20 Things You Didn’t Know About Living In Space. Like it may be a cure for snoring.

Why they called it the Manhattan Project. At least 5,000 people worked in Manhattan secretly building the bomb.

How would life on earth be different if we had no moon? Well, for one thing, we’d have to come up with another term for the act of showing one’s backside.

The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History. Curiously, Numa Numa is not on this list.

So bad they’re good: the worst music videos ever. No, you don’t have to watch to the end.

PS: Happy Halloween!

THE BOOKSTORE: Skylight Books, Los Angeles
THE DICTIONARY: American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, 2000
THE WORD: “loopy”

c.1390, probably of Celtic origin (cf. Gael. lub “bend,” Ir. lubiam), influenced by O.N. hlaup “a leap, run.” In ref. to magnetic recording tape or film, first recorded 1931. Computer programming sense first attested 1947. The verb meaning “to form a loop” is first recorded 1856. Looped “drunk” is from 1934; loopy “crazy” is from 1925. To loop the loop (1902) originally was a stunt of bicycle-riding. (thank you, Online Etymology Dictionary)

Ok. So, “loopy”–I used to know a girl nicknamed this. I never found out why, or if I was hearing it incorrectly–because even if it had been something else (like Lupe), in the Midwest we draw those vowels right out, giving the umlaut treatment whenever possible. But perhaps nicknames aren’t meant to be exactly inviolable. If you’re famous, infamous, or just plain unpopular enough, chances are you’ve been the recipient of a nickname. And nicknames, being the intrinsic property of others, seem to beg derivations: Hoss becomes Jefe becomes General Excelsior (perhaps a ridiculous route).

In eighth grade a band of Heathers adopted me as an extremely ancillary member, and christened me Tabük. The etymology of this is foggy to me now, though most certainly it involved some meme leftover from a group science project. It died off by high school, but I have to say I kind of missed it, even if was supposed to mark me as, um, loopy. (If you have Stockholm Syndrome at all, you cling to crumbs!)

So first of all a) am I psychic and was your day especially loopy? and b) did you ever have a nickname and was it ever butchered by others?

This article was written by Jay M. Pasachoff, Professor of Astronomy at Williams College, and originally appeared in mental_floss magazine.

Galileo may have been threatened with the rack during the Inquisition almost 400 years ago, but—relatively speaking—that was hardly terrifying. Whether the Earth went around the Sun (as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton thought) or vice versa (in the old model of Ptolemy or Aristotle), Galileo’s Universe was still a placid place. But these days, astronomers are facing threats so bone chilling, they make the rack look like a simple walk on the moon. Here are some of the things astronomers worry about, and some things you may want to start worrying about, too.

1) Asteroid Extinction

Most of us humans think we’re the kings and queens of the Earth, lording over our dominions with our big brains. But so did the dinosaurs, up until about 65 million years ago when, one day, a small asteroid came their way, colliding with the Earth and creating a cloud of dust across the planet. From the dust and the cooling temperatures that resulted, thousands of species died. The dinosaurs joined in this mass extinction, and any day now, we could be in for a mass extinction of our own.

Evidence of future asteroid collisions with Earth can be found by analyzing past collisions like the one that ended the dinosaur age. So what do we know about that collision so long ago? Evidence of the collision began emerging when California scientist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter discovered the element iridium in a layer of segment all around the planet. The layer was known from radioactive dating to be 65 million years old, and, when coupled with the fact that asteroids are sometimes known to be rich in that metal, the idea of a collision became plausible.

Verification of the theory came when the actual crater created by the asteroid was located in the ocean off the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Known as Chicxulub, the crater is now covered with sediment, but geologists and space mapping have traced out its structure, leading to the discovery of giant rings hundreds of miles across the Earth’s surface.

