A study published in the Royal Society Open Science journal suggests that mushrooms are pretty chatty. In fact, the electrical signals fungi emit toward one another when they encounter food or danger bear a striking resemblance to human speech, at least in terms of the patterns they use.
Andrew Adamatzky of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England noticed that fungi electrical signals spiked in certain situations.
Now, you can’t hear mushrooms speak, of course. Many mushrooms grow as part of a network with tiny roots and filaments connecting them underground, called hyphae – and that’s where the signals are passed.
Adamatzky admits that his experiment is a far cry from finding a secret “mushroom language,” but making the comparison allows us to understand the possible purpose of these electrical signals. In the end, they may mean nothing, but the fact that we can distinguish patterns of electrical activity in certain situations would suggest something interesting is going on.
The article reminds us:
“This is indeed quite a primitive classification akin to interpreting binary words only by sums of their bits and not exact configurations of 1s and 0s. That said, we should not expect quick results: we are yet to decipher language of cats and dogs despite living with them for centuries, and research into electrical communication of fungi is in its pure infant stage.”
The world didn’t end on April 27, 2022, though we’re confident that a few people thought it might after seeing a giant fireball in the sky headed straight for earth at 8 am.
Around 60 people in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana saw what turned out to be a meteor, but hundreds of people heard the loud boom. That’s because it exploded 34 miles above a swampy area in Louisiana with the power of 3 tons of TNT. Frankly, we would have just gone back to bed after all that.
NASA confirmed the meteor and verified that pieces of it had been recovered on the ground in Mississippi. At first, they estimated its speed at 55,000mph but later amended it to a more modest 35,000mph.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said the event caused no physical injuries or property damage. However, we’re pretty sure there was at least a little bit of existential damage done to anyone who thought they were about to meet the same end as the dinosaurs.
Because the law states that meteorites belong to whoever owns the property they land on, NASA will not disclose the locations of any of the fragments. (We’re pretty sure someone on Facebook will take care of that.)
NASA also reminded people: “We are not meteorite people, as our main focus is protecting spacecraft and astronauts from meteoroids.” So they won’t be identifying or authenticating any other rocks people claim are meteorites. They also confirmed that Mississippi is particularly meteorite-prone, with incidents occurring in 1854, 1910, 1922, and 2012. – WTF fun facts
Pretty soon, it may be illegal for Canadian astronauts to go on crime sprees in space.
Now, we’re pretty sure that’s not why Canadians become astronauts in the first place, but apparently, you can never be too careful.
So, what’s this all about? Well, Canada just proposed an amendment to the country’s Criminal Code in their no-doubt riveting 443-page Budget Implementation Act in the House of Commons. It basically states that any crime committed in space by Canadians will be considered to have been committed on Canadian territory and punished accordingly. In other words, if you commit moon murder as a Canadian, you better not come back.
Interestingly, Canada has been preparing for space crime for a while now. Their Criminal Code already lays out prohibitions on crimes Canadian astronauts may commit during space flight to the International Space Station. accounts for astronauts who may commit crimes during space flights to the International Space Station.
Canada is part of the Lunar Gateway Project, a NASA-backed orbiting space platform. Part of that plan includes a trip to the moon, and apparently, the government wants to make sure Canadians maintain their reputation for being polite even among extraterrestrials.
The proposed code change reads:
“A Canadian crew member who, during a space flight, commits an act or omission outside Canada that if committed in Canada would constitute an indictable offense is deemed to have committed that act or omission in Canada.”
There are two interesting questions at play here – 1) who controls space justice, and 2) what gives a country the right to say space in their territory for prosecutorial purposes?
If you think space crime is absurd, there have already been accusations that have raised questions (however, no crime actually occurred). In 2019, astronaut Anne McClain was accused by her estranged spouse, Summer Worden, of improperly accessing bank records from the International Space Station. But McClain was later cleared after her spouse admitted to lying.
Still, it made people wonder how we might prosecute crimes in space, where no one technically owns territory (yet) and no one has jurisdiction.
