Wayne Kusy is a shipbuilder, but he builds neither seafaring ships nor small models, not even tiny ships in a bottle. His preferred material is toothpicks! Actually, that's his only material besides glue and some accessories. And his ships are big, and have gotten larger over time. Kusy has been building ships out of toothpicks for 50 years now (in his spare time, as he does have a regular job), and his latest accomplishment is a 25-foot-long model of the Queen Mary made of more than 815,000 toothpicks. That project took five years. He's also built replicas of the Titanic, the Lusitania, and the America, all containing many thousands of toothpicks each. Kusy does commissions, in case you want a model of your own boat made of toothpicks. You can see the time-lapse of a shipbuilding project that he referenced at his website, as well as other projects he's done.   -via Geeks Are Sexy

You might think that Outerbridge Crossing is called that because it is the most remote bridge in New York City, or maybe because it is the southernmost crossing in New York state. But it was named after Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge, the first chairman of the New York Port Authority. They might have named it Outerbridge Bridge, but then thought better of it. You might think that Baker's chocolate is called that because it is the preferred chocolate used by bakers. Wrong- it's made by a company founded by Walter Baker. And you might assume that Main Street is used as a name because it's the main street, but in San Francisco, the street was named for Charles Main. It was only appropriate.

In science, Southern blot is a process used in sequencing DNA. There is also Northern blot, Eastern blot, and Western blot. However, they were not named for Dr. Blot. Southern blot was named after biologist Edwin Southern, who developed it. When the other methods came along, they were named in sequence after Southern blot. There are other surprising things that were actually eponyms, meaning they were named after people, although you will be forgiven for thinking they were just named for what they are. Roland Crosby compiled a list of them with links to the story behind each name. Even when the inclusion in a list seems like a stretch, the stories are all rather interesting. -via Metafilter, which gives us even more of them.

(Image credit: Jason Eppink)

In the 1850s, New York City was looking for a new hangman. The profession came with a real drawback in that when people knew his identity, they didn't want to be around him. So another hangman retired, and a young man who had worked at a slaughterhouse took the position. He worked for the city for decades, and became known as Monsieur de New York.

This guy took his work seriously. He designed a new gallows that killed quickly and thoroughly, and kept improving upon it. Although public hangings were no longer done, any execution inside the walls of the justice system were standing room only as the public clamored to get a restricted number of tickets. Monsieur de New York put on a show, dressed nattily for the occasion, and acted as a master of ceremonies. His reputation grew, although no one knew who he was. He preferred it that way. As the executioner's fame grew, he was enlisted to carry out federal executions, design gallows for other departments across the country, and even lent his name, or pseudonym, to U.S. Grant's presidential campaign.

Although several men claimed to be Monsieur de New York, and others were accused of that identity but denied it, we still don't know who was the celebrity executioner of New York. Read about Monsieur de New York's work and fame at Atlas Obscura.  

To make a 15,000-egg omelet, you will need a 13-foot frying pan, a fork lift, a bunch of concrete mixing paddles, 70 liters of duck fat, and a battalion of chefs to break all those eggs. Oeuf! It happens on Easter Monday in Bessières, France, as it has for the past 50 years, as the pièce de résistance of a three-day festival. Once the giant omelet is ready, it will be given to festival attendees free of charge. The Festival of the Giant Omelet takes place in several places throughout the year, including the US! The American celebration is in Abbeville, Louisiana in November. But the biggest and best-known is the Easter festival in Bessières. These events are sponsored by the Brotherhood of the Giant Omelet, who have yet to update their page for 2024. Sometimes they go by the Knights of the Giant Omelet (Confrérie Mondiale de Chevaliers de l'Omelette Géante). Oeuf! -via Boing Boing

Silk is one of the strongest natural fibers on earth. Spider silk is stronger, but extremely hard to produce commercially. We learned about the first bulletproof vest that was made of silk and failed because it was biodegradable, but that very property makes silk a great tool for medical care, like sutures that do not have to be removed. Scientists have figured out how to purify silk down to its essential fibroin protein that can be reshaped for many uses.  

Imagine a vaccine that could be delivered in a simple patch. The underside contains many tiny needles made of silk protein that pierce only the very top layers of the skin, and these remain after the patch is removed. Those tiny silk needles are embedded with the vaccine, which is released into the body as the silk degrades. Furthermore, embedding the medicine into the silk protein preserves it, so these vaccine patches can be stored at room temperature for years until they are needed. Larger silk needles can be used to deliver cancer drugs to a tumor without affecting the healthy tissue around it.

