Fun facts!

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There's a species of flounder that can live in, and has been found in, freshwater habitats called a "Hogchoker." They apparently got their name for their habit to using their ability to suction onto objects to stick to the top of the mouths of the hogs that were fed them. They're also tiny and use that suction ability on hard surfaces to try and keep themselves from being eaten. Here's a picture of one in an aquarium sticking to the glass:
wet-lab-pics-hogchoaker-045_2008-scaled-e1594064845704.webp
And a picture of one in someone's hand:
20210821-fluke-flounder-hogchoker.webp
 
There is an industry that revolves around salvaging shipwrecks that sunk prior to 1945 for their steel. This is because ever since the Trinity nuclear test, the entire world’s supply of steel made after this date is ever so slightly radioactive. Nowhere near enough to be a problem for mere mortals, however it can be a huge problem for certain use cases, for example in the nuclear industry where radiation detectors can be incredibly sensitive - if you were to use normal steel, it would flag false positives because it’s effectively detecting itself.

Thus exists a market for so-called low background steel.
 
A sizeable portion - around a third - of the steel which makes up Tokyo Tower is made from recycled tanks that were supplied by the USA in the aftermath of the Korean War, making it a pretty cool example of the 'swords to ploughshares' idiom.

However, an even cooler example of this idiom can be found in Project Plowshare, a plan by the USA to use nuclear bombs in civil engineering, the kind of radiation-infused optimism that could have only come out of the early Atomic Age. Among the things proposed to be built by blowing the absolute fuck out of the ground include artificial harbours, canals, mining projects, roads and railways, and creating spaces underground to build petroleum storage facilities. Below is a diagram for one such proposed idea, which would have seen thermonuclear explosives used to blow open an artificial harbour on the coastline of the Chukchi Sea.
1757803406300.webp

Although testing showed some promising results, it was quickly found that in reality, nuclear explosions are far from easily controllable, and the lingering radiation would make such sites hazardous at best, and life-threatening at worst. Project Plowshare was ultimately given up on in the early 1970's, following 27 tests. The USSR, however, didn't get the memo - they had their own version of Project Plowshare, Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy, which utterly dwarfed Project Plowshare with a whopping 124 nuclear tests conducted, spanning all the way from 1965 to 1988.
 
Tungsten Hexafluroide (boiling point 17.1 °C) is the heaviest gas known under standard conditions (25 °C, 1 atm). It is about 11 times denser than air.
 
Positron said:
Tungsten Hexafluroide (boiling point 17.1 °C) is the heaviest gas known under standard conditions (25 °C, 1 atm). It is about 11 times denser than air.
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Uranium hexafluoride (manufactured to enrich uranium in gas centrifuges) is about 12 times denser than air. I was about to mention it, but its boiling point is 56.5C, so not under standard conditions.
 
Positron said:
Tungsten Hexafluroide (boiling point 17.1 °C) is the heaviest gas known under standard conditions (25 °C, 1 atm). It is about 11 times denser than air.
Click to expand...
Speaking of dense gases: You can breath in Sulfur Hexafluoride to make your voice deeper without poisoning yourself, unless you count anesthetic effects as poisoning oneself.
Perfluorobutane is even denser and can also be used. In either case you have to be careful to not suffocate as getting the gas out of your lungs is much harder than with helium.
Him being so out of breath is how I excuse the cringy bit about being "The Dark Lord Fuzzybutt."
 
Yugica said:
Speaking about The South and resource extraction, in 1894 a German immigrant to Louisiana invented a process that revolutionized sulfur mining and broke the Sicilian hegemony on sulfur. The process was named after him and is known as the "Frasch Process" and is a form of leach mining. His invention led to the US being the largest producer of sulfur for quite some time and brought in a substantial amount of wealth, as sulfur was incredibly valuable during that point of time for a massive variety of industrial applications. Even today sulfuric acid production is one way economists measure the industrial capabilities/activity of a nation. Here's a diagram showing off the process.
View attachment 7636282
It's only in the latter portion of the 20th century that sulfur extraction was then dominated by sulfur extracted from crude oil and other fossil fuels as a waste product. Many refining facilities will actually have large mounds of elemental sulfur awaiting to be sold or transported.
View attachment 7636294
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Related trivia: processing the oil sands in Alberta has produced so much Sulphur that the stockpile is nicknamed the Alberta Sulphur Pyramids, largely because the volume has surpassed the volume of the Great pyramid in Egypt.

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No elements with an odd atomic number has more than two stable isotopes (an example of one that has two stable isotopes is Silver, atomic number 47, which has ¹⁰⁷Ag and ¹⁰⁹Ag). On the contrary, elements with even atomic numbers often has more stable isotopes. The record leader is Tin, atomic number 50, which has ten.
 
