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Archive for November, 2006

The Only Nazi Aircraft Carrier

This is a classic Damn Interesting article which originally appeared on 04 March 2006

In no naval action of World War 2 will you find a German aircraft carrier taking part. All the major navies in the war used them extensively, except for Nazi Germany. There were lots of German U-Boats, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, but no flattops. However, the Nazis had plans to build a total of four carriers and almost finished one of them.

Her name was the KMS Graf Zeppelin and though launched in December 1938 she was never over 80% completed. Construction delays, lack of aircraft, and bitter disputes between Air Marshall Herman Goering and the Navy insured that the ship was doomed to become scrap metal.

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Damn Interesting: Back From Holiday

We took a few days off for the US Thanksgiving holiday, but now we’re back. We’ll be splitting the lickety to get a new article published, and within the next few days we anticipate finishing a few new features. We’ll keep you apprised of our progress.

Giant Carnivorous Centipedes

The world has many moist, warm, and dark cavities where phobia-inspiring organisms quietly lurk. The tropical climate of South America’s Amazon jungle has an unnaturally large number of such pockets, and consequently that region is home to unnaturally large specimens.

One such example is the Scolopendra gigantea, a venomous, red-maroon centipede with forty-six yellow-tinted legs. These centipedes are the largest in the world, and they are more commonly known as Amazonian giant centipedes due to their massive size. Adults commonly reach lengths of over thirty-five centimeters– the length of a man’s forearm. Not only are these creatures very swift runners, but they are also highly adept climbers, a skill which allows them to scale walls to enjoy some surprisingly ambitious prey.

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Damn Interesting Additions

I just wanted to pop in and mention that we’ve made a few subtle additions to the site over the past few days. We created a Flickr photostream as an alternate way of staying abreast of updates, we scrubbed some of the lameness off of our CafePress logo store, and we erected a page to list our recommended books and DVDs. If you happen to buy any stuff from those last two links, Damn Interesting will receive a fistful of pipin’-hot nickels.

Links to the new features have been added to the About and Store menus at the top of the page. We also have a few more updates planned for the coming weeks. Of course if you ever have any damn interesting suggestions, just let us know. Especially if it involves pie.

The Relics of Mu

Yonaguni MonumentIt seems that most every culture has a legend of a great society, ripe with wealth and wisdom, which is lost to the sea. To westerners these are the stories of Atlantis or Thule. To many of the peoples of the South Pacific it is Lemuria or Menehune. To Asians it is called Mu, and was home to people who could fly and who drank an elixir that would cease aging.

After years of searching, and combing the Pacific for a possible lost land that could have been the root of one of these legends, it is clear that there is no extra continent in the sea. However, in 1986, a SCUBA diver, Kihachiro Aratake, diving off the coast of the island of Yonaguni-jima discovered something that may lend credence to the existence of Mu or Lemuria. On the sea floor he found vast geometric structures cut out of the rock. There was evidence of stairs, and improbable angles in the stone. He marked the location for future divers, and in the intervening years these undersea ruins have come to be known as the “Yonaguni Monuments”.

Efforts to date the monument are derived from the last time the area was above sea level, which would have been approximately 8,000-10,000 years ago– about 3-5 millennia before Egypt’s pyramids were erected. If the monuments were indeed built by humankind, it would require some dramatic revisions to the accepted chronological history of humanity.

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Hovering in History

De Lackner HZ-1 AerocycleDe Lackner HZ-1 AerocycleDuring the 1950s and 1960s the United States Army spent considerable energy developing one- and two-man flying machines to carry its soldiers into battle. These vehicles were intended to offer a powerful advantage in scouting and observation, and to give infantrymen unprecedented freedom of movement on the battlefield. Ultimately the US Army hoped to give the common foot soldier a set of wings.

The US National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) began to conduct feasibility research on such technology in the early 1950s. After some encouraging results in the laboratory using compressed air, several companies went on to build experimental vehicles. This brief fad of military aviation gave rise to a number of unique contraptions, including such unlikely inventions as backpack helicopters, hovering platforms, and flying jeeps.

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Half-Brothers in the Womb

Image Credit: Dateline NBCImage Credit: Dateline NBCIn 1993, Wilma Stuart gave birth to two baby boys. They were fraternal twins, so some dissimilarity was to be expected. However, only one of the boys seemed to take after his parents of white Dutch heritage. The other sported a much darker complexion.

Wilma’s pregnancy was due to in-vitro fertilization (IVF), in which her husband’s sperm was combined with her ova in a petri dish. In an unforgivable breach of proper medical procedure, however, the pipette used to transfer material had apparently been reused after a visit from a previous sperm donor. Wilma Stuart’s ova were fertilized by both men, and two of the re-implanted embryos matured into healthy young boys.

Strictly speaking the boys were only half-brothers, even though they were delivered as twins. They entered the medical literature as yet another documented case of heteropaternal superfecundation, a scientific term meaning “different fathers, multiple babies.” Most such cases, however, are not the result of IVF, but rather more traditional conception methods.

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The Timber Terror

De Havilland MosquitoIn the late 1930s, the dark cloud of war was lurking on the horizon in Europe. Even as the United Kingdom and France employed diplomats to appease Hitler with compromises, each country also began reinforcing its military in anticipation of hostilities. Among other preparations, Britain’s air force ramped up production of its state-of-the-art bombers. These large aircraft were well-armored and capable of delivering a brutal amount of destruction; but the four-engine steel/aluminum planes were slow and ungainly, leaving them highly vulnerable to fighter planes and anti-aircraft weaponry.

Despite shortages in the metal supply, the Royal Air Force (RAF) made plans to broaden their air fleet to include a new variety of bomber which was somewhat smaller and faster. In 1936 the RAF commissioned several companies to submit designs for such a plane, and a civilian outfit called De Havilland responded with a highly unorthodox concept: a bomber constructed almost entirely out of plywood. Initially the British Air Ministry scoffed at the idea, and suggested that the airplane company instead use its resources to construct wings for existing bomber designs. But the people at De Havilland were convinced that their unconventional idea had some merit.

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