The United States claimed the biggest prize in the Cold War space race when we landed men on the moon in 1969. However, the Soviets had many firsts, like the first satellite, the first man to orbit the earth, and the first woman in space. There have been some horrific disasters, too. We all know about Apollo 1, the Challenger explosion, and the space shuttle Columbia. But the Soviets beat us in that, too, with a disaster that killed more than 100 people and was kept secret for almost thirty years.

On October 24, 1960, the USSR rolled out a new, improved rocket called the R-16 that used two toxic and corrosive chemicals for fuel that automatically ignited when they were combined. What could possibly go wrong? The rocket had been rushed through its testing phase in order to launch in time for the 43rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and to impress premiere Nikita Khrushchev. There were plenty of people at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to witness the launch. One thing led to another, and before you know it, there's a 120-meter-wide fireball on the launch pad. Many died instantly, while others were set on fire but couldn't flee the scene because the asphalt beneath their feet had melted. The incident is called the Nedelin catastrophe after Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, the head of the missile program, who died instantly. The R-16 rocket was developed by Mikhail Yangel, who survived and had to apologize to Khrushchev for doing so. The disaster was kept secret by the Soviets until 1989. Read the gory details of the worst space-related disaster ever at Amusing Planet. 

(Screenshot via YouTube. Not recommended.)

Everyone knows what bears do in the woods. They dance, of course! When bears emerge from their hibernation in the spring, they've shed most of the weight they put on last summer, but they still have their winter coat. As the temperatures rise, they feel their fur starting to get loose. It's an itch that must be scratched, and the best place to do it is against a tree with rough bark. So they all head to their favorite tree. The dancing in this video starts at about 1:45, and it's a downright sensuous experience. As they scratch their backs, the fur comes off, and so does that bear's scent. It's our job to add the music.

This clip, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, is from the BBC TV series Planet Earth II. The entire video is a feast for the eyes, as long as you aren't a marmot. -via Born in Space

Since the dawn of humanity, people have looked up into the night sky to see the stars. Observing them allowed us to learn how the universe works, how to mark time with calendars, and how to navigate around the world. But in our modern world, light pollution means that city dwellers never see stars, much less the further reaches of the Milky Way, and even in small towns it's hard to discern what's going on up there. If you want to see a meteor shower, for example, you have to drive long distances out into the wilderness. But even in the most remote places on earth, skies are brighter than they used to be. LED lights save energy, but that just means we use more of them and leave the lights on all night. And even if you find a remote dark area, the sky itself is full of satellites that get in the way of natural phenomena.   

Astronomers have coined a new word that describes the sadness one feels at the loss of stargazing opportunities: noctalgia. Read how this emotion came into being, and what it means at Space.com.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Brucewaters) 

In the US, you can give your baby pretty much any name you choose, but the very worst examples might draw the attention of Child Protective Services. In Australia, regulations prohibit certain types of names, and each is judged individually. The rule that gave me pause was a restriction against naming your child a title. In Kentucky, that would exclude a lot of Generals, Majors, Dukes, and Earls. But one rule is a restriction against a name "contrary to the public interest for some other reason." That's as ambiguous as you can get, and gives bureaucrats a lot of power over naming your child.

Kirsten Drysdale of the Australia Broadcasting Corporation decided to test the limits of the law by naming her child something pretty bad, but not specifically prohibited. Oh yeah, she really did. Let's see how that goes. This video does a good job of covering up the worst language, but it still has NSFW audio. It's Australian. -via reddit

Thousands of hunters have gone in search of a treasure that could be worth over $257,000. But after an accidental death (and a legal battle over the solutions), conspiracies swirl around the coveted statue: Does the golden owl even exist at all? https://t.co/aVxP2HBOr1

— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) September 18, 2023

In 1993, marketing consultant Régis Hauser and artist Michel Becker launched a treasure hunt for a buried bronze owl. The person to find the owl would win its golden twin, an owl sculpted in gold and silver, encrusted with diamonds, worth around a quarter million dollars today. Becker created the owls, and Hauser designed the treasure hunt, which could be solved with eleven clues revealed in a book titled On the Trail of the Golden Owl. Hauser suspected that it would take a few months, a year at most, for someone to find it. Thirty years later, no one has.

