Neatorama

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• Moving a Courthouse by Rail
• The Rise and Spectacular Flameout of the Segway
• Is This The Earliest Known Animal On Earth?
• How To Take Stunning Photos Using A Smartphone
• Einstein’s Prediction Proven: Light Detected Behind A Black Hole
• The Diving Gondola: A Strange Elevator to the Ocean Floor

Moving a Courthouse by Rail Posted: 03 Aug 2021 09:23 PM PDT Box Butte County, Nebraska, was born in 1886 when it separated from Dawes County. Its first county seat was the village of Nonpareil, then Hemingford, then Alliance, all moves that county residents voted for. But when Alliance became the county seat, there was some question of what to do with the courthouse that had been built in Hemingford. It was less than ten years old, and quite substantial. As you know the building is fifty feet long by forty wide[,] two full stories in height with a heavy truss roof and constructed with a heavy hard pine frame. As there were two cuts to pass through the building was raised on timbers high enough to clear the banks and when ready to start it was fifty feet from the railroad track to the top of the deck on the building. The weight of the building was estimated at 100 tons. The decision was made in 1899 to move the courthouse. The first attempt was a disaster, moving the building only 15 feet in ten days. Then the railroad was mentioned. Read the story of moving the Box Butte courthouse at Amusing Planet. Alas, one has to wonder how much stress the move put on the building, since they built a new Box Butte County courthouse in 1913.

The Rise and Spectacular Flameout of the Segway Posted: 03 Aug 2021 09:23 PM PDT A lot of new ideas that inventors consider revolutionary come and go for one reason or another, and we tend to forget about them when they aren't successful. In contrast, the Segway was unveiled in 2001 and became a spectacular failure for many reasons, one of which is because it was so overhyped. Its development was pretty much an accident that engineers considered a lot of fun. But keeping the project a secret (known internally as Ginger and publicly only as IT) meant that there was no real-world beta testing, no marketing research, and no devil's advocate, while the speculation over a vague leaked proposal went unexpectedly viral and sent expectations sky high. Engineers loved it, venture capitalists loved it, but everyone else expected something cool and useful. Inside Magazine's debut issue published in February. On the cover: "WHAT 'IT' IS." The author of the story, a freelancer named Adam Penenberg, had combed domain-name registrations and public patent records, and was positive he'd figured out the answer: IT was a hydrogen-powered scooter. "I was on, like, every show for a week," Penenberg told me. "I was on the Today show with Katie Couric. I don't know how many hundreds of interviews I must have done that week." Dean Kamen hadn't been careful enough for the new world of the internet. All those patents he filed? His inventor's paranoia backfired. In an earlier time, a journalist would have had to do a lot more legwork to dig up those patents, but now they were all right there on the patent office's website. Penenberg may have basically worked out that Ginger was a scooter, but plenty of people didn't believe it. Or maybe it was just more fun to speculate like crazy. Some of that speculation happened on sites like Slashdot, where one poster, for example, correctly pegged that the name Ginger was meaningful—but then declared authoritatively that IT was a hoverboard, because the Ginger in question was the heroine of the animated movie Chicken Run, who is convinced she can teach chickens to fly. After all this, the actual Segway was a letdown- bulky, expensive, and not at all cool-looking. Read the story of the Segway's unintentional rollout from the perspective of a journalist who was part of it at Slate. -via Digg (Image credit: Richard)

Is This The Earliest Known Animal On Earth? Posted: 03 Aug 2021 09:21 PM PDT Around 541 million years ago, the diversity of life on our planet suddenly exploded. This period is known as the Cambrian explosion, and it lasted for 13-25 million years. It is said that fossil records of major animal phyla first appeared in this time period. Recent research, however, suggests that there could have been animals older than those in the Cambrian explosion. This research has found what seems to be sponge fossils that are 890 million years old, about 350 million years older than the animals of the Cambrian period. The ancient discovery is igniting debate among palaeontologists, who have long contested when complex animal life first evolved. "If I'm right, animals emerged long, long before the first appearance of traditional animal fossils," says study author Elizabeth Turner, a sedimentary geologist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada. "That would mean there's a deep back history of animals that just didn't get preserved very well." However, some scientists, like geoscientist and fossil reef specialist Rachel Wood, argue the validity of Turner's suggestion, saying that "It's such a big claim that you really have to eliminate all the other possibilities." Sometimes crystals also grow in a way that looks like patterns formed by living organisms, she says, meaning that the rock samples Turner found might not be fossils at all. Turner, however, argues that there are no known reef-building organisms that existed 890 million years ago. Other scientists see the possibility of Turner's claim. Whatever the case, Turner's research creates a stir in the debate about the age of animal life here on Earth. More about this over at Nature. (Image Credit: Elizabeth C. Turner)

How To Take Stunning Photos Using A Smartphone Posted: 03 Aug 2021 09:19 PM PDT Want to get better at night photography? Stuart Palley has some tips for you. And if you're wondering who he is, he is a seasoned photographer who has spent nine years taking photos of wildfires in California at night. He is, as he says, "well-versed in long exposures, adverse conditions, and dealing with weird light sources." In this video, Palley provides us with practical tips on how to stabilize your smartphone, as well as how to change the camera exposure. He also encourages us to take advantage of the phone camera's features. Watch the video over at Outside Online. (Image Credit: Outside Online)

Einstein’s Prediction Proven: Light Detected Behind A Black Hole Posted: 03 Aug 2021 09:18 PM PDT Light that goes into the black hole becomes trapped inside and is unable to escape. However, in spite of this, the enormous gravity around the black hole can heat up material to millions of degrees, which could result in the release of waves and X-rays.  Astrophysicist Dan Wilkins and his colleagues were observing this release of x-rays from the supermassive black hole located at the center of a galaxy, when Wilkins spotted small flashes of X-rays behind the black hole. This is the first time scientists witnessed such a phenomenon. Because the light is trapped inside the black hole, seeing what's happening behind the black hole would be impossible. So how did Wilkins notice it? "The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself," he said. [...] Einstein's theory, or the idea that gravity is matter warping space-time, has persisted for a hundred years as new astronomical discoveries have been made. The findings of Wilkins and his team prove that Einstein's prediction is true. "Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists starting speculating about how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein's general theory of relativity in action," said Roger Blandford, study coauthor and the Luke Blossom Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor of physics at Stanford University, in a statement. Einstein indeed was ahead of his time. (Image Credit: Dan Wilkins)

The Diving Gondola: A Strange Elevator to the Ocean Floor Posted: 03 Aug 2021 05:51 PM PDT If you've ever wanted to go to the bottom of the ocean in a diving bell, then you should head to the coast of Germany, where they actually have a few, and tourists are welcome. But if you can't go right now, Tom Scott will show you what it's like. Personally, I'd recommend waiting until they build these in spots with a better view. -via reddit

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