There are people who love J.R.R. Tolkien's books about Middle-earth, and there are fanatics who study their history, origins, and inspirations. Sometimes these people are also geography geeks and love studying maps of Tolkien's imaginative universe. Then there's Mohammad Reza Kamali, an Iranian Tolkien fan who spent years comparing Middle-earth to real maps of the real world. He noticed an uncanny similarity between Mordor and the Himalayan mountain range.

Now, Tolkien himself said that the Shire was based on rural England, and that action of the story takes place in a part of Middle-earth that is "equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean.” Many fans took that simply as meaning Europe. But "equivalent in latitude" doesn't mean Europe. Kamali was very familiar with Tolkien's maps, and recognized their lines and shapes when he saw the real-world topography of Pakistan's mountains. Furthermore, the Indus River shares many similarities to Anduin, the Great River of Middle-earth, where the One Ring was lost. Read Kamali's theories about Tolkien's maps and the reasoning behind them at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Ian Alexander)

The TV series M*A*S*H introduced us to the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, an innovation of the Korean War. Studies from World War II led authorities to determine that wounded soldiers who received immediate care near the front lines were much more likely to survive, so medical teams were mobilized to be there. You can't argue with the results: a 30% drop in fatalities among wounded front line soldiers. The difference between the MASH units and the M*A*S*H TV show was that in the real world, there wasn't much comedy, and that almost all the round-the-clock work was done by nurses. And they were all women, as men could not serve in the military as nurses until 1956!

In the three years of the Korean War, around 1500 women were put on the front lines to care for wounded soldiers, often stepping up to act in capacities beyond their training. Mike Weedall, the author of the new novel War Angel: Korea 1950, gives us an overview of the life of an army nurse of the real MASH units in Korea at Military History Now.   -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Stewart/U.S. Army)

Science can be weird. Your goal may be to unlock the mysteries of how the human body develops, but you find yourself counting nose hairs in dead bodies to see if there are more hairs in the left or right nostrils. How does one obtain a grant for that?

The annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night in an online ceremony to researchers who published studies concerning the sexual activities of anchovies, hi-tech toilets, people who talk backwards, and other science that makes you laugh, and then makes you think. These prizes are sponsored by The Annals of Improbable Research, and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

Each winner this year received a .pdf document that can be printed and assembled to make a three-dimensional trophy, and a ten-trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. The prizes were bestowed by a line-up of real Nobel Prize winners: Frances Arnold (chemistry 2018), Marty Chalfie (chemistry 2008), Peter Doherty (physiology or medicine 1996), Esther Duflo (economics 2019), Jerry Friedman (physics 1990), Wolfgang Ketterle (physics 2001), Eric Maskin (economics 2007), Ardem Patapoutian (physiology or medicine 2021), Al Roth (economics 2012), Rich Roberts (physiology or medicine 1993), and Barry Sharpless (chemistry 2001 and chemistry 2022). Continue reading for all the winners.

Prohibition left lasting effects on the US still felt today, like organized crime, NASCAR, and state liquor control. Fortunes were made providing illegal booze to a thirsty nation, and not all by men. Women were just as likely to jump at the chance to get rich in the underground liquor trade.

Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan knew an opportunity when she saw it. She had already made a name for herself under the name "Texas" Guinan in vaudeville and silent movies where she played a rough and tumble Western gunslinger. In the 1920s, her fame got her gigs as a celebrity hostess in speakeasies, where she provided entertainment and became quite a draw. Guinan invested her earnings in her own nightclubs scattered throughout New York City, where she hosted celebrities, sold illegal liquor, and staved off police raids as best she could.

Then there was “Moonshine Mary” Wazeniak, who re-purified methanol to make liquor, with deadly results, and “Spanish Marie” Waite, who operated a fleet of boats running rum from Havana to Miami, even after her husband was imprisoned. And Elise Olmstead, an FBI agent assigned to keep an eye on a suspected liquor smuggler, who instead married him and joined his business. Read about these women and others who became notorious for their Prohibition exploits at Mental Floss.

If you were to fall into the Amazon River, are you doomed to be torn apart and eaten by piranhas? Piranhas can be pretty ferocious, and we've all seen those demonstrations where a meaty bone is offered to a school of piranhas and they go to town, churning the water until it's bloody. Teddy Roosevelt wrote about piranhas in his 1914 book Through the Brazilian Wilderness, describing how they consumed an entire cow before his eyes during his South American safari, and would likely do the same to a human. That's how the idea of piranhas as dangerous man-eaters got started, and we have plenty of gory movies to show for it. A century of research has raised questions about that demonstration, but the piranha became a terrifying symbol of the dangers of the Amazon just the same. Learn about piranhas and the danger they pose in this this TED-Ed lesson.   

