The fish pepper (named for its common use in seafood dishes) is popular today, but it nearly disappeared altogether: that it still exists is thanks to William Woys Weaver, a Maryland author and ethnographer. In 1995, Weaver discovered a jar of seeds in the bottom of a freezer that belonged to his grandfather, H Ralph Weaver. Back in the 1940s, African American folk artist Horace Pippin gifted the fish pepper seeds to H Ralph Weaver after getting treated by him for arthritis using honeybee stings from a hive belonging to the family.

Decades later, when William found the jar of seeds, he handed them over to the Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit that catalogues and preserves heirloom varieties. The Exchange regenerated the seeds and began cultivating them before offering them to the public. They first sold in Maryland and the surrounding Mid-Atlantic region before becoming popular elsewhere.

Currently, all the master copies of the episodes from the original run are being held by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They were donated by Tad Low, the creator of the show. Although master copies are known to exist, they are not publicly available due to licensing. [...] With the sheer number of episodes produced, the fact that both runs of the show are no longer rerun on VH1 or MTV Classic, and the fact that the show did not receive many home media releases (apart from a 1999 80's-themed VHS / DVD) due to licensing issues, episodes of the show are very hard to come by. The only way that episodes can be found is through home recordings of the show from when it aired.

During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee. This policy by the fast food chain is the reason the jury awarded $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages in the McDonald's hot coffee case. Punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for their inappropriate business practice.

Williams was one of three operators of the parts retrieval system, a five-story robot built by the Unit Handling Systems division of Litton Industries. The robot was designed to retrieve castings from high density storage shelves at the Flat Rock plant. Part of the machine included one-ton transfer vehicles, which were carts on rubber wheels equipped with mechanical arms to move castings to and from the shelves. When the robot gave erroneous inventory readings, Williams was asked to climb into the racks to retrieve parts manually. Another news account states the robot was not retrieving parts quickly enough.

He climbed into the third level of the storage rack, where he was struck from behind and crushed by one of the one-ton transfer vehicles, killing him instantly. His body remained in the shelf for 30 minutes until it was discovered by workers who were concerned about his disappearance.

His family sued the manufacturers of the robot, Litton Industries, alleging "that Litton was negligent in designing, manufacturing and supplying the storage system and in failing to warn [system operators] of foreseeable dangers in working within the storage area." In a 1983 jury decision, the court awarded his estate $10 million and concluded that there simply were not enough safety measures in place to prevent such an accident from happening. He would go down in history as the first recorded human death by robot. The award was raised to $15 million in January 1984. Litton settled with the estate of Williams for an undisclosed amount in exchange for Litton not admitting negligence.

"It was a certain weather pattern that spared Fujita from that bombing, allowing him to pursue his atmospheric discoveries.

Fujita was living in Kokura, Japan during World War II, which was the primary target for the "Fat Man" atomic bomb. But on the morning of August 9, 1945, the city was obscured by clouds and smoke, so the bomb was dropped on the secondary target, Nagasaki."

Wikipedia: "Although he is best known for creating the Fujita scale of tornado intensity and damage, he also discovered downbursts and microbursts and was an instrumental figure in advancing modern understanding of many severe weather phenomena and how they affect people and communities, especially through his work exploring the relationship between wind speed and damage."

For critics of widening projects, the prime example of induced demand is the Katy Freeway in Houston, one of the widest highways in the world with 26 lanes.

Immediately after Katy’s last expansion, in 2008, the project was hailed as a success. But within five years, peak hour travel times on the freeway were longer than before the expansion.

Matt Turner, an economics professor at Brown University and co-author of the 2009 study on congestion, said adding lanes is a fine solution if the goal is to get more cars on the road. But most highway expansion projects, including those in progress in Texas, cite reducing traffic as a primary goal.

“If you keep adding lanes because you want to reduce traffic congestion, you have to be really determined not to learn from history,” Dr. Turner said.

A keystone species is an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem. Without its keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether.

Keystone species have low functional redundancy. This means that if the species were to disappear from the ecosystem, no other species would be able to fill its ecological niche. The ecosystem would be forced to radically change, allowing new and possibly invasive species to populate the habitat.

Any organism, from plants to fungi, may be a keystone species; they are not always the largest or most abundant species in an ecosystem. However, almost all examples of keystone species are animals that have a huge influence on food webs. The way these animals influence food webs varies from habitat to habitat.

In news media and scientific accounts and on some government websites, kudzu is typically said to cover seven million to nine million acres across the United States. But scientists reassessing kudzu’s spread have found that it’s nothing like that. In the latest careful sampling, the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland, an area about the size of a small county and about one-sixth the size of Atlanta. That’s about one-tenth of 1 percent of the South’s 200 million acres of forest. By way of comparison, the same report estimates that Asian privet had invaded some 3.2 million acres—14 times kudzu’s territory. Invasive roses had covered more than three times as much forestland as kudzu.

The initial rate in 1866 for messages sent along the transatlantic cable was ten dollars a word, with a ten word minimum, meaning that a skilled workman of the day would have to set aside ten weeks' salary in order to send a single message. As a practical matter, this limited cable use to governments (transmissions from the British and American governments had priority under the terms of their agreements with Field's telegraph companies) and big businesses (who made up about 90 percent of telegraph traffic in the early years).

Businesses quickly turned to the use of commercial codes through which one word could convey an entire message. For example, the word "festival" as telegraphed by one fireworks manufacturer meant "a case of three mammoth torpedoes." And for truly urgent information, price was considered no object: New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley spent $5,000 (over $65,000 in 2003 dollars) in 1870 to transmit one report about the Franco-Prussian War. During three months in 1867, the transatlantic cable sent 2,772 commercial messages, for a revenue that averaged $2,500 a day. But this represented just five percent of capacity, so the rate for sending a telegram was halved to $46.80 for ten words, a move which boosted daily revenue to $2,800.

At the turn of the 20th century, humidity threatened the reputation of Brooklyn’s Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographic and Publishing Company’s high-quality color printing. After two summers of extreme heat disrupted business and caused swelling pages and blurry prints, the printing company found that a nascent cooling industry could offer help.

Willis Carrier, a 25-year-old experimental engineer, created a primitive cooling system to reduce humidity around the printer. He used an industrial fan to blow air over steam coils filled with cold water; the excess humidity would then condense on the coils and produce cooled air.

David Misell, an English inventor, invented the first flashlight and patented it in 1899. It used three D batteries in a tube that was used as the handle of the device. The batteries supplied enough power to create light through an incandescent bulb.

The name “flash” light was a knock on the reliability of the model. These units could not be left on for long because of the zinc-carbon batteries that couldn’t hold an electrical current for long periods of time, thus creating only a “flash” of light.

These early flashlights were nothing more than a novelty at the time. The batteries were inefficient, and the bulbs were dull. Improvements of the batteries and bulbs by Eveready and others started to increase the popularity of flashlights by the second decade of the 1900s.

For the past few years Spotify's Discover Weekly has been the main way I discover new (to me) music. Secondarily I guess just from browsing the related artists of the ones I already listen to. Looking for other strategies inside or outside of spotify.