Astronomers are discovering that water, and life, might exist on many planets where conditions are very different from those on Earth. “It’s like science fiction, only better.”
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Yesterday’s organ transplant story might never have happened due to overzealous airline security. The day was saved by last minute charter from a German surgeon with his own jet.
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Shea Gunther drank 17 cans of energy drinks in seven days in order to bring you reviews of each. Ha! I drink the equivalent in coffee every day.
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The Dos and Don’ts of the James Bond Lifestyle. Master all these things, and  the world will buy tickets to your life story.
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See tiny works of art created inside the eye of a needle. Don’t take these sculptures anywhere near a haystack!
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Statistics on hunger in America for 2007 are out, and they don’t look good. Don’t expect the situation to be any better for 2008.
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Ten Reasons why Teddy Roosevelt is the Coolest President Ever. Fun stuff culled from what could have been a much longer list.

Today’s crazy science video: a Science Channel documentary in which scientists pour 10 tons of cement down a massive anthill, let it harden for a month, then carefully excavate it to demonstrate the internal structure of the colony. It took three days of pumping to fill the colony with cement.

The sad thing about this is that the colony was alive at the time. And it’s a heck of a big colony — the ants excavated an estimated 40 tons of dirt in its construction.

You may find the narration annoying. It’s worth it to see what happens around the four-minute mark, though. The inside of the colony is shockingly well-organized, and looks creepily like an animal’s lymph system.

(Via Kottke.org.)

I’m so looking forward to next week. Short week at work, copious amounts food, lots of naps, shopping… and, of course, enjoying the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade while curled up on the couch in my pajamas. Unfortunately, it’s not always that cozy - very serious things often happen at the parade. Here are 10 of them, thanks to the research of Meg McGinn.

1. Kathleen Caronna might want to think about buying a lucky horseshoe or something. First, in 1997, she was the victim of the infamous Cat in the Hat incident. When the Cat balloon got swept astray of the parade route by high winds, it ran into a lamp post and knocked it down – right in to Ms. Caronna, who was in a coma for a month afterward. She sued the city, Macy’s, and the lamp post manufacturer for $395 million and settled for an undisclosed amount. But that’s not all. In 2006, a plane carrying Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor crashed into the Belaire Apartments building. Caronna’s apartment was one of the ones hit, although she wasn’t home at the time. Still: weird.

2. In 1986, there were two incidents: a 61-year-old bagpiper had a fatal heart attack while marching in the parade, and a spectator fell out the fourth story window he was watching from and landed on someone below.

3. In 1942, the parade was cancelled and the balloons were reduced to rubber for the war efforts. The Red Cross War Fund of Greater New York received a check for $12 for the 650 pounds of rubber.
4. In 1957, a downpour caused the hat on the Popeye balloon to fill up with rain. (more…)

By Linda Rodriguez

Until two centuries ago, ice was just an unfortunate side effect of winter. But in the early 1800s, one man saw dollar signs in frozen ponds. Frederic Tudor not only introduced the world to cold glasses of water on hot summer days, he created a thirst people never realized they had.

In 1805, two wealthy brothers from Boston were at a family picnic, enjoying the rare luxuries of cold beverages and ice cream. They joked about how their chilled refreshments would be the envy of all the colonists sweating in the West Indies. It was a passing remark, but it stuck with one of the brothers. His name was Frederic Tudor, and 30 years later, he would ship nearly 200 tons of ice halfway around the globe to become the “Ice King.”

Ice Man Cometh

Nothing in Tudor’s early years indicated that he would invent an industry. He had the pedigree to attend Harvard but dropped out of school at the age of 13. After loafing for a few years, he retired to his family’s country estate to hunt, fish, and play at farming. When his brother, William, quipped that they should harvest ice from the estate’s pond and sell it in the West Indies, Frederic took the notion seriously. After all, he had little else to do.

Frederic convinced William to join him in a scheme to ship ice from New England to the Caribbean. Tudor reasoned that once people tried it, they’d never want to live without it. During the next six months, the brothers pooled their money and laid out plans to ship their product to the French island of Martinique, where they hoped to create a monopoly on ice.

No one believed the idea would work. In fact, no ship in Boston would agree to transport the unusual cargo, so Frederic spent nearly $5,000 (a big chunk of the seed money) buying a ship of his own. On February 10, 1806, The Boston Gazette reported, “No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.” (more…)

Hey floss community, I need your help! I’m just starting a book project on Sherlock Holmes for an awesome publisher, Quirk Books, and I’m looking for an intern/research assistant who’s a bit of a Sherlock him/herself. The book itself will be really fun — a guide to being a detective like Holmes, packed with info about what life in Victorian-era London was like. There’s no pay, but you’ll get my copious thanks in the book acknowledgments, and anyone interested in the publishing world could do a whole lot worse than getting connected with Quirk, who as I mentioned earlier, are awesome.

The schedule’s pretty tight, so we’d ideally start working sometime next week. The gig would mainly entail doing research on interesting and obscure things related to Sherlock Holmes’ work — for instance, info on how fingerprinting worked at the turn of the century, how to analyze footprints and different kinds of tracks (animal tracks, wheel tracks, person tracks, etc) and 19th century life as relates to Holmes — he visits opium dens in Conan Doyle’s stories; what were they like in reality? Could you buy cocaine over the counter?

