Ruby seadragons are majestic and fascinating, but, up until 2015, were unknown to the scientific community. Now a new study published in the journal Marine Biodiversity Records [PDF] reveals that a member of this elusive species has been recorded alive in its natural habitat for the first time.
The video was recorded in April 2016 by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Western Australian Museum. Unlike the two other known seadragon species, the leafy seadragon and the common seadragon, 10-inch long rubies (Phyllopteryx dewysea) most likely hang out at depths that exceed what humans can handle. So instead of sending down scuba divers, the team used a remotely operated vehicle to capture the footage 164 feet deep in the waters off western Australia’s Recherche Archipelago.
Scripps researchers declared the ruby seadragon a new species in 2015 after analyzing a dead specimen. It lacks the leafy camouflage its closest relatives are known for, instead using its red coloring to blend in at depths where the hue is absorbed. The new footage also shows that ruby seadragons sport a curly tail like their seahorse cousins, complicating scientists’ ideas about how the trait evolved.
Before this footage was recorded, only four preserved specimens of the species had been studied. Now that more is known about the creature, scientists are asking Australian lawmakers to grant it the same protection that’s given to other seadragons. Since 1999, for instance, the leafy seadragon has been shielded from international trade and commercial use under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
On January 15, 1919, Boston suffered one of history’s strangest disasters: a devastating flood of molasses. The “Great Molasses Flood” tore through the city’s North End and deposited so much gooey residue that locals claimed they could still smell the molasses on warm days decades later. Let’s take a look at this odd, tragic story.
While most of us probably think of molasses as a tasty ingredient in treats like gingerbread, the sticky stuff has quite a few other uses. With a little know-how one can turn molasses into rum or industrial alcohol fairly easily, and the Purity Distilling Company had built the gigantic tank in Boston’s North End in 1915 to supply its booze-making operations. The steel tank was enormous: 50 feet tall, 90 feet across, and capable of holding 2.5 million gallons of molasses. (Although Prohibition kicked in with Nebraska’s ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment the very next day after the 1919 disaster, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, Purity Distilling’s parent company, still had a license to distill alcohol for industrial applications.)
By Unknown – Anthony Mitchell Sammarco. Boston’s North End. Arcadia Publishing, 2004, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
The massive tank was nearly full on January 15 thanks to a recent infusion of 2.3 million gallons of Puerto Rican molasses. Just after noon, something went horribly wrong. Witnesses later recalled hearing a noise like gunfire as the tank’s rivets popped and the steel sides ripped open. Suddenly, 26 million pounds of molasses were tearing down Commercial Street in a 15-foot wave.
A SHOCKINGLY DESTRUCTIVE FORCE
A giant wave of a sticky foodstuff sounds like something from a cartoon, but the surging molasses was a shockingly destructive force. The wave moved at upwards of 35 miles per hour, and the power was sufficient to rip buildings off of their foundations. The molasses snapped the support girders from an elevated train track and smashed multiple houses. The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities’ website says the property damage alone totaled around $100 million in today’s dollars.
The human cost of the disaster was even grimmer. The wave of molasses moved so quickly and so forcefully that anyone who was unlucky enough to be in its way didn’t stand much of a chance. They were either knocked over and crushed or drowned in the goo. The flood claimed 21 lives, and another 150 people suffered injuries. Any flood would have been disastrous, but the viscous nature of molasses made rescue attempts even trickier. Medics and police officers arrived on the scene quickly but had to slog through waist-deep goo to reach victims.
Even after the victims had been pulled from the muck, cleanup crews quickly learned that getting rid of two million gallons of molasses is no small task. Stephen Puleo writes about one of the chief obstacles to the cleanup in his book Dark Tide: firefighters couldn’t just use their hoses to blast the molasses off of building and streets with fresh water. Eventually they realized that saltwater would cut the hardened molasses and enable them to hose it down the streets into gutters. Thanks to all the foot traffic of rescue workers, cleanup crews, and rubberneckers, the sticky mess quickly moved around the city via peoples’ shoes. In all, the cleanup effort required over 80,000 manhours.
THE BLAME GAME
How did this tragedy happen in the first place? The United States Industrial Alcohol Company was quick to blame everyone’s favorite early 20th-century scapegoats: anarchists. The company claimed that since its alcohol was an ingredient in government munitions, anarchists must have sabotaged the tank by detonating a bomb. Another theory explained that the molasses had fermented inside the tank, which led to an explosion.