Silk can also be used to make support mesh used in surgery that never has to be removed after the patient heals. It can even be used as a biodegradable wrapper to keep food fresh. There are a host of other possible uses for purified silk protein you can read about at Works In Progress. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: RG72)

Many authors publish literary works under a pen name, to made their name easier to pronounce or remember, or to avoid being judged by past works, or, like yours truly, just to keep their professional life separate from their private life. It was a different story for Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. He took different pen names, or what he called "heteronyms," as completely different personalities, and wrote from the viewpoint of each personality. In other words, Pessoa created characters and then inhabited them, writing as if he were in the character's body, even if the writing itself wasn't about the character. It was a habit he picked up as a child, to unleash his creativity without revealing too much of himself. The strangest part of the story was that no one knew that these different writers were all one person until Pessoa passed died! Pessoa's unpublished writings were discovered after his death in 1935, revealing him to be 70 different authors.

Today is March the first, and if we were in ancient Rome, that would come with a "Happy New Year!" greeting. A couple of days ago, we learned that in the Roman calendar, they just doubled February 24th to have a Leap Day. That seems confusing and nonsensical, but you haven't heard the half of it. The Roman Empire had a real time trying to come up with a workable calendar. See, early calendars were decreed by absolute rulers instead of by astronomers and mathematicians, so correcting any anomaly was a political risk.

Ancient calendars only had ten months (304 days) because no one did any agricultural work in the midwinter. Yes, those days existed, but they just weren't counted. In 731 BC, King Numa Pompilius decreed two new months, but that only brought the calendar up to 355 days. No problem, they just added another month when needed, but that didn't work so well, either. A few hundred years later, the harvest festival was falling in springtime, so something had to be done. That fell to Julius Caesar in 46 BC. He created a new calendar for only one year that aimed to set everything straight, but it ended up being 445 days long!

That long year helped to set the calendar right by the seasons, but it wasn't perfect. In another few hundred years, it again had to be adjusted again. Read about the Roman attempts to create a calendar that made sense at BBC Future.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Leomudde)

The earth is surrounded by a cloud of space debris. We have been launching things into space for more than 60 years, and they usually just stay up there long after their job is done. They do fall apart and collide with each other, so that we have tiny pieces of metal, plastic, and paint orbiting the earth and posing danger to spacecraft and other satellites. Yeah, we've managed to even pollute space. So what can we do about it? Many ideas have been proposed, but they are difficult and expensive, and may be dangerous. But what about space lasers? Vox explains how lasers would work, and the pros and cons of launching such a program to deal with space debris. What could possibly go wrong?

Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner studied the language of the Gullah Geechee residents of coastal Georgia in the 1930s. He recorded Amelia Dawley singing a song in another language that she was taught by her grandmother. No one knew what the song said, or where it came from, but it had been passed down through Dawley's family from her grandmother Catherine, who was kidnapped in Africa and enslaved on a coastal rice plantation in America in the early 1800s. A student from Sierra Leone recognized the lyrics in the recording as being of the Mende language.

Decades later, anthropologist Joseph Opala took a recording of Dawley's song to Sierra Leone. His colleague, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, searched through villages in that country to find anyone who might recognize the song. In 1990, she finally found one woman, Baindu Jabati, in an isolated village called Senehun Ngola, who sang a song she learned from her grandmother. It was the same song. Her family had preserved it for hundreds of years.

Since the song contains about 50 words, it’s “almost certainly the longest text in an African language ever preserved by an African American family,” says Opala. “By comparison, [Roots author] Alex Haley was led to his roots in the Gambia by about five or six words in Mandinka.”

Through this song, Amelia Dawley's family was traced to a specific area in Sierra Leone. Dawley's daughter, Mary Moran, was 11 years old when the recording was made. She met Baindu Jabati in 1997, as seen above. Read how the preservation of a song in its original language led to the breakthrough in a family's history at Smithsonian.

(Image courtesy of Sharon Maybarduk)

The annual Dance Your PhD competition invites PhDs and graduate students to illustrate their dissertation with an interpretive dance video. Yes, it seems weird, but it's a lot of fun, and a great way to communicate science ideas to those who don't read dissertations. The contest has been going on since 2008, and we've covered it sporadically since then.

