Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
The Daily Drift
Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.
Real Sea Monkeys ... !
You want the unvarnished truth?
Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told
Not a clue!
Today in History
| 1770 | Marie Antoinette marries future King Louis XVI of France. | |
| 1863 | At the Battle of Champion’s Hill, Union General Ulysess S. Grant repulses the Confederates, driving them into Vicksburg. | |
| 1868 | President Andrew Johnson is acquitted during Senate impeachment, by one vote, cast by Edmund G. Ross. | |
| 1879 | The Treaty of Gandamak between Russia and England sets up the Afghan state. | |
| 1920 | Joan of Arc is canonized in Rome. | |
| 1928 | The first Academy Awards are held in Hollywood. | |
| 1943 | A specially trained and equipped Royal Air Force squadron destroys two river dams in Germany. | |
| 1951 | Chinese Communist Forces launch second phase of the Chinese Spring Offensive in the Korean War and gain up to 20 miles of territory. | |
| 1960 | A Big Four summit in Paris collapses because of the American U-2 spy plane affair. | |
| 1963 | After 22 Earth orbits, Gordon Cooper returns to Earth, ending the last mission of Project Mercury. |
Ways Your Crazy Schedule Wrecks You Below the Belt
Fatigue and brain fog may not be the only effects
The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity
As the railway grew more popular in the 1850s and 1860s, trains allowed travelers to move about with unprecedented speed and efficiency, cutting the length of travel time drastically. But according to the more fearful Victorians, these technological achievements came at the considerable cost of mental health. As Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote in The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, trains were believed to “injure the brain.” In particular, the jarring motion of the train was alleged to unhinge the mind and either drive sane people mad or trigger violent outbursts from a latent “lunatic.” Mixed with the noise of the train car, it could, it was believed, shatter nerves.The novel experience made people nervous, which probably sparked some incidents. Train travel also caused people of different classes to be in close proximity, which may have exacerbated anxiety. But over time, people got used to travel, mad "railway madness" seemed to disappear. Although modern-day riders know that if you ride a commuter train every day, you're going to see some strange behavior even today. Read about railway madness and the trouble it caused at Atlas Obscura.
Elizabeth Taylor, Christie’s, and the Case of the Cursed Necklace
The Totally Normal Town Where Everyone Worked on Weapons of Mass Destruction
It had multiple barber shops, movie theatres, and jewelers, a photography store, pastry shop and even a florist. There was a police force and fire department, albeit one directly subsidized by the federal Atomic Energy Council that also had to be trained in special firefighting techniques involving radioactive materials. There was a daily flight from Los Alamos to Albuquerque, a library stocked with over 18,000 titles, and living space aplenty, with the smallest one-bedroom apartments going for $22 a month and rents for the largest units capped at $135. Residents of Los Alamos could even listen to the radio, a luxury that wasn't afforded them during wartime. Their local station, KRSN was presided over by a certain Robert Porton, whose "large record collection is the envy of many a disc jockey."Read about how Los Alamos went from a brand new wartime facility to a "normal" town at Motherboard.
Sure, most of 12,000 citizens were working on developing weapons of mass destruction or the family members of someone who was, but other than that, Los Alamos was a paragon of idyllic 50s American life.
Texas Moving To Ban Jews, Muslims, and Gays from Adopting
It will be the most discriminatory adoption policy in the country.
Half The World’s Salmon Supply Threatened
It’s being called a “backdoor deal” by critics and a “slap in the
face” to the citizens of the Bristol Bay region who petitioned to keep
the region protected.
Monday, May 15, 2017
The Daily Drift
Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.
Sassy Hat ... !
You want the unvarnished truth?
Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told
Today happens to be Nylon Stockings Day!
