Marie Curie Invented Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wounded Soldiers in World War I

A hun­dred years ago, Mobile X‑Ray Units were a brand new inno­va­tion, and a god­send for sol­diers wound­ed on the front in WW1. Pri­or to the advent of this tech­nol­o­gy, field sur­geons rac­ing to save lives oper­at­ed blind­ly, often caus­ing even more injury as they groped for bul­lets and shrap­nel whose pre­cise loca­tions remained a mys­tery.

Marie Curie was just set­ting up shop at Paris’ Radi­um Insti­tute, a world cen­ter for the study of radioac­tiv­i­ty, when war broke out. Many of her researchers left to fight, while Curie per­son­al­ly deliv­ered France’s sole sam­ple of radi­um by train to the tem­porar­i­ly relo­cat­ed seat of gov­ern­ment in Bor­deaux.

“I am resolved to put all my strength at the ser­vice of my adopt­ed coun­try, since I can­not do any­thing for my unfor­tu­nate native coun­try just now…,” Curie, a Pole by birth, wrote to her lover, physi­cist Paul Langevin on New Year’s Day, 1915.

To that end, she envi­sioned a fleet of vehi­cles that could bring X‑ray equip­ment much clos­er to the bat­tle­field, shift­ing their coor­di­nates as nec­es­sary.

Rather than leav­ing the exe­cu­tion of this bril­liant plan to oth­ers, Curie sprang into action.

She stud­ied anato­my and learned how to oper­ate the equip­ment so she would be able to read X‑ray films like a med­ical pro­fes­sion­al.

She learned how to dri­ve and fix cars.

She used her con­nec­tions to solic­it dona­tions of vehi­cles, portable elec­tric gen­er­a­tors, and the nec­es­sary equip­ment, kick­ing in gen­er­ous­ly her­self. (When she got the French Nation­al Bank to accept her gold Nobel Prize medals on behalf of the war effort, she spent the bulk of her prize purse on war bonds.)

She was ham­pered only by back­wards-think­ing bureau­crats whose feath­ers ruf­fled at the prospect of female tech­ni­cians and dri­vers, no doubt for­get­ting that most of France’s able-bod­ied men were oth­er­wise engaged.

Curie, no stranger to sex­ism, refused to bend to their will, deliv­er­ing equip­ment to the front line and X‑raying wound­ed sol­diers, assist­ed by her 17-year-old daugh­ter, Irène, who like her moth­er, took care to keep her emo­tions in check while work­ing with maimed and dis­tressed patients.

“In less than two years,” writes Aman­da Davis at The Insti­tute, “the num­ber of units had grown sub­stan­tial­ly, and the Curies had set up a train­ing pro­gram at the Radi­um Insti­tute to teach oth­er women to oper­ate the equip­ment.” Even­tu­al­ly, they recruit­ed about 150 women, train­ing them to man the Lit­tle Curies, as the mobile radi­og­ra­phy units came to be known.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioac­tive a Cen­tu­ry Lat­er

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Lau­re­ate

Marie Curie Attend­ed a Secret, Under­ground “Fly­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” When Women Were Banned from Pol­ish Uni­ver­si­ties

Marie Curie’s Ph.D. The­sis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doc­tor­al Degree in Physics

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. 

Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Design for a Perpetual Motion Machine

Is per­pet­u­al motion pos­si­ble? In the­o­ry… I have no idea…. In prac­tice, so far at least, the answer has been a per­pet­u­al no. As Nicholas Bar­ri­al writes at Mak­ery, “in order to suc­ceed,” a per­pet­u­al motion machine “should be free of fric­tion, run in a vac­u­um cham­ber and be total­ly silent” since “sound equates to ener­gy loss.” Try­ing to sat­is­fy these con­di­tions in a noisy, entrop­ic phys­i­cal world may seem like a fool’s errand, akin to turn­ing base met­als to gold. Yet the hun­dreds of sci­en­tists and engi­neers who have tried have been any­thing but fools.