A notorious tale in aviation circles involves a Michigan pilot who bought a plane in California sight unseen and had some trouble getting it home in 2021. These seven incidents from the trip are described as "crashes," which may be technically correct, but no one was killed, and the pilot was flying alone. Also technically they occurred over nine days. Sixty-year-old Dennis Collier sold his house to buy a Seawind 3000, an experimental amphibious homemade plane. He was so excited about the plane that he didn't get a pre-buy inspection. When he picked up the plane, he found its history to be pretty sketchy, but he had already sunk $100K into it and the seller was in a hurry to leave.

The story reads like a comedy of errors, and it is, but it should also reassure us that many things can go wrong with a plane without dooming us to die in a fiery crash. Not that we should push our luck like Collier did. After reading the account at General Aviation News, you might want to also read an interview with Collier for a taste of the saga from his perspective. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: AirplaneHub.com)

We know the term the Gilded Age as a time of rapid industrialization, massive immigration the the US, and technical innovations that caused a few people to accumulate astounding wealth. In Europe, the period was called the Belle Époque. But the period between roughly 1870 to 1914 was also referred to as the Great Binge, because the industrial and economic boom was accompanied by an awful lot of drug use.

Industrialists and other businessmen raised capital by importing opium and cocaine. Politicians leveraged the trade to gain power over supplying nations and those trading with them. Authors, artists, inventors, and other celebrities indulged regularly. College students navigated a world soaked with dangerous but still legal drugs. Everyday people relied on opium and laudanum to ease the pain of conditions we couldn't fix, even for children. Heroin was developed as a "less addicting" pharmaceutical alternative to morphine. Coca-Cola got its name from the cocaine it contained.   

We've covered a lot of those turn-of-the-20th century drugs individually, but when you consider them all together in one historic period, it's a wonder anyone survived long enough to deal with World War I. Read about the Great Binge at Messy Nessy Chic.   

A long time ago, in a country far, far away... specifically in 1987 and '88, George Lucas did six ads for Panasonic, shown on Japanese television. Sure, he had plenty of money from the first three Star Wars movies and the first two Indiana Jones movies, but was also dealing with the disaster that was Howard the Duck and didn't know how long his charmed film career would last. Neil Cicierega used those six ads and some extra Star Wars clips and related material to construct a surreal, seomwhat psychedelic trip back in time and space to the "George Lucas Eggsperience." Levitate an egg, learn to load a VHS tape, and ponder the importance of the color red in this video. Meet Lucas' favorite droid, Sparky, but don't tell R2D2 or C3PO.

If you want to see the original ads, there's a source list at the YouTube page. -via Metafilter

The scariest, and most dangerous, hotel is the Frying Pan Hotel, 32 miles off the coast of North Carolina atop the Frying Pan Tower. The tower was built in 1964 with a lighthouse to warn approaching ships of the shallow Frying Pan Shoals. Since new technology made the lighthouse obsolete, the tower was sold to Richard Neil in 2010. Now it is a research station and marine wildlife refuge, but it also has an eight-room bed and breakfast.

The location is Spartan, but this hotel has amenities for those looking for adventure. There are boat and helicopter shuttles, a hoist to and from the water's surface, high-speed internet, scuba diving, snorkeling, fishing, shooting, golf, games, and a full kitchen. There's even an underwater camera so you can schedule your snorkeling around the sharks.

Book your adventure at the Frying Pan Hotel here. No pets, no children under ten, and guests over 300 pounds must travel by boat. All guests must undergo a safety briefing and sign a liability waiver. -via Everlasting Blort

The Prime Meridian is an arbitrary line drawn from the North Pole to the South Pole as a starting point for us to measure longitude. It was decided to place the meridian in a line going through Greenwich, UK, at the  International Meridian Conference in 1884. Before that, different countries used their own meridians as a starting point. The Prime Meridian is said to be the line between the Western Hemisphere and the Eastern Hemisphere, but as you can see, that doesn't make sense because then a big chunk of Africa, plus Spain and Britain, would be in the Western Hemisphere. Still, Britain held a lot of power in the 1880s. The equator is not arbitrary, because it's the midpoint between the poles, which are designated by the earth's rotation.

