Carl Scheele was an 18th century chemist who had some amazing accomplishments. He discovered oxygen, for instance. He also isolated and identified a slew of other elements, including molybdenum, tungsten, barium, hydrogen, and chlorine, plus a bunch of organic acids. But almost 300 years later, Scheele's name is known best for a pigment he developed called Scheele's Green, which became quite popular, especially in wallpaper. It was loaded with arsenic, however, which was released into the air when fungus consumed the wallpaper.

Scheele himself had a habit of studying his elements and compounds by sniffing them and tasting them, and ended up furthering our knowledge of how dangerous these chemicals can be. When he died at age 43, the cause of death was determined to be mercury poisoning. It probably didn't help that he had, over time, consumed a fair amount of arsenic, chlorine, and other heavy metals along the way. Scheele is only one of five scientists whose work ended up either killing them or making their lives miserable, tragically chronicled at Cracked.   

Update: To be fair, Cracked's list could be described as "four scientists who brought destruction upon themselves, and one who brought destruction on everyone." However, Geoduck pointed out that the fifth, Thomas Midgley, was indeed killed by his own invention. Thanks, Geoduck!

You may have seen a visual comparison of the Titanic (the biggest ship of its time) with a modern cruise ship to show how enormous cruise ships have become. You also have to understand they are two different kinds of ships, with different purposes, and that's why they are built that way and look nothing alike. In fact, ocean cruises started out as a new idea that sprung up to keep ocean liners earning money in the off season, and grew substantially when people started traveling by plane. Not only were ocean liners refurbished to cruise, but new ships were designed specifically to make money on cruises alone. Today, cruise ships are pretty much modern resorts in one crowded building that happen to float. But at least you can tell people you've been to the Bahamas without having to drive or find a pit stop on the way. Vox takes us from luxury ocean liners to modern cruise ships and explains why they are so different.

Do you remember that time that the Idaho Department of Fish and Game dropped a bunch of beavers from an airplane and they parachuted into Chamberlain Basin? That was in 1948. The beavers took a look around at their new home and said, "We got a lot of work to do here." And boy, did they ever work! The beavers and their descendants built dams and transformed the area along Baugh Creek into a series of ponds and wetlands, which saved the local flora and fauna from the dangers of drought. Satellite imagery shows that the areas where beavers live are more lush and green than parts of Idaho with no beavers.

In 2018, the Sharps Fire blazed through Baugh Creek. In the aftermath, the picture above was taken. You can see that the creek has its own firebreak, built completely by beavers damming up the water. With the data we now have, ecologists are convinced that bringing in more beavers to other creeks would be a long-term strategy for dealing with wildfires and drought. Read what Idaho's beavers have done since they were resettled at YaleEnvironment360. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Fairfax and Whittle)

In the vast spectrum between bankable movie stars and extras scrambling for jobs, there are character actors. They are the backbone of TV and movie productions, actors who are good at what they do and will take roles that don't get top billing. You see them over and over, and you'll recognize them from some other production, but knowing all their names is beyond the average entertainment consumer. Yes, they deserve recognition, and they deserve a successful resolution to the current SAG-AFTRA strike. To help you sort out who's who, Screen Junkies has put together a musical guide to character actors sung in the style of of "Yakko's World" from the TV series Animaniacs. Sure, there are a lot of them, but you can pause the video anywhere and look up the lyrics at the YouTube page. Or you can just enjoy the song and the clips. I predict your response as some point will be, "Yeah, I know that guy, I liked him in that one movie, but I didn't know he was also in that other movie!" These are the kinds of discussions that will make you miss a plot point in whatever it is you're watching.

It took a while, but the world has gotten used to the idea of sending encoded signals through the air. First radio and then TV broadcast signals, satellite signals, cellphones, and now wifi and bluetooth. In amongst those, we also got wireless remote controls for our television sets. There were a lot of different methods and technologies developed to enable us to sit on the couch and change the channel. My family never had a remote control when I was young, as my father didn't need one- he had children to change the channel for him. So I missed out on one bit of technology that's still amazing today. It's the remote that didn't need wires or batteries or any power source at all.

The Zenith Space Command went on the market in 1956. It was an improvement over earlier designs that had two problems. First, they depended on a beam of light, but there was interference from sunlight or other light sources, and you had to aim it exactly right to trip the receiver. Second, other wireless remotes depended on batteries, and when they ran down, people thought their TVs were broken. It was the 1950s, after all. Zenith's Space Command remote used neither light nor batteries, and depended on sound to signal the set receiver. It was a a completely mechanical idea that still impresses us today. Read how it worked at the Verge. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Marcin Wichary)

Tom Scott is back out in the road finding weird places to tell us about. Tomorrow Bio is a new cryonics lab in Switzerland. While they store their dead clients at very low temperatures (-196°C), they will tell you that they aren't freezing them. The liquids in the body are replaced with antifreeze, but not the kind you put in your radiator, and the word they use is "vitrify." The dictionary tells us the process of vitrification uses heat and fusion, so they must be talking about something different, although it's not fully explained.

