In the movie Armageddon, NASA enlisted a team of deep-sea oil drillers to destroy an asteroid that was threatening Earth, turning them into astronauts in the process. The real story of earth-moving engineers who helped NASA is much more plausible. See, the space program built these huge Saturn rockets that weighed 3000 tons (that's six million pounds), and had to somehow get them from the assembly plant to the launch pad. They were not only heavy, but relatively fragile and very expensive. The rocket scientists consulted transportation engineers, but they should have gone straight to the ones who were already doing this kind of work because it's profitable.  

On January 1962, the American Machine & Foundry Company, one of America’s largest recreational equipment manufacturer who produced everything from garden equipment, to atomic reactors, to yachts, presented a plan that involved using a rail-barge combination where the weight of the rocket was supported by barges but propulsion was achieved by rails. The details were still being worked out when the Deputy Chief of the Future Launch Systems Study Office received a phone call from Barry Schlenk, a representative of the Bucyrus-Erie Company, a mining equipment manufacturer. Schlenk had heard about NASA’s transport problems, and offering to help, he sent the Deputy Chief photographs of Bucyrus-Erie's steamshovel crawler used in the Kentucky coal fields. The vehicle seemed suited to NASA’s needs, especially its capability to level and balance a load on uneven terrain.

NASA sent their engineers to the coal town of Paradise, Kentucky, to observe the steam shovel crawler in action, and we're impressed. Read how strip mining technology was drafted to haul Saturn rockets at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: NASA)

Jon Rahm had the most astonishing golf shot at the Masters in Augusta; too bad it was during a practice round and not actual play. The perfect spin led the ball to skip across the pond, once, twice, onto the green, curving around, and even seems to speed up approaching the hole and it's a hole in one! -Thanks WTM!

This may literally be a shaggy dog story, but it doesn't have that kind of punch line. Redditor SwarmTendon told the tale of the time she got to have a dog even though she doesn't have a dog. A stranger thought her dog-friendly office was a dog daycare center and left her Basset hound Otis there all day.

At the end of the day the woman, thank God, came back. She said “Thanks, you’re a lifesaver. How was he?” And I said “He was a champ.” And was about to say “But why is he here” when she said “Thats a relief. Most kennels say he gets anxious around other dogs. I heard you operated at a much higher capacity, I was thrilled to see you had so few clients in the room at one time. So, how much do I owe?” And that’s when I realized she thought we were a dog daycare.

Now, I probably should’ve corrected her. But I loved my day with the office dog and I did want to get paid for supervising this strange dog all day. I just threw out the number that sounded fair and appropriate “That’ll be $20.” I said.

She replied “Reaalllly?!” In this very high tone, and I couldn’t tell if I’d overshot or undershot. But she paid me and left.

But the kicker is that the lady returned and left Otis again and again, for months before she found out what was really going on. In that time, Otis was named employee of the month more often than SwarmTendon was and also appeared in the office Christmas card. Read the story of how the ruse was exposed and what happened to SwarmTendon afterward at reddit. -via Bored Panda 

(Unrelated image credit: Carlos Alejo)

One of the leading causes of preventable deaths is cigarette smoking. In the United States alone, cigarette smoking causes over 480,000 deaths annually, and 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure.

Over the years, cigarette smoking in adolescents has declined, but it seems that the numbers would soon be increasing again due to e-cigarettes, according to this study.

A new study, published Nov. 9 in the journal Pediatrics, finds that e-cigarette use is associated with a higher risk of cigarette smoking among adolescents who had no prior intention of taking up conventional smoking. These findings have strong implications for practice and policy, researches say.

"Research is showing us that adolescent e-cigarette users who progress to cigarette smoking are not simply those who would have ended up smoking cigarette anyway," says Olusegun Owotomo, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., the study's lead author and a pediatric resident at Children's National Hospital. "Our study shows that e-cigarettes can predispose adolescents to cigarette smoking, even when they have no prior intentions to do so."

Learn more about this over at EurekAlert.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: sarahjohnson1/ Pixabay)

If you’re someone who likes spicy food, then you might just live longer than me. According to this preliminary research which will be presented this week at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2020, eating spicy food (those with chili peppers) may help you live longer.

Chilli eaters may have a “significantly reduced risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or cancer”...

