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New incredible 3D imaging confirms a heartbreaking story from the Titanic's final moments

Eyewitness accounts from survivors have been confirmed.

via NOAA/Institute for Exploration/University of Rhode Island (NOAA/IFE/URI)/Wikimedia Commons

The bow of the Titanic in 2004.

As technology improves, we learn more about the fate of the RMS Titanic, which sank into the freezing waters of the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage in 1912. In 1985, the sunken vessel was discovered 12,500 feet below the surface due to a remote-controlled deep-sea camera system called Argo, which could explore depths never thought possible.

In 2022, Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, gave the world incredible new insights into the Titanic’s final voyage by taking over 700,000 images from every angle of the ship, providing an exact 3D reconstruction. The new images, known as the ship's “digital twin,” are an incredible way to preserve the Titanic for future generations as it slowly decays at the bottom of the ocean. It’s believed that the iron in the ship's bow will eventually dissolve between 280 to 420 years.

"It allows you to see the wreck as you can never see it from a submersible, and you can see the wreck in its entirety, you can see it in context and perspective. And what it's showing you now is the true state of the wreck,” Parks Stephenson, who has studied the Titanic for many years, told the BBC.

Investigators working with Magellan and Atlantic Productions, which recently made the documentary Titanic: The Digital Resurrection (now streaming on Disney+), have found that evidence supports one of the most courageous stories about the ship’s sinking: The engineers put their lives on the line to keep the ship's power on as it slowly plunged into the water.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

The Titanic had 25 engineers working on the ship, and they all perished when it sank. Six hundred ninety-six crew members died during the disaster, and only 212 survived. Eyewitness accounts said that the engineers remained in the engine and boiler rooms to keep the power on, to allow the boat to send distress signals, and to control flooding as much as possible. This kept the lights on during the night evacuation and allowed the wireless radio system to send distress calls. According to National Geographic, their bravery helped save the lives of more than 700 people, even though it cost their own.

Analysis of the digital twin confirmed the eyewitness accounts of the engineers’ bravery by studying the ship's boilers, which were concave at the time of its sinking, meaning that they were still running when the vessel sank. Additionally, a valve on the stern of the boat was open, indicating that steam was still powering the electrical system as the ship sank.

"They kept the lights and the power working to the end, to give the crew time to launch the lifeboats safely with some light instead of in absolute darkness," Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told the BBC.

The Titanic’s story continues to unfold over a century after its demise, thanks to those dedicated to keeping its memory alive. It’s wonderful to see that all these years later, we are not only learning more about how the ship sank but also about the people who gave everything to save the lives of its passengers and fellow crewmembers. The story of the Titanic will be remembered for many reasons. Hopefully, the message that survives the longest is the bravery of those who made the ultimate sacrifice on the ship.

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History (Education)

The actual border between the U.S. and Canada is much stranger than people realize

The border may look like a simple, mostly straight line, but it's got some weird quirks.

Photo credit: Canva

The border between the U.S. and Canada has some funky anomalies.

Canada has been the United States' friendly upstairs neighbor for over 150 years, with people on both sides of the border enjoying good relations and a mutual flow of tourism and trade. But the border that separates us is a bit…odd, and not just because President Trump's confusing second-term commentary about it: "If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight, artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago. Makes no sense."

The border itself was formed before Canada officially became a country, when the 49th parallel was negotiated with Britain to become the boundary (without consulting the indigenous tribes that lived along it, which caused no shortage of confusion and displacement). But what appears to be a "straight, artificial line" is not actually straight (and no more artificial than any other manmade border). It's actually a kind of wobbly line with some dips and blips and sticky-outy-places and islands-in-dispute that the average American and Canadian remain largely unaware of.

Long before the leader of the free world began pontificating on the Canadian-U.S. border, CGP Grey created a video that shines a light on how strange it actually is.

Check this out:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com


The 5,500-mile-long border is the longest border between two countries in the world, and there's a 20-foot wide space along the border that's been deforested as basically a "no touchy" zone to delineate where it is. The border line looks straight on a map, but the actual, official border is actually 900 zig-zagging lines that twist and turn by as much as several hundred feet. The uncharted wilderness that made up most of the border when it was being established explains why the line is not perfectly straight. However, as CGP Grey points out, the hundreds of monuments marking the international border are in "about as straight a line as you could expect a pre-GPS civilization to make."

