The Land Under Antarctica
A team of glaciologists from the University of California Irvine (UCI) made public the most accurate portrayal of the land underneath Antarctica’s ice sheet yet.
Humans
The Early History of Human Excreta
As humans kept wandering, they fertilized places along the way—especially those “rest stops” where their clans chose to stay for a while. Some of these early humans may have even noticed that plants tended to grow bigger, better, and tastier in such rest stops. So, tribes made a point of coming back to those spots the next season, or even several years in a row—and then, one year some decided to just settle at those convenient spots. These early settlers brought us to the advent of farming.
Airport Runway Names Shift with Magnetic Field
For example, the Fairbanks International Airport in Alaska renamed runway 1L-19R to 2L-20R in 2009 when magnetic north shifted enough to mandate a change. And the airport operators know—from NCEI’s World Magnetic Model (WMM) and other sources—that they’ll likely need to update the name again in 2033…
Agrivoltaics: combining solar panel farms with agricultural farms
“Many of us want more renewable energy, but where do you put all of those panels? As solar installations grow, they tend to be out on the edges of cities, and this is historically where we have already been growing our food,”
“We started to ask, ‘Why not do both in the same place?’ And we have been growing crops like tomatoes, peppers, chard, kale, and herbs in the shade of solar panels ever since.”
Magnetic Strip data on credit cards can be extracted with the naked eye
Magnetic stripes (magstripes) are in fact magnetic. What’s so cool about magstripes is that while the magnetic strips inside are weak, they’re still strong enough to attract small ferrous particles and wide enough that we can fully extract all data from a magstripe or credit card with the naked eye.
Lunar Eclipses – 2021-2030
Eclipses recur over the Saros cycle, a period of approximately 18 years 11 days.
The saros is a period of exactly 223 synodic months, approximately 6585.3211 days, or 18 years, 10, 11, or 12 days (depending on the number of leap years), and 8 hours, that can be used to predict eclipses of the Sun and Moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saros_(astronomy)
The ‘Great Shoe Spill of 1990’, Art, and Flotsam Science
Tens of thousands of NIke shoes fell into the Pacific in 1990
Panic at the Library
Though Huntington died in 1927, he intended his collection to live on long after him, but as the librarians discovered, the volumes were literally too full of life. The problem with assembling a massive collection of books is that you necessarily collect the very organisms that feed on books.
The comedian who could be President
Feb 2019: “Polls suggest Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a comedian with no previous political experience, has become one of the frontrunners in Ukraine’s presidential election.”
What if we rethought how typical American sports leagues were organized?
These assumptions, among others, have created the landscape of American sports. But you can violate many if not all of these assumptions while maintaining a compelling league. One which may, in fact, be more fair and lead to a superior product with more exciting outcomes.