Will this technique work? Will these bodies ever be resuscitated? Most likely not, but the company frames it as a research project instead of a promise. You can't assign numbers to the odds of success in a project like this like you can in a lottery, but like the lottery, your odds of success rise ever so slightly if you buy a ticket.

In order to survive a destination wedding deep in the Guatemalan rainforest, the author must submit to heat, terrain, and a small blood sacrifice https://t.co/Kw43Ct6B4P

— Outside (@outsidemagazine) July 20, 2023

Would you hike for five days into the Guatemalan jungle to the ruins of an ancient Maya pyramid with no facilities in July to watch your friends get married? Melissa Johnson said sure, even though she was ten years older than the other 13 people on the trip. They traveled 60 miles through the lush rainforest and battled high humidity and voracious insects to witness Angela and Suley's nuptials, even though neither of them had any connection with Guatemala. It sounds like a dangerous idea, and it was. Johnson considers herself a brave person, but then she thought about the viruses and parasites transmitted by mosquitos, ticks, and other insects that flourish in Central America. And she was indeed attacked in her sleep, in an episode some might categorize as "too much information." The clandestine wedding was glorious, but then the group decided to take a shortcut back out, without considering how much vegetation had grown over the unused route during the rainy season. It was an adventure you'll be glad you didn't go on, but you can read about it at Outside magazine. -via Nag on the Lake

You might be aware that Vantablack is the blackest color humans have produced. It absorbs up to 99.96 percent of light, but you can't get it because its use is restricted to one artist. But you can buy Musou black paint, which absorbs up to 99.4 percent of light. The effect of either is surreal, as if Photoshop were involved, because we are used to painted surfaces reflecting light. Or any surface for that matter.

James Orgill of The Action Lab had been experimenting with Musou black paint. But then he found that Musou black comes in a fabric, too! So he covered a car in the Musou black fabric called Kiwami, which seems like velvet, except there is no part that shines like velvet, from any angle. At about 2:30 in this video, you get to see a comparison between the fabric and the car's regular black paint. The original paint looks almost light gray! Then he took the car out to show off, both in daylight and at night. I wouldn't want to drive this car in dim twilight without the headlights on. Then he eventually finds out how much light it takes to get a reflection from the car.    

This video is only five minutes long. The rest is an ad. -via Born in Space

The 1975 movie Jaws changed cinema forever by introducing the summer blockbuster. The terrifying shark brought in a ton of money, and later on the story of how the movie was made was almost as good. Director Steven Spielberg, only 27 at the time, had to contend with mechanical sharks that didn't work, and so had to reframe the film and imply shark attacks from the shark's point of view- which just made the movie scarier. The behind-the-scenes chaos became legend and spawned a musical titled Bruce that opened in Seattle last year.  

A different one-act play is scheduled to open on Broadway next month. The Shark is Broken is an obvious title to those who know how Jaws was made, but the play has a different focus. The characters are Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss, the main Jaws actors, together on the fishing boat Orca during the film shoot. Robert Shaw is played by his son Ian Shaw, who looks just like his father and co-wrote the play with Joseph Nixon. The chemistry between the three actors was quite volatile on the Jaws set, friends one minute and clashing chaotically the next.

Alex Brightman, who plays Dreyfuss, tells Broadway Direct’s Paul Art Smith that the production is “really, truly about fathers and sons, a little bit of alcoholism, ego and the trauma that leads us to who we become.” At the same time, Shaw maintains that it’s primarily a comedy. “We dip into the serious elements, but our intention is to entertain,” he tells the AP.

The Shark is Broken did well at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and at the West End in London, and will open at the Golden Theater on Broadway on August 10. Read about the production at Smithsonian.

Forest fires are nothing new, but they are different these days- bigger and more destructive than ever. Before human settlement, forest fires occasionally cleared areas where there was too much of a buildup of organic fuel, mostly wood. Animals learned to escape a forest fire, and some returned to a burned area quite soon- after all, a burned area cannot burn again. One species of marsupial developed an ability to induce its own hibernation during a fire. It would burrow underground and enter a state of torpor until the danger had passed overhead! Other species of animals -as well as plants and microbes- seek out burned areas for the released nutrients in the ash to start the process of renewal.

