Moai Statues Easter Island is branded into popular consciousness as the home of the mysterious and towering moai statues, but these are not the only curiosity the South Pacific island holds. Where the moai are fascinating for their unknown purpose and mysterious craftsmen, the island’s lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity.

Known as Rapa Nui to the island’s inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts from the island’s history. The art of writing was not known in any nearby islands and the script’s mere existence is sufficient to confound anthropologists. The most plausible explanation so far has been that the Easter Islanders were inspired by the writing they observed in 1770 when the Spanish claimed the island. However, despite its recency, no linguist or archaeologist has been able to successfully decipher the Rongorongo language.

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We hope you don’t mind a few more classics than usual over the holidays. This one was originally published on 10 February 2006.

Sergei Anokin must have been one of the bravest men in the Soviet army of World War 2. He is the only pilot to ever fly, or drive, the Antonov KT-40 Flying Tank.

The KT-40 was a Soviet T-60 light tank fitted with cheap wood and fabric wings. It was designed to glide into fields behind enemy lines. The KT kryl’ya tanka, (Tank Wings) was designed by the Antonov Bureau in 1940 and amazingly one working prototype was completed.

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We hope you don’t mind a few more classics than usual over the holidays. This one was originally published on 07 March 2006.

When standing at the rail of the observation deck of the Sears Tower– one of the tallest buildings in the world– many visitors experience some degree of vertigo at the brink of the sheer, 1,353 foot drop-off. This is a natural response as the body’s self-defense system reminds its owner of the dangers of gravity. If you’re not fond of heights, a new construction project underway in Arizona will probably cause that self-defense mechanism to chew its way out of your body and flee for safety. It’s called the Grand Canyon Skyway, and it dabbles in altitudes which dwarf that of the Sears Tower.

The horseshoe-shaped walkway, scheduled to open later this year, will jut out seventy feet off the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, suspending its occupants about 4,000 feet above the ground (about thrice the height of the Sears Tower) as they stand on a glass floor, looking down. The walkway’s walls will be comprised of the same four-inch-thick glass as the floor, which will leave the spectacular view relatively unobstructed, even for those people who opt to remain on all fours.

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If you are a writer looking for a bucket you can wring your excess brain-juices into, please expose your fancy so we may attempt to tickle it. We’re presently seeking frequent and not-so-frequent contributors.

Update: If you submit something it may take us some time to get back to you, as we’re a bit overloaded at the moment. But you’ll hear from us eventually.

This is a classic Damn Interesting article which was originally published on 28 January 2006.

In the USA and other developed countries, cancer is presently responsible for about 25% of all deaths. The human immune system employs a network of microscopic sentries to watch for all manner of diseases, including the malformed, rapidly-dividing cells which make up cancer. But sometimes the immune system’s somewhat lackadaisical response to cancer cells allows the rogue cells to overwhelm the immune system, posing a deadly threat to the body.

Conventional cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy can injure and kill these tumor cells, but with an inevitable degree of collateral damage. By way of example, chemotherapy has a therapeutic index of six to one, meaning that one healthy cell is killed for every six cancer cells which are destroyed. Given that tumors can be made up of millions of cells, the incidental damage caused by chemotherapy is considerable. Radiation therapy has the same drawback.

Clearly these radiation and specialized-poison therapies are highly indiscriminate treatments, but they are the best that modern medicine’s cancer-fighting toolbox has to offer. But science is working hard to develop an army of microscopic agents which can hunt down and destroy cancer cells with decisive prejudice: antitumor viruses.

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During the Cold War, the US and the Soviets had an ongoing game of tag taking place under the Arctic Ice Cap. Among the better-known technologies employed in this chase, both sides often built “research stations” on the arctic ice floes. Though there was a potential for real science to take place in such locales, the purpose of these ramshackle huts was just to house hydrophones that would track submarines ranging the Arctic Sea. A problem arose, however, in manning these stations: they were beyond the limited range of the period’s helicopters, too far into the floe for icebreakers, and in areas that are inhospitable to landing airplanes.

The only practical solution was to deliver personnel from an airplane without stopping, which meant that anyone who pulled arctic-listening-post duty had to parachute onto the ice. When it came time to bring them back home, their extraction was very much like their dramatic parachute entrance, only in reverse.

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Due to popular demand (mostly from Misfit (he’s very popular (this sentence narrowly averted collapsing into a black parentheses hole, from which no pointless tangents could escape))) we’ve added a page where you can peruse the thirty most recent comments posted to Damn Interesting. You can access it here, or by clicking the “Most Recent Comments” option under the Sections menu.

If you’re familiar with RSS, there is a risk that you’ll over-exert your delight muscles when you learn that we also dolled up our main RSS2 feed. And as always, you can use the Comments feed to stay abreast of commenty content.

More improvements are on the way. Suggestions are always welcome.

Rendered image of the Daedalus, courtesy of Adrian Mann (click for larger view)In the winter of 1973, the men and women of the British Interplanetary Society convened in London to engage in some lively interstellar discourse. The members’ intent was to draw up a workable design for an extremely ambitious unmanned space probe, one capable of reaching a neighboring star system within fifty years. Moreover, they limited themselves to using only current and near-future technology, as this would allow the theories to be translated into practice one day if the concept proved feasible.

In order to reach even the nearest stars within the allotted fifty-year window, the thirteen scientists and engineers of the research group had a formidable task ahead of them. Their space probe would be required to accelerate to astonishing speeds, and it would need to weather the constant battering of particles from the soup of space debris known as the Interstellar Medium. In spite of these problems, in 1978 the organization presented a highly developed spaceship concept which may yet prove to be the model for future interstellar travel. It was called Project Daedalus.

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