Neatorama

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• Squibbing at the Bridgwater Carnival
• Invisible Galaxies Spotted!
• Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded
• What Happened To MSN Messenger?
• So, How Do You Build A Terrarium?
• Why Did Ancient Egyptians Stop Building Pyramids?
• Rethinking Invasive Species Amid Climate Change
• Searching for the Elusive Origins of Glass
• Is This Viral Video Real or Fake?
• Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2021: Vaccine

Squibbing at the Bridgwater Carnival Posted: 30 Nov 2021 04:55 AM PST "It's like any of these traditional regional things that it wouldn't be allowed if you were to ask anywhere else in the world to do it now, innit." For more than 400 years, Bridgwater, Somerset, UK, has celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, with plenty of gunpowder. The Bridgwater Carnival is held every fifth of November, except it was canceled in 2020 and scaled back in 2021. In a normal year, there is a full carnival including an illuminated parade after sundown. This year they still managed to do the traditional "squibbing," which involves a phalanx of 150 or so people holding fireworks over their heads. Tom Scott got a chance to investigate how the squibbs are made and used, which is just a little bit safer than the traditional ones from hundreds of years ago. He also got to participate in the festivities a few weeks ago, and seems downright giddy at the pyromaniac pyrotechnical display. A good time was had by all.

Invisible Galaxies Spotted! Posted: 30 Nov 2021 04:13 AM PST Experts have discovered two galaxies hiding near the dawn of the universe. These 'invisible' galaxies, named  REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2, imply that there were far more galaxies in the early universe than scientists thought. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) captured the radio waves emitted by these stars, which existed 13 billion years ago, actually.  According to Swiss astronomer Pascal Oesch, they were looking at a sample of very distant galaxies when they noticed the invisible galaxies. "And then we noticed that two of them had a neighbor that we didn't expect to be there at all. As both of these neighboring galaxies are surrounded by dust, some of their light is blocked, making them invisible to Hubble," he said.  Image credit: NASA

Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded Posted: 30 Nov 2021 04:00 AM PST We almost failed to notice it, too!  A New Zealander who was flying home from a holiday in Samoa noticed a strange mass floating in the ocean in her airplane window. The woman took photos of the odd sight and emailed them to scientists, who then realized that this large mass wasn't a new island popping out of the ocean-- it was a mass of floating rock from an underwater volcano that erupted.  The volcano in question is theHavre Seamount, which was initially unnoticed by scientists until its eruption that produced the large rift of rocks to flow to the top of the ocean. The eruption is estimated to be roughly 1.5 times larger than the1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens – or 10 times the size of the2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland . Image credit: Rebecca Carey, University of Tasmania/Adam Soule, WHOI

What Happened To MSN Messenger? Posted: 30 Nov 2021 03:55 AM PST Microsoft's MSN Messenger was one of those old-school platforms that actually provided the comfort and efficiency of instant messaging during the early days of the Internet. The application competed against AOL Instant Messenger,ICQ, and Yahoo! Messenger for popularity.  While MSN Messenger didn't initially rise to the top, its integration with Hotmail managed to overtake the competition, as it offered the convenience of instant messaging to clients of the popular web email service. While it did manage to pull some users, Microsoft phased out the application in 2013 after its acquisition of Skype. Tech Spot's Shawn Knight details the history of MSN Messenger here!  Image credit: Tech Spot

So, How Do You Build A Terrarium? Posted: 30 Nov 2021 03:53 AM PST It's definitely a good addition to your home! Terrariums are small enclosures, usually a glass container, that contain a select number of plants and/or small land animals. Building one is like working hard to create a living garden. As for making sure that your terrarium stays alive for a long, long time, New York Times' Margaret Roach says that choosing the right plants and right locations can determine your plants' longevity. "Your subjects should be selected not just for their good looks, but for their compatibility with the environment you'll prepare for them — inside a container of a particular size and shape — and with one another," she adds. Learn more tips and tricks to create and tend to a terrarium here!  Image credit: Neslihan Gunaydin/Unsplash

Why Did Ancient Egyptians Stop Building Pyramids? Posted: 30 Nov 2021 03:47 AM PST Egyptian pharaohs stopped building royal pyramids after the New Kingdom period (16th century B.C. - 11th century B.C.). While there is no official or recorded reason behind the ending of pyramid construction, experts hypothesize that security concerns could have been a factor.  According to Harvard University Egyptology professor Peter Der Manuelian, "...since pyramids were inevitably plundered, hiding the royal burials away in a distant valley, carved into the rock and presumably with plenty of necropolis guards, surely played a role." Check out Live Science's full piece on the topic here.  Image credit: Osama Elsayed/Unsplash

