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Lewis and Clark marked their trail with laxatives

The Corps of Discovery left on its journey with a trove of 600 giant pills that the men called “thunder-clappers,” which the soldiers and travelers used to jump-start things when they got bound up. And everyone used them pretty regularly.

And, strange as it seems, that fact is why we know several of their campsites along the way. The main active ingredient in “thunder-clappers” was a mercury salt, which is a pretty stable compound. Archaeologists simply have to search for dimples in the ground — which is what old latrine pits often end up looking like, hundreds of years later, after Nature has partly filled them in — and take samples of the dirt in them.

@ offbeatoregon.com
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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.

@ daily.jstor.org
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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…

@ ncei.noaa.gov

via https://news.ycombinator.com/
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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.”

@ news.arizona.edu
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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)

@ eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov

via https://nasa.gov
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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.

@ laphamsquarterly.org
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