Guess you really can’t beat the real thing.

Coca-Cola gets its iconic taste thanks in part to a chemical processing factory in a sleepy New Jersey neighborhood that has the country’s only license to import the plant used to make cocaine. //

The Maywood-based facility, now managed by the Stepan Company, has been processing coca leaves for the soft-drink giant for more than a century and had its license to import them renewed by the Drug Enforcement Agency earlier this year.

The coca leaves are used to create a “decocainized” ingredient for the soda and the leftover byproduct is sold to the opioid manufacturing company Mallinckrodt, which uses the powder to make a numbing agent for dentists, DailyMail reported. //

Importing coca leaves was banned in 1921, but the legislation left an exemption for Maywood Chemical Works, which ran the factory before Stepan Company bought the site in 1959.

How to create your own tensegrity table.

The concept of tensegrity was invented by Kenneth Snelson and made famous by the architect Buckminster Fuller in 1949

[read more: https://buff.ly/41Tgqhp]
[ Engineer Ye: https://buff.ly/3Nr9tjc]

Drone show flight testing. Perfectly timed

According to google searches, the Jinping Underground Laboratories are the "deepest" building or buildings constructed, reaching 7900 feet (2400 metre) below the surface.... However, the surface in question is a mountain. While that does classify as underground, it highlights a flaw in the question of the deepest underground building.

I can't seem to find the lowest building in the world though, or the deepest in relation to depth within the earth's crust.

What is the lowest point below sea level that we have built where a human can go? I imagine this is likely another laboratory. But where would a building of this description be?

A newfound species of millipede has more legs than any other creature on the planet — a mind-boggling 1,300 of them. The leggy critters live deep below Earth's surface and are the only known millipedes to live up to their name.

He's a tall, lanky Southerner with a penchant for cars, and, of all things, lizards. He has a polite face and an eager-to-please demeanor. His teaches Sunday school with his wife. Ed Bolian is the kind of guy you might meet on an airplane and forget before you picked up your bags – with one exception: he just became the fastest man ever to drive across the United States.

That's right: Alex Roy's familiar cross-country driving record, set in his now-famous LeMans Blue 2000 BMW M5 during the fall of 2006, no longer stands. It was allegedly broken by a three-man team consisting of Ed, a co-driver, and a passenger, in a 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG.

First, we should address the term "broken". When I think of a record that's been "broken," I imagine beating something by a second, or a minute, or maybe a few RBIs. If what Ed says is true, the record wasn't broken: it was shattered. In 2006, Alex and company completed the transcontinental journey in 31 hours and 4 minutes. Two weeks ago, Ed and his crew say they managed to do the deed in 28 hours and 50 minutes. Google says it takes 40 and a half. //

All of this started in 1933 when a crazy man from Indiana named Edwin "Cannonball" Baker drove from New York to Los Angeles in 53 hours and 30 minutes in some car called the Blue Streak. No one knows Baker's motivation for the run, but his 50 mph average was highly impressive, considering the interstate system was not yet built. The record went unbeaten for 40 years.

In the 1970s, noted auto racer and Car and Driver contributor Brock Yates conceived the "Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash" – also called the Cannonball Run – to protest highway speed limits. I won't bore you with the details, but the record was slowly whittled down over the next decade until Dave Heinz and Dave Yarborough teamed up in 1979 to make the trek in 32 hours and 51 minutes behind the wheel of a Jaguar XJS.

This SOMA puzzle site has 360 MegaByte, over 15000 figures, over 142 Newsletters,
original Danish and Parker Bros. booklets, history, Scans of original newsletters, theories, proofs,
An advanced SOMA puzzle solving program, ... and a lot more !

A heroic rat named Magawa has been working for five years in Cambodia, sniffing out dozens of land mines. He is believed to have saved lives.

Now, the animal is about to embark on a well-deserved retirement.

"Although still in good health, he has reached a retirement age and is clearly starting to slow down," the nonprofit APOPO said Thursday. "It is time."

Magawa is a Tanzanian-born African giant pouched rat who was trained by APOPO to sniff out explosives. With careful training, he and his rat colleagues learn to identify land mines and alert their human handlers, so the mines can be safely removed.

