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Royal palace discovered in area believed to be birthplace of King Arthur. Future - The hidden base that could have ended the world. Yvonne Morris had three minutes to get to work at the start of her shift. Any longer between phoning through her secret code at the perimeter gate and descending a set of stairs and she would have been arrested, at the very least.

Morris was one of the first female crew commanders of a Titan 2 nuclear missile silo. Stationed with the 390th Strategic Missile Wing in Tucson, Arizona between 1980 and 1984, she was responsible for three other crew members and a nine-megaton nuclear weapon. “Even though our primary mission was peace through deterrence by preventing World War Three,” she says, “in the event we failed, we had to be ready to launch at all times in retaliation.” From the early 1960s to the mid-80s, the city of Tucson was circled by 18 Titan 2 nuclear missile silos. “The three minutes to get to the silo is a built in security protocol,” Morris explains. “I have to tell you, I slept better when I was on crew than I did today,” says Morris. And that is it. How Houses Were Cooled Before Air Conditioning - Curbed. The Slave Who Stole the Confederate Codes—and a Rebel Warship.

When three Confederate officers decided to go ashore for a night in Charleston, they left their gunboat—and their naval codes—in the hands of an enslaved pilot. It was a critical mistake. We don’t know precisely why the three white officers on board a Confederate transport and gunboat called the CSS Planter decided to go ashore in Charleston, South Carolina, the night of May 12, 1862. Maybe they went to see their families. Maybe they went drinking or whoring. Certainly they were acting against orders, but they seemed to think the slave they left in charge of the Planter, a skilled 23-year-old harbor pilot named Robert Smalls, would take good care of the ship for them.

On board were pieces of naval artillery, including a 32-pounder on a pivot, a 24-pounder howitzer, and a gun that had been at Fort Sumter. A couple of hours before dawn, the Planter started its engines and its paddle wheel began to turn. Probably Smalls had encouraged the white officers to go ashore. Everett/Alamy Thank You! Confessions of a Former Apocalypse Survival Guide Writer. The first time I bid on a freelance job to ghostwrite a doomsday survival guide, I was only asked one question: Did I have experience writing for middle-aged Republican men?

I told the client that I had experience writing for a wide variety of ages and political affiliations, which was noncommittal enough to be true. The client said, “Sounds good, bro.” We were off to the races. It was 2009, and a surprisingly high number of people thought society might collapse in 2012, on or around December 21, in accordance with a supposed doomsday prediction in the Mayan long count calendar.

(Unsurprisingly, this was not a view held by many scholars of Mesoamerican culture.) The film 2012, which concerns itself with the same subject matter, came out the same year. I didn’t know anything about the client, let’s call him Dimitri, other than that he lived in Florida, and that he had about $600 for me if I could pump out 100 pages on how to survive the end of the world. I set to work. Do people buy them? Trump’s Boswell Speaks. “You’re right,” Trump agreed.

“Do you want to write it?” Schwartz thought it over for several weeks. He knew that he would be making a Faustian bargain. A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of Trump’s ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. “It was one of a number of times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the higher side,” he told me. He had grown up in a bourgeois, intellectual family in Manhattan, and had attended élite private schools, but he was not as wealthy as some of his classmates—and, unlike many of them, he had no trust fund.

“I grew up privileged,” he said. Such terms are unusually generous for a ghostwriter. Schwartz thought that “The Art of the Deal” would be an easy project. In those days, Schwartz recalls, Trump was generally affable with reporters, offering short, amusingly immodest quotes on demand. Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Other journalists have noticed Trump’s apparent lack of interest in reading. Break-In at Y-12. The Y-12 National Security Complex sits in a narrow valley, surrounded by wooded hills, in the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 and Oak Ridge were built secretly, within about two years, as part of the Manhattan Project, and their existence wasn’t publicly acknowledged until the end of the Second World War.

