Fascinating Wikipedia fact of the day (7/26)

[Joe Molotov]

Your vocal cords:



Here's what's your vocal cords looks like during normal talking or singing:



Here's during falsetto singing:



Am I the only one that could watch those gifs for hours? 

[Great Rumbler]

My, what a lovely epiglottis you have there. 

[T-Short]

this was my fave from the other day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

Radiotrophic fungi are fungi which appear to use the pigment melanin to convert gamma radiation into chemical energy for growth. This proposed mechanism may be similar to anabolic pathways for the synthesis of reduced organic carbon (e.g., carbohydrates) in phototrophic organisms, which capture photons from visible light with pigments such as chlorophyll whose energy is then used in photolysis of water to generate usable chemical energy (as ATP) in photophosphorylation of photosynthesis. However, whether melanin-containing fungi employ a similar multi-step pathway as photosynthesis, or some chemosynthesis pathways, is unknown.

These were first discovered in 2007 as black molds growing inside and around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine showed that three melanin-containing fungi, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, Wangiella dermatitidis, and Cryptococcus neoformans, increased in biomass and accumulated acetate faster in an environment in which the radiation level was 500 times higher than in the normal environment.

[bagofeyes]

sure looks like a vagina

[Groogrux]

Spend a weekend at an EMS symposium going through hours of lectures and that shit isn't so interesting anymore...

[Dickie Dee]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers

Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881 – March 21, 1947) and Langley Collyer (October 3, 1885 – March 1947) were two American brothers who became famous because of their snobbish nature, filth in their homes, and compulsive hoarding. For decades, neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarely seen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street), in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders. Both were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived as hermits, surrounded by over 130 tons of waste that they had amassed over several decades.[1]

...

Homer Collyer found dead
 
March 21, 1947, an anonymous tipster phoned the 122nd Police Precinct and insisted there was a dead body in the house[3]. A patrol officer was dispatched, but had a difficult time getting into the house at first, noting however that an awful odor was emanating from somewhere within the building. There was no doorbell or telephone and the doors were locked; and while the basement windows were broken, they were protected by iron grillwork. An emergency squad of seven men eventually had no choice but to begin pulling out all the junk that was blocking their way and throw it out onto the street below. The brownstone's foyer was packed solid by a wall of old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes, parts of a wine press, and numerous other pieces of junk. A patrolman, William Barker, finally broke in through a window into a second-story bedroom. Behind this window lay, among other things, more packages and newspaper bundles, empty cardboard boxes lashed together with rope, the frame of a baby carriage, a rake, and old umbrellas tied together. After a two-hour crawl he found Homer Collyer dead, wearing just a tattered blue and white bathrobe. Homer's matted, grey hair reached down to his shoulders, and his head was resting on his knees.

Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Arthur C. Allen confirmed Homer's identity and said that the elder brother had been dead for no more than ten hours; consequently, Homer could not have been the source of the stench wafting from the house. Foul play was ruled out: Homer had died from the combined effects of malnutrition, dehydration, and cardiac arrest. By this time, the mystery had attracted a crowd of about 600 onlookers, curious about the junk and the smell. But Langley was nowhere to be found.

...

Manhunt

On March 30, false rumors circulated that Langley had been seen aboard a bus heading for Atlantic City. A manhunt along the New Jersey shore turned up nothing. Reports of Langley sighting led police to a total of nine states.[4] The police continued searching the house two days later, removing 3,000 books, several outdated phone books, a horse's jawbone, a Steinway piano, an early X-ray machine, and more bundles of newspapers. More than 19 tons of junk were removed from the ground floor of the three-story brownstone. The police continued to clear away the brothers' stockpile for another week, removing another 84 tons of rubbish from the house. Although a good deal of the junk came from their father's medical practice, a considerable portion was discarded items collected by Langley over the years.


Langley Collyer found

On April 8, 1947, workman Artie Matthews found the body of Langley Collyer just 10 feet from where Homer died. His partially decomposed body was being eaten by rats. A suitcase and three huge bundles of newspapers covered his body. Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him.[5] Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later.[5] The stench detected on the street had been emanating from Langley, the younger brother.

Both brothers were buried with their parents at Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn.

