There is a problem when people try to retrieve the huge deposits of natural resources underneath the earth's crust. The most valuable of these resources is fuel, and to get to them, we must expose them to air. One stray spark can cause that fuel to catch fire, and you've learned your lesson. But by then it may be too late, since there's a lot of fuel under there, and mines and wells continue to feed the flames while making it impossible to fight the fire. You know about Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a coal seam has been burning since 1962. But that's just one fire that's been burning an awful long time. The world is full of them.

The Jharia area of Dhanbad, India, was once a treasure of mining, as billions of dollars in prime coke coal lie underneath the ground. But it's turned into a nightmare, since that coal seam has been on fire since 1916! Over 40 million tons of coal has burned in that time, and in addition, no new mines can be opened to collect the unaffected coal, since the burning seam goes in all directions. The fire is making a growing area on top uninhabitable. That's just one of five places where the earth has been on fire for ages and probably will remain on fire for years or even centuries to come, that you can read about at Cracked.

(Image credit: miketnorton)

What we have here is someone driving into a huge morningstar, a medieval weapon that resembles a wrecking ball with spikes. You have to wonder why. The van seems pretty tough against it at seven miles per hour, but then they try again at higher speeds.

Trust me - The most entertaining video you will watch on Twitter today. 💥🚐 pic.twitter.com/WwcM66zXwo

— TG ☕️ (@TG22110) May 29, 2023

I'm sure there were many thoughts going through your head while you watched it.

1. Why are they doing this?
2. That van seems to be pretty tough.
3. Hey, what's that ball hanging from?
4. Wait, are they using more than one van?
5. No Ford van, especially one that old, can go 75 mph.
6. Where did they get all these vans?
7. Oh, I get it.
8. Airborn!
9. Yeah, this is the most entertaining video I've seen today.

-via Everlasting Blort

Dr. Sander Markx was astonished to learn that a catatonic psychiatric patient he'd met as a medical student was still in the same hospital in the same unresponsive state 20 years later. April Burrell had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and could not communicate, care for herself, or follow orders. Markx ordered a full workup on April, and test results showed she also had lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks various body organs. Could it have attacked April's brain? April underwent a serious regimen of chemotherapy designed to treat lupus, in which she was bombarded with medications once a month for six months. By the time her treatment was completed, she had returned to reality, reconnected with her family, and was discharged from the psychiatric hospital to a rehabilitation center.

So did the lupus cause April's psychiatric symptoms? A second patient was found to have both schizophrenia and lupus, and showed an even better recovery after treatment. This opens up a whole new world in possible treatments for autoimmune diseases that may have caused psychiatric illness in people who are currently consigned to lifetime care. That may be just a small fraction of schizophrenic patients, but it is a possibility well worth testing for. Read about April, the second patient Devine, and Dr. Markx's quest to help them. -via Digg

(Image credit: NIMH)

The coastal region of Sweden known as Bohuslän is known for its ancient petroglyphs. In early May, a series of 40 petroglyphs that hadn't been seen in hundreds of years was discovered on a rock face in Bohuslän. A team of archaeologists had to stand on a platform to remove moss and reveal them. The carvings are estimated to be around 2,700 years old.

What's remarkable about these petroglyphs is their location. This particular sheer face was on an island 2,700 years ago, and there are no footholds in the rock, which means that whoever made them either had to do it from a boat, or stand on a platform built on the winter ice. The biggest petroglyph depicts a ship 13 feet long, while many are only 12 to 16 inches wide. Scientists say they were made by banging rocks on the cliff face, which chipped away the dark outer layer and revealed a lighter material just below the surface.

No one knows the meaning of the images, although they might tell a story, or mark territory. The big question is what made them so important that people went through such trouble to place them where they are. Read more about the new discovery at LiveScience.

(Image credit: Foundation for Documentation of Bohuslän’s Rock Carvings)

You've seen this stunt performed in movies before, and probably on The Dukes of Hazzard several times. When it happens in real life, the outcome can be much worse. The above is police bodycam footage from an incident near Valdosta, Georgia. Lowndes County sheriff's deputies were making an arrest on the side of a highway on May 24, and had a tow truck ready to impound a car. But a driver didn't see the activity going on and drove up the tow truck ramp at a high speed. The car launched into the air off the front of the truck, flew about 120 feet, and crashed into another car. The driver was taken to the hospital with serious injuries. The only other injury was to a police officer hit by flying debris.