Rethinking Invasive Species Amid Climate Change Posted: 29 Nov 2021 06:13 PM PST Embed from Getty Images We've posted quite a few stories of how invasive species can wreck an ecosystem, but those stories represent a small minority of what we call invasive species. The truth is that species move all the time. About 90% of them die out in an unsuitable new environment. Of the remaining 10%, nine will settle in and cause no harm (like kudzu in America). That leaves only 1% of invasive species to make headlines for the damage they cause (like feral cats in Australia). Also, we usually assume that non-native species were transported by humans, such as the plant lovers who bought kudzu from Japanese merchants and the ship crews that carried rodent-hunting cats to Australia. But there's another kind of invasive species that moves more and more each year- they are climate refugees. As the planet warms up, plants, animals, and other organisms wander further into areas that are becoming more hospitable than their original homes. Is this going to cause problems for existing species in those areas? Maybe, but it may also be the only way those refugee species can continue to exist. Read about this emerging phenomenon and its implications at Vox.

Searching for the Elusive Origins of Glass Posted: 29 Nov 2021 05:26 PM PST The production of glass goes back somewhere around 3500 years. Or at least we once thought so. Producing glass in those days required skilled artisans, or at least we once thought. Glass products were so expensive that they were reserved for royalty, we once thought. Scientists can tell where a glass object was made from the materials used to make or color it, we once thought. All these ideas about the origins of glass have been thrown into the wind with recent discoveries. It's possible we will never know who invented glass, or where. The very nature of ancient glass shows that it deteriorates in humid conditions over thousands of years, so there may have been samples from its origins that simply no longer exist. Global trade in ancient times indicates that not only was glass imported, but also the raw materials once used to identify its origin. Therefore, glass found in one country, thought to be made in a second country, could have been partially made in a third country with imported ingredients from somewhere else. Partially made glass was shipped in ingots, as in the image shown above, to be remelted and fashioned by artisans into its final form elsewhere. You see how global trade in ancient times makes the story rather murky. Throw in the fact that archaeologists once ignored evidence of glass when plundering artifacts, and modern archaeologists and material scientists have their work cut out for them. Yet modern technology that can analyze tiny samples of glass without damaging an artifact is helping scientists to learn amazing things about the ancient glass industry. Read about that line of research and what we've discovered at Smithsonian. (Image credit: Flickr user Panegyrics of Granovetter)

Is This Viral Video Real or Fake? Posted: 29 Nov 2021 02:00 PM PST Этому шедевру немого кинематографа я ставлю 10 из 10! pic.twitter.com/Z5oKNj8pQA — Артём Дерягин (@DerArto) November 26, 2021 It's only one minute and six seconds long. In those 66 seconds, a lot happens. This plot is all over the place and moving constantly. Allegedly, the events take place in Russia. This immediately rings true, but I'm at a loss to explain why I think that. I don't think that it's just the Russian text in the tweet where I first saw the sequence. Whether this is real or just a slice of security camera footage, I can't wait to see the sequel, preferably directed by Michael Bay -via Richard Chapman POLL: What do you think? Is this video real or staged? Real Staged I don't know - just show me what other people think!

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2021: Vaccine Posted: 29 Nov 2021 11:43 AM PST Merriam-Webster’s choice for the annual Word of the Year sums up what the English-speaking world has been talking about pretty well most of the time. Last year, they selected "pandemic." For 2021, the word everyone is using and wants to know more about is "vaccine." "Vaccine" not only encompasses what was happening in the worlds of science and medicine, it also dominated the world of politics. It also affected the lives of millions of everyday people. Online dictionary lookups for the word "vaccine" increased 601% over 2020, and 1048% over 2019. The rate of lookups has remained high since its peak in August. The word was so hot that Merriam-Webster revised and expanded its definition.       Besides the Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster names ten other words that define the language of the year 2021. They are: insurrection, perseverance, woke, nomad, infrastructure, cicada, Murraya, cisgender, guardian, and meta. Find out what they mean and why people wanted to look them up in 2021 at the dictionary's website. PS: the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary selected "vax" as their Word of the Year. Great minds think alike. (Image credit: Spencerbdavis)

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