When a drug company in the 80s scaled up production they accidentally created seed crystals that spread around the entire Earth’s atmosphere that prevented other companies from manufacturing a generic drug without it attaching to the seeds and converting to the patented drug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph#Paroxetine_hydrochloride
Of course it was GSK with paroxetine
Ok, that’s absolutely bonkers
And it’s merely a hypothesis, there is no proof. Also we can assume that chemical plants are aware and have taken precautions, but it still happens. Back in the day it was speculated that chemists caried microcrystals around in their beards. This problem has been around for a while. One of the coolest hypothesis has been put forward by Rupert Sheldrake. He thinks that there is something in nature akin to memory. A force of nature as you will.
If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called ‘tonic immobility’.
Here is a photo from Wikipedia:
OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.
I found a paper from 1928 titled “On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates” written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).
In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:
OK, but, that’s still not it… The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:
Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them… Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.
Excellent fact, and bonus points because the fact is only recorded in a footnote of a writeup about an already moderately obscure fact.
Like you’d see crazy evangelical pactors do to people on tv?
Ha, maybe! I don’t remember if I ever saw a 180 flip. This is the closest I could find from a quick search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZpIglVnYuY
If you have a video with the 180 degree flip I would really like to see it. This context seems like a plausible place to see such a move in modern days. I would imagine that in some martial arts this effect would be well known.
I don’t think anyone was bent over at 90° in the video?
Regardless, that video is incredible; sending it to my ex-Evangelical partner immediately.
Yeah, I’m still looking. This is the closest I found so far
That reminds me of a “game” kids would (try) to play when I was young at school. The kids would say to do just that “bend over, take a deep breath” and the other one would try to lift them up really quickly. I never saw it work. I guess you were supposed to pass out. Idk
Some of these ‘games’ do trigger real physiological mechanisms. A well-documented example is the Valsalva maneuver, where forcefully exhaling against a closed mouth and nose affects heart rate and blood pressure.
In some games, this maneuver (or similar) is combined with a second action that normally increases blood flow demand to the brain. The mismatch between reduced blood pressure and sudden demand can cause dizziness or brief loss of consciousness due to insufficient oxygen reaching the brain.
Actually, there is a similar effect sometimes seen during heavy deadlifts, suddenly releasing can sometimes make people pass out. There are many “deadlift passing out” videos online.
So, those ‘games’ can work. I have known of kids breaking their teeth after face-planting against the floor while playing those games. Not a very smart thing to do.
Yup did that as a kid. Totally passed out. Later found out it’s kind of dangerous.
I’m glad nothing went awry. I was always skeptical about it because no one figured it out. It’s crazy what we do especially as kids with our innocent bliss
You got that right. Lost my eyebrows once designing “custom rocket engines” with my best friend. Ahhhh, good times.
You can also do this with rabbits.
Ancient Egypt was ancient before it ended. The time when Cleopatra ruled is about as close to today as it was to the first pyramids.
It’s actually even wilder than that.
The earliest know pyramids date back to around 2600BCE, and Cleopatra reigned around 50-30BCE, so her reign is closer to the modern day than to the first pyramids by about 600 years. One of the earliest surviving pyramids, Djoser, was built by Imhotep (with help, I assume) during a period called the Third Egyptian Dynasty meaning, as it’s name suggests, the unified Kingdom of Egypt was already well-established by the time it was built. The First Dynasty started about 3100BCE so even ignoring the proto-Dynasty period of Egypt, that’s pretty humbling: if you drew a timeline with the founding of Ancient Egypt on the left and the founding of OnlyFans to the right, Cleopatra would be three-fifths of the way along it.
Cleopatra had a kid with Julius Caesar lmao. When you think of it like that it makes more sense.
One of my favorite facts is that while the first pyramids were being built, there were still Mammoth roaming some northern European regions (never checked whether this is true or not but I’ve heard it so many times that I want to believe it is true)
Not obscure but apparently a lot of people aren’t aware that sheep don’t have top teeth in front.
TIL. I’ve looked gift horses in the mouth but never gift sheep /s
The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.
The things at the end of shoelaces are called aglets
The thing at the back of your throat is called the. “Hangy downy thingy”
Marx did actually consider human nature
Chinese scientists worked to create the “humanzee,” a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.
This sounds like a bunch of b***shit so I had to look it up. Seems like you’re actually right… 😳
Seriously find a source. a three month pregnant chimpanzee, pregnant with a humanzee, died of neglect? Sure, Humanzee experiments were attempted but because of how biology works, two species as different as a chimpanzee and a human cannot make children.
Peking (KNT) -Chinese at one time experimented with fertilizing a chimpanzee with human sperm in an attempt to create a “near -human ape,” and they may try it again. The chimp was three months pregnant before the first experiment was halted, one of the original researchers claims. Western science long has scoffed at such an experiment as medically impossible, but Dr. Ji Yongxiang says the research, if it ever resumes, has the potential to develop creatures with higher animal intelligence who could speak and perform simple tasks. A second researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science said there were plans to resume testing.
