Thursday Things: Things Hidden Edition
11 June 2020. Vol 2 No 24 By Dan McGirt. #44
Welcome to Thursday Things!
Not an underground missile silo, but also nice. Mesa Verde National Park. Photo by Alec Krum on Unsplash
This is pretty much my dream home: A couple converted a Kansas nuclear missile silo into a bizarre 18,000-square-foot castle, and now it's on the market for $3.2 million.
Just 25 miles west of Topeka, this unique structure hides mostly underground. Ed and Dianna Peden bought this Cold War Atlas E nuclear missile silo and spent the last 33 years renovating it into an underground mansion and castle, which they rented out on Airbnb for years.
It comes with 47-ton blast doors, underground entry tunnels, a 3,500 sq foot living room, and lots of closet space. Lots. Also a hot tub.
All I need now is $3.2 million.
Those of you with damaged livers for whatever reason will be interested in this story — Scientists Grow Tiny Human Livers, Changing the Course of Organ Transplants
Scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and their colleagues have grown tiny human livers and successfully implanted them into rats. The livers began as stem cells that are cultivated into skin and vascular cells that form a complete microenvironment.
Here is another article on the tiny livers: “The mini livers the scientists created function just like real ones. They secrete bile acids and urea to digest and process food. Also, these livers are produced relatively quickly. A liver normally takes about two years to fully mature — these livers can be grown in less than a month.”
Robot Learns to Cook Your Perfect Omelet: “At ICRA 2020 this week, roboticists from the University of Cambridge, in England, presented a paper on OmeletteBot, a fully autonomous end-to-end omelet-cooking robot. What’s new here is that the robot is able to optimize its omelet making for different people based on how they react to a few sample omelets. Your perfect omelet is now within reach.” You can watch OmeletteBot in action here:
The perfect appliance for your underground lair. Although I worry this is teaching robots that you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, which may not bode well for us in the long run.
This is something I would do if I were a multimillionaire living in a missile silo — hide treasures in various places and plant clues in the form of poems and puzzles and ciphers. Multimillionaire Forrest Fenn's treasure hidden, worth $1M, found in Rocky Mountains
Famed art and antiquities collector Forrest Fenn, who hid $1 million in treasure in the Rocky Mountain wilderness a decade ago, said Sunday that the chest of goods has been found … Fenn posted clues to the treasure's whereabouts online and in a 24-line poem that was published in his 2010 autobiography "The Thrill of the Chase."
Congratulations to the anonymous treasure finder!
‘Titanium Rain’ would be a great band name. Or maybe a nail polish color. But on some planets, titanium rain is literally a thing that can happen. Exoplanets Exist That Are So Hot They Rain Titanium And Have Aluminium Oxide Clouds
Thanks to the success of the Kepler mission, we know that there are multitudes of exoplanets of a type called 'Hot Jupiters'. These are gas giants that orbit so close to their stars that they reach extremely high temperatures. They also have exotic atmospheres, and those atmospheres contain a lot of strangeness, like clouds made of aluminum oxide, and titanium rain.
Bring a very strong umbrella! ‘Hot Jupiters’ would also be a great band name.
Speaking of subterranean construction. Archival photos of sewer systems before they were full of sewage.
Archival photos reproduced in Stephen Halliday’s An Underground Guide to Sewers give us a rare view of these sewers of the past, as they looked to the people who engineered, built, and maintained them.
Most of these photographs—dating from the 1880s to the 1940s—show new construction; the before without the after. Pristine iron bars free of rust, walls too freshly mortared to settle and crack, cement yet unstained by water and waste. Older photos show brick-lined culverts, each brick having been laid by hand.
We will close with Toto’s ‘Africa’ played on musical Tesla coils. Because we can.
Thank you for reading Thursday Things. See you next Thursday!