Based on this evidence, scientists estimated that the asteroid that hit Earth during the dinosaur age may have been about ten kilometers (about six miles) across. And that’s bad news because asteroids or meteorites that size are thought to hit the Earth every 100 million years or so. Thus, we may be due. Several space projects are now scanning the skies to detect asteroids that may be on a collision course with Earth. The hope is that if there are any giant, apocalypse-capable asteroids heading for us, they may now be in an orbit around the Sun, and we will have many years advance notice to do something about it. There are about 1,000 near-Earth asteroids greater than 1 km in diameter (still a civilization-threatening size), and astronomers calculate that there is a one percent chance of a collision with one of them each thousand years. So it may not be time to get to work on that fallout shelter you designed in the 1940s, but it’s not time to throw out the blueprints, either.

2) Here Comes the Sun … Seriously This Time

The Sun may seem hot on a summer’s day, but you ain’t seen nothing’ yet. That’s right: The Sun will get even hotter in the future. Today, the surface of the Sun is about 6,000 degrees Celsius (about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The problem is, the Sun is only a middle-aged star right now, and stars (unlike people) get hotter with old age.

Scientists determine the intensity of the Sun’s heat by measuring its light in two different ways. The first is to look at the Sun’s color: The Sun gives off mostly yellow-green light, with lesser amounts of red light at longer wavelengths and lesser amounts of blue light at shorter wavelengths. Hotter stars give off even more blue light relative to yellow-green, while cooler stars give off relatively more red light. The second method is for astronomers to break down the Sun’s light into its color spectrum. Astronomers use spectrographs to spread the color spectrum out, allowing them to see specific colors that are absent or relatively dark. These darkened colors tell astronomers the Sun’s temperature.

But what will happen in the future? The Sun is now about halfway through its 10 billion-year lifetime. In a few billion years the outer parts of the Sun will begin to swell, making the Earth hotter. Eventually, the oceans will boil, making human survival, much less a dip in the sea, impossible. (Of course, by then we may be able to get onto rockets and go farther out into the solar system or even to neighboring ones.) After about 5 billion years, the Sun will swell so much that it will become a “red giant,” with its surface extending beyond where Mercury’s orbit is today. By then the Earth will be roasted, and nobody will be around to see the Sun give off its outer layers, which is too bad because it will actually be quite beautiful; the layers will puff away to make a colorful planetary nebula like the famous Ring Nebula. And nobody will be around on Earth when the remaining core of the Sun shrinks to become a superhot white dwarf.

Actually, even now some parts of the Sun are much hotter than 6,000 degrees. The Sun’s center is about 15 million degrees, and the Sun’s outer layer—the solar corona that we see at total eclipses—is about 2 million degrees (4 million degrees Fahrenheit). But that high temperature merely tells us that the particles (electrons, protons, etc.) in the corona are moving around very quickly. Luckily, however, there are not enough of them to hold a dangerous amount of energy.

3) Exploding Stars

Our Sun may broil our home in a few billion years, but there are some other stars that could explode, or implode—to be exact—any day. At the core of a star, fusion transforms hydrogen into helium and a bit of helium into carbon. Sounds harmless enough, right? Normally, it is. At the Sun’s core, for example, the pressure from the radiation coming out from the nuclear fusion balances gravity, and all is safe and good.

In a more massive star, however—one with five times the Sun’s mass or more—the inside becomes so hot that the core’s carbon fuses into heavier elements like oxygen and magnesium. The creation of these heavier elements generates a great deal of energy, and, eventually, the elements turn into iron, when all hell breaks loose. As fusion continues in the star’s core, iron takes in energy instead of giving off energy. So once iron accumulates in the core, the energy is sucked out of the center of the star and the star collapses. Within seconds, the outer layers fall in from millions of miles up, and the star becomes a supernova.