(Image credit: Graham Curran)

The point where the Prime Meridian crosses the equator is 0° longitude and 0° latitude. That place is hundreds of miles off the coast of Ghana, with no islands nearby. The numbers were just a point on a map before satellites and digital geolocation, but in the modern era, errors in geolocation will default to 0°,0°. In the internet age, this point on earth has come to be called Null Island. Redditors have designed flags for Null Island, and you can buy souvenir t-shirts. Only there is no island there. But there is a scientific buoy, named Soul Buoy, installed in 1997. Read about the imaginary Null Island at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura

My sleep habits are very consistent. I crash quickly at 11 PM and at 2 PM. Seriously, I can tell what time it is by how my brain feels. That 2 PM part makes it hard to think about getting a real job, but it helps me skip the hottest part of the day in summer. There was a time when I could work way into the wee hours of the morning, but I probably didn't get enough sleep overall. Each person has their own natural rhythms, developed over a lifetime. Our bodies set our sleep schedules by releasing hormones. Can we change that? Yes, up to a point. The secret is to make sure we get enough sleep overall. Sunlight is a great help. But when those hormones start flowing, it's not easy to fight against them. If we only had the freedom to work with our bodies' natural circadian rhythms, harnessing the time of day we can be most productive, we could enjoy our free time and our sleep time more. The TED-Ed lesson explains circadian rhythms and what we can do about them.  

We are most familiar with Katmai National Park because of Fat Bear Week every autumn. The park in Alaska has cultivated many fans who keep up with the progress of bears gaining weight through the summer by watching live webcams set up around the park's bear country. That was a good thing for a hiker who became lost while walking on Dumpling Mountain last Tuesday. Users who were watching noticed a man addressing the Dumpling Mountain camera about 3:15. He had walked by the camera, then realized it was a chance to communicate and came back. The wind drowned out the man's voice, but viewers could see he was cold, wet, and miserable in the rain and fog.

Viewers contacted the site's moderators, and one even contacted his local police. About three hours later, park rangers found the unnamed man waiting near the bearcam. It was the first time that Explore.org's webcams were used for a rescue situation. We don't know if the hiker is a fan of Fat Bear Week, but anyone who wanders the park's four million acres must at least be familiar with it. He recognized the opportunity for help and used it to save his own life. Read the story of the rescue here. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Explore.org)

English as we know it today is a mishmash of words that came from everywhere. Sure, the majority of it came from German and evolved through Old English and Middle English until we could no longer read or understand the source languages. Then along the way, we've added a ton of words from other languages. Many can be traced directly to Greek mythology, Latin used in the Roman Empire, and real Greek people and things. So when you say "It's Greek to me," you should be able to figure at least some of it out. A lot of that is because the Greek and Roman Empires were widely influential and rather well documented. Some words were filtered from Latin by the romance languages that descended from it: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Romanian. If you ever studied Latin, you can often figure out what new words might mean. And if you run across a Greek god you are unfamiliar with, you can often figure out their story by the modern word we took from their name. -via Digg

In 2011, NASA ended the space shuttle program, and the US began hitching rides to the International Space Station (ISS) in Russian spacecraft. What could possibly go wrong?

Astronaut Frank Rubio launched his mission to the ISS on a Soyuz space capsule on September 21, 2022. While docked, that capsule sprung a leak and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, decided it was too risky to bring anyone back to earth. Rubio's planned six-month mission on the ISS was extended until he could get a slot on another spacecraft. Another Soyuz capsule went to the ISS and back, but carried Russian crew. Other ISS personnel arrived and departed on SpaceX vehicles, with all seats taken. So Rubio stayed in orbit, along with the two cosmonauts he arrived with.

As of today, Rubio has spent 355 consecutive days in orbit, most of it unplanned, longer than any other US astronaut. He is scheduled to return to earth on September 27th, and by that time will be the first NASA astronaut to spend more than a calendar year in space, with a total of 371 days. A statement from NASA said, in part:

“Your dedication is truly out of this world, Frank!”

It's amazing how much dedication you can muster when you have no choice. Rubio's record is only among NASA astronauts. The record for the longest consecutive time in space is held by cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, who stayed aboard the space station Mir for 437 consecutive days in 1994-95.

Incidentally, the investigation of the coolant leak in that docked Soyuz spacecraft determined it was caused by an external factor, such as space debris. Which brings up a whole other subject on the dangers of space travel.  -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: NASA)

A legal deposit library is one in which all printed materials are required to be deposited. The United States requires copies be sent to the US Copyright Office, but only if you want a copyright, and they don't retain materials forever. In the UK, there are six legal deposit libraries, but as of now, the only one a publisher is legally required to sent materials to is the British Library, and they keep it forever. As you can imagine, this collection is massive, requiring off-site warehouses. It's not easy to get a library card to do research among all those materials, but when an item is requested, they move heaven and earth to get it for you. This requires giant high-speed robots and an impressive archiving system that has evolved over time. It will have to evolve further, as they are now taking all UK materials published online as well. Tom Scott gives us an overview, and ends with some lucky timing.