To apply, send me an email at sherlock.book@gmail.com with

1) a paragraph about yourself
2) a brief writing sample (a couple of pages is fine, non-fiction) and
3) a well-organized brief — a page should do it — on how to analyze typography. The more specific you can make it to Holmes’ time period, the better.

Looking forward to reading your submissions!

Here are a couple quizzes from yestermonth you might have missed the first time around. Click on either banner to take that quiz.

In the current issue of mental_floss magazine, Erik Vance profiled nine “New Einsteins”—visionaries who are discovering how to grow organs, peer into black holes, levitate food, cure plagues, and let blind men see. This week, Mr. Vance will be anointing five additional New Einsteins here on mentalfloss.com, one per day. Today, it’s Nathalie Cabrol’s turn.

Who She Is: Nathalie Cabrol, astrobiologist and principal investigator with the SETI Institute

What She Did: Cabrol’s work covers a number of different aspects of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (often called SETI). First, she looks for life in one of the harshest environments on the planet, the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. The idea is that understanding plants and animals in an environment that might go decades without rain (until 1971, some parts might have gone rainless since 1570) tells us something about what might survive on Mars. The Atacama Desert is so harsh that if the same Viking landers that couldn’t find life on Mars in the mid-1970s were to land there, they would say the same thing about Earth.

A few years ago, she climbed the nearby volcano, Licancabur. At the 20,000-foot summit, she descended into the cauldron and dove into the crater lake. It was the unofficial record for the highest female dive. Yet even there, where temperatures get down to -30 degrees, she found tiny living organisms.

Recently she has been focused on helping the Mars rovers. She has helped run several experiments with one version (named Zo), where researchers follow it along and see if it can detect life in the desert.

Why You Should Start Idolizing Her Immediately: (more…)

We’re back with another 5-day trivia hunt, this time with a whole new format, and new prizes, so read on!

The new, updated rules: Every remaining day this week, I’ll be presenting a specific challenge. Your job: come up with the answers and hold onto them! Why? Because on Monday, next week, you’ll need them to solve a short puzzle. The first person to email in the correct answers and successfully show how you arrived at them (thus the title: How Did You Know?) wins a choice of any TWO t-shirts and book from our store. We’re also doing something new from now on: in addition to the above, we’ll be awarding a t-shirt to one random winner who has all the correct answers. So even if you’re not the first one with the right answers, there’s still a chance to wind up a winner on HDYK?

And remember, we’re also giving away a really big, sa-weeet prize to any winning contestant who can defend the title three months in a row. Avery Dale, Ken Laskowski, Colin Utley, and Hayley Wells are our current champions and they’re going for the trifecta this month. So let’s see if someone can knock them out before they claim the big, mysterious trophy. (no, it’s not a can of silly puddy, but good guess.) You can read about them here.

As with previous How Did You Know? posts, comments have been turned off, but I definitely encourage you to work in teams like our present champions did. Write your friends, send around each daily challenge, conspire, work together, whatever it takes to make sure you’re armed with the right answers going into next Monday’s puzzle. If you missed Day 1, check that out here.

Today we’re playing Name That Tune. Each of the following pages has a tune you need to I.D. (hint: there’s a theme here that should help you figure out some of the harder ones.) So go to it and remember to check back tomorrow morning for your next challenge.

(more…)

Whether it was when the show originally aired or in syndication in the years since, odds are that you’ve seen an episode or two of the long-running sitcom Cheers. If that’s the case, then you’re most likely familiar with the face pictured here. It’s the man, the legend: postal carrier Cliff Clavin, fountain of knowledge and hero to trivia mavens everywhere. Just check out the shape and size of that cranium. Impressive, eh?

What you may not know is that many years ago, Cheers’ four main employees - Sam, Diane, Carla and Coach - each drew names from a hat to buy holiday “thank you” gifts for the pub’s four key patrons - Norm, Cliff, Frasier, and Paul. Using the clues that follow, can you determine which employee bought which patron’s gift?

1. Coach’s gift did NOT go to someone with a four-letter name.

2. Frasier received a gift from someone of the opposite sex, but Paul did not.

3. Norm was happy that he didn’t get Carla’s gift.

HERE is the solution.

Berry Gordy changed the face of pop music by founding Motown Records, and in the process changed race relations in America. Fifty years later, he tells the real story behind the business.
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Cat Rides a Roomba. The irony is the cat dragging his tail and leaving hair in the just-cleaned carpet.
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A Colombian woman received a transplant of a windpipe grown from her own stem cells. Unlike other transplant recipients, she won’t spend her life taking anti-rejection drugs.
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Guitar Hero + bicycle = Bike Hero. A masterpiece of planning and timing that will have you leaning into the curves.
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People who seem to attract good fortune are different from people who don’t. They pay attention, seize opportunities, and count their blessings. (via Geek Like Me)
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The Top Ten Arguments that Can’t Be Won. So you may as well not bring them up at the family holiday dinner.
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What to do with 66,000 business cards. Why, build a level three Menger Sponge, of course!