The long list of con­tenders includes famed 12th-cen­tu­ry Indi­an math­e­mati­cian Bhāskara II, also-famed 17th-cen­tu­ry Irish sci­en­tist Robert Boyle, and a cer­tain Ital­ian artist and inven­tor who needs no intro­duc­tion. It will come as no sur­prise to learn that Leonar­do da Vin­ci turned his hand to solv­ing the puz­zle of per­pet­u­al motion. But it seems, in doing so, he “may have been a dirty, rot­ten hyp­ocrite,” Ross Pomery jokes at Real Clear Sci­ence. Sur­vey­ing the many failed attempts to make a machine that ran for­ev­er, he pub­licly exclaimed, “Oh, ye seek­ers after per­pet­u­al motion, how many vain chimeras have you pur­sued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”

In pri­vate, how­ev­er, as Michio Kaku writes in Physics of the Impos­si­ble, Leonar­do “made inge­nious sketch­es in his note­books of self-pro­pelling per­pet­u­al motion machines, includ­ing a cen­trifu­gal pump and a chim­ney jack used to turn a roast­ing skew­er over a fire.” He also drew up plans for a wheel that would the­o­ret­i­cal­ly run for­ev­er. (Leonar­do claimed he tried only to prove it couldn’t be done.) Inspired by a device invent­ed by a con­tem­po­rary Ital­ian poly­math named Mar­i­ano di Jacopo, known as Tac­co­la (“the jack­daw”), the artist-engi­neer refined this pre­vi­ous attempt in his own ele­gant design.

Leonar­do drew sev­er­al vari­ants of the wheel in his note­books. Despite the fact that the wheel didn’t work—and that he appar­ent­ly nev­er thought it would—the design has become, Bar­ri­al notes, “THE most pop­u­lar per­pet­u­al motion machine on DIY and 3D print­ing sites.” (One mak­er charm­ing­ly com­ments, in frus­tra­tion, “Per­pet­u­al motion doesn’t seem to work, what am I doing wrong?”) The gif at the top, from the British Library, ani­mates one of Leonardo’s many ver­sions of unbal­anced wheels. This detailed study can be found in folio 44v of the Codex Arun­del, one of sev­er­al col­lec­tions of Leonardo’s note­books that have been dig­i­tized and pre­vi­ous­ly made avail­able online.

In his book The Inno­va­tors Behind Leonar­do, Plinio Inno­cen­zi describes these devices, con­sist­ing of “12 half-moon-shaped adja­cent chan­nels which allow the free move­ment of 12 small balls as a func­tion of the wheel’s rota­tion…. At one point dur­ing the rota­tion, an imbal­ance will be cre­at­ed where­by more balls will find them­selves on one side than the oth­er,” cre­at­ing a force that con­tin­ues to pro­pel the wheel for­ward indef­i­nite­ly. “Leonar­do rep­ri­mand­ed that despite the fact that every­thing might seem to work, ‘you will find the impos­si­bil­i­ty of motion above believed.’”

Leonar­do also sketched and described a per­pet­u­al motion device using flu­id mechan­ics, invent­ing the “self-fill­ing flask” over two-hun­dred years before Robert Boyle tried to make per­pet­u­al motion with this method. This design also didn’t work. In real­i­ty, there are too many phys­i­cal forces work­ing against the dream of per­pet­u­al motion. Few of the attempts, how­ev­er, have appeared in as ele­gant a form as Leonardo’s.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renais­sance Man

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Designs the Ide­al City: See 3D Mod­els of His Rad­i­cal Design

The Inge­nious Inven­tions of Leonar­do da Vin­ci Recre­at­ed with 3D Ani­ma­tion

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (Cir­ca 1482)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The PhD Theses of Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein & Others, Explained with Illustrations

Raise your chil­dren with a love of sci­ence, and there’s a decent chance they’ll grow up want­i­ng to be like Richard Feyn­man, Marie Curie, Albert Ein­stein, or any num­ber of oth­er famous sci­en­tists from his­to­ry. Luck­i­ly for them, they won’t yet have learned that the pur­suit of such a career will almost cer­tain­ly entail grind­ing out a PhD the­sis. But it’s also lucky for you that they con­se­quent­ly won’t ask you to explain the sub­jects of their idols’ the­ses. Maybe you tell them about quan­tum elec­tro­dy­nam­ics, radi­a­tion, and even the the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, but what can you recall of “The Prin­ci­ple of Least Action in Quan­tum Mechan­ics,” “Research on Radioac­tive Sub­stances,” or “Eine neue Bes­tim­mung der Moleküldimen­sio­nen”?