Astronomers believe that a supernova implodes in our galaxy every 100 years or so, but we haven’t seen any since the great astronomers Tycho Brahe (in 1572) and Johannes Kepler (in 1604) saw and wrote about them. This may be because most supernovae are believed to be on the far side of the galaxy, hidden from us by the dust in our galaxy’s center. The nearest supernova we know of today recently formed in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of Milky Way’s satellite galaxies that is closer to us on Earth than some parts of our own galaxy. The supernova exploded in 1987 and reached a brightness sufficient enough to be seen with the naked eye. It then faded, but, today, the matter ejected from its core is hitting matter ejected long ago, and it appears that the supernova is brightening again. In fact, we may soon be able to see it without telescopes again.

So far, these supernovae have been safely far away. But a supernova too close to us—as in anywhere in our part of the galaxy—could wipe us all out with its x-rays, gamma-rays and other particles. And actually, the possibility is quite realistic. Many scientists have had their telescopes focused on one object in particular that looks like a massive star, and, over the last 100 years or so, it has brightened and changed substantially. Maybe it is a supernova on the verge of going off. Or maybe it has already exploded, its radiation currently en route and capable of reaching us any day now!

4) Accelerating Universe

As the astronomer Edwin Hubble figured out in the 1920s, our Universe is constantly expanding. Back then, Hubble measured changes in the sky by sitting out all night in the cold using a telescope to take photographs with exposures up to eight hours long. His giant telescope focused its light onto a tiny piece of film that was coating a glass plate. The light from the sky created a spectrum, which showed all the patterns of colors in the sky and shifts in those colors. The evidence from his photographs showed him that the farther galaxies had their spectra shifted more, helping him to deduce, in a leap of genius, that the Universe was expanding uniformly.

Since Hubble’s early work, the expansion of the Universe has been a cornerstone of cosmology. When NASA launched a space telescope in 1990, they named it after him, since studying cosmology and the expansion of the Universe was a major part of its mission. Now, NASA has named its successor (to be launched in 2010) after James Webb, who was the Administrator of NASA. (Whether or not it is a good thing that its naming has moved from scientists to bureaucrats is yet undetermined.)

In the last few years, telescopes have gotten bigger and more powerful. And, by 1998, a related phenomenon had been discovered, and it surprised everyone. It turns out that the most distant galaxies weren’t going away at the rate that astronomers had expected. They were going away even faster, which made them look fainter than expected. The phenomenon is known as the “accelerating universe.”

Do you like your future hot and bright, or do you prefer it cold and dark? The accelerating Universe theory seems to tell us that the latter is what will happen. Some had thought the Universe would eventually stop its expansion and start contracting, but it looks now as though the Universe will expand forever, with galaxies just getting farther and farther apart, disappearing from our view. Eventually, the stars will die and reach their final stages as white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes. After 50 billion years or so, the Universe will be just a dying vestige of its current magnificence.

It’s a good thing that all of recorded history—say 5000 years—is only one ten-millionth of the time until 50 billion years have passed. It will take a trillion times a 50-year adult lifetime until we reach that distant stage of the Universe, so perhaps we shouldn’t worry so much after all.

Previously on mental_floss:

• The Moon Disaster That Never Happened
• Six Cool Plants We’d Find A Way To Kill
• People Ferment The Darndest Things
• Disgusting Flavors We Never Got A Chance To Love
• The Analogist: Party-Crashing Soviet Spacecrafts

You remember Q—the lab-coated scientist who’s always giving James Bond new gadgets like a bulletproof Aston Martin or explosive fountain pen.

The U.S. military’s version of Q is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The unmanned Predator aircraft now being used in Iraq and Afghanistan is just one of the many remarkable—and sometimes kooky—innovations dreamt up by DARPA engineers.

The next installment of Quiz Week!! tests your ability to distinguish the actual DARPA projects. Take the quiz: Crazy Uncle DARPA. And be sure to check back tomorrow for more Quiz Week!! fun.

Chris Weber is an occasional contributor to mentalfloss.com. You can visit his online home here.

