectancy has changed over the years. And vets are now able to provide far superior medical care to pets than we could even a decade ago. So now we use a better methodology to define just how old rule of thumb that counted every calendar year as seven “animal years.”

You'll find life stage charts for cats and dogs at The Conversation. According to the cat chart, I have two mature cats and one cat entering his prime.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Flickr user Omer Balamir)

The Soviet Union operated pretty much in isolation from the rest of the world from 1922 to 1991. They had their own nuclear weapons buildup and their own space program, plus manufacturing and technological advances like every other nation, but we didn't get to see them. When they were revealed later, the photographs of Soviet machinery, vehicles, and architecture seemed to come from some bizarro world where nothing is familiar to us. Take, for example, the snowmobile pictured above from the 1950s. It was the Sever-2 Aerosan, developed for the military, seemingly by plopping a sedan body on top of skis and powering it with an airplane engine. You can see a gallery of things made in the USSR, ranging from goofy car designs to scary military installations to Tetris, at Messy Nessy Chic.   

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President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958. That act transferred the duties of the  National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) from the military to a new civilian agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA came about as a response to the Soviet Sputnik program, and accelerated when President Kennedy challenged the US to go to the moon by the end of the '60s. NASA has accomplished a lot in 60 years! This video is one of a series celebrating big milestones in NASA's history. -via Digg 

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Darth Vader is at the top of many "greatest villain" lists, and near the top in the rest. Nerdwriter looks at the reasons why. You might think, duh, but there's a lot more to it than just a badass in a black mask. This video takes a close look at Vader's scenes in the original trilogy, which are fewer and shorter than we remember. -via Laughing Squid

The little triangle you see above is the result of the collision of New York City's street grid with New York City's attitude. And it happened over a hundred years ago. But the story begins a lot earlier, when Manhattan Island was a new and popular place to settle, long before city planners tried to make sense of the city.   

While most of New York City’s streets are laid out in a neatly ordered grid, Lower Manhattan—the oldest part of the city—is, cartographically speaking, kind of a mess. That’s because the city didn’t implement an official master plan for the layout of new streets until 1811, more than a century after the Dutch established a settlement at the southern tip of the island. The earliest-built parts of the city still maintain some of the quirks of a pre-plan settlement where property owners built their own streets with nearly no official oversight, resulting in a haphazard array of oddly shaped, variably sized blocks and narrow, crooked streets.

The bit of property now known as Hess’s triangle is located in this latter part of Manhattan, where the street grid is still a little wonky. It was even more so in the 1910s, when the city decided it needed to extend Seventh Avenue, a wide thoroughfare that was first built as part of that landmark 1811 master plan. In order to make room for traffic and for the construction of a new subway line, the city condemned an 11-block stretch of the West Village, demolishing hundreds of buildings starting in 1913. The extension was finished in 1916.

David Hess owned one of those buildings that was condemned, and he didn't like the idea one bit. Read the story of the Hess Triangle at Mental Floss, and see an explanation of the maps that led to it in this Twitter thread.

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Crowds of people were celebrating Anzac Day in Australia on April 25, 1935, including quite a few who visited Coogee Aquarium south of Sydney. Their festive mood was ruined by a shark with an upset tummy.  

There was a 14-foot tiger shark on display that had been caught the week before. The shark acted like it was in distress and was thrashing about.  Then, in front of horrified onlookers, it threw up a human arm.

In an effort to identify the arm’s poor owner, police published pictures and a description of the dismembered appendage in newspapers throughout the region.  The left arm had a tattoo of two boxers in a fighting stance, there was also a rope tied around the wrist.

The arm was identified by its tattoos and fingerprints as belonging to a former boxer named James ‘Jim’ Smith. The grisly public display by the shark would lead one to think that the fish had killed and eaten the man, but that wasn't the case at all. The shark was gutted and searched, and no other human remains were found. Furthermore, police determined the arm had been severed with a knife. The poor shark had not committed murder, but only presented evidence of one. Read the story of the shark arm murder investigation at Strange Remains.  -via Strange Company

Further reading reveals that the tiger shark didn't even eat the arm. The tiger shark had eaten a smaller shark that had eaten the arm.

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Artist Charlie Wren shared the concept art for Mjolnir, Thor's mighty hammer, as it was developed for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Oh, these weren't the only ideas, but they are the many that were approved by Marvel as the process went along. Any of them would have been fine by me, but after three Thor movies and four Avengers movies, it would be hard to accept anything but the final Mjolnir. Click on the pictures to see them in full. -via io9

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Pro surfer Koa Smith caught a wave off Namibia's Skeleton Bay that took him for a nearly a mile! He surfed a single wave for a distance of 1.5 kilometers for two minutes that took him through eight barrels. It was captured on video, both from a drone and from Smith's own GoPro POV. Both videos are mesmerizing. 

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My whole day surfing I try to InVision that one dream wave that I want to experience. I picture it clearly. What it will look like. How it will feel. The emotions pouring out of me when the wave is complete. Then this happen :)

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We are coming to the end of another Shark Week, and once again we must confront the difference between real shark research and the exciting movies in which they play the villain. Jill McAndrew of the Long Island Aquarium knows sharks, and is happy to burst your bubble about the biggest shark films. -via Buzzfeed

Antique piano keys, scrimshaw, and those weird hooks that grandpa hangs his hat on... they are all made from the solid parts of animals. But what's the difference between ivory, bone, antler, and horn, and what makes some more valuable than others? Ivory, which is dental material from elephants, whales, and walruses, may be valuable because of scarcity due to legal restrictions, but there are other reasons it was once so popular.

Ivory is also valued and appreciated for its structural properties. The layers of dentine within the tusk form a wavy, interlacing pattern (or 'grain'). This offers different surface effects and also gives ivory its strength, making it suitable for long-lasting, detailed carving. An oily substance within the pattern's cavities helps reduce brittleness and give a smooth finish that can be enhanced with polishing to reveal a range of colours from bright white through to shades of yellow-brown. Indian elephant ivory is generally whiter and softer than African ivory. When soaked in warm water ivory expands very slightly making it easier to carve. In China master craftsmen may have used this process to ease the manufacture of the multi-layered 'puzzle' balls, where each ball is a detached layer carved within another, and which together represent principals of Chinese philosophy. The Northwest Coast Style drumstick-head is an excellent example of how the individual characteristics of one piece of ivory have been used to show off the skills and traditions of the Haida people of North America.

Bone, antler, and horn have their own unique properties, and are available from a larger number of species. Read more about these various materials at the Pitt River Museum. -via TYWKIWDBI

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In which Jhall and Andrew Bridgman at Dorkly explain why Darth gave up his entire reason for turning to the dark side. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Star Wars: Episode IX, expected in December of 2019, will complete the nine-movie Skywalker saga. Filming is set to begin, so there's really no way to keep the working cast a secret. Therefore, Disney has announced who will be returning to work on the film, who will not, and who has been hired for new roles. That announcement contains spoilers, although you will probably encounter those same spoilers again and again in the next year-and-a-half. The biggest one, or maybe second biggest, is:

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Yeah, America is big, so we developed four lane roads to get us from town to town faster. Then four-lane roads were extended into town to alleviate traffic. But do we really need four-lane roads in a city? City streets are safer with traffic going slower. To achieve that, some cities are putting their streets on a diet, making them smaller and slower. So far, that's making street use easier for pedestrians and cyclists, while still not causing worse traffic for drivers -in most places. Your mileage may vary, no pun intended. -via Laughing Squid