Now, we already have some guidelines for international space law, believe it or not. According to CBC News:
“‘There are five international treaties governing activities in space but the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, ratified by Canada and more than 100 other countries, is the most relevant when it comes to dealing with alleged crimes in space, wrote Danielle Ireland-Piper, an associate professor of constitutional and international law at Australia’s Bond University. ‘As for the question of who prosecutes space crimes, the short answer is that a spacefaring criminal would generally be subject to the law of the country of which they are a citizen, or the country aboard whose registered spacecraft the crime was committed.'”
But things might be different if the astronaut-on-astronaut crime occurs between two different nations. In that case, there might be some disagreement about which country is able to prosecute the space offender. – WTF fun facts
While it may be kind of funny, it’s really not a good thing that the methane emissions from cow burps can be viewed from space. That methane actually gets trapped in the earth’s atmosphere and contributes to climate change.
These emissions were detected by an environmental data company called GHGSat. Their high-resolution satellites saw the emissions in February, but it took until April to confirm their suspicions.
The burping cattle reside on a feedlot in California’s Joaquin Valley. According to CNN: “If these emissions were sustained for just one year, enough gas would be released ‘to power 15,402 homes,’ the company said.”
Farm cattle contribute to 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by human activity around the world. In California alone, there are 650,000 beef cows.
This marks the first time that scientists have been able to use satellite imagery to pinpoint methane emissions from cattle farming.
CNN explained the process:
“The company has three high-resolution satellites in orbit, which it has previously used to measure emissions from open-pit coal mines. Each satellite is just the size of a microwave oven, says GHGSat. “This is really pushing the envelope of our capabilities,” said Wight. “What’s unique about us is we can really kind of get to the source” of emissions, focusing in on specific feedlots. Each satellite flies over a designated location for just about 20 seconds, taking a quick “snapshot” of emissions, Wight said. Over time, regular monitoring with these satellites could create a “temporal picture” showing the change in emissions over time, allowing farmers to, for instance, test out the impact of different diets on cows’ methane emissions.” – WTF fun facts
Sure, it sounds gross. It is gross. But so is a lot of the creative stuff doctors do to keep us alive.
As it turns out, the resurgence of therapies that use maggots and leeches has saved thousands of lives. Doctors can use them because they are FDA-approved as medical devices, despite being living creatures.
Now, no one heads to the local community garden or dumpster to get medicinal leeches and maggots. They are created in labs within very specific parameters.
So, let’s start with maggots. How can they possibly be medicinal?
The maggots used in medicine are the larvae of bottle-green blowflies. Because maggots only eat dead skin and not living skin, they’re actually perfect for cleaning infected wounds. Instead of having some first-year resident scrubbing out your open wound, maggots are even more gentle by comparison. In fact, since they’re eating dead tissue that’s already numb, you don’t feel the chomping at all. And they do a darn thorough job!
Leeches, on the other hand, are known as blood drinkers. Both of these creatures have been used in medicine for thousands of years, but are just making a comeback. However, leeches weren’t always applied in helpful ways in the past. Now, they’re used to clean up pooled blood in the body.
According to Discover Magazine: “When blood starts pooling instead of circulating, the area swells, and the lack of fresh, oxygenated blood causes skin tissues to die. Leeches can prevent that from happening.”
In the 1980s, as more wounds became resistant to antibiotics, a few doctors wanted to try maggots again and got some men at the VA hospital to agree. After the trials worked, the doctor in charge realized that in order to share the maggots with colleagues, he had to file paperwork with the FDA, and they turned out to be hard to regulate. But it was possible and in 2003, the FDA approved maggots as a medical device. Six months later, leeches were approved as well.
Obviously, not all hospitals are keen to use them (and patients aren’t generally big fans of the idea either). – WTF fun facts
Well, to be fair, we’ve driven on salted roads and sometimes the best we ever got was the need for a car wash afterward. So we believed it when we heard cities use other methods. We just wouldn’t have immediately come up with pickle or beet juice as the alternative.