But the story has many twists and turns. Along the way, the jewelry company the promotion was meant to promote dropped out and never even opened a store. The golden owl was seized in a bankruptcy case. Becker, the artist, managed to get it back when he found out years later. Then Hauser died suddenly in 2009. His heirs wanted nothing to do with the treasure hunt, and Becker didn't know where the owl was buried. He eventually got Hauser's files, but they weren't easy to decipher. Meanwhile, thousands of treasure hunters became very invested in the hunt. You can see a trail of lawsuits forming in this story. But that's just the bare overview! Read the full story of the hunt for the Golden Owl, the world's longest completely unsolved treasure hunt, at Atlas Obscura.

PS: The clues are online.

If you haven't seen Barbie yet (and there are a few of us), here's your chance to get an extended look and critique of the movie. Oh, and you won't want to miss the Quentin Tarantino part. Screen Junkies pronounces it a showcase of ad placement, not just for Barbie dolls and all their accessories, but also for Chevrolet and other consumer products. Plus, it's deeply feminist, implausible, and juvenile. But who cares about all that? The movie is really funny, which covers all other sins. But they find plenty of other good things to say about Barbie, so it's no wonder that the movie has made $1.4 billion already, the most of any 2023 movie so far.

Barbie will make another go-round at IMAX theaters for one week beginning Friday (September 22) and is already available for digital download, and will be released on home video on January 2.

The supernatural monster we call a vampire goes back hundreds of years, as reanimated corpses that rose from their graves to terrorize the living, almost the way we view zombies today. But through literature, they were turned into pop culture creatures who are cultured, sexy, and move among the living without being detected until it's too late. We often think of the 1897 novel Dracula as the beginning of that type of vampire, but there were others in literature before. The first aristocratic vampire was Lord Ruthven in the novel The Vampyre. The origin of this story is a story in itself.

There was that one night at a fine house on Lake Geneva in Switzerland in June of 1816 that a group of vacationers waited out a rainy night with a competition to see who could write the best ghost story. They included poet Lord Byron, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron's physician 23-year-old John Polidori. Oh yeah, we already know what Mary Shelley wrote that night. But what about the other participants? They also wrote tales, or fragments of story ideas. Lord Byron came up with an idea that he never fleshed out, but it inspired Polidori to later write a novel about an attractive, cultured vampire. It was published in 1819, with Lord Byron listed as the author! Read what we know about the convoluted route that story went through to become The Vampyre at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: F.G. Gainsford) 

The Canadian marble fox, also called the Arctic marble fox, is a beautiful animal. It's also somewhat confusing. I've found a source that says it's a rare subspecies of the red fox found in the wild. Almost all other sources tell me it is not a naturally occurring fox, but is the result of selectively breeding red foxes for the color variation. Or a hybrid that's the result of breeding red foxes with Arctic foxes. Note that red foxes and silver foxes are the same species with varying colors; the Arctic fox is different. Some sources say the mutation that was then selectively bred originated in Norway in 1945, so Canadian marble foxes aren't necessarily Canadian, either. There's also some talk about these deliberately-bred foxes living in the wild after escaping from captivity in a fur farm, breeding facility, or a household that kept them as pets. I have no idea how true that is, but all those places are not where a fox needs to be. In fact, the fox pictured above is not a fox at all, but a plush doll! It was made by MalinaToys. Here is a more representative picture.

This one looks like a fox, and nothing like a cat. Still beautiful, and still better off in the wild than at a fur farm or in a family living room. Too bad they lack the perfect camouflage natural selection gave other foxes. (Thanks WTM!)

We know that a few words are the same in all languages, or at least many languages, because they move from one language to another. It's only natural, as we travel the globe and find things and concepts that are new to us. There are a lot of "loanwords" that just become a part of the second language. That's what we get for communicating. Even more common are words taken from another language and then get changed a bit to fit better into the second language. You might even call them mangled, as some examples end up being rather funny to people who speak both the old and new languages. Then there are "calques," which I wasn't at all familiar with, but it has to do with translation. Tom Scott explains these leaps of language that eventually enrich all of our languages. Along the way, we also find out where Admiral Ackbar's name came from.

You can always recognize Dutch fans at global sporting events because they are wearing orange. The color is deeply ingrained in their national identity. But did you know that the Netherlands is also responsible for orange carrots? It's true!

