Stuff you didn't know and probably don't care about

[Charmonium]

Alexander Graham Bell (yes, that one) invented the metal detector. Cool story --->

Back in the mid-1800s, amid the frenzy of the California Gold Rush, scientists began to toy with the idea of a machine that could detect underground metal. But the first person to create such a machine was Alexander Graham Bell, better known as the inventor of the telephone. In 1881, Bell attempted to save the life of President James Garfield, who had been shot in the back by assassin Charles Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station. Bell's crude metal detector wasn't able to locate the elusive bullet in Garfield's body, but the electromagnetic device turned out to be the prototype for all future metal detectors.
The bullet pierced Garfield’s vertebra but missed his spinal cord. It did not affect any major organs, arteries or veins. However, doctors searched the president's body with unsterile hands and instruments, leading to sepsis, a massive infection that led to his death.
The search for the missing bullet:

• Doctors severely limited Garfield's solid food intake, believing the lead bullet might have pierced his intestines. X-rays, which would have been helpful in the search, weren't discovered until the 1890s.
• During the autopsy, the bullet was found lodged in the adipose tissue on the left side of the president’s back, just below the pancreas.
• The metal springs in Garfield's bed may have confused Bell's metal detector, rendering it useless.

http://www.wisegeek.com/who-came-up-with-the-metal-detector.htm

 

[feralkid]

They should have sailed into Mexico and then jumped the border. They could have saved the $1 and gotten an education and free health care.

They would've been in for a rather long wait, since free healthcare wasn't introduced in Mexico until 1943.

 

[John Connor]

Alexander Graham Bell (yes, that one) invented the metal detector. Cool story --->

http://www.wisegeek.com/who-came-up-with-the-metal-detector.htm

I always found the name Alexander Graham Bell interesting. When I was young living in Riverside, California we had Bell Telephone I think it was. So seeing this sign I always thought it was due to old phones using a bell. But it's actually taken from Alexander Graham Bell's name. LOL

I have a book on Alexander Graham Bell. Very interesting.

 

[Charmonium]

This bug is 'geared' for hopping

In 2013, using high-speed video, scientists were finally able to see what makes a young Issus coleoptratus so unique. They've known for years about the interlocking gear-like structures on the plant-hopping insect's legs, but until they were able to see the bug in action in slow motion, they didn't fully understand how the wave-shaped gears meshed. These interlocking gears allow the insect to launch itself with one smooth, explosive motion.
"To the best of my knowledge, it's the first demonstration of functioning gears in any animal," said study researcher Malcolm Burrows, an emeritus professor of neurobiology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
A small insect with serious moves:

• Once locked and loaded, the adolescent planthopper accelerates to nearly 400 times the force of gravity, much more than a human could withstand. The Issus coleoptratus is among the animal kingdom's fastest accelerators.
• The researchers believe the Issus coleoptratus, which lives mostly on European climbing ivy, evolved its lightning-fast reflexes in order to flee from dangerous situations.
• The insect doesn't keep these gears throughout its life, however. They disappear during the molting process as the Issus coleoptratus reaches adulthood.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-unique-about-the-issus-coleoptratus-insect.htm

 

[Charmonium]

Did you ever wonder how you borrow and lend money if you're a devout muslim? Islam prohibits the charging of interest, so how do Sharia law bonds (Sukuk) work?

I never really thought about this. I knew that in Islam you couldn't charge interest but I figured they just farmed this function out to non-muslims.

It turns out that bonds that comply with Sharia law are available, they just work differently from what we think of as a bond.

Sukuk represents undivided shares in the ownership of tangible assets relating to particular projects or special investment activity. A sukuk investor has a common share in the ownership of the assets linked to the investment although this does not represent a debt owed to the issuer of the bond.

More at link - http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=sukuk-(Islamic-bonds)

 

[Charmonium]

Caterpillar drug pushers - https://www.sciencenews.org/article/caterpillar-treats-and-tricks-ants-oozing-spiked-juice

Not sure if behind paywall so here is the lead in.