Even among his skilled cohorts working in Cambodia, Magawa is a standout sniffer: In four years he has helped to clear more than 2.4 million square feet of land. In the process, he has found 71 land mines and 38 items of unexploded ordnance. //

Christophe Cox, APOPO's CEO and co-founder, said the organization began exploring new explosive-detection techniques after an analysis found that land mine detection was "the most expensive and tedious part of the problem."

"That's why we came up with the idea of using rats, because rats are fast. They can screen an area of 200 square meters in half an hour – something which would take a manual deminer four days," Cox said at the virtual ceremony. //

Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their size – they are too light to trigger the mines. When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found.

MURFREESBORO, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — A man from Washington visiting Crater of Diamonds State Park found a two-carat diamond during his third day on the hunt at the iconic spot.

26-year-old Christian Liden, of Poulsbo, Wash., said he wanted to find the raw materials to make his own engagement ring. He started by panning for gold around his home state. After five years, he had accumulated enough for the ring. Up next, it was time for the diamond — which led him to Arkansas.

Starting a conversation with a complete stranger can be a little intimidating, and sometimes you don't know what to say. Use the FORD technique the next time you meet someone to avoid those awkward silences.

Family
Occupation
Recreation
Dreams

Think of a couple questions for each category, keep them saved in your memory bank, and you should be able to start up a lasting conversation with anyone you meet. You could even think of a few follow-up questions or sentences that can help move things along and show you're actively listening. Hit the link below to read more.

When officials in Utah on Monday revealed they had found a shimmering, metal structure deep in the Red Rock desert, they refused to say exactly where.

They hoped that would be enough to deter amateur adventurers from setting off to find it, risking getting dangerously lost in the process.

But there was little chance that people would abide by this advice. By Wednesday, pictures were emerging on Instagram of people triumphantly posing with the monolith, eager to show the world that they had got there first - even if the wider mystery of why it is there remains unsolved.

There will always be an endless list of chores to complete and work to do, and a culture of relentless productivity tells us to get to it right away and feel terribly guilty about any time wasted. But the truth is, a life spent dutifully responding to emails is a dull one indeed. And “wasted” time is, in fact, highly fulfilling and necessary. //

“Wasting time is about recharging your battery and de-cluttering,” he says. Taking time to be totally, gloriously, proudly unproductive will ultimately make you better at your job, says Guttridge. But it’s also fulfilling in and of itself. //

At the end of the day, all of us have the urge to while away time flicking through a magazine, walking around the block, or simply doing nothing. We should embrace these moments, and see them as what they are: time well spent.

Goodwill.com Hunting

A Graphical Analysis of Women's Tops Sold on Goodwill's Website

by J. Peter

After 10ish years of second-hand shopping, I've started to ask myself a lot of questions about the clothes I've been buying, like, "Did someone die in this?" or, "Have thrift stores always been this pricy?" (the answer to the former being, "yeah, probably"). In the absense of any conclusive answers, I tried to get the data myself.

I set up a script that collected information on listings for more than four million women's shirts for sale through Goodwill's website, going back to mid-2014. The information is deeply flawed—a Goodwill online auction is very different from a Goodwill store—but we can get an idea of how thrift store offerings have changed through the years. There's more info on data collection method below.

1. Are Used Clothes Getting More Expensive?

In short, yes. Or rather, maybe.

In a literal sense, Rocket Science Ice Cream is likely the “coolest” thing made in Elkhart County. It’s 321 degrees below zero, to be exact.

Rocket Science Ice Cream, located inside Coppes Commons in Nappanee, offers a new twist on ice cream: It’s made-to-order and flash-frozen using liquid nitrogen.

“Flash-freezing results in less air pockets and less ice crystals for a smoother product,” owner Eddie Schwartz said. “In the end, you get this velvety, creamy ice cream. It’s fresh, and it’s smooth. Even if people don’t like ice cream, they’ll like our ice cream.”

Rocket Science started as a science experiment in a trailer in Osceola and was so popular that a storefront was first opened in Nappanee in 2011. //

At Rocket Science Ice Cream, the visual experience is just as fantastic as the taste experience. When you visit, the staff focuses on your order of ice cream. Each individual serving is crafted from a premium ice cream mix and real fruits, nuts, candies, and sauces using their own special recipes or ingredients that you pick. It is then quick-frozen right before your eyes with liquid nitrogen.