As it turns out, pickle brine, the wastewater from beet processing, and even beer wastewater are all effective in combating icy roads.
And that’s a good thing because we do know that too much salt is problematic in lots of ways, to us and to the surrounding land. In 2014, a U.S. Geological Survey found that 84% of U.S. streams in the northern part of the country had toxic levels of chloride. And road salt is sodium chloride. These levels peaked during the months when road salt is used. A lot of this salt also ends up in our lakes as it leeches through the land. These are big consequences that we’ll have to deal with soon, somehow. Just think about how well water is going to be affected.
According to Big Think, here’s how road salt works:
1. Salt attracts ice and snow molecules. 2. The salt break the bonds that hold together the ice and snow molecules. 3. This melts the snow, creating a brine consisting of salt and water. 4. The brine spreads, repeating the process as it moves over the road.
Beet wastewater can have the same effect. It contains sugar to lower the temperature of ice. However, the communities that have used it tend to dislike the smell – something it smells like soy sauce or stale coffee. Now, if it smelled like FRESH coffee, we’d be in business!
Pickle juice has some similar smell issues, but all of these alternatives (cheese brine is another) are less corrosive to cars as well.
Want to read more about the alternatives? Check out the source below – it’s pretty interesting to see how we may all use something different based on what’s available to us in our region. – WTF fun facts
There’s no arguing with the fact that trees keep the planet alive. And we all know they help keep the Earth cool, though we may not know the exact mechanism by which they do it.
But the amount of influence trees can have over the climates in their immediate areas is still pretty stunning.
Even when trees grow in cities (relatively far apart and under conditions that are probably less ideal than, say, a forest), they can have a large cooling impact.
According to the EPA, cities sometimes create “heat islands”:
“An urban heat island (UHI) is an urban area or metropolitan area that is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to human activities. The temperature difference is usually larger at night than during the day, and is most apparent when winds are weak.”
Tl; dr – Cities are hotter because of all the stuff we do there.
But what’s cool about trees (see what we did there?) is that they can lower both surface and air temperatures. We all know it’s cooler in the shade (sometimes by as much as 20-45 degrees F!), so that’s part of it. But there’s also something called evapotranspiration that plays a role. That’s the method by which water moves from the earth’s surface (the soil) up into the atmosphere. So, later, when we get precipitation, it can cool off our buildings and sidewalks.
Evapotranspiration (along with shading, in most cases) can reduce peak temperatures on a summer day by 2-9 degrees F.
And chances are that if you have a thoughtful city planning department, the trees planted around your nearest city are planted in very strategic locations to take advantage of this process. (For example, you may find more trees planted to the west of buildings to take advantage of maximum shade.)
There’s a very long list of the benefits of trees, but we’ll add a few that are less obvious about city trees:
They reduce energy usage by lowering the demand for air conditioning
They help with stormwater management after big storms by absorbing and filtering rainwater
They can reduce the need for constant pavement maintenance by keeping sidewalks, roads, and parking lots cool
They improve our quality of life, in part, by reducing noise pollution in cities.
Sometimes trees get in the way, but it’s critical to have them around (or replant them when we need to remove them). – WTF fun facts
When we saw a webpage titled “Frog Vomit: Everything There is to Know,” we knew there would be something great to share with you. And by “great,” we mean we hope your stomach has already committed to holding down your breakfast because we’re going to talk about barf. (Emetophobics – that is, people who have a fear of vomit – turn back now.)
Ok, so most frogs have a unique way of tossing their cookies, so to speak. The little creatures can’t just hurl the way the rest of us do.
When we vomit, it’s because of signals in our brain that contract all of our major muscle groups – diaphragm, chest wall, abdominal muscles – put so much pressure on our stomachs that the contents are then forced up through our throats and through our mouths. You probably know the feeling. But next time you have to heave, just be glad your stomach is staying where it is because that’s not the case for most frogs.
No matter what you think of vomiting, we must be able to do it because it can keep us safe from anything toxic being absorbed into our bloodstream and killing us. So frogs are lucky, too, because they CAN vomit. It’s just a bit more of a production.
