Picher, Oklahoma, was once a booming mining town of 20,000 people. The Eagle-Picher Company mined zinc and lead there for over a hundred years, but today it's a ghost town. The mine closed in 1967 and in 1983 Picher was declared a Superfund site, with dangerous levels of lead found in the city's residents. Underground mining left its buildings unstable. And a tornado wiped out 150 of the remaining homes in 2008. The government paid people to move away, and Picher city services ceased in 2009. Louise Story, who is on a quest to visit all 50 states, visited the eerie ghost town with her son, driving by the abandoned homes with the windows rolled up because of the toxic lead-filled air.  

But they also visited Commerce, Oklahoma, less than five miles away, the boyhood home of Mickey Mantle. Story told her son about how his father, Mutt Mantle, and his grandfather Charlie trained him to be a switch hitter baseball star from an early age. It was only afterward, with a little research, that the stories she told of the two Oklahoma towns became connected. Read that story at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: peggydavis66) 

We've watched movies and TV shows about space travel since we were little kids. Most of us have also watched the miracle of real space travel, such as the many videos we have of operations on the ISS. Have you noticed the real difference between the two? In the real world, we have not achieved artificial gravity. Not that we've ever tried to. But it's in every show involving space travel. That one system must require a lot of power. 

Adam Schwartz (previously at Neatorama) took this idea and ran to its logical conclusion. When a ship's life support systems are failing, as happens a lot when you're trying to add drama to a plot, why not try turning off the artificial gravity system and use the enormous amount of power it's consuming for life support? One might think that the system is built like some modern electronics without an off switch. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

President William Howard Taft was America's largest president at 340 pounds (although he lost 70 while in the White House). It's very likely the only thing you know about him is that he got stuck in a bathtub and had to be rescued. A replacement tub big enough for four men was installed afterward. The photo above, which made the papers in 1909, proves it. Except it doesn't. The story of Taft's bathtub is usually attributed to White House staffer Irwin Hood Hoover, whose memoir was published in 1934, long after the supposed bathtub incident and a year after Hoover's death. Those who know suspect the anecdote was added by the book's editors. 

But there was a somewhat similar story about Taft's 1909 tour down the Mississippi River, and how the president's quarters aboard the steamship Oleander were outfitted with extra-large furniture- except for the bathroom, because fixtures couldn't be found in time. Read the real origins of the bathtub story that just won't go away at Smithsonian. Incidentally, the tub in the photo was never installed in the White House, but on another boat that took Taft to the Panama Canal. 

YouTuber Brick Technology (previously at Neatorama) built a LEGO traffic simulation as a miniature version of Yuki Sugiyama's full-size traffic experiment on what causes traffic jams. While this involves a round track with no intersections or turns, the results are similar to what we may encounter in real life.  

First he has to build a track using magnetic guidance, and then the trucks. They are programmed to act either like human drivers or robot drivers in the way they accelerate, slow, and stop. The results are dependent on the density of traffic, because one too many trucks will slow them all down. Then he throws in confounding factors: one drunk driver, then a real human with a controller, and finally he raises the speed limit. It's all chaos by the end. You might get the idea from this that robots drive better, but keep in mind there are no pedestrians or animals wandering onto this track. -via The Awesomer 

Do you want to get fit, but worry about being vulnerable to close-quarters melee attack during your exercises? Then sword yoga is for you! The New York Post reports that performing yoga routines while holding swords is becoming a popular activity in some studios in The City. It's a synthesis of vinyasa yoga, tai chi, and kung fu.

Sabrina Stoberg founded WeaponUp, a sword yoga fitness firm. Her background in Shaolin kung fu provided her with a foundation for this vigorous yoga practice that demands strength, balance, and flexibility. It also encourages women who participate to feel strong and develop what Stoberg calls "main character energy."

-via Jarvis Best | Photo: Sabrina Stoberg

In 1892, Arthur Hotchkiss patented what he called the "elevated railway." Hotchkiss and other innovators imaged rail travel for individuals by pedal-powered machines that rolled over specially-built rail networks.

My Modern Met introduces us to Amanda Meyer, an art student in Madrid who works with fashion, fabrics, paint, and tattoos. She spent 40 hours and 100 meters of thread to compose this mini dress that is literally made of leaves. The preservation process leaves the leaves looking like leather and somewhat sturdier than untreated leaves. Although the dress is delicate, it is wearable.

"Datalore" is the thirteen the episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this episode, we learn more about Data's origins and are introduced to his brother (of sorts)--the villainous Lore who lacked his successor's moral character.

Dallas-based artist artist Heather Lynn creates in a variety of media, often drawing inspiration from the Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements, as well as images from high fantasy.

In this tattoo, she shows Data and Lore as they appeared in one particular moment of the episode, attending to the details of Lore's gesture and Data's first season uniform. Lynn's organization of the image is drawn from Art Nouveau playing cards.

We all want to save money on food, not just when prices spike above our budget, but always. We watch sale pries and clip coupons. But we should learn basic strategies for buying everything. Lauren Torres calls them "12 Cosmic Truths." They range from the basic awareness of reading labels and spotting a bargain to philosophical guides to shopping, cooking, and eating. 