By then, the secret city had a population of seventy-five thousand. Few of its residents had been allowed to know what was being done at the military site, which included one of the largest buildings in the world. Y-12 processed the uranium used in Little Boy, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Strict security measures have been adopted at the site to prevent the theft of its special nuclear materials.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility was built, at a cost of more than half a billion dollars, to safeguard Y-12’s uranium. Not so long ago, the threat of nuclear terrorism seemed imminent. William P. The H-Bombs in Turkey. Among the many questions still unanswered following Friday’s coup attempt in Turkey is one that has national-security implications for the United States and for the rest of the world: How secure are the American hydrogen bombs stored at a Turkish airbase?

The Incirlik Airbase, in southeast Turkey, houses NATO’s largest nuclear-weapons storage facility. On Saturday morning, the American Embassy in Ankara issued an “Emergency Message for U.S. Citizens,” warning that power had been cut to Incirlik and that “local authorities are denying movements on to and off of” the base. Incirlik was forced to rely on backup generators; U.S. Air Force planes stationed there were prohibited from taking off or landing; and the security-threat level was raised to FPCON Delta, the highest state of alert, declared when a terrorist attack has occurred or may be imminent. According to Hans M. Incirlik was built by the U.S. The Fake Townhouses hiding Mystery Underground Portals. The Fight for the "Right to Repair" We need to call American breakfast what it often is: dessert. In America, breakfast is often nothing more than disguised dessert, as this recent tweet from author and researcher Alan Levinovitz reminded us: Look no further than the menu at IHOP, where dessert for breakfast reigns.

You can find such items as New York cheesecake pancakes or raspberry white chocolate chip pancakes, which come with a whopping 83 grams (nearly 21 teaspoons) of sugar. Remember that the government recommends no more than 12 teaspoons of sugar per person per day (though the average American consumes 23.) But you don’t need to go to IHOP to get a day’s worth of sugar in your morning meal. The muffins that greet us in the bakery aisle and at the coffee shop can contain about 37 grams of sugar — or a little more than 9 teaspoons. And yogurt? Javier Zarracina/Vox Yet companies like Yoplait and Chobani have built yogurt empires in America by saturating their products with sugar.

And if you believe granola is any healthier, think again. Granola didn’t fare much better. Did the Star-Spangled Banner land Stravinsky in jail? This story begins and ends with a photo. It’s Igor Stravinsky, the legendary modernist composer. He looks a little worse for wear. In fact, it looks like a mug shot. The date on the Boston police placard around his neck appears to be April 15, 1940. The novelist Neil Gaiman thought it was a mug shot. He sent the image to the blog Boing-Boing a few years ago, along with an astounding plot point: He claimed that Stravinsky had been arrested in Boston — for the crime of performing a weird arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Advertisement Spoiler alert: The photo is not a mug shot, and Stravinsky was never arrested. It should have been a triumph. It’s January of 1944, and Igor Stravinsky, regarded as the world’s greatest living composer, is about to conduct an entire evening of his own compositions with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a high-profile guest appearance in a city that had become practically a second home to him. The best guess? How research into glowing fungi could lead to trees lighting our streets | Science. On a moonless night deep in a Brazilian rainforest the only thing you are likely to see are the tiny smears of light from flitting fireflies or the ghostly glow of mushrooms scattered around the forest floor.

Both effects are the result of bioluminescence, the peculiar ability of some organisms to behave like living night-lights. Bioluminescence has been “invented” dozens of times in evolutionary history and serves a variety of purposes, from attracting mates and luring prey to warding off predators. Its existence in fungi – a rare if not unique case of bioluminescence outside the animal and microbial worlds – has posed more of a mystery. But scientists may now be able to explain not only why certain mushrooms glow in the dark, but how – and in doing so they could be nearer to creating glowing trees as a novel form of street lighting. Naturalists in the early 19th century identified fungal growth as the source of the glow from wooden support beams used to shore up mines. Secrets Of The London Library. The London Library was born in a fit of rage in 1841, exactly 175 years ago.