A change came about when people began fighting forest fires instead of letting them burn. The result was a massive buildup of fuel, which makes modern uncontrollable wildfires much more dangerous and destructive. But still, nature is adapting. Read about the animal kingdom's strategies for dealing with inevitable wildfires at Vox. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: U.S. Forest Service- Pacific Northwest Region)

In a post about Attila the Hun, I mentioned that Genghis Khan's life was much better documented. But that only goes so far. After the Khan had conquered almost all of Asia and parts of Europe, he wished for privacy in death. He died in the year 1227, in August, but the news wasn't made public for some time, lest it interfere with the Mongols' current battle campaign. No one knows the cause of death, although contemporary accounts make some wild and differing claims. His funeral procession took his body back to Mongolia where extreme care was taken to keep his burial place a secret. It's been said that witnesses were executed, and then the executioners were also killed.

Mongolia, China, Russia, and Kazakhstan have all claimed to be the site of Genghis Khan's tomb. However, we know that the sacred mountain in Mongolia called Burkhan Khaldun was an inspiration to him in his younger days, when his name was Temüjin. He had asked to be buried on the mountain a few times during his life. After the Khan's death, a 93-square-mile (240 square kilometers) area around Burkhan Khaldun called Khan Khentii was declared a "taboo zone" and stayed that way for seven centuries. It was fairly inaccessible anyway, but trespassers were killed. The exception was Genghis Khan's family. Khan Khentii eventually fell under Soviet rule, then Mongolian rule, and now its a UNESCO World Heritage site, but it's still not exactly open to the public. Read about this mysterious plot of land and its history at Atlas Obscura.

When the US government launched the Manhattan Project during World War II, they went all out to recruit the best scientists available. That's how they found J. Robert Oppenheimer and named him to head the secret laboratory at Los Alamos. And that's why there's a movie about him now. But there's still more to the story. The untold account involves a scientist you may know who was right there in New Mexico already. Alternative Cuts is not afraid to tell the story of how Walter White lent his expertise to the making of the atomic bomb, quite enthusiastically, as it turns out. We still haven't figured out why he insisted on bringing along his dimwitted assistant Jesse Pinkman, though. White was omitted from the history books because he's shy and really didn't want the publicity. Enjoy this clever mashup of the movie Oppenheimer with the erstwhile TV series Breaking Bad. -via Laughing Squid 

There's a reason we have a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The past was full of cruelty, and unusual was only limited by one's imagination. Here's a punishment that wasn't all that cruel, as we would view it now, but it sure was unusual. In Florence, Italy, during the Rennaissance, the Bargello was the building that housed prisoners. If a detainee were to escape, or skip bail, they would add a new fresco to the wall of the Bargello in the image of that person. It wasn't like a mugshot for identification, but a pittura infamante, a punishment in itself, because they would paint the perpetrator in a humiliating way, often hanging upside-down. The face must be recognizable, but often had a silly expression. And details could be added for extra embarrassment, like a defecating dog in the background.

This kind of punishment really only affected elite perpetrators with status, because such humiliation could hurt their social standing or even their business connections. Artists didn't want to do these punitive portraits, because they didn't want to offend their wealthy patrons. But Botticelli painted one, and possibly Leonardo da Vinci, too. Hardly any of these images survive today, as the wall was painted over and over. Read what we know about these pittura infamante at Jstor. -via Strange Company

Denali, in Alaska, is the tallest mountain in the United States. In 1906, Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the summit, which would make him the first to do so. However, no one believed him, especially after his photographic proof was identified as a different location (Cook later claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole). Alaskan miner Thomas Lloyd was skeptical about Cook's claims and said he could do better than Cook. The bartender replied,  

"Tom, you are too old and too fat to climb to the top of Denali."

There's nothing that will light a fire under a man like someone telling him he can't do something. And that was the beginning of the Sourdough Expedition of 1910, in which four guys with no climbing experience went up Denali and lived to tell about it. But if a movie were to be made about the expedition, it would be a comedy, as David Friedman of Ironic Sans explains. See, no one believed any of the four had reached the summit, and they had plenty of reasons to be skeptical. -via Laughing Squid

We cover the most popular baby names in the US every year, and have also tracked the popularity of names over time, and you rarely learn anything you didn't already know. In a few years, schools will have to find a way to tell all the Liams and Olivias apart. But when you look around the world, you are in for some surprises. You could probably guess that Mary and its many variations is the top name of choice for girls in the most nations, and Muhammad with a few spelling variation is the top name for boys in more countries than any other. But look closer. I have never met anyone named Isla, which is the number one name for girls in Australia and New Zealand. Is it new? The top baby girl name in Israel is Avigayil, which might be pronounced like Abigail, or maybe not. The most popular name in Japan for boys is Aoi. Does anyone know the proper pronunciation for that?

Letter Solver did research in each country's native language to dig up the data from available sources. Not all sources were for the same time period, but priority was given to the most recent data when identified. See world maps of the most popular baby names (you can click to enlarge them), and a chart that lists each country where data was available. -via Digg