There are some strange anomalies along our border, including an island in the Northeastern U.S./Southeastern Canada that both countries believe belong to them. Machias Seal Island has a fascinating history as it's been a disputed territory since the origination of the border, with Canada and the U.S. holding different interpretations of what defines the parameters of the border. But thankfully, it's a peaceful dispute—or at least it has been so far.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Another weird anomaly on the Canadian border is the little rectangle of land that juts out from the top of Minnesota into the province of Manitoba, mostly over a lake. Oddly enough, that's a result of the erroneous way some maps that were used to plot out the border were made, which eventually led to a dilemma over how to connect the border in that area. Known as the Northwest Angle, or as locals call it, the Angle, this remote area of land and water actually marks the northernmost point in the contiguous U.S.

Another place where the 49th parallel caused an issue was with Vancouver Island, as the line cut off the southernmost tip of the island. That was easily solved by just going around it, but there is a tiny piece of U.S. land that gets cut off on the Canadian mainland, Point Roberts, which creates a bit of a strange reality for the 1,000 or so Americans who live there. Basically, residents can't drive anywhere else without crossing the border, including the kids who go to middle school and high school around the crook of Canadian land that connects the peninsula to the rest of Washington State. Not the end of the world to cross the border a few times a day as long as our countries remain on good terms.

There are several other places along the Canada-U.S. border where one country contains a little bit of the other, creating a fun little game of figuring out why certain places are the way they are. But again, as long relations between our countries stay friendly, those little quirks just constitute a fun part of our mutual history and are not a cause for conflict. Let's do our best to keep it that way.

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GE co-founder Elihu Thomson discusses growing up in the 1860's in unearthed video

90 years later people are seeing him on a device he never thought possible.

Photo credit: Canva, Wikipedia

A photo of a lightbulb and a portrait of Elihu Thomson

We can read all the history books in the world, and still, there’s something magical about hearing about a time period firsthand, from someone who actually lived in it. Especially since, depending on how far back you go, it can be incredibly rare.

Take for instance this video interview, originally filmed in 1932 (wow), which was colorized and shared to Youtube by the ‘Life in the 1800s’ Channel. It features Elihu Thomson, an English-America engineer and inventor who helped bring mainstream electricity to America.

But this video isn’t about his career, but about his childhood memories while living in Philadelphia in the 1860s.

Much of the conversation revolved around Thomson’s first electrical experiments. Apparently, the young, precious lad was “forced out of high school” when he was only 11, and teachers recommended that he use his spare two years to “keep away from the books and to develop physically.”

That, however, didn’t fly with preteen Thomson, who said “if you do that you might as well kill me now, because I’ve got to have my books.” Hey, at least he wasn’t saying that about an iPad.

Thomson essentially homeschooled himself for a couple of years, learning about chemistry and electrical experiments, and even performing a few with his father, who was also scientifically minded. Thomson even recalls at one time “getting even” with his dear old dad by giving him a shock with a handmade leyden jar, or as he called them, "lightening jars.”

history videos, cool history, victorian era, colorized video, vintage videoDiscovery of the Leyden jar in van Musschenbroek's labPhoto credit: Canva

Overall it’s a brief interview, but people found it remarkable nonetheless. It seemed to feel particularly meta how someone clearly passionate about science would be even more floored to see today's technology.

“Imagine sitting there, talking about your life, never knowing that in 90 years a bunch of people will be listening to you from a device you would never believe could ever be possible.”

“This guy witnessed the invention of telegraph, telephone, trains, steamboats, planes, tanks, automatic weapons, automobiles, radio, cinema and probably heard some news about a television device before dying. Amazing.”

People were also amazed by how many groundbreaking firs’ts Thomson must have seen, which are just common, everyday occurrences now.

“This man lived through the civil war, saw the first lightbulb, a telephone call, the radio and then silent and talking films, horses being replaced by cars. Everything we take for granted today. He saw them first. Amazing.”