One that stood out to me is #6: "Taste cheap food often." You may have hated the generic or store brands that you ate when you were a kid, and considered it a luxury to get the famous brand. However, over many years, the big brands tend to take advantage of scale and reduce the quality of their ingredients or the amount of food you get. At the same time, off-brands have been working hard to earn your purchase. Check out the cheaper brands you rejected long ago, and you may be surprised at how tasty they've become.

Some of these "cosmic truths" are things you've heard before, but this list goes deeper into explaining the mechanisms behind them. Read all about the philosophy and process of grocery shopping at Bitches Get Riches. -via Metafilter 

The Pan-American Highway is a road that goes from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in the Arctic Circle, to Ushuaia, Argentina, known as the most southern city in the world. It was going to be a railroad, but then cars were invented and that made construction easier. The United States has the most miles of the highway, but we had to cheat a bit to actually claim that. Yet a hundred years after the project was initiated, the highway is still not complete. The real problem is the Darién Gap, in southern Panama and western Colombia. So the highway gap is right where the two American continents meet.  

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are the Map Men (previously at Neatorama). They make jokes aplenty while explaining how the Pan-American highway was conceived and what stopped its completion. There's a sponsor message from 4:43 to 6:10, and everything after 11:06 is promotional. -via Damn Interesting 

One of the funnier quirks of Star Trek is that all alien sentient life forms look just like humans, just with funny bumps on their faces or pointy ears. Better special effects gave us different aliens, but most still ended up with a head, eyes, mouths, and limbs. The new movie Project Hail Mary explores a different kind of alien life- things that don't resemble anything we've ever encountered before. And that's what we should really be looking for. 

What if life on other planets isn't dependent on liquid water? What of the building blocks of life elsewhere were based on, say, silicon instead of carbon? The search for life elsewhere has been based on detecting signals that indicate planets are like earth, but that might not be necessary. The search for signals of an advanced technology may be looking for the wrong patterns, or may be a completely useless framework. Alien life may be different in more ways than we can even imagine, and a lot of that depends on how you define "life." The Conversation poses five ways we may have been thinking about alien life all wrong, with links to further information on each idea. 

What do you do with a blind husky? In Dani's case, she was sent for euthanasia when she was just a puppy, possibly by a breeder who couldn't sell her. Dani was born without eyes. She was rescued from her fate by an organization that takes in special needs dogs, and then was adopted. Her new family had plenty of pets, but still had the time and patience that Dani needed. 

Huskies are bred for the outdoors, and even a blind dog wants to run and play. Dani gets that chance with a long lead that keeps her in sight but still lets her go full speed ahead in a safe area. She also loves to play ball, and is used to losing it every now and then. She has no trouble getting around in familiar places, and not much trouble in unfamiliar places. That's a good dog. See more of Dani and her occasionally pink tail at Instagram. 

The Kunlun Mountains form the northern boundary of Tibet. If you stand on summit of them and look northwest, you should be able to see Pik Dankova, the tallest mountain in the Tian Shan range of Kyrgyzstan 329 miles away--provided that the weather is clear.

This is the farthest line of sight on the planet Earth.

Google Maps Mania directs our attention to All the Views, a fascinating interactive tool that allows you to calculate the farthest line of sight from any location on Earth.

It's an interactive tool that is fun to explore. I learned that the farthest line of sight in Texas is Guadalupe Peak which has a line of sight of 140 miles to the southeast.

-via Nag on the Lake

In December of 2007, a newspaper photographer in Lewiston, Idaho, saw a sign painter adding a Christmas message to a storefront window. It was a nice seasonal scene, so he took a picture for the Lewiston Tribune. Other journalists that day reported on a wallet theft that was caught on a security camera. A still image showing the perpetrator ended up on front page, just below the sign painter. The two men looked alike, and they were wearing the same colorful jacket. And the sign painter's name was in the upper caption. 

Who noticed the similarities in the two front page pictures? Pretty much everyone. It didn't actually fly over the heads of the newspaper copy editors, either, but it went to print before they could update the story. See the paper and read the story of the guy who made the front page twice at Now I Know. -via kottke, where you'll see a larger, readable image. 

(Unrelated image credit: Michael Slaten) 

When plastics were developed, they were considered life-changing. A material that is cheap, strong, lightweight, furable, and can be shaped in any way? Sure, let's go for that! But as terrifyingly long lasting as plastic is, it does degrade. That's why bottled water has an expiration date- because the plastic in the bottle wears out. As it degrades, plastic sheds microscopic pieces that get into our environment, our food, and our bodies. And out bodies haven't yet developed an efficient way to get rid of it. 

So what does accumulating plastic in our bodies do to us? We don't know much about it yet, but we're seeing evidence that it can lead to obesity and infertility, two of the major health trends in the modern world. We can't do a lot about the microplastics we already have in our bodies, but there are a few things we can do the lessen the amount we ingest. -via Geeks Are Sexy