I know I’m only about a decade late, but I recently, finally, watched the entire run of The Sopranos. Tony and his crew get their hands into plenty of different moneymaking schemes, but throughout the series one character or another (Tony, Richie Aprile, Ralph Cifaretto) is involved in solid waste management. What makes trash collection so attractive to mobsters?

The areas where criminal organizations tend to do steady business – drugs, stolen goods, gambling and protection rackets, for example – conform to the basic necessities of the wiseguy economy. They’re all easy to get into (you need significantly less startup capital to hijack a truck than to start the next Google) and exploit, and are highly profitable. The business of garbage collection satisfies those same needs, but has the added bonus of actually being legal. Mobsters can pull down serious profits from a legitimate, in-demand business, while also using it to launder dirty money from their other enterprises.

The mob really got into trash in the mid-20th century, when many cities stopped collecting commercial waste and left businesses to find private haulers. (more…)

Smelling image via Shutterstock

I’m perfectly suited to answer the Big Question that reader Katie posed the other day, because I have anosmia, which means I can’t smell. At all. Every diaper my two-year-old has ever filled has been totally odorless to me. I also missed out on her new baby smell, which I hear is pretty fantastic. I can’t tell if I come back to work still stinky from a lunchtime run, which often concerns me, but other people’s B.O. doesn’t bother me either. I’m never tempted by the smell of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels wafting through the mall, and when someone burns popcorn in the microwave at work, I really don’t care. I’m also convinced I’m going to die due to a gas leak sometime when I’m alone in the house.

The first thing people always ask when they find out about my lack of smell is, “Wait, but can you taste?” (more…)

Eye image via Shutterstock

Eye floaters — or muscae volitantes, Latin for “hovering flies” — are those tiny, oddly shaped objects that sometimes appear in your vision, most often when you’re looking at the sky on a sunny day. They look like spots, or a squishy little amoeba, and drift aimlessly around in your field of vision. Try to get a fix on one, though, and it seems to disappear.

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Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th President of the United States. He was first elected in 1884, coming off a successful stint as Governor of New York. Then in 1888, thanks to a shady election and controversy over tariffs, Cleveland lost reelection to Benjamin Harrison.

By all accounts, Cleveland really thought he was done with government after that. But his wife may have thought otherwise, as she supposedly said to a servant upon leaving the White House, “Now, Jerry, I want you to take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, for I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again… four years from today.”

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Image credit: NASA

Let’s start with the bad news: Remember that hole in the ozone layer that scientists discovered over the Antarctic in 1985? The one we worried would give us all skin cancer and cataracts with its unshielded bursts of UV rays? It’s still there.

It gets worse. Scientists announced that a new hole opened up in early 2011—this one over the Arctic. So it’s still a rough time for the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that helps block out some of the sun’s UV rays.

But here’s the good news: we’ve got a handle on the problem. (more…)

Lightning image, which is kind of related to thunder, via Shutterstock

While we use the term figuratively today, its original usage — by English playwright John Dennis in the early 1700s — was literal.

Live theater productions have plenty of sound effect tricks up their sleeves, some of them centuries old. If the sound of thunder is needed for a stormy scene, for example, off-stage crew members might roll metal balls down troughs, grind lead shot in bowls or shake thin sheets of metal.

For the performance of his play Appius and Virginia at a London theater, Dennis came up with a new thunder effect, a refined version of the “mustard bowl” that used metal balls in a bowl instead of lead. The play was not well received, but the thunder was, and after Appius and Virginia was cancelled, the theater manager continued to use Dennis’ thunder-making method for a production of Macbeth.

One night, Dennis was in the audience and recognized the distinct sound of his thunder effect. According to legend, he leapt from his seat and shouted, “That’s my thunder, by God! The villains will not play my play but they steal my thunder.”

Woodpecker image via Shutterstock

If you or I bump our heads hard enough on a hunk of wood, it might smart for a while. But to get through an average day, a woodpecker might ram its head into a tree trunk at a speed of 6 or 7 meters per second some 12,000 times without seeming the least bit bothered by it.

Lucky for them. The life of a woodpecker revolves around slamming its face into trees at high speeds. It’s how they feed themselves most of the time, excavating bugs from the wood when fruit or nuts aren’t available. It’s also how many of them make their homes, hollowing out a space in a trunk some 8 inches wide and up to two feet deep to make a nest. This is the niche they’ve come to fill, and over millions of years of doing it, they’ve evolved some intense headgear to prevent brain damage, cracked skulls and retinal detachment.

To figure out what all goes into woodpecker head trauma prevention, a team of Chinese scientists took a look at the birds’ heads, brains and behavior in several different ways last year. (more…)

Quicksand is a staple hazard of adventure movies, TV shows and video games. Whenever a minor character needs to be killed off quickly, the hero needs someone to rescue, or danger needs to be introduced without calling the villain in, quicksand is there to fulfill the task and swallow an explorer whole. Conveniently, there’s always a pool of pasty goo sitting around somewhere, usually perfectly circular and somewhat hidden from the characters’ view. This shouldn’t come as a shock, but real quicksand isn’t exactly how Hollywood makes it out to be.

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Paper cut image via Shutterstock

There are a couple things at play here, some involving the paper, some involving your skin.

For one thing, what part of your body comes in contact with paper the most? Right, the majority of paper cuts happen on the fingers and hands. Your hands are pretty complex sensory instruments, and they’re absolutely jam-packed with nerve fibers called nociceptors. These guys sense temperature, pressure and pain, and there are more of them per square inch in your hands and fingers than most other parts of your body. Injuries there are noticed much more than similar injuries elsewhere. The same small paper cut on a less nerve-dense area, such as, say, your leg, won’t send nearly as many pain signals to your brain.

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Eclipse mania is gripping the western part of the United States. Should the wide-eyed and unprotected hazard a peek?

NASA doesn’t advise it. The truth is, a quick glance at a solar eclipse won’t leave you blind. But you’re not doing your peepers any favors. (more…)