Frogs expel the contents of their stomach via a full gastric eversion. And while your worst hangover might have felt like that, it wasn’t. A full gastric eversion is when a body doesn’t just eject vomit, it ejects the entire stomach organ.
When frogs puke, they actually see their stomachs outside of their bodies. Of course, it doesn’t freak them out because that’s just how their species rolls. But what we find fascinating is that their stomach can just be out there, all like “hello, world!” and then go back in without much drama.
According to the experts, frogs can even give their stomachs a bit of a dust-off while they’re at it, wiping their bellies clean of whatever might be stuck in there causing a problem. Seriously, they’ll use their little froggy hands to wipe it right off, using the front, right hand (obvs). (Ok, we also didn’t know this, but the front, right hand of a frog is the closest to their expelled stomach due to the way the stomach is positioned in their bodies.)
If you’re wondering what happens next, it’s all relatively routine after that. They just pick their expelled organ up, plop it back in their mouths, and swallow it. After all, it’s the only way back in!
And there’s no chance of them biting it either since frog teeth (which, we’ll admit, we never really thought about) are only used to keep food in, not for chewing.
Frogs vomit for many of the same reasons we do – because there’s something in their stomach that is toxic, inedible, or simply too big (buffet-lovers, you know what we mean). Frogs can even vomit due to motion sickness!
Now, if something very unnatural happens in their environments and they cannot re-swallow their stomach for some reason, the frogs will suffocate and die. So if you see the little guys (and gals) in a rough situation, give them a minute to swallow before you interfere.
If you got this far, we know what you’re thinking. So there’s a video below where you can see a frog barf its stomach out. You’re welcome. (Oh, and if the pedant in you wants to point out that this is a toad, please note the fun fact that a toad is a type of a frog and that there is no official scientific distinction between the two creatures.) –WTF fun facts
Cowbirds (Molothrus ater) have an interesting way of parenting.
Females (known as “brood parasites”) use all their energy to produce eggs and can even lay around three dozen each summer. It seems like a lot of babies, right? But they’d never know because they abandon them all to whatever feathery foster parents they can find. They lay their eggs in the nest of other birds and expect those birds to raise their young. They’ll even lay their eggs in a nest with other chicks already in it and expect the resident birds to evict their own young in favor of the newcomers!
Even more interesting is that they don’t choose other cowbirds – the babies are raised by completely different species of birds. There are at least 220 other species of bird that could find cowbird eggs in their nest one day, but individual females tend to choose one species with which to leave all of their eggs.
Cowbirds have been a challenge for scientists to understand because it’s hard to follow and get to know birds that don’t build nests. But we’ve had more luck in recent years as their habitats have become smaller, and they’ve moved closer to humans (although that’s not really a good thing for the birds).
So, you may wonder how cowbirds learn to become cowbirds if they are raised by other species. And that’s where the really interesting fact comes in.
Cowbirds eventually find their own kind and spend the rest of their lives associating with other cowbirds. They reunite with their species as juveniles, even though there’s no reason they should have the skills to recognize that they aren’t like their foster parents. (Bird brains aren’t that big.)
So how do cowbirds come to recognize one another? They have a password or “secret handshake” deal going on. Technically, it’s a very specialized chatter call. No matter their age, they can take to the trees, make their calls, and other cowbirds will come and find them. – WTF fun facts
Did you know that cattle can be potty trained with less instruction than toddlers? Some say it’s “easier” or “faster,” but that’s really going to depend on your access to and familiarity with each. Still, we didn’t realize cows would have the inclination to do it at all!
Researchers and cattle ranchers have worked together in Germany to train cattle not to pee out in the open. And it’s not a matter of cleanliness; it’s a matter of survival. OUR survival.
There are around 1 billion cattle in the world. Each pees about 10 liters (or 5 gallons) a day. It’s a lot. But we all pee, so what’s the problem?