A lot of people know of the April Fools 418 I’m a Teapot error code, but did you know there’s a full Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol from the same RFC for running a coffee pot server? It even includes an HTCPCP method named “WHEN” to let the pot know it has poured enough cream.
2” x 4” construction timber is 1.5” x 3.5” because of industrialisation (not shrinkflation)
xkcd?
Much as a 12oz steak won’t weigh exactly twelve ounces when served to you after cooking them a 2x4 piece of wood was nominally that measurement prior to the kiln drying process.
It’s more that they used to be shipped 2x4 unfinished, and would be planed smooth on site. Once the equipment and distribution was able to do the planing before it got to the customer, they had so much established practice that the installed timber would be smaller, they had to keep to what people were used to.
Because of universe expansion. (I guess industrialisation also works)
The Latin meaning of the color ultramarine is “over the sea” Also, they once made a pigment called mummy, which was literally made out of finely grinded mummy.
in the same vein, cerulean (blue) comes from caelum, the sky
There is a dust layer in the ice at the South Pole about 2km under the surface that interferes with about 5000 photomultiplier tubes spread out over a cubic kilometer in the ice that are watching for light created from high energy muons moving faster than the speed of light in the ice that were in turn the result of the very rare chance of a high energy neutrino interacting with the nucleus of a single atom in the ice.
Just want to make sure I am understanding this correctly: Faster than the speed of light, within the medium, right? So the neutrinos are a bit like Cherenkov radiation. But not actually faster than the speed of light, since if that was happening, my world view was just revised rather abruptly :)
You’re correct! It is Cherenkov Radiation; specifically from the muon (or electron or tau) that is a result of the neutrino interacting with the nucleus of an atom because Cherenkov Radiation happens with charged particles.
Thank you for confirming :)
I thought dust was human skin cells? What is this dust layer
There’s, uh, lots of different kinds of dust.
Also that one is mostly a myth.
mineral aerosols.
here is a recent paper trying to figure out the composition from ice core samples for a given age range and location
A large amount of visual inspections on the inside of nuclear reactors is done literally with a camera duct taped to either a really really long pole assembled in sections or a rope. Operators “swim” the cameras to various locations and camera handling is basically an occupation in that field. You also need camera shots for any work being done on the inside of the flooded reactor with, again, really really long poles that end up acting more like pool noodles at such a length. It is silly and difficult work. Also you basically are wearing a trash bag sitting above a hot tub while doing this work. So it is a wild experience.
Eric Blair was a Trotskyist who wrote
Animal Farm and 1984 to spite Stalin,
as Stalin turned on Trotsky,
as Trotsky was a one-world-government proponent,
(with Moscow as its capital),
with the argument that capitalist nations would do anything
to isolate and destroy socialist nations,
whereas Stalin thought that socialism would bring the
Soviet Union enough success to defend itself.
This had far-reaching consequences for
Eric Blair who was participating in the
Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939,
having joined the Trotskyist resistance group
and saw the Stalinists resistance group turn on them
and outright attacked them.HD-DVD and Blu-ray weren’t the only HD video disc formats competing for dominance in the '00s. HD VMD which was basically a DVD containing more layers unsuccessfully tried to compete with the two. The company who produced it dissolved in 2008 and only a few titles were ever released on the format.
There was actually a tape format called VCR. Made by Phillips, I believe it was the first video tape system that recorded a high quality signal in color available to consumers. It was test marketed in the PAL regions, proving to have reliability issues, and then JVC launched VHS later that year and Phillips gave up.
You mean the LP-2000 ? That came out in 1970.
Philips owns Victor, which developed the VHS from LP-2000 in the mid-1970s.
I don’t think anything you just said is correct.
I cannot find anything about a tape format called “LP-2000” that came out in 1970.
Phillips released the VCR format in 1972, and a successor Video 2000 in 1979. Most people on earth have not heard of these, because they weren’t nearly as successful as Sony’s Betamax format which lost the format war to…
VHS. Made by JVC, Japan Victor Corporation, at the time owned by Matsushita…and/or Panasonic? Not Phillips.
The first VHS deck was released by JVC under the Victor brand name in 1976, three years before Video 2000. If VHS is a successor to anything, it’s U-Matic.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
“The truth is always stronger than the lie.”One is a quote made by Joseph Goebbels,
the other is a paraphrase of a paraphrase
of a quote made by Joseph Goebbels,
with the “In British culture” part missing.Guess which one is which.
(P.S. I disavow German fascism.
It’s just the more I learn about the US or UK,
the more I’m surprised that fascism took hold in Germany… (first.))