While previous research has found consuming chillies has an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer and blood-glucose regulating effect due to capsaicin – which gives chilli its characteristic hot taste, the study is the first large scale effort to compare reported consumption of chilli with disease mortality.

Learn more details about this over at Independent.

(Image Credit: Hans/ Pixabay)

Do you enjoy looking at great tits (Parus major)? Well, then, we'd better take action to ensure that our and future generations get to enjoy the company of great tits. The Independent reports that scientists think this bird species could become extinct due to global warming:

Great tits are among many species which depend on an abundance of larvae available when their chicks are newly hatched and growing.

Among populations of great tits, some birds’ young hatch earlier than others, and in a rapidly warming world with earlier springs, to begin with, these families of tits could survive.

-via Instapundit | Photo: Pixabay

Previously on Neatorama: Great Tits Use Syntax

In 1920, the audacity of one Black man trying to vote in the November election in Ocoee, Florida, led to a riot that left six people dead, and caused all of Ocoee’s black residents to leave forever. The Orlando newspaper covered the incident, highlighting “2 white victims.” Of the four Black people who were killed, only one, July Perry, was ever identified by name. Pamela Schwartz of the Orange County Regional History Center tell the story.      

That invoice and headline illustrate the challenge facing Schwartz and other researchers. They’re typical of what she calls the “intentional obfuscation” of much of Black history, the product of official records that are sketchy or apathetic or worse. As a result, much of the evidence we inherit of such events is indirect and incidental. “You just didn’t go to Ocoee,” recalled Francina Boykin, a Black woman from nearby Apopka, while describing her childhood in an oral history that informed the exhibition. “You just didn’t.” People don’t always know why they were raised to avoid the town, but Boykin’s comments echo “the sentiment from almost every Black person we’ve done an oral history with, [even on subjects] totally unrelated to the Ocoee Massacre,” Schwartz says. That’s the thing about oral history, she adds. It leads to “this whole other world of information that lives in each individual”—information that is not always precise, but is nevertheless revealing.

The Ocoee Massacre left a legacy felt to this day. The Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando declined to do an exhibit on the incident in the early 21st century because it was still too sensitive. But this year, an exhibit about it will run until February. Read about the Ocoee Massacre of 1920 at Atlas Obscura.

On the Data is Beautiful subreddit, dyqz posted the results of a poll he took in which 1600 people showed how differently they view holes. If you can dig a hole in the ground that is shaped like a bowl, then doesn't a bowl also have a hole? But if there was a hole in your bowl, your soup would leak out! Is a pore in your skin considered a hole? What if it is filled with a blackhead -is it still a hole? How about a coffee cup: is the hole the place where you put the coffee, or the place you put your fingers in to hold it, or both? And then there's the drinking straw, which may have one hole or two (one at each end). Jason Kottke gives us some definitions of a hole from various thinkers, which only raise more questions. A golf course has holes, but a topologist would say they are not holes at all, since they don't go all the way through the earth. In that case, your digestive tract would be a hole, but most people consider the ends to be two different holes. -via Metafilter, where there is a lot more discussion on the subject.

England, 1796. It was a year when the incurable smallpox became rampant across the country, and the only method that physicians employed back then to deal with the infectious disease was variolation. In this method, people were deliberately infected with a small dose of smallpox pus, in hopes that they will become immune to the disease.

That's a nice way of putting it. The process that physicians had developed – likely as a method of generating more income – involved semi-starvation, bleeding and purging, before deliberate infection (in Jenner's own case, at the age of 8 being thrown into a stable with other infected boys) in a game of Russian roulette for survival and immunity.

One of the men who experienced this rather horrifying method when he was a kid was Edward Jenner. However, despite going through this, Jenner still walked the path of a physician. Little did he know that, through his work developing the world’s first vaccine, he would be the man who would save millions, if not billions, of lives.

Learn more about how the vaccine was created over at IFL Science.

(Image Credit: Wellcome Images/ Wikimedia Commons)

Banded mongooses are fearless fighters, and are famous for standing up to venomous snakes. A new study, combining observation and genetic analysis, shows that they'll even go to war with rival groups of other banded mongooses. What's notable about these fights is that they're apparently started as an excuse for sex.

The researchers found that the fights were predominantly started by females, who wield a great deal of influence over the group, according to the research, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This influence is particularly great when females are ovulating and capable of becoming pregnant, which in banded mongooses happens for all female group members at the same time.

