This visualization of how deep underground structures go will blow your mind. As you go down as deep as Mammoth Cave, the video pauses and you think it might be over, but oh no. That's when the scale can no longer show the surface of the earth, and they switch to a graphic on the right for scale to go much, much deeper. The caves, of course, were formed by the earth itself. The manmade structures are astonishing. It's nice to know that radioactive waste is buried so deep, but the further you go, the more likely they are to be wartime facilities, and even deeper for pure profit. The newer ones were dug by machines, but the older ones were dug by human labor, maybe slave labor or Stalinist prison labor, and who are the people working at the bottom? I looked up a few of the deeper places.

The Mponeng gold mine in South Africa is so deep that the temperature at the bottom is about 151°F (66°C), and they send ice down the shaft to cool it to bearable working conditions.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled over a 19-year period by the Soviets, in Russia near the Norwegian border. It was a scientific project to see how deep a hole could be dug.  

-via Laughing Squid

The game Wordle shows no sign of losing popularity, even as we hear the announcement that it was acquired by the New York Times. The newspaper said the game will still be free ...for now. Better get in the game before it's monetized! And computational biologist Devang Thakkar has developed Wordle  Archive so that you can play previous games or more than once a day. But how does one win at Wordle?

The object is to guess the five-letter word of the day. You have six guesses, and each guess will let you know whether a letter is right and if a right letter is in the right place. It would have never occurred to me to develop a strategy, but Minnesotastan did. While some folks begin with ADIEU to find the vowels, he uses words designed to cover the most common consonants. Those words are BRINK, CADGY, WHELM, and POUTS (although he switched to SPOUT upon learning that Wordle disallows a lot of words ending in "s" because they may be plurals). In the example above, he found the vowels in the right place in two guesses, and discovered all the consonants in three guesses. Read his thinking behind this strategy at TYWKIWDBI, and the strategies of others in the comments. This method won't always ensure that you win in fewer guesses than the next person, but it will help you to get the right word more often. Do you have a strategy for playing Wordle?

The New Zealand parrot called a kea has been known to steal interesting objects from humans. In this case, a family visiting Fiordland National Park were recording a kea when the bird decided to take that GoPro camera. It flew off and got some nice footage of the scenery. Away from the people, the kea decided to eat the camera, but had some difficulty snapping off a small piece. It probably didn't like the way the plastic tasted, either. But how was the camera found? The bird's flight was not as far as it appeared to us, and the family followed it visually and then heard the commotion as he tried to tear the GoPro apart. -via Boing Boing

Addison Del Mastro was intrigued by the building you see here. Yes, it's a Pizza Hut, but it is somewhat different from the iconic architectural style of the pizza chain. We've seen plenty of buildings with that style that used to be Pizza Huts, but this is the opposite- a Pizza Hut that apparently used to be something else. So Del Mastro started researching the location's history. It wasn't easy.

While the story behind the building is quite a ride, the greater story is the way record-keeping is changing and and how fragile digital records really are. Digitizing books, photos, historical records, and newspapers seems like a wonderful idea, because it saves physical storage space and makes searching easier, but it also relies on changing technology. Think of all the digital files that are lost when a storage system becomes obsolete. Online digital files depend on servers, which depend on power, which depends on money. Many historic document files will only be kept as long as they are profitable. A lot of what Del Mastro found was crowdsourced from people's memories, and those people and their memories won't be around forever. Read about this particular architectural history project and the roadblocks thrown up at The Deleted Scenes. -via Metafilter

You've heard that goods are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them. British Airways was getting rid of some of their older planes, and offered a Negus 747 for the low, low price of £1 ($1.30). After all, the pool of potential buyers was limited, because where would you park this plane? Cotswold Airport bought the airliner, as they had a place to put it. But instead of trying to refurbish and fly it, they turned it into an event space.



After 14 months of renovations, the Negus is ready to book parties, weddings, and other events- for £1000 ($1,300) an hour. That's some return on investment! But the makeover was expensive at about £500,000 ($671,000). And that doesn't include upgrading the restrooms, which still hasn't been done. See, toilets for planes are designed to work at altitude, and must be completely replumbed to work on the ground. But at $1300 per hour, they might be able to bring in some porta-potties. Read more about the Negus party plane at CNN, and see more pictures at Instagram. -via Jalopnik

The "adorable blob" above is a White's tree frog named Cousin, in a picture taken around the time Cousin came into the care of Be Wild Reptile Rescue in Durham, North Carolina. He had lived in several homes and weighed 144 grams. A large tree frog should weigh around 40 to 50 grams. Here's a picture of Cousin taken a year later.