Carrots originated in central Asia, where wild carrots were first cultivated by the Persians. Those carrots were purple. There were also some yellow and white carrots, but most were purple. And that's what people were used to when carrots were taken to the rest of the world. An orange carrot was extremely rare, and considered odd. Then Dutch agriculture discovered carrots in the late 16th century, and selectively bred them to be sweeter and more resistant to pests. They were also orange, due to greater amounts of beta-carotene. People liked the sweeter Dutch carrots, and they looked better in a stew than the purple ones. Did they make carrots orange deliberately to reflect the royal House of Orange? Was it a branding thing? Or could it be that the Netherlands' orange identity comes from their famous carrots? It's possible that one had nothing to do with the other, and people argue about it to this day.

Read up on the history of carrots and the meaning behind their color at ZME Science. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Stephen Ausmus)

When we think about the Stone Age, we think of cave men, or The Flintstones. You might be surprised at the many important steps that mankind took toward civilization during the Stone Age, which lasted a couple of million years. What we think of as "primitive" during that period was the best life ever gets for early man, and those folks made great efforts toward making their own lives better with new ideas and technical innovations. We call it the Stone Age because that's what they left behind. Who knows what else they used? Bones, sure, and maybe wood, leather, plants, and a host of other things that just didn't survive long enough for us to find them. Meanwhile, during that time humans developed fire-making, cooking, art, clothing, agriculture, and long-distance travel. That's a lot of innovation for "cave men." We only call them "prehistoric" because they didn't write their accomplishments down, but we can figure out their history from what little they did leave behind.

Dutch coffee company Man Met Bril Koffie (Man with Coffee Glasses) is building a hotel in Rotterdam. The hotel isn't quite finished yet, but they have big plans for the Coffee Hotel. One of those plans is a residency program, in which baristas and other hospitality pros are invited to come work for a few months at a time. It's not like an American internship, as they will pay you, and also put you up in the hotel for free. It's not clear whether Americans are invited; the website offers several languages, none of which is English, but the residency program page is in English. It's an opportunity to spend a few months in the Netherlands without spending like a tourist. The program is kicking off with a residency roadtrip through Europe, so they can recruit coffee enthusiasts from all over. Read more about the Koffie Hotel and the residency program at Sprudge. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Man Met Bril Koffie)

In 1924, Fritz Heinrich Angerstein was arrested for eight murders in Germany. His wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and several household employees were all dead. Angerstein blamed bandits for the carnage, but the police told him there was evidence against him. He was told an expert had photographed the retinas of the victims, and his image had been preserved as their last sight before death. Angerstein then confessed to the murders. It was a risky move, but the police never had to actually produce those photos, which probably didn't exist.

However, the idea that the last thing one sees before death becomes imprinted on the retina at the back of the eyeball had been around a long time, and became a scientific pursuit with the rise of photography. Serious and often gruesome experiments were done to find images recorded by the eye itself, most notably by German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne. He even achieved some success- in rabbits. Read about the study of optography, as it was called, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Aravind Sivaraj)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both Florida and California were desperate for new people to come and put down roots. Both states had to battle deeply-ingrained Puritan beliefs that the comfort of year-round warm weather wasn't good for a person. Besides, California was a desert and Florida was a swamp. State boosters and land developers spent decades convincing people that their state was a paradise. California rerouted rivers and built aqueducts to bring water to Los Angeles and San Diego. Florida drained swamps and concentrated on beach access. Both states also pitched the wonders of healthy and delicious fresh oranges and other citrus fruit. And neither state was above criticizing the other.

Both campaigns worked well over the long term. California and Florid are high-population states- ranking first and third among the 50 states. Both became tourist meccas, even before the Disney theme parks. But now that warm semitropical climate is threatened by change. California is dealing with chronic drought, wildfire, and landslides. Florida is increasingly a hurricane magnet, and the rising sea level threatens its most costly real estate. Read about the campaign to settle Florida and California and their precarious status as paradise at the Conversation. -via Smithsonian

(Image source: Covina Public Library)

The Jewish high holidays wouldn't be the same without a new song from a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama). Rosh Hashanah, the New Year celebration, began Friday evening and will continue through sunset on Sunday. By the Hebrew calendar, we have reached the year 5784. The guys in Six13 have been waiting years to bring you this song, a Rosh Hashanah anthem that uses the tune of the 1970 Chicago song "25 or 6 to 4." The time has finally come. Honestly, they've probably been working on this recording for years, with its many-layered voice orchestra. No instruments were used; even the drums are voices. The lyrics are at the YouTube page, although you will have to click "more" to see them. They make more sense than the original lyrics. L'Shanah Tovah!