Per­haps “recall” isn’t quite the word. But if you want to get a han­dle on these papers, which con­sti­tute impor­tant parts of the foun­da­tion of the research that would ulti­mate­ly make their authors famous, you could do much worse than begin­ning with the expla­na­tions of sci­ence YouTu­ber Toby Hendy. In recent years, while build­ing up an ever-larg­er audi­ence with her chan­nel Tibees, she’s occa­sion­al­ly reached into the archives and pulled out a notable sci­en­tist’s PhD the­sis.

We’ve assem­bled all of her videos in that series into the playlist above, which also includes Hendy expla­na­tions of the­ses writ­ten by fig­ures not pri­mar­i­ly known to the pub­lic for their research: Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Bri­an Cox (the physi­cist, not the Suc­ces­sion star), whose media work has inspired gen­er­a­tions of fans to go into sci­ence.

Though a young woman, Hendy has mas­tered old-school teach­ing tech­niques, such as draw­ing on a trans­paren­cy placed on an over­head pro­jec­tor, that may trig­ger Prous­t­ian mem­o­ries of sci­ence class, at least in those of us of a cer­tain age. With her calm­ness and clar­i­ty (not to men­tion her will­ing­ness to admit when she her­self strug­gles with the mate­r­i­al) she’d sure­ly have ranked among any of our favorite teach­ers, and if you intro­duce her chan­nel to your kids, she’ll prob­a­bly become one of theirs. Whether they go on to earn a sci­ence PhD is, of course, down to their own incli­na­tion and efforts. Like so many young peo­ple these days, they may ulti­mate­ly come away with a stronger desire to become a YouTu­ber — which, after all, is what Hendy quit her own PhD to do.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Marie Curie’s Ph.D. The­sis on Radioac­tiv­i­ty — Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doc­tor­al Degree in Physics

John Nash’s Super Short PhD The­sis: 26 Pages & Two Cita­tions

Queen Gui­tarist Bri­an May Is Also an Astro­physi­cist: Read His PhD The­sis Online

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fas­ci­nat­ing Look at His Report Cards

This Is What an 1869 MIT Entrance Exam Looks Like: Could You Have Passed the Test?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His Final Interview (1996)

Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) con­tin­ued doing what he did all along — pop­u­lar­iz­ing sci­ence and “enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly con­vey­ing the won­ders of the uni­verse to mil­lions of peo­ple on tele­vi­sion and in books.” When­ev­er Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son dur­ing the 70s and 80s, his goal was to con­nect with every­day Amer­i­cans — peo­ple who did­n’t sub­scribe to Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can — and increase the pub­lic’s under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of sci­ence.

At the end of his life, Sagan still cared deeply about where sci­ence stood in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion. But while los­ing a bat­tle with myelodys­pla­sia, Sagan also sensed that sci­en­tif­ic think­ing was los­ing ground in Amer­i­ca, and even more omi­nous­ly with­in the cham­bers of the Newt Gin­grich-led Con­gress.

Dur­ing his final inter­view, aired on May 27, 1996, Sagan issued a strong warn­ing, telling Char­lie Rose:

We’ve arranged a soci­ety on sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in which nobody under­stands any­thing about sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, and this com­bustible mix­ture of igno­rance and pow­er soon­er or lat­er is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is run­ning the sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in a democ­ra­cy if the peo­ple don’t know any­thing about it.

