Bring the hedgehog’s likeness to your next tea party with this hedgehog tea infuser. The food-safe, silicone kitchen gadget keeps loose tea in its stomach, while small holes allow the tea to seep into the mug just like a regular tea bag. So far, the infusers only come in brown, but we wouldn’t blame you for stocking up for any upcoming hedgehog-themed events you might be hosting. (By the way, a group of hedgehogs is called an array.)
You can pre-order your own on Perpetual Kid for $14.99. If you’re still browsing, we also have a full list of fun infusers to consider.
15 Popular Comic Book Characters That Started As Jokes. Turns out they were pretty good jokes.
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10 Superstitions About Stars. Those lights in the night sky must be magical, right?
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What Happened When a Swedish Town Tried a Six-Hour Work Day. In the U.S., that would be called a part time job.
* Revenge of the Lunch Lady. She performed a miracle by serving good food, that kids like, that meets federal nutrition standards, within a budget, in a school kitchen.
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What Would Happen If You Just Left Your Stove Burner On? The answer depends on the exact situation.
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This foster father takes in only terminally ill children. Mohamed Bzeek has loved and lost the neediest kids for more than twenty years.
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How Uber could become a nightmarish monopoly. That’s a possibility when a trade war eliminates the competition.
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15 Amazing Things Aluminum Foil Can Do. A wad makes a pretty good cat toy, too.
Aiming to reduce pollution and expand his country’s limited housing options, a South African inventor has created Nubrix, a brick made of recycled paper, France 24’s The Observers reports.
Elijah Djan, 21, is an industrial engineering student at the University of Pretoria. His innovative construction material has been years in the making: As a kid, Djan witnessed his father, a lecturer, burning old textbooks, and was inspired to take action. “I knew that it was bad for the environment, but my dad said he wouldn’t stop doing it unless I had a better idea for how to use the paper,” Djan says.
Djan watched a documentary on South Africa’s low-income housing shortage (as of 2011, nearly 2 million of the nation’s families lived in shacks and informal dwellings), and a business plan was born. A prototype for his brick scored Djan, then 11 years old, a national science prize; later, he tested the design and even built a still-standing wall from the bricks in his own backyard.
To turn Nubrix into a viable commercial product, Djan says he needs a regulatory board’s official certification of approval. For this to happen, the bricks need to be tested for fire resistance, water penetration, thermal capability, durability, and acoustics. Djan now has both the money and the opportunity to see if his product can meet requirements: In late 2016, the student won first place in the Gauteng Accelerator Programme (GAP) Innovation Competitions. The prize was €14,000 (nearly $15,000), and the chance to collaborate with mentors on his project.
“For me, these bricks are just a start. Eventually, I want to create all different construction materials made from recycled products,” Djan says. Considering that South Africans produced 108 million tons of waste in 2011 [PDF], and less than 10 percent of it was recycled, his ambition couldn’t be more timely—or necessary.
Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s monumental artwork along the shore of the Great Salt Lake, is getting farther and farther away from the lake itself. Though Smithson designed it in 1970 with the idea that the red-hued water on the lake’s northern shore would ebb and flow, ongoing droughts are likely to make it permanently dry, according to Hyperallergic.
The sculpture—a 1500-foot-long, 15-foot wide coil of rocks—has been completely obscured by the lake’s saline waters before. It was created during a low-level time in the lake’s history, and when the lake returned to normal levels just a few years later, it was completely submerged. It was invisible, viewed only through photos and videos taken during its creation. But since 2002, continued droughts in Utah have brought it above the water line for the long term. Rather than reddish water, the black basalt rocks that make up the sculpture are now covered in salt crystals.
The water is not going to come back to the sculpture anytime soon. The lake currently is experiencing its lowest water levels in recorded history. Between October 2015 and October 2016, the shoreline of the lake’s northern arm fell by almost 10 inches, from 4190 feet above sea level to 4189.2 feet. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s a drastic difference from the lake’s historic high-water mark, at 4211.2 feet above sea level.
Smithson may have actually been pleased with the development. According to the Dia Art Foundation, the museum that now owns the piece, Smithson was “fixated on the chance operations of nature that lead to a state of transformation.” As the shoreline continues to recede, the sculpture will continue to transform.