One person even noted, “It's amazing how much of a difference it makes having this old black and white footage colourised. It just makes it that much more real, and gives a feeling that this wasn't so long ago.”

Lastly, someone argued that Thomson was a prime example of why “fostering your child's creativity and knowledge is so important.” After all, Thomson would develop around 700 patents, and later help found the General Electric company, thanks in no small part support he received from his dad helped him discover his talents as an engineer. Guess that doesn’t change no matter what time period you’re born into.

Watch below:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

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History (Education)

The U.S. Air Force concocted a serious plan to nuke the moon in the 50s as a show of power

A young Carl Sagan was one of the scientists on the team that planned it.

Photo credit: Canva

The moon nearly had a man-made crater on it.

Over the past 70 years, scientists have created detailed maps of the entire surface of the moon in minute detail, right down to every crater and rock formation. But those maps almost looked a lot different, considering the fact that the United States wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon a decade before we sent the first humans there.

That's right, Project A119 (which might as well have been called Project Nuke the Moon) was a real U.S. Air Force project to send an atomic bomb to the moon and detonate it in a spot where the explosion would be seen from Earth. Why? Because we could, and because we wanted the Kremlin to see that we could, in a nutshell.

That team of scientists working on the project included a young graduate student named Carl Sagan. Yes, that Carl Sagan, who became one of the most famous and beloved cosmologists and science communicators of all time. If you're wondering whether he thought nuking the moon was a whackadoodle idea or not, apparently he was at least somewhat on board with it. He thought it might reveal information about possible microbes or organic compounds on the moon.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Let's step back for a minute here. This was the 1950s, a time when much of our scientific advancements and nearly all of our space research was inextricably linked to the Cold War. Support for science was largely dictated by political and military aims, which left scientists to mold their own goals and aims around the projects the government wanted to explore.

If the military wanted to create an explosion on the moon big enough for the Kremlin to see it and feel intimidated, scientists would make the most of the opportunity to learn what they could from it. Some of the team were interested in what the detonation would reveal about the chemical makeup of the moon. Others were interested in studying the seismic effect of the blast on the moon's subsurface structure.

The top-secret project, known by the benign title "A Study of Lunar Research Flights," was launched in 1958 and led by physicist Leonard Reiffel, who would eventually become deputy director of NASA's Apollo Program. To his credit, he did try to explain to the government why nuking the moon might not be such a great idea, scientifically speaking.

"I made it clear at the time there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment," Reiffel told The Observer. "But the US Air Force were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on Earth."

The plan was to detonate a bomb on the Terminator Line, the border between the light and dark side of the moon, which would be the location most visible from Earth. And as asinine as it might sound to us now, the goal of this enormous undertaking really was just to flex our muscles—to show Russia that we could best them in both the space and the arms race.

"It is a pretty interesting window into the sort of American mindset at that time," Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology, told the BBC. "This push to compete in a way that creates something very impressive. I think, in this case, impressive and horrifying are a bit too close to each other."

Reiffel himself told The Observer in 2000, ‘It was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on Earth."

Would it have even worked, though? According to Reiffel, they could have gotten the bomb within two miles of where they wanted it and could have detonated it, creating a big enough flash bang to see from here. However, there wouldn't have been a mushroom cloud, since there's very little atmosphere on the moon. Without the resistance of a dense atmosphere, the dust and debris from the explosion would just keep expanding outward; it wouldn't curl back inward into any kind of formation like it would on Earth.

Ultimately, nuking the moon didn't happen, though the reasons the project was scrapped are classified and have never been revealed. Thankfully, we went ahead with sending humans to the moon instead of our most notorious weaponry. Can you imagine how much bombing the moon would have changed our approach to space exploration?

astronaut, moon, NASA

As British nuclear historian David Lowry said according to The Guardian, "It is obscene. To think that the first contact human beings would have had with another world would have been to explode a nuclear bomb. Had they gone ahead, we would never have had the romantic image of Neil Armstrong taking 'one giant step for mankind.'"

It was "one giant leap for mankind," actually, but who's counting? Let's all just be grateful we got that giant leap instead of a big ol' nuclear crater that would forever change the way we see the moon, literally and figuratively.

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