[Great Rumbler]

WOW

[Himu]

holy shit

[Mupepe]

Now that was actually fascinating.

[Madrun Badrun]

Jesus.  I want tunnels and booby traps in my house

[Yeti]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HH_Holmes

Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861[1] – May 7, 1896[2]), better known under the alias of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was one of the first documented American serial killers. Holmes opened a hotel in Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair, which he built himself and was the location of many of his murders. While he confessed to 27 murders, of which nine were confirmed, his actual body count could be higher.

Chicago and the "Murder Castle"
While in Chicago during the summer of 1886, Holmes came across Dr. E.S. Holton's drugstore at the corner of S. Wallace and W. 63rd Street, in the neighborhood of Englewood.[5] Holton was suffering from cancer while his wife minded the store.[5] Through his charm, Holmes got a job there and then manipulated her into letting him purchase the store. They agreed she could still live in the upstairs apartment even after Holton died. Once Holton died, Mrs. Holton mysteriously disappeared and Holmes told people she was visiting relatives in California. As people started asking questions about her return, he told them she enjoyed California so much that she decided to live there.[5]

Holmes purchased a lot across from the drugstore, where he built his three-story, block-long "Castle"—as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood. It was opened as a hotel for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure used as commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes' own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle so only he fully understood the design of the house he had created, thus decreasing the chance of being reported to the police.

After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), lovers and hotel guests, torturing and killing them.[5] Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate [6]. The victims' bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty. Holmes picked one of the most remote rooms in the Castle to perform hundreds of illegal abortions. Some of his patients died as a result of his abortion procedure,[7] their corpses also processed and skeletons sold.[5]

[bagofeyes]

lol

[Brehvolution]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

The Dyatlov Pass incident refers to an event that resulted in the deaths of nine ski hikers in the northern Ural mountains on the night of February 2, 1959. It happened on the east shoulder of the mountain Kholat Syakhl (Холат Сяхл) (a Mansi name, meaning Mountain of the Dead). The mountain pass where the incident occurred has since been named Dyatlov Pass (Перевал Дятлова) after the group's leader, Igor Dyatlov (Игорь Дятлов).

The lack of eyewitnesses and subsequent investigations into the hikers' deaths have inspired much speculation. Investigators at the time determined that the hikers tore open their tent from within, departing barefoot in heavy snow. Though the corpses showed no signs of struggle, two victims had fractured skulls, two had broken ribs, and one was missing her tongue.[1] According to sources, four of the victims' clothing contained high levels of radiation. There is no mention of this in contemporary documentation; it only appears in later documents.[1] Soviet investigators determined only that "a compelling unknown force" had caused the deaths. Access to the area was barred for three years after the incident.[1] The chronology of the incident remains unclear due to the lack of survivors.[2][3]

A legal inquest  had been started immediately after finding the first five bodies. A medical examination found no injuries which might have led to their deaths, and it was concluded that they had all died of hypothermia. One person had a small crack in his skull, but it was not thought to be a fatal wound.

An examination of the four bodies which were found in May changed the picture. Three of them had fatal injuries: the body of Thibeaux-Brignolle had major skull damage, and both Dubunina and Zolotarev had major chest fractures. The force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high, with one expert comparing it to the force of a car crash. Notably, the bodies had no external wounds, as if they were crippled by a high level of pressure. One woman was found to be missing her tongue.[1] There had initially been some speculation that the indigenous Mansi people might have attacked and murdered the group for encroaching upon their lands, but investigation indicated that the nature of their deaths did not support this thesis; the hikers' footprints alone were visible, and they showed no sign of hand-to-hand struggle.[1]

There was evidence that the team was forced to leave the camp during the night, as they were sleeping. Though the temperature was very low (around -25° to -30°C) with a storm blowing, the dead were dressed only partially. Some of them had only one shoe, while others had no shoes or wore only socks.[1] Some were found wrapped in snips of ripped clothes which seemed to be cut from those who were already dead. However, up to 50 percent of hypothermia deaths are associated with so-called "paradoxical undressing"[4]. This typically occurs during moderate to severe hypothermia, as the person becomes disoriented, confused, and combative. They may begin discarding their clothing, which, in turn, increases the rate of heat loss.