Investigators soon found the real culprit, though: absurdly shoddy construction work. The company had been in such a hurry to get the tank built back in 1915 that it didn’t cut corners so much as it ignored the corners completely. Modern studies have found that the tank walls were both too thin and made of a steel that was too brittle to withstand the volume of molasses. The man who oversaw the construction wasn’t an engineer or an architect; in fact, he couldn’t even read a blueprint. The tank needed to be an engineering marvel to hold all that weight, but the company never even consulted an engineer on the project. Basically, it threw up a gigantic tank as quickly and cheaply as possible, skimped on inspections and safety tests, and hoped for the best.
In light of these details, it’s amazing that the tank held together for four years. Nearby residents reported that the tank had leaked since its construction. Rather than fix the problem, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company had painted the tank brown so the leaks would be less noticeable.
The largely working-class North End residents who had lost their homes and loved ones in the disaster predictably turned their rage towards the United States Industrial Alcohol Company. USIA soon found itself named as the defendant in 125 lawsuits, which led to a legal battle that nearly matched the flood’s scale.
The Massachusetts Superior Court named Colonel Hugh Ogden as the auditor who would hear the evidence and report back on the cause of the disaster. It took Ogden nearly six years to hear testimony from 3,000 witnesses. When he finally penned his report, he concluded that there was no evidence to support the company’s theory of anarchist saboteurs. Instead, Ogden found that the “factor of safety” in the tank’s construction and inspection had been woefully low. USIA was liable for the damage and paid around $7,000 to the family of each victim.
The Great Molasses Flood still seems like a tragedy that could have been averted, but the disaster really drew attention to the potential repercussions of shaky construction. The case helped prompt Massachusetts and many other states to pass laws requiring that engineers and architects inspect and approve plans for major construction projects.
For non-musicians, sheet music can look incomprehensible. Dots, wavy things, and doodles somehow equate to the written version of music. So how do we begin understanding this notation, without paying for lessons?
In this five-minute video, composer Tim Hansen breaks down the basics, using the white keys on a piano as a reference point. While this won’t turn anybody into a piano player in five minutes, it packs an incredible amount of information into a brief, digestible format.
If you’ve ever wondered how musicians read sheet music, spend the next five minutes learning the basics.
As a recurring feature, we share some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. These items were the ones that were the most popular with our readers this week, and they’re still available.
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!
Wiki Wiki bus at the Honolulu International Airport. Image Credit: Andrew Laing via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0
What did we do before Wikipedia?
You might ask this (facetious) question all the time, but wikis, or user-edited websites, are older than you might think—in fact, they’re practically the elders of the online world. Long before Twitter, Facebook, or even Google, a computer programmer created software to help colleagues share information about their work. Since then, we’ve used wikis to compile knowledge on Wikipedia, track election patterns, catalog fandoms, preserve cultures, and laugh at ourselves. And unlike Netscape Navigator, Geocities, or Friendster, wikis have yet to become obsolete.
On March 25, 1995, a computer programmer named Ward Cunningham premiered what he called “WikiWikiWeb” on his website, c2.com. The “wiki” part was inspired by the Wiki Wiki Shuttle service at the Honolulu airport—wiki is the Hawaiian word for “quick.” The program was meant to help share knowledge about software design patterns among developers, and worked inside a user’s browser. It also included built-in edit tracking, which implied that article changes were worth preserving and discussing.
“It’s basically a way of writing where you’re reading,” Cunningham told New Relic. “On the Web before that, you would read something in one place but if you wanted to write more, you would have to go through a completely different mechanism. You couldn’t author through the Web before that.”
Ward’s program meant that with no knowledge of HTML necessary, just a markup language that did formatting and linking for you, anyone could theoretically contribute to a body of knowledge for everyone else to learn from. Today, every popular social media platform owes something to the easy “what you see is what you get” interface that wikis popularized.
The focus of WikiWikiWeb was, and is, what Cunningham called “people, projects, and patterns”—patterns being replicable ideas about software design. “Friends,” Cunningham wrote in a May 1, 1995, email, “I’ve always been interested in the way programming ideas are carried by people as they move between projects … I’ve put together a new database to give the project [of documenting ideas about making programs work] another try. You can help.”
