Many years ago, T.C. Poulter revealed some loud surprises from Antarctica, in the study “Arctic and Antarctic Acoustics,” T.C. Poulter, Stanford Research Institute Biological Sonar Lab, 1966. Poulter reports: …first observed in the Antarctic in 1934 during the construction of a tunnel through the very porous, coarsely crystalline snow for communication during the winter night […]
Fruit flies can be measurably affected by explosion-puffed coffee, suggests this new study: “Effect of Explosion-Puffed Coffee on Locomotor Activity and Behavioral Patterns in Drosophila melanogaster,” Bong Soo Ko, So Hyun Ahn, Dong Ouk Noh, Ki-Bae Hong, Sung Hee Han, and Hyung Joo Suh, Food Research International, epub 2017. The authors, at several institutions in […]
Today, reportedly, is the 45th anniversary of the famous exploding whale. The event was documented in this KATU television report, in 1970: The announcer summarized, firsthand, the fallout: “However, everyone on the scene was covered with small particle of dead whale.” Now, people have built an entire business, or at least a web site, on the […]
Bad things can happen when soy sauce goes to waste. Bad things can happen, too, when the residue of making soy sauce goes to waste. This study explains and explores: “Causes of accidents by soy sauce squeezing residue and fish meal,” Naoharu Murasawa, Hiroshi Koseki, Yusaku Iwata, Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management, January 2013, […]
This 1947 video is catnip for sodium disposal enthusiasts [HT Bob O’Hara]: Many people have re-enacted that on a tiny scale, albeit in a bigger body of water. Here’s one example: If you have a nuclear processing facility, you can pick up some tips on alternate methods of sodium disposal by reading the International Atomic Energy Agency‘s […]
Behold three eras in the international saga of trouser flammability. THEN: The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for agricultural history was awarded to James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his study, concerning the period between World War I and World War II, called “The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers.” LATER: This month, in 2013, the […]
This newspaper report gives public details about an embarrassing explosion: “The Coffin Blew Up“, The Meridan [Missouri, USA] Daily Republican, July 21, 1890. (Thanks to investigator Erwin Kompanje for bringing this to our attention.) Here is a reproduction of the entire article: BONUS (mostly unrelated): The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine honored the […]
Bruce Willis heroically managed to save the world in the film 1998 Armageddon. He was able to deflect a huge Earth-bound asteroid with the expedient use of a well placed thermonuclear explosion. But some have questioned whether Willis’s feat would actually have been possible – without breaking the laws of physics . . . A […]
The US Forest Service has decided to not use its standard disposal-by-detonation procedure in the celebrated case of the forlornly frozen cows, which we described recently. MSNBC/US News reports [HT Adam Orbit, again]: Solution found for dead cows stuck in mountain cabin: saws What to do with the carcasses of six cows inside a U.S. […]
People muse that they will, come the day, “go out with a bang”. A little more often than you might expect, someone or other does exactly that, which is why there came into existence a study called Pacemaker Explosions in Crematoria: Problems and Possible Solutions. Christopher Gale [pictured here], of St James’s University Hospital in Leeds, and […]