WSB has more on the incident. 

Update: I found a better quality video.

Louisiana Representative Robert F. Broussard introduced a bill to the US House of Representative in 1910 that would promote the importation and domestication of hippopotamuses for commercial purposes. Broussard thought he had a great idea for killing two birds with one stone. Hippo meat would help ease the meat shortage the country was experiencing at the time, and hippos could also eat the invasive water hyacinths that had spread across Louisiana's wetlands since it was introduced in 1884.

The idea had some support. Teddy Roosevelt, the big game hunter, was all for it. Broussard also brought in experts to tell how nutritious hippopotamus meat is, how it tasted like a “combination of pork and beef,” and how hippo ranches could be set up on federal land to get the concept started.

Broussard had ideas for importing all kinds of African wildlife to the US, but hippos offered the most bang for the buck. He was mistaken in thinking that it would be easy, though. Hippos are dangerous, and there is no evidence they can ever be domesticated. Also, they wouldn't be able to survive on a diet of water hyacinths. There are many reasons the idea was bad, but Congress didn't know about them at the time. While Broussard's idea for hippo ranching never got out of the starting gate, his campaign for the US to eat hippos is an amusing story you can read at Smithsonian.

(Illustration credit: Meilan Solly)

A "misle" is an unofficial term for a word that you mispronounce because you've only seen it in text. The term came from the story Eric Wolfe posted in 1991 about the way he used to pronounce the word "misled." Instead of mis-led, he saw it as my-zuld. Wolfe's unconcious assumption was that the word was akin to "titled," which you would never pronounce as tit-led if you know what's good for you. The response from his Usenet group had plenty of other examples, because English is weird. Eventually, this kind of mispronunciation based on logic and other English words led to these words being called "misles."

I mispronounced the word "biopic" in my head for years until I heard someone in a YouTube video say bio-pic. I knew what it meant, but I assumed it was pronounced bi-opic. Some misles are pretty funny, like pronouncing "barfly" as barf-ly, or pronouncing "infrared" as if it rhymes with "scared." Someone even admitted to thinking the word "apply" was said like an adjective for something that's like an apple, you know, apple-y. Read about the linguistic phenomenon of misles and laugh at some common ones at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Silar)

Warning: this video may be nightmare-inducing. Or you might just find it hilarious. We know artificial intelligence algorithms are pretty good for writing an essay, or at least ChatGPT is, Midjourney can construct an illustration for you, and some recent videos show that an algorithm can be rather good at dressing movie characters in Balenciaga fashions or mashing up Wes Anderson movies. But it doesn't do all that well recreating real living animals moving as animals should. I don't know what program was used to make this video of dogs, but the producer should ask for his money back.   

From a different YouTuber, here's a cat video generated by an algorithm. It's just as disturbing.



I couldn't post these videos on Supa Fluffy, because people go there to watch real-life cute animals and feel good about it. But you were warned. -via Nag on the Lake

A couple of months ago, we touched on the subject of aperiodic monotiling. A shape called "the hat" was a breakthrough in the quest to find a single tile shape that would produce a non-repeating pattern. This is often called an einstein, because the German words "ein stein" mean "one tile."

But there is a caveat in the hat, in that it requires both left-handed and right-handed hats. In geometry, that's called reflection. The next quest was to find a monotile shape that did not require reflection in producing a non-repeating pattern.

It didn't take long. David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss (the same guys who brought us the hat) present us with "the spectre," a shape that produces a non-repeating pattern and does not require reflection. The term "vampire einstein" comes from the fact that vampires don't produce a reflection in a mirror. But the spectre is real, and makes tiling a bathroom floor in a unique non-repeating manner easier because only one shape needs to milled instead of an unknown proportion of left- and right-handed hats.

