Langston Hughes was one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most influential leaders. But in the decades that followed the writer’s death in 1967, his New York City brownstone—located on East 127th Street—fell into disrepair. Now, thanks to an activist group of writers, the home will get a second life as an arts center, the New York Daily News reports.
Hughes lived in the three-story building for the last 20 years of his life, and it was later marked as a national landmark. Still, it remained empty and derelict for many years. It was briefly used as a performance space in 2007, but its tenants were evicted—and in 2010, The New York Times reports, its current owner tried to sell the house for $1 million, but nobody purchased it. Currently, the structure has 20 open Department of Building violations.
Concerned that developers would try to transform the historic building into an expensive co-op, members of the Harlem-based I, Too, Arts Collective—which describes itself as a “nonprofit organization committed to nurturing voices from underrepresented communities in the creative arts”—have collected $130,000 through fundraising initiatives and donations. They aim to eventually reach $150,000, which is the estimated cost to renovate and run the center for one year.
The I, Too, Arts Collective plans to sign a lease in the next few weeks, and hopes to get the arts center up and running by Hughes’s birthday anniversary on February 1. Eventually, the organization plans to host children’s poetry events and visual arts programs.
“I think it’s important for the young people who still live in Harlem to know that in their own neighborhood, blocks away from where they’re playing basketball, … that a literary giant lived there,” Renee Watson, executive director of I, Too, Arts Collective, told NPR. “And not just lived there but created there and was a part of the community.”
If you’ve caught a case of wanderlust and are looking for a new city to call home, a website called The Earth Awaits wants to help you plan your move. Created by travel blogger The Frugal Vagabond, the new website lets users search for cities based on lifestyle and income, and generates detailed budgets for life in cities around the world.
The website, which aggregates data from sources like Numbeo, lets users search for cities based on factors like monthly income, family size, quality of life, and language. For each city, The Earth Awaits provides information on population size, pollution levels, crime rates, transportation options, and overall quality of life.
It also lets users calculate detailed monthly budgets based on the cost of living in each city. Users can automatically generate budgets based on how “lean” or “opulent” their ideal lifestyle is, or create a custom budget by entering the quantities of goods they purchase each month. For each city, The Earth Awaits adjusts its calculations based on the average cost of housing, transportation, and goods ranging from a loaf of bread to a pair of running shoes. That makes it the perfect tool for people looking to compare the cost of living in different cities, as well as those working on creating a monthly budget for the city they currently call home.
Navigating the famed New York Public Library that’s located in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building can be intimidating even to long-time members. The Manhattan institution houses millions of volumes, many of which are stored in the stacks deep below the neighboring Bryant Park. In an effort to make these materials more accessible to readers, the branch has installed a little book-mobile that zips through the building, Quartz reports.
The mini transportation system—which the library describes as a “state-of-the-art book train,” according to Gothamist—begins in the storage rooms beneath the park and snakes up to the Rose Main Reading Room on the third floor. Each of the 24 carts carry up to 30 pounds of literature at a time, zooming in and out of tunnels and climbing 90-degree inclines along the journey.
The book train is part of a larger overall renovation to the Rose Room that’s been two years in the making. Visitors can experience the fancy new book delivery system for themselves when the space reopens on October 5.
Wearing tiny polyester pants affects the sex life of rats. Rocks have distinct brand personalities. Dragonflies have a fatal attraction to black tombstones. Things may look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.
These are just some of the scientific revelations that were celebrated, tongue firmly in check, at the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony on September 22. The awards are organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, which combs through thousands of scientific journals for amusing (but not necessarily trivial) research news. Recent articles have covered the kissing games of adolescents in Ohio, the health benefits of dirty water and smoking, and feminist glaciers.
This year’s awards—given in honor of “achievements that first make people laugh then make them think”—went to a man who lived as a goat, a man who wrote a multi-volume autobiography on the pleasures of collecting flies, and a team that studied the reception of pseudo-profound bullshit. The awards were held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre during a hijinx-filled live webcast that featured genuine Nobel laureates giving out the awards (live tweets gave a taste of the proceedings). The full list is on the Ig Nobel website, but here are a few highlights—and if you happen to be near MIT on September 24, there will be a “half-afternoon” of informal public lectures by the winners.
REPRODUCTION
For studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for conducting similar tests with human males.
For discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.
Winners: Gábor Horváth, Miklós Blahó, György Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Balázs Gerics, Róbert Farkas, Susanne Åkesson, Péter Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth
For two projects: to Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.
For a three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.
Winner: Fredrik Sjöberg
Book: The Fly Trap is the first volume of Fredrik Sjöberg’s autobiographical trilogy, En Flugsamlares Vag (“The Path of a Fly Collector”), and the first to be published in English, by Pantheon Books.
Nearly 40 years after Star Wars arrived in theaters, it has become virtually impossible to find a retail category that hasn’t picked up the franchise’s valuable license. A Tauntaun sleeping bag? You can have one. A severed Wampa arm ice scraper? Sold out, but keep checking. A waffle maker that can make breakfast in the shape of the Death Star? Yours for $39.99.
Now you can show up for job interviews with OppoSuit’s line of Star Wars-inspired men’s formal wear. The first designs—“Strong Force,” a colorful multi-panel collage, and “Stormtrooper,” a sleek black and white number—are on sale now, with more designs expected to arrive between the December release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and May 2017’s Episode VIII.
OppoSuits
“We have been big Star Wars fans our entire lives and are therefore extremely proud of these great additions to our range of suits,” Jasper Castelein, creative director and co-founder of OppoSuits, told Licensing.biz.
Each suit retails for $109.99. Consumers can help OppoSuits decide on future designs by signing up for their newsletter.
As a recurring feature, our team combs the Web and shares some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. Here’s what caught our eye today, September 23.
Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers, including Amazon, and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Good luck deal hunting!
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully launched on September 8 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It will spend the next two years traveling to the asteroid Bennu. After meticulous study of the asteroid, OSIRIS-REx (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security-Regolith Explorer) will eventually touch Bennu’s surface and take a small sample before returning to Earth.
So how does a space-faring robot with no legs or landing gear snatch up asteroid material and bring that sample home to Earth? It uses a highly specialized tool called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM for short.
HOW IT WORKS
The TAGSAM looks like a pogo stick with a wide suction cup at the bottom. The “stick” is a 10-foot reticulated arm; the suction cup is a sample collection head that’s about the diameter of a dinner plate and as thick as a dictionary. During launch, the whole mechanism was tucked safely inside the spacecraft, and it will stay there during the voyage to Bennu. Following the mapping and characterization of the asteroid, a process that will last two years, the OSIRIS-REx team will identify a scientifically interesting spot, and the sampling phase will begin. The spacecraft will release a protective cover—the team calls it the “garage door”—and the TAGSAM arm will fully extend. OSIRIS-REx’s human support team on Earth will then rehearse how they will collect the sample. They will check thrusters, maneuverability, and the collection arm’s dexterity. They want to be sure that everything is behaving as expected. When the team feels comfortable, the actual collection will begin.
The Touch-and-Go Sample Arm Mechanism (TAGSAM) is tested in a Lockheed Martin facility. Image credit: Lockheed Martin Corporation
The spacecraft will approach Bennu at 10 centimeters per second, the pogo stick perpendicular to the surface. On contact, the collection head will disturb the asteroid surface, and as it presses into the asteroid, it will release a burst of nitrogen gas. This will create a dust-up of sorts, sending regolith—the loose soil and other material covering the solid rock—into a collection chamber. After two years of travel and another year of study, OSIRIS-Rex’s direct contact with Bennu will last just about five seconds.
Scientists have a few expectations about what will happen after that contact. Remember how the Philae lander touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and then bounced around? That resulted in a bad outcome for Philae but turned out to be great news for the OSIRIS-REx team, because it is counting on the bounce. After the sample collection, the arm’s contact with the asteroid will spring the spacecraft outward. To measure how much material it has collected, it will begin a spin maneuver. The mass of the collected sample will alter the angular momentum of the spinning spacecraft. Changes in spin from before and after collection will reveal how much material it has captured. If an insufficient amount is collected, the spacecraft will be able to “kiss” the asteroid two more times.
Team members are confident that they will get the sample they seek. “We’ve tested this arm extensively over the last decade,” Rich Kuhns, program manager of OSIRIS-REx, said at a press conference held at the Kennedy Space Center on the day of the launch. “We’ve exposed it to vacuums. We’ve exposed it to temperature. We’ve tested it both pre- and-post vibration, and we’ve tested it over a very wide range of materials.” Insufficient collection has never been a problem during testing. The team intends to collect a minimum of 60 grams of asteroid regolith.
