When Jill Tarter was a little girl, she was fascinated with the vastness of the universe and the stars and planets in it. She declared she was going to be an engineer when she grew up, in the days when people laughed at such ambitions in a little girl. Tarter was stubborn, and earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell, then a master's and PhD from Berkeley, where she got in on the ground floor in computer programming by neccesity. That skill helped her become involved in the search for extraterrestrial life. Tarter eventually worked for 35 years in the field, and worked her way up to director of the Center for SETI Research. In 1985, Carl Sagan wrote a novel named Contact in which the protagonist, Ellie Arroway, was based on Tarter. Here we meet the real Arroway as Tarter tells us a bit about her life and inspirations.   

On August 16, 1942, Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams took off from an island in San Francisco Bay in a US Navy blimp. Their mission was simple: surveillance of the West Coast for signs of Japanese submarines. Their ship, designated the L-8, was a Goodyear blimp repurposed for the war effort. Five hours later, the L-8 crashed into a street in Daly City. There was no fire and minimal damage to the blimp, but there was no one on board. A Navy investigation found multiple witnesses who saw the blimp through its journey that day, so they could retrace its steps, but the witnesses gave unreliable and contradictory testimony about the crew. No trace of Cody and Adams was ever found.

Plenty of theories about what happened to the men were proposed, some more outlandish than others, yet none were confirmed. The L-8 went on to serve the Navy through the rest of the war, but became known as the ghost blimp. Read about the mystery of the L-8 that still lingers 80 years later at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: U.S. National Archives)

RiffTrax, the online successor to MST3K, skewered the 1989 movie The Return of Swamp Thing last night. You can see the original trailer to get a taste of how over-the-top that movie was. "He's got a grudge, 'cause they turned him to sludge!" Kevin Murphy and The RiffTones (featuring Brian Murphy) were so inspired by the love story between Swamp Thing and Heather Locklear that they wrote a little song about it. You'll find the full lyrics at Metafilter.

We know the term tutti frutti as a shortcut for a mixed fruit flavor for ice cream or lollipops, or a nonsense song from Little Richard. But in the 19th century, it was a recipe for preserving summer fruits of almost any kind in brandy. Before refrigeration, alcohol was one of the more dependable ways to make fruit last through the winter. Home cooks would begin making tutti frutti in the spring with strawberries, sugar, and brandy, and later add berries, peaches, cherries, pineapples, and whatever else was available as the crops rolled in. By the time the jar was full, the delicious fruit compote was ready for storage or eating. And it made those long winter days a bit more sunny.

Sadly, tutti frutti was made illegal during Prohibition, and by the time brandy was legal again, other fruit preservation methods were well established, and advances in transporting crops made fresh fruit available all year. But you can go back to the days of tutti frutti, because the history of tutti frutti is accompanied by a modern recipe for making your own at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Ionutzmovie)

SolarProphet made a video for "Mr. Blue Sky" by the Electric Light Orchestra by feeding each line of the lyrics separately into the machine learning program Midjourney. You can tell that the algorithm is trying to create art with feeling, but not a coherent narrative. The simple song about a day with nice weather can sometimes shift into emotional melodrama as each line is interpreted as a possible book cover. Mr. Blue Sky himself is quite lovely, but Mr. Night is a rendering of our worst nightmares. When he's called just Mr. Blue, he could be anyone, but he's blue. -via Laughing Squid

The history of ketchup, or catsup, goes way back. The condiment was made with fermented fish, or mushrooms, or bananas, or whatever was locally available for cooks to turn into a sauce to liven up other foods. In America, the main ingredient was tomatoes. But early ketchup recipes called for fermented tomatoes to make the sauce last longer. After the Civil war, commercial food companies started mass-producing tomato ketchup. It was usually made from the parts of tomatoes that were left over after other products were made. Then the buying public started turning away from the flavor of fermented tomatoes, so companies began using new food preservatives to make ketchup shelf stable, particularly benzoates.

Dr. Harvey Wiley of the Department of Agriculture led a campaign against chemical preservatives in food, and particularly hated benzoates. He couldn't get them outlawed, but Wiley convinced Henry Heinz that they needed to go. Yes, that Heinz. Heinz worked diligently to come up with a recipe for ketchup that didn't require fermentation and didn't contain chemical preservatives. Read how he did it, and why tomato ketchup using his recipe became the only ketchup most of us know, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Mike Mozart)

Anyone who has cared for a family member with dementia knows how terrifying it can be, and how depressing nursing home care can be. Since the first dementia village, De Hogeweyk in the Netherlands, opened in 2009, the concept of designing a safe place to live that seems more like normal life than like a hospital has spread to other parts of Europe. Here we take a deep dive into how these villages are designed and operated. The video mentions that dementia villages are expensive, costing around $70K to $90K a year per resident. That may be expensive to a European, but it's no more expensive than the standard nursing home in America, and it feels more like a retirement community. The real question is, does this system work? Raw data is hard to come by, but then how can you measure comfort and happiness, and what is it worth? -via Digg

Ever since Europeans colonized Australia, that country has been fighting invasive species that threaten its unique ecosystem. Some of that was accidental, but other invasive species were deliberately introduced with disastrous results. The British imported the first prickly pear cactuses in 1788 to establish a plantation in New South Wales. The purpose of the cactus was to feed cochineal insects which produce a lucrative red dye, but that never happened. Cochineal insects didn't thrive in Australia. What happened was that prickly pears escaped the plantations and spread all over the desert and into farmland. By 1880, farmers were throwing their hands up because prickly pears had taken over their land, often growing 20 feet high. Chopping them up did no good, because each part of the cactus can root and regenerate. Trying to poison them only caused other problems.

