In steel mills, the molten metal is passed through a series of rollers to mold it into the right size. The steel is at 1200°C (2200°F) or even hotter. Occasionally, something will go wrong and you get a "cobble."

A cobble will occur when there is a roller malfunction, the line of steel deviates from the roller path or, as mentioned above, the end of the steel splits. All of a sudden the continuous roll of steel will come to an abrupt halt although the steel behind is still being pushed through the working rollers at speeds which can reach up to 30 mph. The steel at the front of the line has nowhere to go, the pressure builds very quickly, the material begins to coil up and then all of a sudden it will flick into the air creating enormous loops which have been likened to a “light sabre”.

That's dangerous. And it happens more often than you'd like to think.

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You can see more videos of steel cobbles at Boing Boing.

The 2016 war movie Hacksaw Ridge was based on a documentary called The Conscientious Objector, about Desmond Doss, a World War II medic who refused to carry a weapon. He was the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Medal of Honor. The movie was a hit with critics, a box-office hit, and won a slew of awards. You might want to learn some of the things that went on behind the scenes of Hacksaw Ridge.  

7. Some things were obviously changed for the film.

The fight between Desmond and his father was actually between Desmond’s father and his uncle. His mother had Desmond hide his father’s gun so nothing happened.

6. The director said that the war scenes were based on his nightmares.

Mel Gibson’s father was a WWII veteran that would tell his son of his days on the battlefield as bedtime stories. There’s no doubt that there would be a few restless nights following that.

There's more trivia about Hacksaw Ridge at TVOM.

If you've ever used a 50-year-old cookbook, you might find yourself confused at an ingredient list that calls for a "box" or "can" of something. That something might have come in one size then, but is available in many sizes or altogether different packaging today. Recreating what people ate thousands of years ago is even more complicated. One archeological site that has an intriguing amount of information about food is Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Farrell Monaco works at the site, with its 35 bakeries complete with frescoes and burnt loaves of bread, frozen in time by the disaster. She chronicles her work with the Pompeii Food and Drink project at her site Tavola Mediterranea.

Each morning, Monaco picked her way across the site early, before it was beset by throngs of tourists. These walks, she says, stoked her imagination. She wondered about daily routines from 2,000 years ago, when the volcano was of little immediate concern and bakers and cooks fussed to fortify the busy city. What smells drifted from ovens in the morning? How did lunch taste? In pursuit of answers, Monaco decided to recreate a panis quadratus and bring the past into her kitchen.  

Piecing together a 2000-year-old recipe took study, experimentation, and guesswork, but the result is something Monaco plans to make a part of her regular meal planning. Read about Monaco's panis quadratus and the difficulty of recreating ancient food at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Farrell Monaco)

It's not easy being a teenager, and it's not easy raising one. As cultures shift, young people are the first to display significant differences. Findings from the Monitoring the Future Study, which has been surveying 12th graders since 1976 and various teenagers since the 1990s, show a recent downward trend in happiness among middle school and high school students.   

The researchers, echoing findings elsewhere, found a steady uptick in self-esteem and happiness among teens throughout the 1990s and 2000s. But they also found that since 2012, teens’ overall psychological well-being has noticeably declined. In 2012, for instance, the average happiness rating of 10th graders hovered around 2.06; by 2016, it had dropped below 2.00. The deceases were relatively modest and never fell below the ratings seen in the dark days of the early 1990s, but they were also abrupt and larger than any other momentary decrease seen in the preceding years.

The year 2012 also happens to be—not coincidentally, the researchers theorize—the first year that a slim majority of Americans reported owning a smartphone, as did over a third of teens. By 2016, over three-quarters of teens said the same.

The biggest drop was between 2012 and 2015, which further points to smartphone culture as a possible culprit. So they compared teens by the time they spent looking at screens and found a correlation between phone, computer, and TV use and lower happiness reporting. Read more about the study at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Flickr user Esther Vargas)

Lesson number one: don't do this. Here we have an illustration of the immaturity of teenage boys, possibly influenced by the action movies they've seen and stunts performed by professionals with a staff ready for any contingency. These guys have an idea, but no contingency plan and little foresight.  

