Scientists studying fungi which discharged their spores using hydrostatic pressure came up with some interesting results. Using ultra high-speed cameras, recording at a blistering 250,000 frames-per-second, the researchers recorded 4 different species of fungi, measuring for distance, velocity, and acceleration. While they found the spores’s launch speeds of 25 meters-per-second impressive, it was their airborne acceleration that surprised them as the spores traveled a distance of up to one million times their length in a single second, making for the fastest airborne acceleration yet found in nature.
This ability is crucial for the fungi’s survival. These particular species, like Pilobolus seen in the footage above, all make their home in dung. The fungi rely on herbivores consuming them to propagate their species, yet cannot rely on them getting too close, requiring more extreme methods to put them within grazing reach.
Admiral ‘Spike’ Blandy and his wife celebrate the success of Castle Bravo, the detonation of the world’s first practical hydrogen bomb — and the largest nuclear explosion ever set off by the United States — at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands on March 1, 1946. The fallout plume spread dangerous levels of radiation over an area over 100 miles long, including inhabited islands.
Records showing fallout levels from the cake are unknown. However, testimony from those who attended the event depicts a frosting that was nice to look at, but inedible otherwise. The raspberry filling was said to have been delicious. Five people fell ill, though this was attributed to excessive amounts of Scotch.
Update: Christ, have I been doing a lot of these lately or is it just me? Anyway, as wile_e_quixote points out in the comments, this photo does not depict the celebration after Castle Bravo, but a previous exercise involving atomic bombs. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
I believe at some point in the past you and several other ectomites requested the Pope, a Gorilla and an explosion, I have done my best to make this so. So without further ado, if you take a look at the photobucket link above, I’m hoping you’ll be at least moderately amused.
Ironically, I keep hearing a newscast along the lines of “And in Vatican City today, Archbishop Bobo and the Pope celebrate the first successful test of the “Holy Hand Grenade” series of tactical nuclear weapons….”
Now that’s just over-the-top awesome. A lion in a sidecar in a wall-of-death act? That’d be like the Pope high-fiving a gorilla as explosions go off in the background.
British Secret Service instructions from World War II on how to make an explosive rat:
A rat is skinned, the skin being sewn up and filled with P.E. to assume the shape of a dead rat. A Standard No. 6 is set in the P.E. Initiation is by means of a short length of safety fuse with a No. 27 detonator crimped on one end, and a copper tube igniter on the other end, or, as in the case of the illustration above, a P.T.P. with a No. 27 detonator attached. The rat is then left amongst the coal beside a boiler and the flames ignite the safety fuse when the rat is thrown on to the fire, or as in the case of the P.T.P. a Time Delay is used.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
