There have been 3 observed interstellar objects that passed through our solar system: Oumuamua, Borisov and ATLAS.
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 flip animals quickly and get them into 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.
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
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.
Cleopatra had a kid with Julius Caesar lmao. When you think of it like that it makes more sense.
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.
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.
I thought dust was human skin cells? What is this dust layer
Most military simulation databases have a classified and unclassified version. In the unclassified database a spefic russian apc is usually set to be indestructable.
It’s used for a quick test when setting up a federated sim. Drop one in the sim and trigger a detonation at the location. It should either be destroyed or not in all the instances.
There are more hydrogen atom in a single molecule of water than there are star in the entire solar system.
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.
The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.
&
This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.
That’s how it got its name. People would say “X,Y,Z, and, per se, And”. (And “sort of” an and). Thus, “And per se And” became Ampersand.
per se means on its own
And in Finnish ”perse” means ass
nice
I love the corruption of the saying to give us the name. Reminds me of “Goodbye” being a corruption of “God be with ye”.
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.
You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.
And the name of that shape is a chevron.
Diamonds aren’t stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon’s more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.
Oh, here’s another good gemstone related one!
Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.
hexagonal molecular structure
You know, I think I’ve heard something about hexagons on the internet before …
Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.
However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up “between” pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.
Most male cats, when investigating something with a paw, will use the left paw.
Why? Are they… alright?
Sinister!