As soon as Cunningham released WikiBase, the software underlying WikiWikiWeb, into the wild, wikis began to evolve, branching out to cover any number of topics and communities. We have wikis to thank for sites as varied as TV Tropes, SourceWatch, and the comedy site Uncyclopedia. Formatting has changed, organization has improved, and underlying programming languages have grown, but the wiki has always been about egalitarian, transparent access to information that anyone can replicate and adapt.
That doesn’t mean people don’t try to use wikis to further their own agendas. Wikipedia itself, which celebrates its 16th birthday today, January 15, is full of arguments about whose knowledge is the right knowledge. Sometimes users have edited Wikipedia entries to harass, to spread false information, to profit, to eliminate evidence of wrongdoing, to challenge the neutrality of the entry or, simply, for the lulz. The Twitter account @congressedits tracks changes from IP addresses inside the Congressional offices. Sometimes it flags politically relevant edits, from representative pages to issue-related entries. But other times, it’s just about calling out government employees who should have better things to do than edit encyclopedia entries like “…Not!” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.”
The gender makeup of Wikipedia editors has also been a cause of concern—they’re reportedly around 85 percent male, which affects what topics receive the most attention and depth. Bias there matters in part because the site is so influential: it’s the fifth most popular website in the world. Wikipedia has more than 5 million articles in English, and versions of the crowdsourced encyclopedia also exist in about 280 other languages.
FROM “CONSENSUS ENGINE” TO “CHORUS OF VOICES”
However, Cunningham has a vision for his creation’s future, and it’s more like a blog network than a single authoritative source. He calls it the Smallest Federated Wiki. His goal, according to a 2012 WIRED interview, is to put the ultimate control of the wiki in the hands of all its users, rather than one centralized hub.
At present, all edits in a wiki take place on one page that everyone can work on, but it’s the only available version. Cunningham’s federated wiki lets users who wish to edit a page “fork” it, copying the page into their own wiki database and updating it there. He envisions a “chorus of voices” through groups of slightly different wiki copies (others have called the current wiki model a “consensus engine”) to encourage discussions about more subjective issues and opinions.
“Is it too nerdy to catch on?” WIRED asks. Cunningham doesn’t think so. “The assumption is that we won’t be creative, but Facebook proves that everyone wants to have their own page, their own stream,” he told the magazine. In theory, the most accurate article then rises to the top of the pile by being copied the most—it’s a conversation, rather than an argument. Federated wikis could also help users seeking out a particular perspective on a topic—perhaps one written by someone with a background different from their own.
It’s a compelling idea, but only time will tell if it’s as popular as Cunningham’s initial conception of the wiki. You can listen to him describe how he developed the wiki, and where he sees it going in the future, at his TEDxPortland 2012 talk below.
UK-based artist Kate Kato makes tiny, life-sized sculptures of insects, plants, and fungi from old books and other recycled materials. She works mostly with paper and textiles, adding color or detail using paints, embroidery, and metal wire. Then, she displays the delicate models in small collections or dioramas.
Kato says her work is inspired by a lifelong love of nature. She grew up in Bristol, England, and now lives in the Welsh countryside. “As a child I spent a lot of time collecting bits and pieces in tins or boxes, which I would take with me on walks through parks or countryside,” she explains in an artist’s statement. “This has had a huge influence on my work, along with my love of botanical illustrations, the natural sciences and the nostalgia of museum visits where, as a child, I would be mesmerized by the variety of exhibits and the way they were displayed. I tend to view my work as a 3D record of my knowledge and experiences of the natural world.”
Kato’s work has been exhibited both domestically and abroad; last fall, her work was showcased at the Confluence Gallery & Art Center in Twisp, Washington. (You can also find her on Etsy.) View some of her sculptures and check out a video of her creative process below.
In Wichita, Kansas, Maggie Ballard and her son Paxton have opened a tiny food pantry in their front yard. Modeled after the little free library concept, Maggie and Paxton call their little free pantry a “blessing box.” It’s a red wooden box with a glass door. They keep it stocked with food and sanitary supplies, and a sign encourages visitors to take whatever they need and contribute what they can. All transactions are anonymous.
Here’s a short video tour of the box:
And here’s Paxton with the box:
Maggie told NPR, “My son is 6 years old, so it gives him a little chore to kind of watch it and see what comes and goes and who comes and goes, and maybe learn a little lesson from it.”
