This is a classic Damn Interesting article which was originally published on 04 February 2006.

On the morning of December 6, 1917, two passenger trains en route to the port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia were stopped in response to a brief, cryptic telegraph message sent from Halifax station: “Munition ships on fire. Making for Pier 6. Goodbye.” The ship described in the message was the French munitions ship Mont-Blanc, which was adrift in Halifax harbor, burning, and loaded with almost 2,700 tonnes of explosives intended for use in the first world war which was then raging in Europe.

On both sides of the harbor, hundreds of onlookers who were unaware of the danger had gathered on the shores to watch the spectacular fire. The burning ship slowly drifted into the pier on the west side, where its flames spread onto land. The fire department arrived in their first motorized fire engine, and began rolling out the hoses in an attempt to douse the flames, but their efforts proved futile. Within minutes, the Mont-Blanc’s highly explosive cargo of TNT, picric acid, and benzol fuel finally reached a tipping point, and the ship exploded in a ball of fire and energy more powerful than any man-made explosion before it.

Read the rest of this article »

This is a classic Damn Interesting article which was originally published on 16 January 2006.

In 1848, a twenty-five-year-old construction foreman named Phineas Gage won nationwide fame by way of a hole in his head. While working on a railroad project in Vermont, he experienced a severe brain injury when a three-foot-long, fourteen pound tamping iron was violently propelled through his skull. Astonishingly, he lived to tell about it.

At the time of the accident, one of Gage’s duties was to set explosive charges to remove unwanted sections of large rocks. Typically, a long, narrow hole was drilled into the rock which was then filled with gunpowder and ignited. Before lighting the fuse, the hole was topped off with sand, and a three-foot-long, 1.25″ diameter iron tamping rod was used to pack down the gunpowder. However on 13 September 1848, Gage was distracted momentarily while in the process of preparing a blast, and he neglected to add the protective barrier of sand. When he thrust the iron tamper into the hole in the rock, it created a spark, and the gunpowder was ignited.

Read the rest of this article »

Proteus bacteria (in green)

Biological warfare is nothing new to the human race. Attempts to use disease to bring down enemies date as far back as we have detailed histories of warfare. Even when the mechanisms for the spread of disease were poorly understood, biological warfare was popular. Dropping cadavers into an enemy’s water supply was common. Some inventive Tartars even tried catapulting victims of bubonic plague over the walls of the city of Kaffa (modern day Feodesia) during a siege.

More recently, several European nations spread smallpox–inadvertently and otherwise–among Native Americans, and later attempted to use biological warfare to their advantage during the first World War. Only after World War I did the 1925 Geneva Protocol attempt to limit biological warfare, with mixed success.

In all this time however, every attempt at biological warfare has been essentially offensive. The idea has always been to incapacitate or kill the enemy. Except once, in Poland, during World War II, where a pair of quick-thinking doctors used a little-known organism to keep the Nazis at bay.

Read the rest of this article »

Picture from the Los Angeles TimesIn early 1942 the United States was still reeling from the Attack on Pearl Harbor. They’d declared war upon the Empire of Japan, but had thus far fought unsuccessfully in every engagement. The West Coast was wary, and prepared for a seemingly inevitable invasion. Cities from Seattle to San Diego had invasion plans including things from air-raid sirens to blackout procedures. Nerves were drawn taut, and there was no shortage of false alarms.

On the night of 24 February 1942 the Air Raid sirens sounded, and the Coast Guard Anti-aircraft guns were ordered to “green alert,” putting them in readiness to fire. From the time the battle began until it ended in the early hours of the morning, thousands of people had witnessed the search lights around Los Angeles fix on a target hovering above the city, and anti-aircraft rounds detonate in the sky. Reputable news agencies reported the attack, complete with eye-witness accounts. But the Japanese claim that they never attacked, and there was no wreckage to indicate that anyone actually did. These conflicting accounts cast uncertainty on the nature of the unidentified aircraft that caused the Battle of Los Angeles.

Read the rest of this article »

The year was 1957. The power of the atom had been unleashed upon the world. Technology–along with just about everything else–was booming. Safe, plentiful nuclear energy promised to be too cheap to meter, and radioactive waste seemed only a minor concern. It was an age of optimism and naiveté; a time of action without consequences.

Though man was the master of the Earth, only once had he managed to explore beyond the confines of the atmosphere, in the form of a beachball-sized spacecraft called Sputnik. Werner von Braun’s rocket men had drawn up plans for spacecraft that would launch humans into orbit, but even then it was clear that inefficient chemical rockets would allow only a few to enter space; the rest of mankind would be mere spectators. Fresh from their success with the atomic bomb, a small team of Manhattan Project physicists gathered to try and change all that. Working in secret within the brand new Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now called DARPA), they designed and tested an enormously ambitious nuclear spaceship concept that would have made everything the Soviets and NASA were doing seem like hobby rockets in comparison. The codename was Project Orion.

Read the rest of this article »

This is a classic Damn Interesting article which was originally published on 17 December 2005.

In the scientific and medical communities, the technical name for using one’s finger to extract boogers is rhinotillexis, and doing so compulsively is termed rhinotillexomania. The act of eating the resulting harvest is called mucophagy.

There is an Austrian doctor who has gained notoriety by advocating the picking of one’s nose and the consumption of the resulting bounty, particularly in children. Dr. Friedrich Bischinger, a lung specialist working in Innsbruck, would have us believe that people who pick their noses with their fingers are healthier, happier, and more in tune with their bodies. His argument stems from the notion that exposing the body to the dried germ corpses helps to reinforce the immune system. The good doctor feels that society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking, and encourage children to take up the habit.

Read the rest of this article »

From childhood, we are taught that the human body has five senses. I’m sure we can all recite them: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. This list has remained unchanged since the time of Aristotle. To most people, a “sixth sense” refers either to one outside the realm of the scientific, or one that simply does not exist in most humans.

However, ask a neurologist how many senses the human body has, and you might get a surprising answer. Many identify nine or more senses- some listing as many as twenty-one. The first category of senses is the “special” senses, including the familiar sight, hearing, taste, and smell. The second category is made up of the somatic senses, which we usually lump under “touch”- including our perception of pressure, heat, and pain. The third category, however, is not nearly as well-known. These are the interoceptive senses- those that deal with data originating in the body itself.

It is fairly obvious what happens to a person when a sense fails. Many members of society are missing one or more senses. It is common knowledge that blindness is the absence of sight. Deafness, of hearing. Everyone knows what it’s like to lose taste and smell as well; this loss accompanies every head cold. But what happens when the body loses knowledge of itself is a far stranger occurrence.

Read the rest of this article »

This is a classic Damn Interesting article which was originally published on 26 December 2005

The United States’ Declaration of Independence asserts that all individuals have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the years since that document was drafted, its phrasing has been subject to much interpretation, and laws have been enacted to limit the scope of those rights, particularly the latter two. For instance, forbidding one from taking mood-altering drugs alienates an individual from his or her liberty and pursuit of happiness, but this limit exists under the debatable reasoning that drug use generally tends to trespass on the rights of others, including their right to pursue happiness.

But what if there were a way to achieve the same “high” sensation as one can get from illegal drugs, anytime, anywhere, and without the chemical side effects and criminal motivation? Such a technology does exist, and has seen limited use in humans for several decades. The practice is known as evoking pleasure by Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), and despite its invention in 1954, few people have ever heard of it, and much fewer have ever experienced it. It sounds like the stuff of science-fiction, but it’s real technology.

Read the rest of this article »