Its founder — curmudgeonly Thomas Carlyle (he of The History of the French Revolution) — hated having to study books in the company of other people. In London at the time, that was all that was available unless you bought books yourself — an expensive option. London had no lending library of its own (unlike Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and Norwich), and the Public Libraries Act was not even a gleam in the eye of bibliophiles of the time. Carlyle was forced to work in the old reading room of the British Library, his studies distracted by sharing the space with the "snorers, snufflers, wheezers and spitters" around him. He didn't get on with the librarian there either, and could never find the books he wanted. His solution? From a little acorn a mighty oak grew and by May 1841 the library had raised enough money to open its doors to the public.

In fact, three mighty oaks have grown from The Freemasons' Tavern. The Lost Chinese City Police Feared to Enter. Kowloon Walled City, a 6.9 acre cesspool of crime, trafficking, and unlicensed doctors, was once the most densely populated place on earth--and its legacy endures today. It was one of the greatest unplanned wonders of the 20th century—a city of no taxes and no laws. A 6.9 acre cesspool of crime, trafficking, and unlicensed doctors that was once the most densely populated place on earth. Kowloon Walled City, an island of ill-repute in Hong Kong that grew out of a technicality in a treaty between two empires was lost forever in 1994, torn down and replaced by a park.

But its legacy is well worth considering, certainly as one of the early forerunners of what is today a cottage industry of slum tours. But most importantly given its unregulated and organic development, as a counterbalance to the 20th century urban planning ideas of giants such as Le Corbusier which we have discussed. For comparison, Manhattan’s density in 2012 was 71,323 per square mile. Alamy Thank You! My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard: A Mother Jones Investigation. Chapter 1: "Inmates Run This Bitch" Have you ever had a riot? " I ask a recruiter from a prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

"The last riot we had was two years ago," he says over the phone. "Yeah, but that was with the Puerto Ricans! " I take a breath. I started applying for jobs in private prisons because I wanted to see the inner workings of an industry that holds 131,000 of the nation's 1.6 million prisoners. CCA certainly seemed eager to give me a chance to join its team. They weren't interested in the details of my résumé. When I call Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, the HR lady who answers is chipper and has a smoky Southern voice. "I like fishing. " "Well, there is plenty of fishing, and people around here like to hunt squirrels. "No. " "Well, I think you'll like Louisiana. Ultimately, I choose Winn. I phone HR and tell her I'll take the job. "Well, poop can stick! " I pass the background check within 24 hours. "You nervous? " "A little," I say. A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Pixar’s New Short Film "Piper"

Sanderlings spend a lot of time in the ocean, scuttling in and out of the water in search of tiny invertebrates buried in the sand. Even downy hatchlings must immediately learn to fend for themselves and feed between unrelenting waves. So the last thing any Sanderling needs is a crippling phobia of the ocean. But such is the lot of the young heroine in Pixar’s newest short, Piper. Directed by Alan Barillaro, the six-minute film preceding Finding Dory concerns the trials of a young chick as she conquers her natural habitat, and greatest fear. The idea came to Barillaro during his morning jogs in the Bay Area, where he would see hordes of the little speckled birds scampering to feed amidst giant kelp, resembling little wind-up toys.

To create Piper, Barillaro and his entire team entered the Sanderlings’ world. Staying True to Reality Beyond the beach, things got a lot more complicated. Barillaro took a different tack, adamant that his film stay true to the biology of a bird. The problem with reinforced concrete. By itself, concrete is a very durable construction material. The magnificent Pantheon in Rome, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, is in excellent condition after nearly 1,900 years. And yet many concrete structures from last century – bridges, highways and buildings – are crumbling. Many concrete structures built this century will be obsolete before its end. Given the survival of ancient structures, this may seem curious. The critical difference is the modern use of steel reinforcement, known as rebar, concealed within the concrete. While repair may be justified to preserve the architectural legacy of iconic 20th-century buildings, such as those designed by reinforced concrete users like Frank Lloyd Wright, it is questionable whether this will be affordable or desirable for the vast majority of structures.