Maggie told mental_floss this week that community members have left cards, donations of supplies, and even cash (including a $20 bill between two cans) in response to the project. Here are some photos of the box and early donations:
And here’s a sampling of the cards:
Maggie and Paxton’s project is an extension of a small movement going on nationwide. From NPR’s report earlier this week:
Similar “yard-based” food pantries have gone up across the country, in states like Oklahoma, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida and Minnesota. Much of it seems to trace back to Jessica McClard, who created what she calls the “little free pantry” in northwest Arkansas.
“The products that are stocked are put directly inside the pantry and turnover is in about 30 to 45 minutes,” McClard says. “The frequency of the turnover and the fact that other sites in town are also turning over that frequently, it suggests to me that the need is tremendous.”
It’s a well-known fact that cats and dogs don’t get always along—except when they’re pictured on Pals Socks. The company’s socks combine unlikely characters to show that it’s what makes you different that makes for a great friendship.
“Pals socks reminds us that the coolest way to be is to be yourself, and despite our differences, we can all be friends,” their website explains. “Pals are much more than colorful mismatched socks – they’re a way of thinking, of promoting harmony. Kids are really our future, and we want to help them grow into empathetic human beings… one foot at a time.”
The unlikely duos include a cat and dog, a unicorn and dragon, and a lion and zebra. The pairings are meant to start a dialog with kids about being open with who they become friends with.
Their socks come in sizes for all ages. Each pair costs $9, or you can make your own custom gift box of three pairs for $25. A portion of the company’s profits are donated to charity. The best part is that when one sock gets lost, the other can be paired with a new pal. You can view all the options here.
Every year, NASA releases a year-end review. In 2016, it’s a doozy. The wide-ranging list includes: Juno’s orbit of Jupiter, Kepler’s exoplanet survey, the New Horizons Pluto flyby, Commander Kelly’s ISS mission, piles of Mars research, Earth climate and weather research, asteroid research (including the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission), the latest X-PLANE, and even its participation in the Star Trek 50th anniversary commemoration and Hidden Figures movie production. It’s exhausting typing that list, and that’s just some of the highlights.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center recently released a stunning image by the Hubble Space Telescope of a megamaser—a galaxy that is basically one giant laser in space.
Iras 16399-0937, as the galaxy is called, does not blast visible light. It’s a little longer on the electromagnetic spectrum, in the microwave range. And there’s a lot going on out there. Unlike our own Milky Way galaxy, which has one core at its center, Iras has two, and they are merging slowly. The southern core, as one of the pair is called, is a star factory. The northern core, meanwhile, hosts a black hole that’s 100,000,000 times the mass of our Sun. The interaction of the two, and consequent galactic turmoil, gives the galaxy its beautiful shape.
Maser is actually an acronym: Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. So was laser, at least initially: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. That’s the difference between the two: microwave versus light. They’re both coherent energy beams, but a maser emits microwave radiation, while a laser emits visible light. Einstein proposed the basic principle in 1917. Masers are used in everything from atomic clocks to NASA’s Deep Space Network. In the case of the latter, giant dishes receive weak signals from spacecraft as far from Earth as the interstellar medium. Cryogenically cooled ruby masers cleanly amplify the signals and allow data to be extracted.
You might not have heard of masers—only lasers—but there was a time when the opposite was true for many. “Phasers” on Star Trek are a shortened form of “photon maser.” Lasers had only been invented a few years before the debut of the television series. To the extent they were known, they certainly weren’t thought to be as powerful as the mighty maser, which was first built in 1953. (Gene Roddenberry worried during filming of the second pilot that people would say, “Oh, come on, lasers can’t do that.”) Even shortly after the laser was invented, theoretical work on masers led to a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964.
GOING GALACTIC
Sometimes stimulated emissions of radiation occur naturally. Vaporized molecules in comets can mase, as can protostars in stellar nurseries. Sometimes masers go big time. A megamaser like Iras is 100 million times brighter than the dinky masers of the Milky Way. With that kind of power, the host galaxy itself is basically a cosmic maser beaming microwave emissions across the universe. There are also gigamasers, which are a billion times brighter than our masers, but that’s just showing off.
Extragalactic masers are useful to astronomers for, among other things, the independent calculation of the galaxy’s distance. Iras, for example, is 370 million light-years from Earth. For comparison, the closest star to our own—Proxima Centauri, of the Alpha Centauri star system—is 4.4 light-years away. Because of how nicely light-years scale, if the Earth were one inch from the Sun, Iras would be 370 million miles away. While we won’t be visiting anytime soon, we can still enjoy its natural, tempestuous beauty.