As you can see, Cousin has lost weight, but still has to deal with the large amount of skin that comes with obesity. And he has some physical impairments from his former size. But he is much healthier now, at 120 grams. Here's his story.  



We don't know how old Cousin is, but we're glad he has a home at the shelter where he will be permanently cared for. -via Laughing Squid

Bill Watterson drew the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes from 1985 to 1995. During that time, Watterson fought tirelessly to elevate the art of the comic strip, and resisted lucrative merchandising deals. Then he retired the comic and withdrew from public life at the end of 1995. He refused to allow old Calvin and Hobbes strips to be syndicated, and forbids all licensed merchandising of the characters.

That's why the only sign you see of Calvin for sale today is the common sticker you see of the 6-year-old peeing. It is a sign of disdain, and varies according to what the sticker shows he's peeing on- a brand, a sports team mascot, a political figure, you name it. Why anyone would want to use a bootleg image of a beloved character to call attention to what one hates is a question for another day, but manufacturers have made money off Watterson's art this way since around 1995. Those under 30 are more familiar with the peeing Calvin and his evil smile than they are with the child who talked to his tiger. Read about the rise of the peeing Calvin and its continuing profitability at Mel magazine. -via Digg

In case you haven't been paying attention, the Winter Olympics are about to begin in Beijing. They officially run from February 4th to the 20th, but some events, such as curling, are already running qualification rounds. The coverage has been pretty low key because of covid restrictions and the fact that we just had Olympic Games last year. But they are the Winter Games, and every time they come around, we have to confront the fact that we mainly watch them to see people slip and slide on snow and ice, waiting for someone to fall.

So to plan your television engagement with the games, The Ringer has a list of 30 events, ranked by how terrified you would be to try them yourself. There's no doubt that curling doesn't seem too dangerous, even if it is fascinatingly silly. Singles figure skating? Well, you might fall, but rarely does someone break a leg doing it. That's not the case with downhill skiing, speed skating, and luge. How about the biathlon? That's cross-country skiing and shooting, which is only dangerous if someone shoots at you. See where your favorite winter sport lands in the ranking, and read up on what's involved in all of them at The Ringer. -via Digg

(Image credit: Martin Rulsch)

Wait. You're saying that while each and every one of us has their simple names like Linda or Matt misspelled, they actually spelled yours right, as a historical first?

— Roland Venesz (@steerio) January 8, 2022

In this modern world, people who already have the names Alexis or Siri get some grief. Having your name associated with a meme is troublesome; just ask any woman named Karen. But imagine if your name was Kovid! Just writing that sentence is difficult, because spellcheck wants to change it to covid. Kovid is a not-all-that-uncommon name in India, and has been for a long time. Kovid Kapoor has been hearing the same jokes for two years now.  

Kapoor has largely turned to humor, telling his Twitter followers he’s been “kovid positive since 1990” – when he was born – and he could only laugh with the airport employees carefully reviewing his passport on his recent trip to Sri Lanka, his first time leaving the country during the pandemic. Or at Google’s assumption his own name must be spelled wrong.

Similar stories can be told by women named Rona, Delta airlines, and of course, Corona beer. Read the stories of several Kovids, both men and women, and what they've had to put up with these last two years. -via Metafilter

In World war II, the Walt Disney Company contributed a lot of propaganda to the war effort. Well, "contributed" might not be the best word, because they were paid well. Donald Duck was the cartoon character that emerged as the most patriotic of them all. The fact that he was often angry contributed to his popularity, but there was more to it than that. Phil Edwards explains how soldiers were able to relate to Donald Duck so much more than Mickey Mouse or any other Disney character. And when you think about it, things haven't really changed much since then. -via reddit

Until recently, scientists thought that Arctic hares traveled up to 22 miles in their lifetimes. But in 2018, a young female hare was tagged near Alert, Nunavut, and named BBYY. The name comes from the colors of her tags: blue, blue, yellow, yellow. That and the tracking device around her neck -plus the white fur- make her look like she's ready for a night out on the town.