And he also went on to add:

And the sec­ond rea­son that I’m wor­ried about this is that sci­ence is more than a body of knowl­edge. It’s a way of think­ing. A way of skep­ti­cal­ly inter­ro­gat­ing the uni­verse with a fine under­stand­ing of human fal­li­bil­i­ty. If we are not able to ask skep­ti­cal ques­tions, to inter­ro­gate those who tell us that some­thing is true, to be skep­ti­cal of those in author­i­ty, then we’re up for grabs for the next char­la­tan polit­i­cal or reli­gious who comes ambling along.

Near­ly 30 years lat­er, we have reached that point. Under the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion, DOGE has rushed to dis­man­tle the sci­en­tif­ic infra­struc­ture of our gov­ern­ment, hap­haz­ard­ly cut­ting the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, and NASA. Next, they’re going after our lead­ing research uni­ver­si­ties, inten­tion­al­ly weak­en­ing the research engine that has fueled the growth of Amer­i­can corporations—and the over­all Amer­i­can economy—since World War II. And they’re replac­ing sci­en­tif­ic lead­ers with char­la­tans like RFK Jr. who dab­ble in the very pseu­do­science that Sagan warned us about. Need­less to say, our com­peti­tors aren’t mak­ing the same mis­takes. Few seri­ous gov­ern­ments are stu­pid enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Steps a Pres­i­dent Would Take to Destroy His Nation, Accord­ing to Elon Musk’s AI Chat­bot, Grok

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

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A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets

The Aus­tri­an mil­i­tary engi­neer Con­rad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, con­sid­er­ing that he was work­ing on rock­ets aimed for out­er space back in the mid-six­teenth cen­tu­ry. Need­less to say, he nev­er actu­al­ly man­aged to launch any­thing into the upper atmos­phere. But you have to give him cred­it for get­ting as far as he did with the idea, a con­sid­er­able progress doc­u­ment­ed in his trea­tise “How You Must Make Quite a Nice Rock­et That Can Trav­el Itself into the Heights,” which no doubt sounds bet­ter in the orig­i­nal Ger­man. As Kaushik Pato­wary notes at Amus­ing Plan­et, its 450 pages are “filled with draw­ings and tech­ni­cal data on artillery, bal­lis­tics and detailed descrip­tions of mul­ti­stage rock­ets.”

“Born in 1509 in Dorn­bach, now part of Vien­na, to a Ger­man fam­i­ly from Bavaria,” Haas moved to Tran­syl­va­nia, then part of the Aus­tri­an Empire, ear­ly in his adult­hood. “In 1551, Haas was invit­ed by Stephen Bátho­ry, the grand prince of Tran­syl­va­nia, to Her­mannstadt (now Sibiu, Roma­nia), where he became the com­man­der of the artillery bar­racks and a weapons engi­neer.”

It was in this pro­fes­sion­al capac­i­ty that he began his research into rock­etry, which led him to dis­cov­er the con­cept of “a cylin­dri­cal thrust cham­ber filled with a pow­der pro­pel­lant, with a con­i­cal hole to pro­gres­sive­ly increase the com­bus­tion area and con­se­quent­ly the thrust,” a clear intel­lec­tu­al ances­tor of the mul­ti-stage design “still used in mod­ern rock­ets.”

Haas’ is the ear­li­est sci­en­tif­ic work on rock­ets known to have been under­tak­en in Europe. And until fair­ly recent­ly, it had been for­got­ten: only in 1961 was his man­u­script found in Sibi­u’s pub­lic archives, which moti­vat­ed Roma­nia to claim Haas as the first rock­et sci­en­tist. Though anachro­nis­tic, that des­ig­na­tion does under­score the far-sight­ed­ness of Haas’ world­view. So do the per­son­al words he includ­ed in his chap­ter about the mil­i­tary use of rock­ets. “My advice is for more peace and no war, leav­ing the rifles calm­ly in stor­age, so the bul­let is not fired, the gun­pow­der is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his mon­ey, the arse­nal mas­ter his life,” he wrote. But giv­en what he must have learned while liv­ing in polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble Euro­pean bor­der­lands, he sure­ly under­stood, on some lev­el, that it would be eas­i­er to get to the moon.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 16th-Cen­tu­ry Astron­o­my Book Fea­tured “Ana­log Com­put­ers” to Cal­cu­late the Shape of the Moon, the Posi­tion of the Sun, and More