Well, there are a couple of issues here: 1. When cows release all that urine in barns, it mixes with poop on the floor and creates ammonia, leading to air pollution for nearby people. 2. When they pee in pastures, it leeches into local waterways. And while most places are equipped with treatment facilities, not all of that infrastructure is in great shape and can be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of potential pollutants in the water. 3. Cow urine also contains nitrous oxide. This substance gets trapped in the earth’s atmosphere and can prevent heat from escaping into space, increasing our planet’s average temperature.
So, if we can prevent all this, why wouldn’t we? And we can’t stop cows from peeing, so scientists want to see if they can capture the urine in a way that allows them to control it so that it causes less harm.
Potty training cows sounds ridiculous, but so does letting them pollute our atmosphere while we do nothing. (And let’s face it, we’re not getting rid of cows any time soon.)
Of course, they had to call it “MooLoo training,” so some of this remains pretty silly. The experiment also involved a “cow psychologist,” which is not something we ever heard about at career day.
Ok, so what does cow potty training actually look like? It’s not quite as bizarre as it sounds. It’s just a special pen with astroturf that cows can be trained to pee in. The floor is created in a way that allows the urine to be captured underneath. And some of it can even be used to make fertilizer.
Cows are pretty smart, but they’re also encouraged by food – so it didn’t take them long to realize they got a snack after using the “restroom,” making it much easier to train them.
The first experiment involved 16 cattle and the researchers had 11 of them trained after about 10 days.
Now that we know “MooLoo training” works, the goal will be to automate it so it can be adopted by farmers with much larger herds.
If you’re really eager to see a cow use the bathroom, there’s a video below!
Softbank’s former line of Pepper robots took on many tasks in Japan, including duties in hospitals, retail stores, and even Buddhist temples. Pepper was even programmed to become a stand-in for a Buddhist monk, news outlets reported in 2017.
While the robot monks can deliver blessings and beat a drum, their real purpose is to preside over funeral services in Japan, which has a significantly increasing elderly population.
The robot funerals not only pick up some slack when there aren’t enough human monks to go around, but they’re economical as well. A robot funeral cost about 1/5 of what a regular one would
It’s a question for the ethicists and theologians.
Another interesting fact is that human Buddhist monks have shown the same respect for robots as well, presiding over ceremonialfunerals for obsolete robotic dogs in Japan.
It may sound like just another day at the office for some mothers used to giving their all to their children, but some spider moms really do make the ultimate sacrifice for their young.
It’s called matriphagy, the act of eating one’s mother, and it’s rare. But it happens in a spider species called Stegodyphus lineatus.
These spiders only have one group of babies throughout their lives. And when these spider babies are born, they are entirely dependent on their mothers to regurgitate food and feed it to them so they can grow up.
And what does she get in return?
Well, to be fair, the moms don’t put up a fight. After about two weeks of motherhood, they allow their children to consume them, leaving behind only an exoskeleton.
The spiders are native to Israel, and research into matriphagy in this species showed another interesting thing. Females that had given birth actually started to digest their own tissues before their gruesome deaths. Now, that might be a sign that the species just wasn’t designed to survive motherhood. However, Dr. Mor Salomon, a postdoctoral fellow in entomology at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food & Environment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also found that the ovaries and the heart were the last organs to degenerate.
It also seems that spider mothers know their time is limited because they stop maintaining their web after their babies begin to grow.
Please don’t assume that females who don’t give birth have it any easier. They also tend to sacrifice themselves when a member of the colony has babies. Researchers are still looking into whether this is conditioned behavior or part of the species’ biology. – WTF fun facts
In a move that John Logsdon, director of George Washington University’s space policy institute, called “so dumb,” engineers at Lockheed Martin made a math error that cost millions.
Sloppy errors had plagued the U.S. space program for years by the time it all took place in 1999, but this mistake was one for the record books.
NASA’s rockets were being built by engineering powerhouse Lockheed Martin before being sent to NASA. Meanwhile, the Mars mission launched in early 1999 was run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the nine months between launch and mishap, no one had noticed that the math for the Orbiter’s orbiting program was off.