Steel reinforcement was a dramatic innovation of the 19th century. The environmental costs of rebuilding This has serious repercussions for the planet. The problem with reinforced concrete. Inside the World of Large-Scale Food Heists. On March 26, 2013, Veniamin Balika pulled his 18-wheeler over at the New Jersey Turnpike's Vince Lombardi rest area. The reprieve didn’t last long, as Balika soon found himself handcuffed and arrested by state policemen.

The driver didn't have anything too suspicious in his possession, only a massive shipment totaling 42,000 pounds of Muenster cheese, valued at over $200,000, stored in his refrigerated truck. Balika was supposed to be delivering the load for K&K Cheese/Old Country Cheese Factory, the cheese manufacturer, in Cashton, Wisconsin. Except it turned out Balika was on detour — an extremely long and roundabout one that was taking him thousands of miles away from his alleged Texas destination. Police claimed that the truck driver had falsified his paperwork, which he had presented to K&K in order to obtain the cheese. "There’s a black market for everything. "There's a black market for everything," said New Jersey state police detective Oliver Sissman at the time of the arrest. The Origin of Dogs: When, Where, and How Many Times Were They Domesticated? Sixty Million Car Bombs: Inside Takata’s Air Bag Crisis.

Sixty Million Car Bombs: Inside Takata’s Air Bag Crisis. Why average people decide to become terrorists. Printing cliches — The Printing Machine. What’s False About True Color — Planet Stories. What Could Bacteria in the Sky Teach Us About Life on Mars? The Origin of Dogs: When, Where, and How Many Times Were They Domesticated? The Lost Secret Sign Language of Sawmill Workers. The big gamble: the dangerous world of British betting shops | Tom Lamont | Business. The Delightful Perversity of Québec's Catholic Swears. One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence. The Story Behind The World's Emptiest International Airport.

Lost at Sea on the Brink of the Second World War. How Breakfast Became a Thing. America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny -- NYMag. ​Iceland’s Ghost Planes — War Is Boring. Car Alarms Don't Work. Why Are They So Common? You’ve Got Hate Mail. Whiskey Can’t Hide Its Age Either - Issue 36: Aging. How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist — The Startup.

How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen. London’s empty towers mark a very British form of corruption | Simon Jenkins | Opinion. Stalin's Soviet showcase under spotlight at Venice architecture biennale. The Persian Rug May Not Be Long for This World. How New York Gets Its Water. Confronting the Parasite Economy. On Siberia's Ice Highway - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. Welcome to Disturbia - Curbed. Repeat after me! – They knew it was round, damn it! | The Renaissance Mathematicus.

Esperanto: the language that never was. The Business of Too Much TV -- Vulture. Neanderthals Built Mystery Cave Rings 175,000 Years Ago. The Vikings at home. Indoor Farms Could Revolutionize Agriculture. On the Trail of Nabokov in the American West. Nothing But The Truth. The secret history of ancient toilets. Hyper-Reality. The Secret of Billions. Why do we have allergies? The Dark Art of Mastering Music. Isaac and the apple – the story and the myth | The Renaissance Mathematicus. From 'Bob's Burgers' to 'Bordertown': How Bento Box is Helping Korean Animation Studios Make Their Mark on American Television.

Australia’s Offshore Cruelty. The trillion dollar question nobody is asking the presidential candidates. Why Are There Violent Rabbits In The Margins Of Medieval Manuscripts? | Jon Kaneko-James. DNA of ancient Phonecian could make us reconsider history of human migration | Archaeology. Io9.gizmodo. The Science Behind Sweden's Six-Hour Workday. After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back – Phenomena: Curiously Krulwich. Inside the hunt for Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. How England's First Feline Show Countered Victorian Snobbery About Cats.