You might already know that in 1947, U.S. test pilot Chuck Yeager was the first person to break the sound barrier in a Bell X-1 named the Glamorous Glennis. But aircraft aren’t the only things that break the sound barrier. Here are a few other items that may surprise you.
1. PEOPLE
When Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a balloon 24 miles above New Mexico in 2012, he broke more than the world record for the highest-ever freefall. About a third of the way down, Baumgartner reached Mach 1.25 or 843.6 mph, and in doing so became the first person to break the sound barrier while in freefall.
Having beaten a freefall record that had existed for 52 years, however, Baumgartner only held it for two years, when it was beaten again by Google exec Alan Eustace. He also broke the sound barrier, though he didn’t hit as impressive a maximum speed as Baumgartner, reaching a measly 822 miles per hour, or Mach 1.23.
2. PING PONG BALLS
Anyone who’s watched the top table tennis players in action knows they hit the ball hard and that it travels almost too quickly for the eye to see. But even that pales in comparison to the air-powered cannon built in 2013 by students at Indiana’s Purdue University, which fired ping pong balls at more than 900 mph. “You can get really, really high accelerations, the ball comes out of the barrel intact and doesn’t break until it actually hits something,” mechanical engineer Mark French Inside Science. The cannon used a vacuum pump to suck the air from a sealed tube, the air rushed to a nozzle shaped like an hour glass, and the nozzle propelled the ping pong balls at supersonic speed—about 919 mph. Remarkably, given their light weight and poor aerodynamics, the ping pong balls delivered as much energy to their target as a brick falling several stories.
3. WHIPS
You know that crack a bullwhip makes when it’s wielded in anger by an expert? That’s a sonic boom, the shockwave created when the tip of the whip breaks the sound barrier. Or at least, that had been the presumption until researchers at the University of Arizona spoiled it for everyone.
They were puzzled as to why, if the crack is a sonic boom, it doesn’t occur until the whip’s tip is traveling at almost twice the speed of sound. It turns out that the cracking noise is actually created by a loop traveling along the whip, picking up speed. And when it reaches the speed of sound, it creates a sonic boom.
4. A TOWEL
Snapping a towel in the changing room is dangerous—you could, in all seriousness, take someone’s eye out. The reason it’s so dangerous has partly to do with the speed the end of the towel is traveling. Like a bullwhip, it goes very fast indeed.
In 1993, a group of students at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics set out to prove that a properly whipped towel could break the sound barrier. They rigged up a high-speed photography kit that would allow them to measure the distance the tip of the towel was traveling at the moment they thought the barrier would be broken. After the experiment, it seemed like they had managed to break the barrier—but the students felt their results were inconclusive.
So they tweaked the experimental setup (and, according to some sources, swapped the towel for a cut down bedsheet) which eventually allowed them to break the sound barrier. But there was another caveat: The team cautioned that they still got snaps when it didn’t appear that they had broken the barrier. The theory was that their camera wasn’t fast enough to catch subsequent supersonic moments, but it remains a mystery.
5. AIR
Here’s an odd one to finish with. According to one study, when a rock or other such object is dropped into water, an hourglass-shaped cavity of air is created, which then ejects the air at speeds faster than the speed of sound.
The city gate to St. Augustine, built in 1808, centuries after the city was first settled by Spanish colonists. Image Credit: Yakin669 via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0
When Hurricane Matthew roared through St. Augustine, Florida, in October 2016, many of the town’s historic buildings were damaged. But it wasn’t until a building owner decided to tear up a flooded floor to mitigate water damage that an historic discovery was made—what may be the skeletons of the earliest European colonists in the United States.
The city of St. Augustine was founded by admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who had sailed from Spain and spotted land in what is now Florida on August 28, 1565. Menéndez became the first governor of Florida, and St. Augustine was its capital for two centuries. Although Pensacola, Florida, is the oldest multiyear European settlement, founded by Tristán de Luna in 1559, St. Augustine, located in the northeast part of the state, wins the title for being the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the contiguous U.S.
Given the age of the city, St. Augustine’s archaeological team has worked for decades to shed light on various phases of occupation. In 1572, the town was relocated from a barrier island onto the mainland, following difficulties defending it from the Timucua Indians. Shortly after this move, the first parish churches were established: Nuestra Señora de la Soledad and, slightly earlier, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, the parish church of St. Augustine.