The LA Times explained:
“A navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet, and pounds. As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.”
Instead of landing on Mars, the Orbiter entered the planet’s atmosphere incorrectly and burned up upon entry, costing roughly $125 million.
The Times went on to explain why people were pretty fed up at this point:
“The loss of the Mars probe was the latest in a series of major spaceflight failures this year that destroyed billions of dollars worth of research, military and communications satellites or left them spinning in useless orbits. Earlier this month, an independent national security review concluded that many of those failures stemmed from an overemphasis on cost-cutting, mismanagement, and poor quality control at Lockheed Martin, which manufactured several of the malfunctioning rockets.”
The basic discrepancy wasn’t all Lockheed Martin’s fault. Engineers at the two facilities had been exchanging data for months and no one ever noticed the numbers were off.
There was a shot at redemption that year as the Mars Polar Lander was scheduled to set down on December 3, 1999, on the frozen terrain of Mars’ south polar cap.
Unfortunately, it crashed into the planet’s surface along with $165 million of hopes and dreams. – WTF fun facts
All jokes about human intelligence these days aside, it’s true that humans have smaller brains than ever before.
The human brain has been shrinking in size for tens of thousands of years (so we can’t blame video games or reality TV or politics). According to anthropologists, the brain volume of Homo sapiens has decreased by about 10% over the last 40,000 years.
We’re used to hearing about the increasing size of brains as humans evolved, but that is a trend that goes back millions of years in human evolution.
And to be fair, our brains may be smaller today, but they are still about 3x bigger than other primates based on body weight.
Anthropologists estimate the brain sizes of our ancestors by measuring the amount of room in the skull. The oldest ancestors of humans had brains the size of a modern chimp’s. The skull cavity could hold about 1.5 cups (to put it in quantities that are easier to picture).
Then, between 2 and 4 million years ago, craniums (and therefore brains) got bigger, distinguishing humans from other primate ancestors. They could hold about 2 cups.
If you go back “just” 1 million years (to our ancestors Homo erectus), their brains could hold 4 cups. And Neanderthals and Homo sapiens (going back about 130,000 years) had craniums that could hold 6 cups.
So if you go back far enough, you see that brain size did increase, up to a point. After that, they began shrinking in size.
Today, the average human brain holds around 5.7 cups. But why? We can only make assumptions.
For starters, human bodies got smaller once the Ice Age was over, and so did skulls and brains.
But Discover Magazine claims that the most convincing hypothesis comes from anthropologist Brian Hare, which he calls “survival of the friendliest.”
This hypothesizes that Stone Age societies valued different, more domestic traits – specifically, ones that made humans more social. Social behavior is regulated by hormones that also affect brain and body size. So when we selected for these behaviors (by breeding with more social humans), we also chose genes that made bodies and brains smaller.
A reduction in skull and brain size isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It may be that we needed less brain volume as we began to live in collectives, cooperate, and rely on our communities. In other words, now we share the burden of survival with others, so our brains don’t have to hold every element of survival. – WTF fun facts
There’s really not that much disagreement in the scientific community – in fact, what constitutes being “alive” is more of a philosophical question. But at some point, it’s both helpful and fascinating to think about what really counts as “being alive.”
In many ways, viruses simply don’t make the cut, even though we talk about them as if they were alive. But that’s because we tend to use metaphors of living things to describe them.
Why not? Well, here are a few reasons: – They cannot carry out any metabolic processes on their own (generally the definition of being alive) – They cannot reproduce on their own, only replicate within a host cell. – They don’t have ribosomes (in fact, they don’t even have cells) – They cannot produce energy or control the environment in which they exist (only replicate in it). – They cannot independently form proteins from messenger RNA – They’re just so darn small (which, to be fair, is not a big part of the argument but something to consider).
In the end, they are just a jumble of protein and RNA that needs a spark of life from somewhere else to do anything at all.