Christina Richey, the deputy program scientist of OSIRIS-REx, tells mental_floss that testing suggests the TAGSAM will collect closer to its maximum capacity—just under 5 pounds of material.
The cameras carried by OSIRIS-REx will record TAGSAM’s contact with Bennu’s surface. So even if TAGSAM fails to capture a single atom of regolith, it will have performed an invaluable science experiment. Very little is known about random mechanics in a micro-gravity environment. Just by watching how the regolith behaves when stimulated, scientists will have new data for constructing models.
Once its prodding and spinning tasks are completed, the arm will bring the collection head to the sample return capsule, where the head will detach. Once the capsule seals and the sample is secured, the spacecraft will begin its journey back to Earth.
FROM MACH 35 TO 10 MPH
Returning home with a sample of Bennu is the (relatively) easy part. That’s because the sample return capsule is proven technology. In 1999, NASA sent a spacecraft called Stardust to comet Wild 2. Like OSIRIS-REx is meant to do, Stardust collected a sample and brought it back to Earth. Its sample capsule detached and landed successfully in Nevada. OSIRIS-REx will use the same design. In 2023, when OSIRIS-REx arrives back at Earth, it will eject its capsule, and the sample will land using parachutes.
“When it re-enters the environment, it’s traveling 27,000 mph,” said Kuhns. “By the time it gently touches down, it’s moving less than 10.” It’s scheduled to land at the Utah Test and Training Range, a U.S. Air Force installation in the West Desert of Utah. From there, NASA will bring the capsule to the same facility where samples from the Apollo program and the Stardust mission are stored and studied—the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Between now and then, NASA will invest in cutting-edge laboratories and equipment for sample analysis.
What happens next—how the sample will be analyzed—is still being decided. Right now, the team is focused on the mission at hand. “OSIRIS-REx has always had the strategy to go slowly and carefully and methodically,” Dante Lauretta, the leader of the mission, said at the press event. “That’s still going to be our plan.” That’s one of the reasons OSIRIS-REx launched on time and under budget. When the sample collection capsule lands on Earth, the team will still have two years of funding to perform a full sample analysis, with all the attendant science.
In the future, scientists who haven’t been born yet will have pristine Bennu sample material to work with. Only 25 percent of the sample will be used by scientists today. Most will be studied at NASA, but 4 percent will go to the Canadian Space Agency, a mission partner that provided the spacecraft’s laser altimeter, and another 0.5 percent will go to the Japanese Space Agency, reciprocating for the sample of the asteroid Itokawa (sampled by its Hayabusa spacecraft) that it provided to the United States in 2010. The rest—75 percent of the sample—will go into long-term storage for scientists of the future, who will be able to study it using tools and techniques not yet conceived.
The purpose of studying the regolith is to analyze its chemical composition. Scientists will be looking for volatiles and organic molecules such as amino acids. This will help explain the role of meteorites in the creation of life on Earth. If they helped us along, they might well have helped other planets develop life as well.
As for OSIRIS-Rex’s timeline, after its successful launch, the next step will be to go into orbit around the Sun before meeting Earth again in September 2017. It will then fly under Antarctica in order to bend its trajectory and slingshot to Bennu. (The trajectory adjustment is necessary because the asteroid is located 6 degrees off of the orbital plane of Earth.) It will make its approach of Bennu in 2018, where it will spend a year, and another year in the sampling process. The return window for its voyage to Earth opens in March 2021.
After OSIRIS-REx reaches home two years later and jettisons the sample capsule, it will remain in space. It will likely still have fuel and be fully functional, with a working payload of cameras, spectrometers, and a laser altimeter. At that time, NASA will have to decide whether to extend its mission, possibly sending it back to deep space where it can continue its charge of exploring the unknown.
In 1925 an all-black baseball team in Wichita, Kansas played an exhibition against a local KKK Klavern, with Irish Catholics serving as umpires. The black team won 10-8.
In the 1960’s, US spy planes were taking photos of Cuba. Those who analyzed them noticed something peculiar. They were building soccer fields. Cubans don’t like soccer, they like baseball. Russians like soccer. This is how the Cuban Missile Crisis started.