The spectre is actually a family of shapes, as the authors have spectre tiles with both straight edges and curved edges. It's a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are the same shape, but you still have to find how they will fit together. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss/CC BY 4.0)

When we think of time, we think of our daily schedules or maybe a lifetime. But the human mind has a hard time grasping the history of the universe, and the relative blink of an eye that humanity has existed. The 300,000 or so years that homo sapiens has been around is the main focus of what we call history, and that seems like a long time.

Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet built a timeline of the universe out in the Mojave desert, the only place they could build something that big. But the history of mankind had to be built to a different scale than the 13-billion-year history of the universe before we came along; otherwise, all of human history would be too small to even label. This video tries to explain the concept of that long, long stretch of time. It's trippy.  -via Kottke 

See also: A Scale Model of the Solar System.

Redditor ceebasst poured out a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast. Or maybe it was a late-night snack. Either way, this came out with the cereal. No explanation on the box. You can see in the second picture at the reddit post that when you push the button, a red light comes on. But should he have pushed the button? There is speculation that he has initiated a series of events he may come to regret, which read like writing prompts for an international spy thriller or a science fiction adventure. Did a random person die when the button was pushed? But there were also some plausible explanations, none of which have been confirmed. The discussion also had many humorously implausible explanations. All we know is that it's a red light. But it could be something else, too. What do you think it's for, and how did it get into a box of cereal?

You remember the terrifying outbreak of Ebola virus in 2013, but do you recall the Ebola outbreak of 2021? No? That's probably because you were more concerned with COVID-19 by then, but it was also because health care professionals had a plan in place to stop Ebola in its tracks by 2021. While the world was dealing with the massive COVID-19 pandemic, several other epidemics were averted by public health systems and rapid response, and that's worth celebrating. The world has learned a lot about fighting diseases in a population, but it takes political will and government funds to keep those global health initiatives in place and ready to go to work when needed. And kudos to those health care workers who carried out these emergency responses.

This TED-Ed lesson directs you to read more about the efforts to stop epidemics before they get out of control at Resolve to Save Lives. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The live-action version of The Little Mermaid has made $118 Million so far in its opening weekend. It may herald another bump in the popularity of mermaids, joining other periods of mermaid-mania from history, going back thousands of years. In ancient times, it was the allure of the mythological tales of beautiful and magical half-human-half-fish creatures among many terrifying terrifying sea monsters. In the more modern era, it is entertainment, feeding a fantasy of sexy women and the allure of the sea. In 1906, the show Neptune's Daughter debuted at New York's Hippodrome, featuring an 8,000-gallon tank full of underwater dancers, which proved both fascinating and charming to audiences. Mermaid mania got another kick when Champion swimmer Annette Kellerman starred in silent films about mermaids, and brought women's participation in swimming into the modern era. Read about the early entertainment media representations of mermaids at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia)

Hair styles, like clothing, go through trends and fads that sometimes make us look back and say, "What was I thinking?" I've had bangs, mullets, braids, Jheri curls, pixies, and purple hair, but all those pale in comparison to some of the hairstyle fads of history. Some were an attempt at beauty or cutting-edge fashion, while others signified status, either officially or unofficially. Long hair or elaborate 'dos indicated that the person wearing it could employ expert services and had plenty of free time. Short hair or shaved heads made a busy, difficult life more practical for working people, but you could always cut the hassle down by wearing a wig. Some hairstyles seem downright painful, while others were just silly. Weird History takes us on a ride through time by highlighting some of the more memorable or consequential hairstyles of various places and historical eras.  

Norway takes its hot dogs seriously. You can get a great hot dog from restaurants, street vendors, airports, and even gas stations, because Norwegians would expect only the best. Like most European countries, sausages have always been a part of Norway's cuisine, but American hot dogs became extremely popular after World War II, back when anything American was considered chic.

But Norway had advanced the art of the hot dog and Norwegians put their own spin on it. They are often served wrapped in flatbread made of potato flour, and slathered with a wide variety of toppings, including potato salad or shrimp salad. The hot dogs themselves can be made from anything, from traditional pork to crocodile meat to vegan sausage. As the hot dog traveled from the US to Norway, their hot dog traditions have traveled back to America as well. Read how hot dogs became Norway's national snack at Atlas Obscura.  -via Strange Company