Today in History
| 756 | Abd-al-Rahman is proclaimed emir of Cordoba, Spain. | |
| 1213 | King John submits to the Pope, offering to make England and Ireland papal fiefs. Pope Innocent III lifts the interdict of 1208. | |
| 1602 | English navigator Bartholomew Gosnold discovers Cape Cod. | |
| 1614 | An aristocratic uprising in France ends with the Treaty of St. Menehould. | |
| 1618 | Johannes Kepler discovers his harmonics law. | |
| 1702 | The War of Spanish Succession begins. | |
| 1730 | Following the resignation of Lord Townshend, Robert Walpole becomes the sole minister in the English cabinet. | |
| 1768 | By the Treaty of Versailles, France purchases Corsica from Genoa. | |
| 1795 | Napoleon enters the Lombardian capital of Milan in triumph. | |
| 1820 | The U.S. Congress designates the slave trade a form of piracy. | |
| 1849 | Neapolitan troops enter Palermo, Sicily. | |
| 1862 | The Union ironclad Monitor and the gunboat Galena fire on Confederate troops at the Battle of Drewry’s Bluff, Virginia. | |
| 1864 | At the Battle of New Market, Virginia Military Institute cadets repel a Union attack. | |
| 1886 | Emily Dickinson dies in Amherst, Mass., where she had lived in seclusion for the previous 24 years. | |
| 1916 | U.S. Marines land in Santo Domingo to quell civil disorder. | |
| 1918 | Pfc. Henry Johnson and Pfc. Needham Roberts receive the Croix de Guerre for their services in World War I. They are the first Americans to win France’s highest military medal. | |
| 1930 | Ellen Church becomes the first airline stewardess. | |
| 1942 | The United States begins rationing gasoline. | |
| 1958 | Sputnik III is launched by the Soviet Union. | |
| 1963 | The last Project Mercury space flight, carrying Gordon Cooper, is launched. | |
| 1968 | U.S. Marines relieve army troops in Nhi Ha, South Vietnam after a fourteen-day battle. | |
| 1972 | Gov. George Wallace is shot by Arthur Bremer in Laurel, Maryland. | |
| 1975 | The merchant ship Mayaguez is recaptured from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. | |
| 1988 | Soviets forces begin their withdrawal from Afghanistan. |
The Woman Who Stood Between America and an Epidemic of Birth Defects
Kelsey was first introduced to the dangers of mass marketed unsafe pharmaceuticals in 1937, when the FDA enlisted Geiling to solve the mystery of Elixir of Sulfanilamide. Sulfanilamide effectively combated infections, but it came in a large and bitter pill that needed to be taken in large dosages. To make the drug more appealing, especially to children, manufacturers added it to a solvent with artificial raspberry flavor.Kelsey went to medical school and joined the FDA in 1960. Read her story, and how her research on Thalidomide saved American babies, at Smithsonian.
The problem was that the solvent they chose was diethylene glycol—commonly known as antifreeze. Between September and October, the drug killed 107 people.
Geiling and his lab of graduate students, including Kelsey, set out to determine what exactly in the elixir was killing people: the solvent, the flavor or the sulfanilamide. Through a series of animal studies—which at the time were not required by federal law for a drug to go to market—Geiling and his lab were able to determine that it was the diethylene glycol that was the cause of death.
Fascinating Facts About the Romans
So head over to Top Tenz to learn more.
NC Senate wingnuts punish Democrats by stripping education funding from Democratic districts in 3 a.m. vote
***
Lily-Liveried, Chicken-Shit Cowards
‘They expected better from Dumbass Trump’
For reactionaries, “anti-war” is a branding campaign for white nationalism
Dumbass Trump White House staffers ‘better damn well’ get attorneys
“If they have information that indicates
contact with Russians or attempts to interfere they better damn well,”
the bureau veteran warned.
The Tale of the Toad and the Bearded Female Saint
In the medieval world, toads were charter members of the cabal of slimy, devilish creatures imbued with powers and beloved of witches—tormentors of the sinful mind. In one medieval cult sculpture motif, the femme aux serpents, the embodiment of sinful lust, toads sometimes sub in for the snakes that writhe around a woman’s body and occasionally bite her breasts. But toads weren’t as purely evil as snakes; they could be humorous, too. In one German story, a woman loses her vagina and it “is mistaken for a toad as it roams the streets,” writes Blumenfeld-Kosinski. (Eventually, the woman gets her detachable vagina back.) Toads were also thought to have the power of spontaneous generation and resurrection.Even weirder is the association of the toad votives with toad votive, who is more of a legend than a saint. Read how a miracle saved Wilgefortis from an unwanted marriage at Atlas Obscura. That she became a patron saint of the marital bed is just more weirdness.
The Best-Preserved Fossil of Its Kind
In
March of 2011, miners using heavy equipment in Alberta found a
dinosaur. But this was not just any fossil. A nodosaur had been swept
out to sea millions years ago and was preserved better than any other
nodosaur before. The front half of the animal was recovered in a state
that doesn't even have to be reconstructed. Its soft tissue, armor, and
even individual scales of its skin were fossilized as well as its bones.
Removing such a large intact specimen was no easy task, and the fossil broke in half as it was removed from the rock around it. But six years later, we are able to see the nodosaur, and further research may reveal what color it was and even what it ate for its last meal. Read the story, and see lots of pictures at National Geographic.The remarkable fossil is a newfound species (and genus) of nodosaur, a type of ankylosaur often overshadowed by its cereal box–famous cousins in the subgroup Ankylosauridae. Unlike ankylosaurs, nodosaurs had no shin-splitting tail clubs, but they too wielded thorny armor to deter predators. As it lumbered across the landscape between 110 million and 112 million years ago, almost midway through the Cretaceous period, the 18-foot-long, nearly 3,000-pound behemoth was the rhinoceros of its day, a grumpy herbivore that largely kept to itself. And if something did come calling—perhaps the fearsome Acrocanthosaurus—the nodosaur had just the trick: two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders like a misplaced pair of bull’s horns.
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