The winner for 2024 is Dr. Weliton Menário Costa of the Australian National University (ANU) for his video Kangaroo Time (Club Mix). It illustrates his paper "Personality, Social Environment, and Maternal-Level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population." Costa illustrates the diversity in kangaroo personalities and how they interact in groups. Kangaroos are quite accepting of each other's differences, and get along well, at least until it comes time to battle for mates. But the Brazilian biologist had a leg up on the competition in that he is also a musician, under the name WELI. He wrote and produced the song "Kangaroo Time," which is available on his new EP Yours Academically, Dr. WELI. It has four songs and drops tomorrow. See a behind-the-scenes video here. -via Metafilter

February 29th is a day that only appears on calendars once every four years, which we call Leap Year. It makes up for the fact that a year is actually 365.25 days long. Why do we put that extra day in February? I used to think it was because February is the shortest month, but that raises the question of why February got shortchanged in the first place. The simple answer is because in ancient Rome, the calendar year began with March. That's why October has a name that means eight even though it's the tenth month. In the Roman calendar, February was the final month of the year, so the placement of Leap Day at the very end of the calendar makes sense.

Except the Romans had Leap Day on February 24th. They essentially had two February 24ths every four years, which was all kinds of confusing, especially if you had an appointment that day. You can thank medieval monks for adding a new day to the calendar, which had to be kept in February because of the calculations of the spring equinox. Read how all that came about at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

People love to gossip, and gossip about someone famous travels wider and is remembered longer than gossip about your neighbors. Some bizarre and totally made-up stories about royalty find new life in print (see any tabloid), and the tales grow larger and stranger as they are passed along until idle gossip becomes a full-blown conspiracy theory. However, the term "conspiracy theory" has inched beyond its original meaning of a secret group engineering something that has a perfectly normal explanation. These stories are more like gossip, alleged scandals, and tall tales that just won't go away.

Any time a monarch dies young, there will be rumors of murder. That happened when King William II died in a hunting accident in 1100, and again when James I died in 1625 after refusing the advice of his doctors. Illegitimate children are a favorite subject of gossip, because everyone likes to think of a hidden royal somewhere. We've all heard the rumor about Prince Albert Victor (pictured above), Queen Victoria's grandson, being Jack the Ripper. And if you can believe it, Charles III is a vampire. Sure, he's related to Vlad the Impaler, but so is all European royalty. Read up on ten stubborn conspiracy theories involving the British royal family at Mental Floss.

Korean YouTuber 아픈 니가 청춘 is 193 centimeters tall, or 6' 4". All his life, he's been the odd man out, with people staring at him and asking if he plays basketball. In this video, he goes to Netherlands, where the average man's height is the tallest on earth, just over six feet. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he is surrounded by men taller than he is. Many are two meters tall, which is 6' 6". He also discovers what normal accommodations for tall people are like. For example, he doesn't have to bend over to use a sink, and he can see his face in a bathroom mirror. He can stand up straight on a train! For contrast, he talks to an average-sized Korean woman who is also in Netherlands, and how she struggles with a world built for tall people. Those of us who are fairly average for our communities don't realize how much difference that makes. -via reddit

Many people keep journals of their lives for a variety of reasons, but through history, women could write in a diary to express ideas that wouldn't be accepted if she said them out loud. Sarah Gristwood's new book, released today, is called Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries. It is a collection of entries from women's diaries over the past 400 years. These personal musings include day-to-day events, but often delve into the feelings they experienced. There is joy, ambition, grief, misery, love, and transformation, but the most common theme over the entire project is frustration.

Beatrix Potter was an expert on fungus, but wasn't taken seriously in her day. Ada Blackjack was treated so badly on her Arctic expedition that she was relieved when the last man died. Florence Nightingale's family objected to her desire to become a nurse. Sophia Tolstoy wrote about the abuse she suffered from her husband Leo. The common theme is the inability to do anything about these problems. Gristwood read hundreds of women's diaries for her project, and she shares some of the more notable emotions she encountered in them at Smithsonian.

David "Sandy" Gottesman had a friend back in the 1960s named Warren Buffet. Over the years, he invested money in Buffet's company and left the portfolio to grow. Meanwhile, Gottesman's wife Ruth taught in the pediatrics department at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. David died in 2022 after 72 years of marriage. He left his Berkshire Hathaway stock, now worth a billion dollars, to Ruth, telling her to "Do whatever you think is right with it." Yesterday the 96-year-old widow announced it would go to the medical school, with a stipulation on how it is to be used.

We are profoundly grateful that Dr. Ruth Gottesman, Professor Emerita of Pediatrics at @EinsteinMed, has made a transformational gift to #MontefioreEinstein—the largest to any medical school in the country—that ensures no student has to pay tuition again. https://t.co/XOy9HZLbfD pic.twitter.com/1ijv02jHFk

— Montefiore Health System (@MontefioreNYC) February 26, 2024

That amount of money ensures that the couple of hundred students admitted to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine every year will pay no tuition for as long as the institution remains in existence. Students who are graduating this spring will receive a refund on the 2024 spring semester. -via Fark