From the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea, a depressing reminder about the extremely long-term dangers posed by mines: Dozens of Second World War mines that litter the floor of the Baltic Sea will be detonated by a British company this spring in the biggest commercial mine-clearance programme in history. Sebastian Sass, head of EU […]
Tags:Bactec International·Baltic Sea·California·landmines·maritime·robots·San Francisco·UXO·World War II
The long spell of political violence that rocked the Solomon Islands last decade, commonly referred to as “The Tensions,” is an episode we know far too little about. We were thus delighted to stumble across this excellent post-mortem from New Zealand’s Sunday Star-Times, which details how the conflict’s aftermath still lingers in a major way. […]
Tags:Liberia·religion·Solomon Islands·The Bulletproof Project
The recent Nigerien coup has put the rest of the world—or at least the part that swears love for democracy—in something of a quandary. Out deepest political principles compel us to oppose the use of force in obtaining power, especially when the afflicted regime was selected at the ballot box. Yet if the old guard […]
By the time this post goes live, we’ll hopefully be halfway through the lede on our next Wired opus. Though given our lackluster writing speed these past few days, we’re starting to wonder if we’ll ever get through this beast. Seriously, few things are more discouraging than closing your laptop at day’s end and realizing […]
Tags:hip-hop·housekeeping·MF Doom·music
Whenever we find ourselves wandering around a massive Chinese supermarket, we inevitably gawk at the price of dried abalone. The delicacy has never crossed our lips thanks to its exorbitant cost. But millions of Asian consumers are willing to fork over the pretty penny, in part due to the marine snail’s reputation as an aphrodisiac. […]
Tags:abalone·China·crime·drugs·economics·methamphetamine·South Africa·wildlife management
We have never attempted to conceal our fascination with movies starring non-human primates. That quirk of our character shines through yet again in this week’s Bad Movie Friday installment, featuring the 1951 Ronald Regan vehicle Bedtime for Bonzo. Suffice to say that the trailer above makes us weep for the scientific literacy of Eisenhower Era […]
Tags:animals·Bad Movie Friday·chimpanzees·movies·primates·Ronald Reagan·Tamba
Nearly a year ago, we marveled at the way in which ancient physicians used ant jaws as sutures. Blame our childhood Flintstones habit, but we have a soft spot for techniques that require the assistance of live animals. And so imagine our glee upon discovering the role that dermestid beetles play in the twin disciplines […]
Tags:crime·dermestid beetles·insects·paleontology·taxidermy·tigers·wildlife management
This will be our last Ug99-related post, we promise. But before we ended our brief run of bonus material related to “The Red Menace”, we thought we’d shout out one of the potential heroes of this story: the late A.E. Watkins, a British botanist who spent much of the 1930s roaming the globe in search […]
In researching our forthcoming Wired piece on drug and alcohol abuse, we’ve found ourselves keenly interested in the tales that addicts tell about their first inebriatory experiences. One common thread we’ve found is a sense that the first drink or dose provided something that the person had always been searching for—the intoxicant made them whole, […]
Already plugging away on our next Wired feature, this time about addiction rather than wheat-devouring fungi (or, for that matter, the creative benefits of social media. Today’s outline day, which is always a chore—envisioning the structure of a lengthy magazine piece requires even more mental bandwidth than we usually utilize. Fortunately, we’ve got The Skatalites […]
Tags:Madlib·music·ska·The Skatelites·Wired
One of the most interesting things about Ug99, the fungus that is currently threatening the world’s wheat supply, is how it managed to sneak up on us. For nearly four decades, the disease that the Puccinis graminis pathogen causes, known as stem rust, was little seen in the wild, and certainly no great peril to […]
The Wired cover story this month is not our Ug99 opus, but rather a brilliant meditation on the future of money. A couple of years hence, you can forget about the ATM—just think “pay this man,” and neural implants will automatically wire dough from your bank account to your creditor. Or something like that. In […]
It took over half-a-year, but the Wired piece that brought us out to Kenya last fall is finally live. It’s the tale of a wheat-killing fungus called Ug99, which is currently sweeping across Central Asia. The pathogen is remarkable because it can easily overcomes the genetic defenses created by the Green Revolution. As a result, […]
Tags:Afghanistan·agriculture·famine·Kenya·Ug99·Uganda·wheat·Wired
An Applebee’s recently opened up here in Atlah, and it’s doing pretty decent business on a strip of 125th Street that attracts scant foot traffic at night. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the restaurant’s success, seeing as how we praised the chain’s business acumen in a 2005 Slate column. But we do find it […]
Tags:advertising·business·Fantastic Sams·marketing·psychology
In reading about the persistence of clan feuding on Mindanao, we got to thinking about how governments can best end such cycles of revenge. Our natural assumption is that these feuds exist where organized justice is in short supply, and so familial units take over the role of punishing offenders. But a University of Maryland […]