401 E Market St
Nappanee, IN 46550

574-264-2615

rocketscienceicecream.com/

But the goal of the modern on-the-go, non-stop worker has to be never having to leave your office behind. Well, now you can with this 2015 Toyota Sienna that's ready to work, though a tad unusual.

A used car dealership in New York is offering up a rather unique proposition to the mobile office fantasy

HASTELLOY® N alloy (UNS N10003) is a nickel-base alloy that was invented at Oak Ridge National Laboratories as a container material for molten fluoride salts. It has good oxidation resistance to hot fluoride salts in the temperature range of 1300 to 1600°F (704 to 871°C).

In tests of over two years duration, corrosion attack on HASTELLOY® N alloy in molten fluoride salts at temperatures up to 1300°F (704°C), was less than one mil per year. It is expected that alloy N will be most useful in environments involving fluorides at high temperatures; however, the alloy compares favorably with other HASTELLOY® alloys in various corrosive media, as shown in the table of penetration rates. Corrosion test samples of the alloy are available from Haynes International locations. It is especially suggested that the alloy be tested in molten halides of zirconium, beryllium, lithium, sodium, potassium, thorium or uranium.

HASTELLOY® N alloy has good oxidation resistance in air. It shows promise for continuous operations at temperatures up to 1800°F (982°C). Intermittent use at temperatures up to 1900°F (1038°C) may also be possible. No discernible oxidation could be measured for the alloy at temperatures up to 1200°F (649°C).

Metallographic examinations have shown that the elements in alloy N remain in solid solution in the 1100 to 1600°F (593 to 871°C) range. Tensile tests have indicated no tendency toward embrittlement for prolonged periods at 1500°F (816°C). Alloy N has good weldability and can be readily forged. The hot working range is between 1600 and 2150°F (871 to 1177°C). It has been successfully extruded and further processed into high-quality seamless or manufactured as welded and drawn tubing.

Solution heat-treatment is recommended after hot or cold working of HASTELLOY® N alloy parts. For sheet and plate, this is accomplished by soaking at 2150°F (1177°C) [sections up to 1/4 inch thick] and then cooling rapidly in air, or at 2165°F (1185°C) [sections 1/4 inch and thicker] followed by waterquenching.

HASTELLOY® N alloy can be supplied, to order, in the forms of sheet, plate, and bar

HASTELLOY® N alloy sheet, plate, bar, rod, and welded and seamless wrought pipe and tubing have been approved for use in the construction of unfired pressure vessels in accordance with the requirements of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Section VIII under Case 1315 (Special Ruling). Alloy N is approved for use at temperatures up to 1300°F (704°C). Design data can be found here.

News and information from Switzerland about Switzerland: direct democracy, education, science, business, living in Switzerland and a lot more – current, informative, in depth and in 10 languages (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Russian).

The route to the lapis mines in the Kokcha Valley is long, tortuous, and dangerous. From Feysbad, capital of Afghanistan’s northeast province of Badakhshan, a poor road stretches southward through tiny hamlets of mud-walled huts standing on uneven ground wracked by the earthquake of 1832. After motoring as far as Hazarat-Said, the traveler must spend another full day on horseback before reaching Kokcha Valley. The small Kokcha River is the eastern tributary of the River Oxus which Marco Polo traversed and wrote: “There is a mountain in that region where the finest azure [lapis lazuli] in the world is found. It appears in veins like silver streaks.”The lapis is mined on the steep sides of a long narrow defile sometimes only 200 meters wide and backed by jagged peaks that rise above 6000 meters. Sparsely populated and covered with snow for much of the year the barren region is inhabited by wild hogs and wolves. The summer sun is scorching, but temperatures drop below freezing at night. British Army Lieutenant John Wood reached the lapis mines for the East India Company in 1837, and wrote in his Journey to the Source of the River Oxus, “If you do not wish to die, avoid the Valley of Kokcha.”

Darreh-Zu, one of the oldest mines along the Kokcha, is now closed and presumably exhausted. The nearby and relatively new Sar-e-Sang mine currently yields substantial amounts of good quality gem material and has produced rare 5-centimeter lazurite crystals. The largest found thus far, a well formed dodecahedron imbedded in calcite, was collected in 1964 by Pierre Bariand, mineral collection curator at The Sorbonne.

Lazurite gem deposits occur in white and black marbles hundreds of meters thick. The gem veins, seldom exceeding 10 meters in length, lie in snow-white calcite.