Video taken by the researchers revealed that females mated with the males of rival groups during battle, while the protective males in their own group were distracted, per New Scientist. Fights were more likely to occur when females of a group were in the fertile stage of their reproductive cycle, called estrus.

“Estrus females have been observed to lead their group deep into enemy territory, closely followed by mate-guarding males, directly inciting intergroup fights,” write the researchers in the paper.

This is not only a betrayal, but an atrocity as mongooses can get killed, including pups. But it's also a scheme to refresh the gene pool. Mongooses are born into permanent groups of around twenty or so individuals, and inbreeding is assured without some way of mating outside the group. It seems a pity they couldn't find a less violent way to do it. Read about the research on mongoose war and sex at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Charles J Sharp)

The current pandemic made a lot of us work from home. Most of our houses aren’t conducive to a working environment, maybe some of us are just using our dining room table, or any flat surface where our computers and files can be placed while we work. If you have the same issue, this article might just be a good place to get some inspiration on how to DIY a portion of your home into a ideal home office: 

For four months, Kris McDonald and his wife both crowded around the dining room table to work from home. It was, as he says, “no longer working.” But when his wife put in an order for a new desk to call her own, they both realized that they didn’t actually have a place to put it—yet.

The unfinished attic in their home was sitting empty, so Kris drew up plans to turn it into a small “Jack and Jill” office space that would give them each a desk on opposite sides of the room. That way, they’d have their own space and would be able to retreat to their living areas in off-hours.

Check how Kris McDonald and his wife did the transformation over at Apartment Therapy. 

Image via Apartment Therapy 

The day, regional travel restrictions for Melbourne has been lifted, we took off the Great Ocean Road. And we had been in luck! Right two minutes drive for Apollo Bay, we met a koala sitting low on a gum tree. She looked at us with surprise in her eyes! Seems she did not see any tourists there for a long time.

A team led by Cornell University has developed a technique called “cold spray.” This technique could produce “mechanically robust, porous structures that are 40% stronger than similar materials made with conventional manufacturing processes.” Aside from that, they can also make these structures much faster.

The structures' small size and porosity make them particularly well-suited for building biomedical components, like replacement joints.

The team's paper, "Solid-State Additive Manufacturing of Porous Ti-6Al-4V by Supersonic Impact," published Nov. 9 in Applied Materials Today.

The paper's lead author is Atieh Moridi, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

[...]

The particles were between 45 and 106 microns in diameter (a micron is one-millionth of a meter) and traveled at roughly 600 meters per second, faster than the speed of sound. To put that into perspective, another mainstream additive process, direct energy deposition, delivers powders through a nozzle at a velocity on the order of 10 meters per second, making Moridi's method sixty times faster.

More details about this over at PHYS.org.

This is awesome.

(Image Credit: Cornell University/ PHYS.org)

Marty, a black Maine coon cat that patrolled the highest peak in the northeast U.S. for twelve years has died. The cat was the Mount Washington Observatory's mascot, loved as a special companion for the observers and state park staff, as AP News details:  

The Mount Washington Observatory staff have had a cat at the 6,288-foot (1,915-meter) summit, called the “home of the world’s worst weather,” since 1932. The observatory had recently shared the news that Marty would retire from the mountain early in 2021.

Image via AP News 

Do you struggle when it comes to learning new languages as an adult? Apparently this phenomenon also applies not only to a select few, because scientists found new data on how language learning is notoriously difficult for adults. A new study offers an answer as to how the adult brain processes language learning: 

Their results suggest learning a new language as an adult actually reroutes brain networks, igniting shifts that can have long-term implications on memory and cognitive function.

As skills improve, language comprehension changes how the two halves of the brain split functions, the study suggests. Language production — speaking that language — doesn't cause the same changes. In particular, the language lateralization changes observed were greatest when it came to reading a new language, smaller when it came to listening, and negligible in speaking.

Based on these findings, it appears that language production is hardwired in the left brain — but comprehension is more flexibly shared across hemispheres.

Co-author Kshipra Gurunandan is a researcher at the BCBL Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language. She tells Inverse these findings imply that, in some ways, adult brains are more flexible than previously hypothesized.

"The brain remains flexible enough to learn new languages well into adulthood, even if nailing the accent might get harder with age," Gurunandan says. "We surmise that for an adult, it might be easier to learn a language that has sounds similar to one’s native language."

Image via Inverse