Beware the caterpillar offering a juicy treat. Sips tweak ant brain chemistry, lulling the insects into neglecting their own colony in favor of hanging around the source of the marvelous droplets.

Effects on the brain help Narathura japonica caterpillars recruit a corps of ant bodyguards, says chemical ecologist Masaru K. Hojo of Kobe University in Japan. In lab tests, ants sipping these secretions scurried around less on their own initiative than normal ants do. Yet the low-key ants burst into frenzies of defensive aggression when the caterpillar showed alarm. Analyses of ant brains suggest that the caterpillar droplets change the concentrations of the chemical messenger dopamine in the brain. And that change may turn passersby into protectors, Hojo and his colleagues suggest in the Aug. 31 Current Biology.

What might look at first like a simple exchange of drinks for some ant muscle defense could turn out to be a trickier manipulation, Hojo suggests. This apparent mutualism could, in fact, be more like parasitism.

 

[Charmonium]

Subway has 20% more outlets than Micky D's making it the biggest fast food restaurant in the world. Eat shit and die Chipotle . . . . oh, right.

Ever since the first McDonald’s fast food restaurant opened in 1955, the burger chain has been expanding rapidly across the globe. For many years, McDonald's was the top fast food restaurant in the world in terms of number of locations and revenue. However, in 2010, the sandwich chain Subway surpassed McDonald’s as the world's most popular restaurant. Subway has about 44,000 locations worldwide, compared to 36,000 McDonald’s restaurants.
However, while Subway has surpassed McDonald’s in terms of number of locations, it does not make as much in revenue. In 2015, Subway's annual sales were $20 billion (USD), compared to McDonald’s, which brought in $27 billion USD.
More about Subway:

• From 2004 to 2014, Subway opened over 2,000 new locations every year.
• A 2013 study of employee expense reimbursements found that Subway was the most popular restaurant for workers traveling in the United States for business purposes. The average bill was $10.79 USD.
• Surprisingly, teens who eat at Subway, which is known for its healthy menu options, are actually more likely to eat higher calorie meals than when they eat at McDonald’s, according to a 2013 UCLA study. The study reported that teens averaged 784 calories at Subway, compared to 572 calories at McDonald’s.

http://www.wisegeek.com/is-mcdonalds-the-worlds-most-popular-restaurant.htm

 

[John Connor]

Did you know they tested drugs in spiders? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg-r-S0fIkA

:awe:

 

[Charmonium]

Did you know they tested drugs in spiders? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg-r-S0fIkA

:awe:

Didn't watch the video but I do remember that. Some of the webs they did on acid were pretty freaky.

 

[Ichinisan]

Did you know they tested drugs in spiders? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg-r-S0fIkA

:awe:

One of the oldest viral videos on the Internet. Still a good one.

 

[John Connor]

I laugh every time I watch it. For more information on the crack spider's bitch, contact the Canadian Wildlife Service in Ottawa. :awe:

 

[Charmonium]

Bed bugs have color preferences for where to hide.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_158493.html

 

[John Connor]

If yo ass has bed bug bites you need a freaking shower yo! :awe:

 

[Charmonium]

Half of your brain stays awake when you sleep in a new place.

http://www.popsci.com/your-brain-stays-half-awake-when-you-sleep-in-new-place

If you’ve ever slept in a hotel, gone camping, or even slept over at a friend’s pad, chances are you’ve woken up the next day feeling groggy and bleary-eyed. Even if you don’t remember tossing and turning, you probably felt pretty tired the next day. Well, that’s because nature dies hard. When we sleep in a new place, our brains are actually in survival mode, only turning half off, with one hemisphere remaining more “awake” than the other. Scientists from Brown University who discovered this phenomenon suggest that it makes us better able to jump awake when strange sounds approach. Their findings are published today in the journal Current Biology.

Sleep scientists have regarded the First-Night-Effect (FNE) in humans as a regular sleep disturbance for some time, but they’ve never fully grasped how it works. So sleep scientist Masako Tamaki and her colleagues took it upon themselves to find out why. Using advanced neuroimaging techniques, they carefully analyzed a number of snoozing brains.