At some point in the not-too-distant future, we hope that the considerable time we spend on Microkhan will lead to some sort of remuneration (apart from the obvious psychic rewards). But until we figure out a way to turn y’all’s interest in Hmong beauty pageants, Medieval drinking habits, and boxing kangaroos into some sort of […]
Tags:housekeeping·Marvin Gaye·music·R&B
We realize we should stop being surprised by the scientific illiteracy of our countrymen, but we just couldn’t let this loopy tidbit pass without notice: Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs? Three in ten Texas voters agree with that statement; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don’t know. We have a […]
Tags:Creation Museum·creationism·dinosaurs·evolution·Kansas·pseudoscience
If you haven’t caught it already, The Independent‘s latest dispatch from the jungles of Laos is well worth a read. It’s an eye-opening look at life for the Hmong tribespeople who decided to remain in Southeast Asia after the end of the Vietnam War, rather than take the CIA up on its offer to resettle […]
Tags:Hmong·immigration·Laos·Miss Hmong International·Vietnam War
In keeping with our recent paying-gig focus on addiction science, we’d like to turn your attention toward the remarkable work of Lee N. Robins, who recently passed away. In the early 1970s, after hearing rumors that tens of thousands of Vietnam War veterans had come stumbling home as hopeless heroin addicts, Robins vowed to determine […]
Contrary to what you might conclude by checking out our “music” tag, we don’t only permit hip-hop, soul, and vintage ZZ Top to enter our eardrums. We’ve also taken quite a shine to ukulele music in recent weeks, a jag that has brought us in touch with the work of the late, great John King. […]
Tags:classical music·John King·Lord Finesse·music·psychology·ukulele
Because so few potential clients are directly threatened by volcanoes, the insurance industry hasn’t developed sophisticated models to estimate damage due to cataclysmic eruptions. But sooner or later, a volcano located near a major population center is going to blow, and government cash alone may not be enough to heal the economic wounds. Could the […]
Tags:economics·Indonesia·insurance·Italy·Mount Tambora·Mount Vesuvius·volcanoes
Big doings up in the Yukon yesterday, as Austrian dog-sledding superstar Hans Gatt captured his fourth Yukon Quest title. If you’ve ever been curious about the strategies employed by professional mushers during their competitive odysseys, we highly recommend the invaluable “Check Point” blog, which is sort of the ESPN.com of dog sledding. We especially enjoyed […]
Tags:Alaska·Canada·dog sledding·Hans Gatt·sports·Yukon·Yukon Quest
There’s an old chestnut (of dubious veracity) about how more rock climbers perish in auto accidents to-and-from the cliffs than from accidental falls. We thought of that contrarian info-nugget this morning upon stumbling across some surprising morbidity news from Britain: Last week, the House of Commons’s Environmental Audit Committee heard evidence that about 35,000 people […]
Tags:Britain·cars·environment·Manila. economics·Philippines·pollution·public health
On this President’s Day, we can think of no better way to celebrate our nation’s most exalted job than by recalling the wise, though incredibly logorrheic words of the starcrossed William Henry Harrison. As the American history nerds in the audience will recall, Harrison doomed himself to an early death by refusing to wear a […]
Tags:Dan the Automator·Handsome Boy Modeling School·hip-hop·holidays·music·politics·President's Day·Prince Paul·William Henry Harrison
For the record, we think Harvey Keitel’s performance in Bad Lieutenant is one of the most awesome acting jobs in cinematic history. It’s such a grandiose villainous turn, in fact, that we have a tough time seeing him as anything other than a crack-smoking, sexually deviant New York City cop. And so we get a […]
Tags:acting·Bad Lieutenant·Bad Movie Friday·Harvey Keitel·Kurt Russell·movies·primates·The Barefoot Executive·Thora Birch
The lamentable advent of Bud Select 55 got us thinking about the history of nutritional science—or, rather, the ways in which dodgy scientific claims have been used to peddle all manner of food products. We’re of a mind that such science-y pitches do an excellent job of reflecting cultural neuroses. So just as today we’re […]
Despite our longtime enthusiasm for ski jumping, we just can’t seem to drum up much interest in this edition of the Winter Olympics. Perhaps that’s because we currently find ourselves smitten with an entirely different set of cold-weather games—those which comprise the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, held annually in Fairbanks, Alaska. Most are simple tests of […]
Tags:Alaska·Drop the Bomb·Native Americans·sports·Winter Olympics·World Eskimo-Indian Olympics
A few days back, we touched on the challenges of undermining one’s enemy by counterfeiting his currency. Today we’d like to shift the focus to another tactic of fiscal warfare: issuing a new currency upon seceding from a national union. We all know the Confederacy did it back in the day, but it has become […]
A minor blizzard out here in Atlah today, and we’re using the weather as an excuse to steal some time for our Secret Major Project™. Back soon with all the information you know and love; in the meantime, please enjoy the decidedly NSFW cut above. Seriously, do not hit play if you’re in a Puritanical […]
Tags:Atlah·hip-hop·Lord Finesse·music
Living in Europe during the Middle Ages was certainly no picnic, given the abundance of horrid diseases, the precariousness of the food supply, and the constant threat of having one’s arms lopped off by a passing knight. Yet how much agony and anxiety did the denizens of Medieval fiefdoms really experience? Not bloody much, given […]
