MostlyOdd
The Journal
Taking the Water from A Waterfall: The Dry Niagara Falls
Autumn 1969, the Niagara Falls verged on collapse. So was the prediction made by the United States Engineering Corps. They believed that the constant rushing of the water was causing damage at the base of the cliff, destabilising the rock. Year on year retreat due to erosion was fine, but any major rock collapse could […]
Wasps and Mind Control
The jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) is a bright, iridescent creature; one with a particular way of making sure its larvae get food. A mixture of hunting, poison and mind control make up its impressive repertoire. It starts when a female wasp finds a cockroach. Upon finding the cockroach the wasp descends and stings it twice. […]
Think It, Feel It
It is possible to catch leprosy from an armadillo if you are a human or an armadillo. Were you to handle an infected armadillo and contract the disease unwittingly you might never notice, around 95% of humans are immune to leprosy. Even if you did contract leprosy it could easily be stopped early on. That […]
The Nuclear City In The Ice
800 miles from the North Pole, in the middle of the cold war, in the Greenland Ice sheet, America was building. Lashed daily by w inds of up to 200 km/h the US Army Corps of Engineering slowly dug out their trenches and sunk in the buildings. In October 1960 they were finished, Camp Century was […]
The Frog Test, the Birth of the Pregnancy Test
From urinating on various grains and seeing what germinated in Egyptian times to burning ribbons in the 17th Century, pregnancy tests have historically been unreliable. Then the 20th Century came, and it brought science. In the 1920’s the presence of hCG, a chemical produced by the placenta, was discovered to be a way of telling […]
The Immortal Jellyfish
Leave a jellyfish out in the sun for long enough, and it will evaporate. Over 95% water, jellyfish are ludicrously simple creatures. They have no brain, no lungs and no eyes. Assemble some tentacles, a stomach cavity, an umbrella head and you are nearly done. For respiration they just have skin thin enough to let […]
The Great Space Elevator
In 2009 a helicopter hovered 900m above the Mojave Desert, Andrew Petro was watching. Dangling from the helicopter was a tethered steel cable and a tripod-mounted laser. As Mr Petro watched a small, square robotic device rose upwards, powered by the laser; its ascension was smooth and rapid along the cable, 600 metres up it […]
The Famous Nameless Face
In 19th Century Paris, just as with any other time in Paris, there were suicides. In Paris, the Seine was a favourite, at a time when most could not swim the large river was a simple death sentence. Bodies would often drift up onto the banks of the river where they were then put into […]
The Door to Hell
In 1971 a small group of Soviet Scientists were rooting around the small village of Dervaza. The village crucially lies in the Ahal Province of Turkmenistan, an area known for its abundance in one useful resource… Natural Gas. They found it. A site was identified next to the village and preparations were made for the […]
The Burning Monk
11th June 1963, Vietnam : A small Buddhist uprising is ongoing. Protests against the Diem regime are now commonplace, the situation has been so for one month already. A small group of American journalists gathered outside of the Cambodian Embassy in Saigon, the busy road intersections traffic producing a low roar which permeated the air, […]
Sunshine: Seeing Things in an Old Light
Light travels very quickly, about 30 million metres per second, but that is only when traveling through a vacuum. Now we know how fast light is let us get some figures of relative relevance. If you were to perform the calculations you would find that light takes all of eight minutes to get from the […]
Sun, Sea and Snake Island
Just off of Brazil’s coast lies the quiet Ilha da Queimada Grande. A picturesque island covered in verdant rainforest and surrounded by azure seas. Oddly enough, given its favourable location and pleasant climate, it is totally uninhabited – uninhabited by humans at least. It makes up for this with an abundance of other wildlife, specifically […]