. . . . .

 

[John Connor]

So that's why I was on hair trigger at the hospital. I woke up as soon as the nurse was in the damn doorway! Amazing!

Thx for posting that. I thought I was just really good at knowing people were near me while I was asleep. This has happened on many other occasions while I was in Job Corp as well. From reading that, apparently I never got used to sleeping there.

 

[Charmonium]

You can now turn water to steam w/o boiling it. Well, at the microscopic scale it's being boiled but for all intents and purposes it's being converted directly to steam.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/turning-water-steam-no-boiling-required

A new, extremely black material can turn water into steam using only sunlight, without the need to bring the water to a boil. Made of gold nanoparticles tens of billionths of a meter wide affixed to a scaffold pocked with tiny channels, or “nanopores,” the material is a deep black color because it reflects very little visible light. It is 99 percent efficient at absorbing light in the visible spectrum and parts of the infrared spectrum, researchers report April 8 in Science Advances.

Thanks to its highly porous structure, the material floats on the surface of water, allowing it to soak up the sun’s rays. When light of a certain wavelength hits a gold nanoparticle inside one of the nanopores, it stirs up the electrons on the surface, sloshing them back in forth in an oscillation known as a plasmon. These plasmons produce localized, intense heating, which vaporizes the water nearby.

The wavelength of light that excites a plasmon depends on the size of the nanoparticle. So in order to take advantage of as much of the sun’s output as possible, the group interspersed a variety of sizes of gold nanoparticles in the pores, which could therefore absorb a range of wavelengths.

 

[Ichinisan]

Boiling converts water directly to steam too.

 

[Charmonium]

Boiling converts water directly to steam too.

This is more efficient. It does the conversion with just sunlight. Not focused sunlight either. Just normal sunlight.

 

[John Connor]

That could be a game changer for energy production.

 

[Charmonium]

I think it's more for desalination. Since the water only boils at the microscopic level, I don't know if the steam would have enough energy to do much work. Maybe with a heat engine though . . .

 

[CZroe]

I washed my hands today and the water on my hands converted directly to steam. Even now, my hands are dry. It was a miracle!

Also, it's raining right now and I'm worried that temperatures will have to reach 212-degrees F before it'll ever be dry outside.

 

[Charmonium]

I washed my hands today and the water on my hands converted directly to steam. Even now, my hands are dry. It was a miracle!

Also, it's raining right now and I'm worried that temperatures will have to reach 212-degrees F before it'll ever be dry outside.

I think we're all familiar with the concept of evaporation. Maybe you should consider reading the article. Just a thought.

 

[Charmonium]

The US Postal Service is one year older than the United States itself.

http://www.wisegeek.com/when-did-the-united-states-open-its-first-post-office.htm

Communication was crucial in the American colonies' fight for independence from British rule. After battles in Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress was convened in Philadelphia in 1775 -- a year before the US was officially born -- and it was decided that the ability to correspond quickly was a key to victory. Benjamin Franklin was designated as the leader of a committee tasked with creating what later became the U.S. Postal Service.

In the process, Franklin received a new title -- Postmaster General. Franklin held the position until 7 November 1776. He was in office when the Declaration of Independence created the United States in July of that year, making him the first official Postmaster General of the United States.

Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night:

• Postmasters and postal riders were exempt from military duty. Even during the American Revolution, delivery of the mail was a top priority.
• The Post Office Department was created in 1792, and it became a cabinet-level department in 1872.
• In 1971, the U.S. Postal Service became an independent agency under the Postal Reorganization Act.

 

[John Connor]

I heard that a post man could run a red light if they had high priority mail. Not sure if that's true or not.

Edit- http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/can_the_u.s._postal_service_run_red_lights_with_impunity/

 

[Red Squirrel]

The first telephone conversation ever was "Mr. Watson. Come Here. I need you." by Alexander Graham Bell himself.

http://bnrg.eecs.berkeley.edu/~randy/Courses/CS39C.S97/telephone/telephone.html

This is a piece of switching tech from the early days: (that link talks about that a bit)