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

Meet the Mys­te­ri­ous Genius Who Patent­ed the UFO

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

What the World Will Look Like in 250 Million Years: Mapping the Distant Future

Most of us now accept the idea that all of Earth­’s con­ti­nents were once part of a sin­gle, enor­mous land mass. That was­n’t the case in the ear­ly nine­teen-tens, when the geol­o­gist Alfred Wegen­er (1880–1930) first pub­li­cized his the­o­ry of not just the super­con­ti­nent Pangea, but also of the phe­nom­e­non of con­ti­nen­tal drift that caused it to break apart into the series of shapes we all know from class­room world maps. But as humor­ous­ly explained in the Map Men video above, Wegen­er did­n’t live to see these ideas con­vince the world. Only after his death did oth­er sci­en­tists fig­ure out just how the geo­log­i­cal churn­ing under the plan­et’s sur­face caused the con­ti­nents to drift apart in the first place.

With that infor­ma­tion in place, Pangea no longer seemed like the crack­pot notion it had when Wegen­er ini­tial­ly pro­posed it. Less wide­ly appre­ci­at­ed, even today, is the deter­mi­na­tion that, as the Map Men put it, “Pangea, far from being the orig­i­nal super­con­ti­nent, was actu­al­ly the eleventh to have formed in Earth­’s his­to­ry.”

It seems that the con­ti­nents have been cycli­cal­ly break­ing apart and com­ing togeth­er again, with no sign of the process stop­ping. When, then, will we next find our­selves back on a super­con­ti­nent? Per­haps in 250 mil­lion years or so, accord­ing to the “Novopangea” mod­el explained in the video, which has the Pacif­ic ocean clos­ing up as Aus­tralia slots into East Asia and North Amer­i­ca while Antarc­ti­ca drifts north.


Oth­er mod­els also exist, includ­ing Auri­ca, “where Eura­sia splits in half, and both the Pacif­ic and Atlantic oceans close up”; Pangea Ulti­ma, “where Britain gets clos­er to Amer­i­ca”; and Ama­sia, “where all the con­ti­nents con­gre­gate around the North Pole, except Antarc­ti­ca” (whose drift pat­terns make it seem like “the lazi­est con­ti­nent”). At this kind of time scale, small changes in the basic assump­tions can result in very dif­fer­ent-look­ing super­con­ti­nents indeed, not that any of us will be around to see how the next Pangea real­ly takes shape. Nev­er­the­less, in this age when we can hard­ly go a week with­out encoun­ter­ing pre­dic­tions of human­i­ty’s immi­nent extinc­tion, it’s refresh­ing to find a sub­ject that lets us even con­sid­er look­ing a quar­ter-bil­lion years down the road.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Bil­lion Years of Tec­ton­ic-Plate Move­ment in 40 Sec­onds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years in the Future

Map Show­ing Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Pangea to the Present to the Future: Watch Ani­ma­tions Show­ing 500 Mil­lion Years of Con­ti­nen­tal Drift

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

This Is What a Nuclear Strike Would Feel Like: A Precise Simulation

Though cer­tain gen­er­a­tions may have grown up trained to take cov­er under their class­room desks in the case of a nuclear show­down between the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union, few of us today can believe that we’d stand much chance if we found our­selves any­where near a det­o­nat­ed mis­sile. Still, the prob­a­ble effects of a nuclear blast do bear repeat­ing, which the New York Times video above does not just con­vey ver­bal­ly but also visu­al­ly, deriv­ing its infor­ma­tion “from inter­views of mil­i­tary offi­cials and com­put­er sci­en­tists who say we’re speed­ing toward the next nuclear arms race.”