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The second part is a lesson in what not to do when you are on fire. Of course he wants his pants off, but the procedure is stop, drop, and roll, which works better when you're not soaked in gasoline. An alternate method is to smother the fire with a blanket or something. They didn't have a blanket, but his buddy eventually did the only thing he could, and smothered the fire with his body. This happened quite a few years ago, so we are pretty sure they are okay. -via reddit

Henriette Kleppan's family moved to a new home with their cat, Sverre. The house needed some work, including building new stairs. After the carpenters were gone, the family couldn't find the cat. They called for Sverre and finally heard him crying weakly from inside the new stairs! Four-year-old Julie and 7-year-old Mikkel were quite upset.

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Sverre was closed up inside the stairs for at least five hours. He was pretty glad to be out, and doesn't seem to hold a grudge about the misadventure. -via Digg

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Bess Flowers was born in Sherman, Texas, on November 23, 1898. While growing up, her father was extremely strict. When Bess dated boys, her father would always bawl them out, much to Bess's consternation. She finally grew tired of her dad's boorish behavior, and "borrowing" the extra money her mother kept stashed in the family sugar bowl, she decided to leave home and head for New York. "I was going to New York because I wanted to be an actress," she was to recall.

But at the train station, Bess spotted a poster with oranges on it, advertising another destination. "What the devil," she impulsively decided, "I'll go to California and get into pictures." Little did she know that not only would she "get into pictures," she would become the most prolific actress (or actor, for that matter) in the history of motion pictures.

Bess actually could never remember the name of the first movie she appeared in, but she did recall it was at Metro in 1922. "I got a job the first day I went on an interview," she remembered. In 1923, Bess made her first known and documented movie appearance, as an un-credited extra in the silent film Hollywood. She appeared in two more films in 1923, then took the next two years off (for whatever unknown reason) before beginning her amazing career as an extra in earnest.

For the next 38 years, beginning in 1926, Bess Flowers was to be an "uncredited extra" in over 350 feature films, not counting many comedy shorts. She is generally accepted by most sources as the performer who appeared in the most movies.

Okay, let me start this post off by saying EATING LAUNDRY DETERGENT IS TOTALLY, COMPLETELY AND ABSOLUTELY STUPID.

January was supposed to be my month off.  It was the month I was going to spend updating the website, getting my recipes for the year in order, and taking a little time off for me.

But noooo…humanity had to step in and decide this was the month that eating laundry detergent was going to get idiotically stupid.

You may've noticed some talk around the internet about young people eating packets of laundry detergent -specifically Tide Pods. It's a social media stunt, and it's dangerous. If you think those things are pretty enough to eat, you can make a treat that's just as pretty but also safe and edible, with the tropical tastes of mangos and coconut. Hellen Die (quoted above) figured out how to do it with a recipe that's part science lesson, since the ingredients include agar-agar and edible film. Get the complete recipe and instructions for Monkey Brain Forbidden Fruit at the Necro Nom-Nom-Nomicon.  

If Quentin Tarantino directed the next Star Trek feature film, it would be the weirdest, bloodiest, most intense Star Trek ever! Luckily, we have some footage that fits the bill in this trailer. This is not for children.  

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Nerdist presents a vision of Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Bones, and the rest of the USS Enterprise crew in a grindhouse B-movie you can't wait to see, coming soon to a drive-in near you. -via Digg

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research About Questions That Might Strike You As Being Strange
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Are Motorways Rational From Slime Mold’s Point of View?
“Are Motorways Rational From Slime Mould’s Point of View?” Andrew Adamatzky, Selim Akl, Ramon Alonso-Sanz, Wesley van Dessel, Zuwairie Ibrahim, Andrew Ilachinski, Jeff Jones, Anne V. D. M. Kayem, Genaro J. Martinez, Pedro de Oliveira, Mikhail Prokopenko, Theresa Schubert, Peter Sloot, Emanuele Strano, and Xin-She Yang, arXiv:1203.2851v1, March 13, 2012. (Thanks to investigator Vaughn Tan for bringing this to our attention.) The authors report:

Motorway networks of fourteen geographical areas are considered: Australia, Africa, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Iberia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, The Netherlands, UK, USA. For each geographical entity we represented major urban areas by oat flakes and inoculated the slime mould in a capital. After slime mould spanned all urban areas with a network of its protoplasmic tubes, we extracted a generalised Physarum graph from the network and compared the graphs with an abstract motorway graph using most common measures.... We obtained a series of intriguing results, and found that the slime mould approximates best of all the motorway graphs of Belgium, Canada and China, and that for all entities studied the best match between Physarum and motorway graphs is detected by the Randic index (molecular branching index).