The sites of both churches, which were in use between the 16th and 18th centuries, have seen archaeological excavations over the years, including the discovery of numerous burials. La Soledad produced evidence of European, African, and Native American individuals buried in Spanish and British styles, while Los Remedios has European and Native American burials in Christian style.
New graves discovered during flood mitigation in January are being excavated this week by city archaeologist Carl Halbirt due to a planned expansion of a water main through St. Augustine’s Charlotte Street. Halbirt and his team found burials both under the cobblestone street and within what is now the Fiesta Mall, a small building in downtown.
Based on the majolica pottery inclusions, the burials date to 1572–1586 and were therefore almost certainly among the earliest made in St. Augustine. The style of burial is Christian, with the skulls oriented to the east and the arms crossed over the front of the body. The discovery of these graves also means that archaeologists have further physical evidence from Los Remedios, cementing its label as the oldest known parish church in the United States.
John Worth, an archaeologist at the University of West Florida who was not involved in the study, tells mental_floss that this discovery is immensely significant. “Not only do they contribute to an understanding of the church itself, the burials may provide an opportunity to learn more about Florida’s earliest European permanent residents, including perhaps where they originally came from,” Worth says. If the people unearthed were indeed founders of St. Augustine, Worth notes, their skeletons may reveal “the struggles of life during the first two decades of the city’s earliest history.”
Analysis of the remains themselves is only just beginning, but preliminary work by University of Florida anthropologist John Krigbaum suggests the people who were just found appear to be European adults. If the state allows destructive testing, further research will be done on samples from the skeletons to potentially investigate their geographic origins, diets, and any diseases they had. The burials themselves, though, may stay put under the floor or may be reburied at the historic Catholic Tolomato Cemetery.
For a look inside the excavation, check out the segment below from First Coast News.
Humans don’t have the luxury of hibernating through the winter. So when the weather outside gets frightful, turn to one of these eight delightful warming products.
1. HONEYWELL UBER CERAMIC HEATER, $35
This chic-looking device is small, but it packs serious heat: Even on low, it keeps several desks in the mental_floss offices warm. Its dual settings—low for personal spaces, and max for bigger areas—as well as an adjustable thermostat allow users to tailor the temperature to their needs.
Pop these rechargeable insoles in your shoes and never have cold feet again. The insoles—which can be trimmed to fit into your shoes—have three temperature settings and are controlled via Bluetooth using a smartphone app. The battery lasts for 8.5 hours of non-stop use and can be recharged in just two.
You don’t have to choose between warm feet and good traction with these insulated hiking boots from Vasque. Available for both men and women, the Coldspark UltraDry boots feature waterproof coated leather uppers and a rubber outsole molded to take on winter terrain. They perfectly weathered a New York City snowstorm, and we’re excited to pack them for an upcoming trip to Alaska.
A pocket built into the bottom of this ultra-plush throw keeps your tootsies toasty warm when you snuggle into your favorite chair with a good book. Or, as one clever reviewer recommends, bring it to your chilly office so you can surreptitiously slip your shoes off and pop your feet into the blanket under your desk.
5. MOUNTAIN HARDWEAR GHOST WHISPERER DOWN JACKET, $200+
At 6.4 ounces, this down-filled jacket is ultra light and packs down small. It’s not super puffy, so it can be worn inside when the heat isn’t cutting it—but thanks to its quilting pattern, which helps to trap warmth, it’s also great to take outside. We wore it on a trip to Iceland, where it kept us cozy on a hike up a glacier and when we got drenched by Geysir and the spray from waterfalls. It’s available in a number of colors and in a hooded version.
These leggings are made of breathable merino wool, which resists odor and keeps the wearer super cozy when playing in the snow. (The fabric also wicks away moisture when the user gets too hot.) We wore them daily as a base layer on a trip to Iceland and break them out on snowy days to make the trek to the subway more bearable.
What’s nicer than slipping into a comfy pair of PJs at the end of a long day? Slipping into a comfy and warm pair of PJs at the end of a long day. Interior heating elements and a thermal satin lining allow this pouch to heat your pajamas—or towels, gloves, or socks—to a balmy 118 degrees.
The only person who hates your icy toes more than you do might be the person sharing your bed. Banish cold feet with this electric warming pad. It has two temperature settings, is made of machine-washable micro-plush fabric, and shuts off automatically after eight hours so you stay safe while you warm up. And did we mention it comes with a lifetime guarantee?