The last nuclear arms race may have been bad enough, but the rel­e­vant tech­nolo­gies have great­ly advanced since the Cold War — which, with the last major arms treaty between the U.S. and Rus­sia set to expire with­in a year, looks set to re-open. Don’t both­er wor­ry­ing about a whole arse­nal: just one mis­sile is enough to do much more dam­age than you’re prob­a­bly imag­in­ing. That’s the sce­nario envi­sioned in the video: “trav­el­ing at blis­ter­ing speeds,” the nuke det­o­nates over its tar­get city, and “every­one in range is briefly blind­ed. Then comes the roar of 9,000 tons of TNT,” pro­duc­ing a fire­ball “hot­ter than the sur­face of the sun.” And that’s just the begin­ning of the trou­ble.

A destruc­tive “blast wave” emanates from the site of the explo­sion, “and then… dark­ness.” The air is full of “dust and glass frag­ments,” mak­ing it dif­fi­cult, even dead­ly, to breathe. What’s worse, “no help is on the way: med­ical work­ers in the imme­di­ate area are dead or injured.” For sur­vivors, there begins the “radi­a­tion sick­ness, nau­sea, vom­it­ing, and diar­rhea”; some of the dead­liest effects don’t even man­i­fest for weeks. “The imme­di­ate toll of this one war­head: thou­sands dead, expo­nen­tial­ly more wound­ed. Dam­age to the ecosys­tem will linger for years.” Indeed, the extent of the dam­age is too great to pon­der with­out resort to gal­lows humor, as evi­denced by the video’s cur­rent top com­ment: “My boss would still force me to come into the office the next day.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Would Hap­pen If a Nuclear Bomb Hit a Major City Today: A Visu­al­iza­tion of the Destruc­tion

See Every Nuclear Explo­sion in His­to­ry: 2153 Blasts from 1945–2015

Pro­tect and Sur­vive: 1970s British Instruc­tion­al Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

Every Nuclear Bomb Explo­sion in His­to­ry, Ani­mat­ed

When the Wind Blows: An Ani­mat­ed Tale of Nuclear Apoc­a­lypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

NASA Visualizes the Ocean Currents in Motion: A Mesmerizing View of Earth’s Underwater Highways

The mes­mer­iz­ing video above lets you visu­al­ize the ocean cur­rents around the world. Using data from space­craft, buoys, and oth­er mea­sure­ments, the visu­al­iza­tion shows the ocean in motion, with the cur­rents cre­at­ing Van Gogh-like swirls around the globe.

Accord­ing to NASA, “the ocean has been [his­tor­i­cal­ly] dif­fi­cult to mod­el. Sci­en­tists strug­gled in years past to sim­u­late ocean cur­rents or accu­rate­ly pre­dict fluc­tu­a­tions in tem­per­a­ture, salin­i­ty, and oth­er prop­er­ties. As a result, mod­els of ocean dynam­ics rapid­ly diverged from real­i­ty, which meant they could only pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion for brief peri­ods.” This all changed, how­ev­er, when NASA and oth­er part­ners devel­oped ECCO, short for “Esti­mat­ing the Cir­cu­la­tion and Cli­mate of the Ocean.” “By apply­ing the laws of physics to data from mul­ti­ple satel­lites and thou­sands of float­ing sen­sors, NASA sci­en­tists and their col­lab­o­ra­tors built ECCO to be a real­is­tic, detailed, and con­tin­u­ous ocean mod­el that spans decades.” “The project pro­vides mod­els that are the best pos­si­ble recon­struc­tion of the past 30 years of the glob­al ocean. It allows us to under­stand the ocean’s phys­i­cal process­es at scales that are not nor­mal­ly observ­able.” Watch above as years of ocean data come to life in a crisp, com­pelling visu­al­iza­tion.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent 

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

What the Earth Would Look Like If We Drained the Water from the Oceans

A Fas­ci­nat­ing 3D Ani­ma­tion Shows the Depths of the Ocean

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