Of course, there are some arguments to the contrary. Those who believe viruses should be considered living things point out the following: – They have genomes – They can evolve – Under the right conditions, they do have the ability to reproduce (even if it’s not on their own)
So perhaps viruses are in between somewhere, only being alive when they can reproduce. That’s something to consider, but only for fun really, since the answer won’t help us solve our viral issues. – WTF fun facts
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was one of a handful of men who were working on a machine that transmitted vocal communications telegrphically. But we only remember him because he got to the patent office first (and he was already a well-known inventor).
Historians and government officials have since reexamined the research and found that Bell wasn’t actually the first to create the world-changing technology. That honor goes to an Italian-American immigrant and mechanical genius from Florence, Antonio Meucci.
In fact, in 2002, U.S. Congress recognized an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell.The Guardianreported, “Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognize a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.”
“It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged,” the resolution stated. (You can read theresolution(107th Congress, H Res 269) onCongress.gov.)
While you might think there was a mad dash to the patent office, it’s actually the case that 16 years went by between Meucci’s demonstration of his “teletrofono” in New York in 1860 and Graham’s 1876 patent.
However, it was Bell’s telephone design that ended up being used to create the first telephones, so he does deserve some pretty massive credit. It’s just that Meucci deserves some and well and never really gets it.
The title of the most annoyed competitor of Bell’s likely goes to Elisha Gray, a professor at Oberlin College. He actually sent his lawyer to the patent office on the same day. Bell’s lawyer got to the desk first on February 14, 1876. His filing was the fifth entry of the day, while Gray’s lawyer was 39th. The U.S. Patent Office awarded Bell with the first patent for a telephone (US Patent Number 174,465).
Some historians actually claim that Bell knew what was happening and may have bribed someone at the patent office to doctor documents showing his patent came in first, but we’ll probably never know. –WTF Fun Fact
3…2…1…we have liftoff. NASA may not have stolen the words for their spaceship launches, but they did lift the idea from a sci-fi film.
Of course, countdown clocks allow everyone involved to ensure they’re on the same page at the same time, but a big part of the countdown is building suspense for those watching. And that’s why NASA decided to make the final countdown a major part of their televised launches.
But they didn’t come up with the idea on their own. Like so much technology, the concept originated in a 1929 sci-fi film titled Frau im Mond by Fritz Lang. Even more unexpected – it was a silent film!
The idea for the story came from the novel Die Frau im Mond, by Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife at the time). According to Atlas Obscura: “The book, which follows a group of backstabbing moon prospectors, is a rollercoaster ride of love triangles, business intrigue, and lunar gunfights…”
Lang needed the film to be a hit. The “talkie” was becoming more and more popular, so he needed a way to make his silent films just as engaging. That’s when he settled on the countdown. (Another fun fact: before Die Frau im Mond, books and movies that involved a shuttle launch usually used countUPs.)
Atlas Obscura explained further how this influenced NASA: “The film’s space advisors brought lessons they learned from the film set back with them to the Society for Space Travel, where they found that loudly timing launches to the second was not only dramatic, but helpful. When NASA launched its first successful satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958, newsreels broadcasting the event breathlessly announced, ‘the moment is at hand, the countdown reaches zero!'”
The breathless countdown worked for Lang – his was the highest-grossing film of the year in 1929. And we can’t imagine a NASA launch without the countdown (something we completely took for granted). – WTF Fun Fact
You can check out the film scene yourself (and no, that’s not the original music!):
You’ll have to travel to the place where the cold water of the Nordic Sea meets the warmer water from the Irminger Sea if you want to catch a vague glimpse of the world’s largest waterfall. The only problem is, it’s underwater.
Because the cold water is dense, it sinks below the warm water and spills over an undersea cataract all the way down to the ocean floor. It’s so big that the downward flow is estimated at over 123 million cubic feet per second. Denmark Strait cataract is around 11,500 feet long (with the next largest being Angel Falls at a mere-by-comparison 3,212 feet).
It also carries an estimated 175 million cubic feet of water per second. For perspective, that’s equivalent to around two thousand Niagaras Falls. – WTF Fun Fact