It took until 1932 to get the prickly pears under control. But you might have guessed that the solution was to import a unique species of insect to kill it, which later caused problems when the scheme was tried in other countries. It's a story told again and again, like the woman who swallowed a fly. Read about the prickly pear invasion and the battle to defeat it at Amusing Planet.

(Image source: State Library of Queensland)

This video takes you through the history of the earth in just three minutes. We see the earth's formation, the evolution of species, and the rise of civilizations. It even jumps into the future! This is an art film, not an educational video. What's really notable is that the art was generated by artificial intelligence. The neural network program used was StableDiffusion, which was given 36 different prompts to generate the images. The thousands of images were then programmed to morph into each other. It's altogether trippy. If you look closely, you'll see a human being at about :58, and a couple more at :59, during the reign of the dinosaurs. Time travelers, or just a glitch? -via Geeks Are Sexy

People from many cultures look at American recipes that call for one clove of garlic and they laugh. One clove? It seems like a waste of a clove. If a recipe requires garlic, then it should be an entire head. However, the folks who write those recipes have their reasons. On one side are the cooks who assume that people will adjust the recipe to their own tastes, or at least they will eventually. On the other side are chefs who don't want to turn off cooks who aren't used to garlic or may be afraid that it will overwhelm the dish. There are other reasons why recipe writers may hold back on the garlic even though they use much more of it themselves, which you can read about at Eater. -via Digg

How do you approach garlic in a new recipe? Do you automatically multiply the amount of garlic, follow the recipe exactly, or just leave it out since one clove won't even be detected?

A few months ago, we were fascinated by watching the mayhem of the physics game BeamNG.Drive when someone put a massive hill in the road. Here's another dangerous situation from the game that's going viral. The road looks just fine from a distance, but there's a giant square pit. Who can drive fast enough to get to the other side? Not many vehicles can do it, so the allure here is watching the rest of them getting ruined in a variety of ways. The takeaway is that you do not want to approach a hidden square pit while pulling a trailer. Unless you're driving a Tesla cybertruck. Plenty of commenters swear they see potholes this big on their drive to work. The rest of them are arguing that it isn't a square hole, it's a rectangle. They're certainly right. It leaves you with a wreck and a tangle. -via reddit

Just about anything that the earth produces will be loved by some, detested by some, and eaten by many. But food has always been a marker of class, and many types of food have suffered from class discrimination. If it is edible and plentiful, then it will be affordable to poor people, and the rich will look down on it for just that reason. It's happened over and over, but eventually that food's reputation will change, either because it became expensive enough to be prized, or else enough people try it and like it that a tipping point is reached. Sometimes a dish is considered "low class" only until someone finds a way to get rich from it, like importing it to places where no one knows that it's a staple among the poor.

For example, lobster was so plentiful when Europeans first colonized America that people got sick of eating so much of it. When other food sources were established, lobster was relegated to poor people, prisoners, and livestock. It's much better when it's a rare treat, which people will pay a premium for today. Read about 15 foods that were once considered trash but are now a treat at Cracked.

(Image credit: Digimint)

The voyage of the RMS Titanic in 1912 was such a spectacular disaster that it's never really been out of the news in over a hundred years. It dominated newspapers for months afterward, books were written, and movies were made about it. Millions were spent to find the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean, and relics from the ship have taken their places in museums. But rarely do we hear the story from the other side- that of the iceberg.

When it was born as an iceberg in 1909, it was 100 feet tall and two miles wide, much bigger than most icebergs. But the unnamed iceberg's story began much earlier, when it started its journey as part of a glacier. The iceberg was already elderly for an iceberg and had outlived its contemporaries when it encountered the Titanic. Read about that iceberg, its origins, travels, and ultimate death, at Smithsonian. 

People change their legal names at different times in their lives for different reasons, the most common reason being marriage. But what about first names? The Social Security Administration released a list of the names that were changed the most in the past five years. At the top of the list for names that are changed to something else are Chole and Issac. At the top of the lists for the most commonly adopted names when a name is changed are Chloe and Isaac. Coincidence? No, these have to be cases in which the name was accidentally misspelled on a birth certificate. We'd really like to know who did the misspelling and how long it took the parents to notice, but that information is not available.

See the rest of the lists of names that are most often changed, and also lists of baby names that are gaining in popularity and those that are dropping in popularity. Surprisingly, Karen is not at the top of the girls' list of names that are dipping in popularity. I don't know what Denise, or Denisse, has done to deserve such disgrace. The boys' names that are falling in popularity make sense, because no one can spell Jaxtyn, Karsyn, and Xzavier. And maybe people have figured out that Willie is supposed to be a nickname for William. -via Fark

Touchscreens were first developed in 1965, but the first one I ever used professionally was in 1999 when I worked at a radio station that had music recorded on and played by computer. Deejays could start, stop, and rearrange the music on screen with our fingers. One day my boss sneezed in the studio and showered the screen with snot droplets. Every song scheduled for that hour, plus ads, played at once. That's when we all started washing our hands -and the screens- regularly. But not all touch screens respond to flying liquid, or even fingers if they are gloved. Those older types of touchscreens had to be modified for phones, or else butt-dialing would be a national epidemic. This TED-Ed lesson explains how touch screens work and the difference in the old screens that were activatewd by a stylus (or a sneeze) and new touch screens that will work with a sausage. -via Geeks Are Sexy