We wouldn't want knees to last so long that they kill someone before they reach 20.

Then it seems having perfect hairless palms makes you imperfect, as having hairy palms would contribute to contrast and pain.

There are now a variety of kinds of Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) in galaxies and quasars are thought to be just one kind. Figuring out the differences between them and what causes the differences is a big area of ongoing work. Seyfert galaxies may be closely related to quasars, but less bright due to less material near the central black hole or simply quasars being very directional and often missing us. There are Seyfert galaxies as close as 40 Mly away, much better than the closest quasar of about 500 Mly away. If material is part of the difference, there would be the possibility of a quasar flaring up, although probably not on human timescales.

And yet our knees bend in a way that is less efficient, more fragile, and wears out quicker than alternate possible designs.

I spent some time looking into that when I was younger, and in my opinion, that has to do more with lazy translation that they all fall under the same name. Many of them are not that similar, as some are based on fish, some are based on serpents, and others a mishmash of other animals. The result is a word that is used for creatures that may or may not fly, may or may not have scales, may or may not have wings. Legends about large creatures seem almost universal, but they are often adapted to locales, like how many cultures have legends of people that can turn into an animal, but usually the particular animal depends on what is the scariest thing around (wolves, jaguars, tigers, hyenas, etc.).

I don't know how much I trust some of these sites. They disagree with each other frequently. Some of the ones with long history of data going back decades show names like James being consistently in the top 10. I just checked another site that shows James was #4 in 2017, up from #5 in 2018. It would seem odd for 2018 to suddenly buck that trend, unless one of the sites is wrong (missing data, or trying to push interesting names to the top).

That building in London has the exact same architect as the hotel in Las Vegas above: Rafael Viñoly.

It seems about once a year there is a news story of a grenade ending up in a French potato harvest, even quite recently. Other large areas probably will see munitions found for a long time too.

Then there is the odd ball PAL-M, using the System M that most NTSC is based on (where the 525 line, 30 fps comes from), but the PAL color encoding. So it is basically a hybrid, with 29.97 fps, 525 lines, but doesn't have tint control like NTSC. I think it was only used in Brazil.

Faraday cages work because charges rearrange to counter electric fields and currents are induced to counter magnetic field changes. In the real world, metals have electrical resistance so these effects can be slowed down in a sense, so some fields get through. Thicker metal is like having multiple layers and hence multiple tries, so the result is fields decay exponentially with regards to depth into the metal. Mesh size comes into play too as it affects the resistivity, and small waves can fit through the mesh holes.

At high frequencies, a metal foil or braid is enough. At lower frequencies you need metal plating. And at the very low end, where it is basically like turning on a static magnet or carrying a box from one place to another, the induced currents that resist change of magnetic fields inside the box will decay quickly and the field soaks into the box so that the box makes very little difference (unless made of a magnetic material).

Pretty much any consumer/household/commercial (and industrial equipment smaller than a substation) electronics would be fine in a geomagnetic storm, as a geomagnetic storm is very different from something like an EMP that many picture or treat it as online. Induced voltage is essentially change in magnetic field times area of receiving circuit, divided by time that change happens over. An EMP happens quickly, so you're dividing by a small number, and can get a large voltage even with small area. A geomagnetic storm is very slow, and a rather small magnetic field change too, so you can only get a large voltage when dealing with a large amount of area. (I think I once worked it out as being comparable to having electronics in your pocket while walking past a fridge magnet on a table....)

So this only becomes relevant for systems many kilometers in size, they will experience an induced (relatively) DC voltage and current. A lot of systems already have specific circuit breakers installed to deal with this situation, and there is the possibility of other systems tripping before permanent damage happens even without the DC breakers. A breaker tripping from a geomagnetic storm is what caused the 1989 blackout in Quebec, and they had things working again less than a day later. There is concern over how many systems have proper protections in place and how many damaged systems can be replaced on a short timescale with given reserves of spares, but still a lot of systems have been protected for some time.

Also, very little of the induced voltages and currents would get through the transformer to your household grid connection, so really most of the risk to your personal goods would be the same as any other blackout or brownout: a slight chance of damage when power cuts.

(And to reply to Alex in the same message, a Faraday cage that can stop very slow effects would be impractically massive. The slower the changing fields are, the thicker the piece of metal you need to stop it. As the geomagnetic storms change fields over the course of hours, this looks like essentially DC compared to faraday cages that deal with stuff changing in a millionth of a second. You can somewhat block static magnetic fields with special alloys like mu metal, but it would still be pointless for anything small enough to fit inside.)

The above is specific to things near the ground, as there are extra problems for stuff in/near space, and temporary complications with ground to space communication. So in a really bad situation satellite communication systems and GPS could go down, plus there might be temporary loss of radio reflections off the ionosphere (like AM stations, line of site stuff like cell phones would be unaffected).

Canadians are friendly because they extracted all of their anger and hatred, and entombed it within the body of a demon. The demon was far too ugly though, so they gave it some feathers and a funny honk to soften the horror, at least from a distance.

I've heard it referred to a dazzling effect. Like looking at a germicidal light but less pink. Or maybe somewhat similar to deep blue lights, like some Christmas lights that your eye never seems to focus on well (due to low density of receptors for blue).