Many people might have heard about the slime mold that was able to design a whole metro system. That same kind of slime mold though can actually adapt somewhat and spread its adaptations to other slime molds. One of the largest single celled organisms is in their group too. The "Tapioca Slime Mold" has had an individual that was weighed to be over 40 lbs. Here's a picture of one:
Brefeldia_maxima_plasmodium_on_wood.jpg
Many slime molds also make pretty sporangia(their equivalent to a mushroom), although they all tend to be very tiny. Here's some pictures:
slime-mould-lamproderma-scintillans-28369591.jpg.webp Arcyria-denudata.jpg 12627002.jpg
It's my belief that Prototaxites, an ancient group of organisms that would make massive tree-like fossils just when plants were first starting to colonize land(and there were no plants taller than a few inches if even that at many points in their existence), was actually a kind of slime mold.
Prototaxites_milwaukeensis.jpg
They used to be believed to be massive mushrooms/fungi, due to the structure of their fossils at a cellular level. However, this had been turned on its head due to analyses revealing that the fossils were laden with phenolic residues(iirc), which you find with woody fossils but not with fungi or mushrooms as the phenolic compounds come from the breakdown of lignin. Phenols are actually very extensively used by slime molds for various other purposes and some even produce cellulose too for their sporangia, their equivalent of a mushroom. The myxogastria also have lots of adaptations that would've made them dominant organisms on land long before the rise of land plants and likely they would've been so at their dawn too. I did a longer post about my idea here, if you wanna read more.

I also wonder how much you can train a slime mold. How much they can learn. If I ever get the opportunity to then I want to do some tests with various chemical markers in petri dishes. I'd place the slime mold right next to the marker and the cell in which the chemical marker is trailed towards is where their treat is. Then for the next step I'd repeat the process but without any oats for them to eat at the spot, but once they got to the spot I'd feed them. In that sense I'd be able to see if they anticipated a reward based on that chemical marker.
 
Yugica said:
Many people might have heard about the slime mold that was able to design a whole metro system.
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Yugica said:
I also wonder how much you can train a slime mold. How much they can learn. If I ever get the opportunity to then I want to do some tests with various chemical markers in petri dishes. I'd place the slime mold right next to the marker and the cell in which the chemical marker is trailed towards is where their treat is. Then for the next step I'd repeat the process but without any oats for them to eat at the spot, but once they got to the spot I'd feed them. In that sense I'd be able to see if they anticipated a reward based on that chemical marker.
Click to expand...
Recently I saw this video of this Youtube science educational channel (for what that may be worth) doing the same slime mold subway experiment, but with tap water instead, and obtaining similar results.
His take on it is that the results in both cases, slime mold and water, are just caused by physics rather than by any sort of intelligence.
It caused some controversy, video responses, and debates.


For my money, I would agree with the guy in so far as we shouldn't be so eager to assign "intelligence" to things that may function through other causal mechanisms.
 
It took about an hour for Bobby "Boris" Pickett to write the song Monster Mash which would later get banned by the BBC.

Bobby Pickett was an aspiring actor by day and singer in a doo-wop group called the Cordials by night. Pickett was performing the doo-wop tune ‘Little Darlin’ by the Diamonds, and decided to pull out his impression of horror actor Boris Karloff for the spoken monologue to the audiences amusement. After the set, his bandmate who was also a fan of horror films Lenny Capizzi suggested that Pickett’s impression should be used for a novelty song to capitalise on then prevalent dance crazes such as The Twist and The Mashed Potato.

Originally, Pickett wasn’t keen on the goofy idea since it didn’t align with his ambitions to become a serious actor. He reconsidered after the death of his acting agent.

And so the pair got together and wrote ‘Monster Mash’ in around an hour using a Wollensak tape recorder. For the various spooky sound effects, they got creative in the studio. Cauldrons were created by blowing bubbles in glasses of water, and the eerie creak of a coffin lid was the scrape of a rusty nail.

The song was released in the autumn of 1962, “Monster Mash” seemed the ideal Halloween single, but it spooked the BBC who banned the song, feeling it was “too morbid” for the airwaves.

The BBC stood firm, but were forced to relent when the Monster Mash was re-released and shot up to No. 3 in the UK in 1973.

Pickett posed his own theory about the ban of “Monster Mash” in his autobiography, Monster Mash—Half Dead In Hollywood:
“On October 12, 1962, the record was banned by the BBC for being ‘offensive,’ though I didn’t hear about this until 1989, twenty-seven years later. I remember wondering at the time why we weren’t doing well in England, but I never got a straight answer from London Records, since in its second release, it had risen to Number 2 in the UK.

“What was so ‘offensive’ about it? Evidently…someone felt that it was undignified for Boris Karloff to be making fun of monsters or dead folks. [William Henry] Pratt had been educated in England and lived in Canada, where he changed his real name to the more exotic Karloff, and I guess my crude satire was beneath the dignity of any self-respecting Englishman. Go figure.”

Bobby "Boris" Pickett - Monster Mash

 
In roughly 5 billion years when the Sun becomes a red giant, Mercury, Venus and potentially Earth will be consumed and vaporized by the suns rapid expansion. 1
reddit space
Eventually, Pluto and its cousins in the Kuiper Belt — plus Neptune’s moon Triton — could be the most valuable real estate in the solar system. When the Sun turns into a red giant, the temperatures there will be equivalent to those in tropical locales on Earth today, such as Miami Beach, according to Southwest Research Institute astronomer S. Alan Stern. 2
 
The largest musical instrument in the world is 3.5 acres in size and is underground.

It is the Great Stalacpipe Organ which, despite its name, is a percussion instrument that uses stalactites to generate sound. It is in the Luray Caverns in Virginia.
Luray-Caverns-Stalacpipe-Organ-H.png
This is one of the more commonly played songs.
 
Richard Burton's drinking was so extreme, that when he had emergency surgery after filming his death scene in The Klansman, doctors observed that his spine was, to sort of, from memory, quote Robert Sellers' book, An A-Z of Hellraisers: A Comprehensive Compendium of Outrageous Insobriety, "coated in crystallised alcohol."
 
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