Even the biggest stars had to start somewhere. It just so happens that many of them started out in horror movies – some classic, some classically terrible. The quiz week festivities continue with Scary Beginnings: match the celeb with their early horror movie credit.

Take Stacy Conradt’s quiz!

Then come back and brag about your score.

Every weekday until Halloween, I’ll be offering up trivia treats about sweets you’re likely to encounter on October 31. Or, in today’s case, October 31, 1900.

1) Popcorn balls were one of the most popular treats in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (Photo courtesy of Tomorrow’s Friendly Food.)

2) Popular flavorings during that time period included orange and lemon juice, rose, peppermint, honey, vanilla, molasses and sugar.

3) 30 percent of popcorn in the U.S. is sold at circuses, movies, fairs and baseball games.

4) I was all set to tell you that the largest popcorn ball ever made lives in Sac City, Iowa, weighing in at 3,100 pounds. But it turns out that the record was topped in 2006 by our neighbors in Lake Forest, Illinois. Lake Forest is home to the Popcorn Factory, a company that makes about 1,000,000 pounds of popcorn every year. The ball took employees two days to make and came in at eight feet in diameter and almost 24.5 feet in circumference. It weighs 3,423 pounds. (Continue reading for a picture.)
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I was visiting family on the Eastern shore of Maryland last week when I saw this little war of words at a remote intersection. My aunt, a local, said “Funny, I’ve driven by here a thousand times and never noticed that!” I guess the poduce vendor hasn’t noticed it yet, either.

Big Al found this (phonetically?) misspelled sign with a punctuation error, to boot — it’s like the four leaf clover of signs!

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The Daily Show has recently opened its video archives with over 16,000 clips, all nicely tagged and searchable. The archive currently contains clips going back to 1999 (sorry, Craig Kilborn fans), but the most important part is the timeline search interface. Using a clever three-level timeline (year, month, and day), you can quickly browse through the archive to find clips by day. Go ahead, look up your birthday. Or look up Jon Stewart’s famous post-September 11 monologue (the show returned to the air on September 20, 2001). More clips are promised in the coming years, but for now 16,000 will just have to do.

This web site promises to waste hours — nay, days — of my life. But wait…is pure joy from fake news video clips ever a waste? I think not.

Here are some best bets:

All appearances by Resident Expert John Hodgman, 681 Stephen Colbert clips, This Week in God (includes many segments after Colbert left), and David Cross.

Halloween is nearly upon us… and there’s no better time to take a look at one of the most famous horror stories in literary history: Frankenstein!

In this two-part article, we’ll discover some truths (and dispel some myths) about Dr. Frankenstein and The Monster. Yesterday, in Part I, we reviewed the story’s influence in movies, TV, music, and pop culture. Today, in Part II, we’ll focus on Mary Shelley’s original novel.

THE BOOK:

Q: What event halfway around the world helped spawn Frankenstein?

A: The eruption of Mount Tambora in present-day Indonesia. The atmospheric dust the volcano spewed out blocked the Sun’s rays, resulting in unseasonably cold weather during the summer of 1816. Mary went to Switzerland along with poet (and husband-to-be) Percy Shelley that May, as houseguests of fellow poet Lord Byron. Unable to enjoy outdoor activities due to the conditions, the group thought it would be fun to challenge each other to write the scariest ghost story imaginable. While Percy and Byron abandoned the project early on, Mary was so struck by a nightmare she’d had that she kept writing. She finished the book the following year, and it was first published in 1818.

Q: How did a book about the creation of a living being manage to escape the wrath of the religious?

Lots more after the jump… (more…)

Alfred Sisley was an accomplished landscape artist, but he is not as well known today as some of his contemporaries, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Today, on Alfred Sisley’s birthday, let’s discuss Renoir’s “Alfred Sisley and His Wife.”

1. Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir met around 1862, when Renoir began studying in Paris under Charles Gleyre.

2. When he was a boy, Renoir worked in a porcelain factory, where he painted designs on fine china.
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