Journalists reporting on the available parts of the inquest files claim that it states:

    * Six of the group members died of hypothermia and three of fatal injuries.
    * There were no indications of other people nearby apart from the nine travelers on Kholat Syakhl, nor anyone in the surrounding areas.
    * The tent had been ripped open from within.
    * The victims had died 6 to 8 hours after their last meal.
    * Traces from the camp showed that all group members left the camp of their own accord, on foot.
    * To dispel the theory of an attack by the indigenous Mansi people, one doctor indicated that the fatal injuries of the three bodies could not have been caused by another human being, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged".[1]
    * Forensic radiation tests had shown high doses of radioactive contamination on the clothes of a few victims.[1]

The final verdict was that the group members all died because of an "unknown compelling force". The inquest ceased officially in May 1959 due to the "absence of a guilty party". The files were sent to a secret archive, and the photocopies of the case became available only in the 1990s, with some parts missing.[1]

[Great Rumbler]

 

[Bebpo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HH_Holmes

Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861[1] – May 7, 1896[2]), better known under the alias of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was one of the first documented American serial killers. Holmes opened a hotel in Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair, which he built himself and was the location of many of his murders. While he confessed to 27 murders, of which nine were confirmed, his actual body count could be higher.

Chicago and the "Murder Castle"
While in Chicago during the summer of 1886, Holmes came across Dr. E.S. Holton's drugstore at the corner of S. Wallace and W. 63rd Street, in the neighborhood of Englewood.[5] Holton was suffering from cancer while his wife minded the store.[5] Through his charm, Holmes got a job there and then manipulated her into letting him purchase the store. They agreed she could still live in the upstairs apartment even after Holton died. Once Holton died, Mrs. Holton mysteriously disappeared and Holmes told people she was visiting relatives in California. As people started asking questions about her return, he told them she enjoyed California so much that she decided to live there.[5]

Holmes purchased a lot across from the drugstore, where he built his three-story, block-long "Castle"—as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood. It was opened as a hotel for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure used as commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes' own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle so only he fully understood the design of the house he had created, thus decreasing the chance of being reported to the police.

After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), lovers and hotel guests, torturing and killing them.[5] Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate [6]. The victims' bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty. Holmes picked one of the most remote rooms in the Castle to perform hundreds of illegal abortions. Some of his patients died as a result of his abortion procedure,[7] their corpses also processed and skeletons sold.[5]

 

[Great Rumbler]

Man, that's like some real-life Saw stuff going on there. 

[Groogrux]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically valid sentence in the English language, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.[1] It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992.[2] It was also featured in Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct.[3]

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are
a. the city of Buffalo, New York , which is used as a noun adjunct in the sentence and is followed by the animal;
n. the noun buffalo, an animal, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos"), in order to avoid articles;
v. the verb "buffalo" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.
Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives you:
Buffaloa buffalon Buffaloa buffalon buffalov buffalov Buffaloa buffalon.
Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:
[Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [whom] (Buffalo buffalo) buffalo, buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).
[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo.
Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.
THE buffalo FROM Buffalo WHO ARE buffaloed BY buffalo FROM Buffalo, buffalo buffalo FROM Buffalo.
"Buffalo buffalo (main clause Subject) [which the] Buffalo buffalo (subordinate clause Direct Object) buffalo [subordinate clause Verb] buffalo [main clause Verb] Buffalo buffalo [main clause Direct Object]."
The sentence can be clarified by substituting the synonym "bison" for the animal "buffalo" and "bully" for the verb "buffalo", leaving "Buffalo" to refer to the city:
'Buffalo bison Buffalo bison bully bully Buffalo bison', or:
'Buffalo bison whom other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison'.
Removing the classifier noun "Buffalo" (the city) further clarifies the sentence (note that the initial capital is retained as the common noun "buffalo" now starts the sentence):
'Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.'
'Bison [that other] bison bully [also] bully bison.'
[edit]Ambiguity
If the capitalization is ignored, the sentence can be read another way:
Buffaloa buffalon buffalov Buffaloa buffalon Buffaloa buffalon buffalov.
That is, bison from Buffalo intimidate (other) bison from Buffalo that bison from Buffalo intimidate.

[Joe Molotov]

I remember reading that in some English class. I also like this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow._Fruit_flies_like_a_banana.