If you're used to a regular chairlift, trying to get up a snowy mountain with a platter lift is challenging. It's even harder on a snowboard. But when you are an inexperienced snowboarder, it's almost impossible. These guys are out on their first snowboarding expedition at Nevis Range Mountain Experience in Torlundy, Scotland.  

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On the one hand, it's nice to find out how incompetent you are before you get to the top of the mountain. On the other hand, you're now stuck in a viral video with the videographer laughing at you, leading the internet audience to do the same. -via Tastefully Offensive

When a little green man from Mars approaches you and says, "Take me to your leader," who are you going to call? "Your leader" could be anyone from your father to the mayor to the president, but getting any of those people to take your call is another thing entirely. Calling 911 might even get you arrested when you tell them what your emergency is. Do we even have a protocol for alien contact? Gizmodo called around to various authorities to find out, and mostly found out how they all passed the buck on such calls.

Bertram Kelly, Public Affairs Team Lead, Centers for Disease Control

UFOs are not in the scope of research work performed by the CDC. We suggest you reach out to NASA for any information regarding UFOs.

Catharine “Cassie” Conley, Former Planetary Protection Officer, currently a researcher at NASA

That would depend if it’s a big alien or a little alien. If it’s an intelligent alien, that’s actually probably [the responsibility] of the Air Force, other militaries and probably the UN. If it’s a tiny alien, you wouldn’t know you ran into it.

Daryl Mayer, 88th Air Base Wing Public Affairs

To be honest, we don’t have any guidance here about such an event. You might be able to get more from the Pentagon Press Desk, but I’m not sure.

There are plenty more opinions and procedures from everyone from the NYPD to the Astronomy Department at Harvard, at Gizmodo.

Want to see Breaking Bad in just a tad over a minute? We've got you covered! Condensing a story that took 62 hour-long episodes into one minute is not the least bit edifying for someone who hasn't already seen the TV series, but for those of us who remember it fondly, it hits the high points. And the tiny little characters are cute. Contains NSFW language.   

(YouTube link)

YouTuber cineytele made this animated recap in celebration of Breaking Bad's 10th anniversary. -via Aaron Paul

The US-Canadian border along the 49th parallel is the longest national border in the world at 5,525 miles. You'd think such a long border would be fairly invisible, especially since it runs through forests for much of its length. But there's a straight line running through those woods in which a 20-foot-wide swath of trees have been cut down. In fact, they call it the Slash. It's visible in satellite photos.

Stripped of trees, this slice runs through national forests and over mountains. It is too long and remote to be continuously cut down, but every few years (longer on the Western sections, where growth is slower) workers freshly deforest the greenery that grows back.

It might seem unnecessary, but there is a reason for this intervention: a person on either side wandering close to the border can see it and recognize they’re approaching the line. So each year, American taxpayers pay around half a cent each to the International Boundary Commission (IBC) to help periodically maintain this dividing void.

Learn more about the Slash, particularly how the two countries maintain it, at 99% Invisible. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Carolyn Cuskey)

You probably never heard of gluten until just the last few years, but all you know now is that it's in bread. The American Chemical Society and PBS Digital Studios show and tell us what gluten is, how it works, and what it does in bread.

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Is gluten good or bad? That depends on who you are. Some people have a physical condition that makes gluten an enemy for them, such as celiac disease or a wheat allergy. But gluten doesn't scale like, say, sugar, in that we should all restrict our intake lest we develop obesity, diabetes, or cavities. Gluten is fine for most of us. Oh yeah, the bread recipe is here.  -via Laughing Squid