The dozens of hares tagged in this study showed that Arctic hares travel much further than other lagomorphs, but BBYY still turned out to be an outlier. She traveled more than 240 miles in one 49-day period! Small herbivores just don't do that. Wildlife biologist Sandra Lai led the study tracking the hares.

Lai had previously done research on Arctic foxes, but had come to Alert with colleagues to track, for the first time ever, the movements of individual Arctic hares. Nearly four years later, Lai still grins recalling her first meeting with BBYY. “She is very special to me,” Lai says.

While BBYY's travels may be a record for her species, the research hints at how animals are adapting to changing environmental conditions. Read about the research project that put one hare in the spotlight at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Charline Couchoux)

Today is the Lunar New Year, and in China that means we are welcoming in the year of the tiger. In honor of the occasion, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin, known as the thepieous (previously at Neatorama), baked a cherry pomegranate pie with a tiger on top! Isn't it gorgeous?

But notice the Instagram photo is a gallery. Click to the right and see how this crust was made. Clark-Bojin begins by making a template, then cuts the crust dough to fit, separately from the rest of the pie. She sculpts the tiger, adding layers as needed. The flowers (made with a cookie cutter) are added, then she paints the tiger with food coloring. The top crust isn't added to the pie until it is perfect, and then it is baked. And finally... she cuts a piece out of it to eat. This is always the heartbreaking part of Clark-Bojin's masterpieces, but when you are this talented, you can always make another pie. And who can resist a piece of cherry pomegranate pie? -via reddit

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: "Ten German scientists walk into a bar..." But instead, they walked into a house, and not by their own choice. In July of 1945, when Allied forces were working their way across Germany, ten of Germany's most prominent scientists were arrested and taken to Farm Hall in Godmanchester, UK. They were all suspected of working on Germany's nuclear weapons program. But instead of being interrogated or prosecuted, they were mostly left to their own devices during their six-month internment. However, the house was riddled with listening devices. The theory was that the ten would not be able to resist discussing their research, which would inform British intelligence about the progress of Germany's quest to develop nuclear bombs.

The ten included Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Karl Wirtz, and others you may be familiar with. The plan turned out to be quite beneficial, because there was little else for the men to do besides talk. While they had differing views on the war and the ethics of nuclear weapons, they couldn't help but discuss the science. A month into their incarceration, the internees heard the news that the Americans had dropped the world's first nuclear bombs on Japan. They were astonished, as they believed such weapons were years away from viability. Read about the ten German scientists locked up together and what happened to them afterward at Amusing Planet.

My father was a geologist. When Interstate 75 was being built through Kentucky, a lot of hills had to be cut through, and Dad would often stop and take a look at the layers of earth and rock those cuts exposed, including layers that aren't horizontal due to tectonic uplift. I don't know if everyone else is as familiar with rock layers and geologic time as I was as a child, but most of us understand the concept somewhat.

At Siccar Point in Scotland, the layers are completely different. In the area called Hutton's Unconformity, the older layers are on their side, while others just above are horizontal. This changed the science of geology in 1788, when James Hutton studied these layers. Tom Scott takes us there and explains.    

Sesame Street has been around for 50 years. Its success has been attributed to the fact that it was designed by researchers in early childhood education, and the fact that the main characters for that entire time have been the Muppets. It's a formula that works, but great care has to be taken to ensure that the show and the Muppet characters stay consistent for all those years. A Sesame Street employee lets us in on some of the rules of the road for Sesame Street that he's picked up on over a couple of years. To illustrate, he gives us theoretical Sesame Street scenes and then tells us why it would never happen. The rules not only pertain to the Muppets, but also the preschool audience the show is serving.

Goodbyes are always tricky. In kids’ media, it’s no different.

At Sesame Street, the rule of thumb is to never say a full “goodbye.” A goodbye could leave kids at home panicking that they’ll never see their furry on-screen friends again.

To avoid this, we use phrases like “See you next time!” or “That was so much fun today! I hope you’ll join us again soon.” This way, no kids have to freak out.

Read the various scenarios and what rules they would be breaking at Cracked.