Mees

After Anthony Crawford was lynched in Abbeville in 1916, Black residents stopped shopping at white stores and started leaving town, and the merchants who'd lost customers and workers began opposing his family's expulsion. I wrote about what that pressure did and didn't change theroloway.org/posts/abbevil…

Dallol, in Ethiopia's Danakil Depression, below sea level Yellowstone's pools get their colors from microbes. These come from iron oxidizing in brines hotter than 108 °C with a pH below zero, and the palette shifts within days as springs die and new ones open [📷 A.Savin]

No wild hummingbirds live outside the Americas. The one hovering at flowers in a European garden is a moth Macroglossum stellatarum feeds midair through a 25 to 28 mm proboscis, humming as it goes. The two are unrelated, a case of convergent evolution [📹 Flexmaen]

4 to 5.5 million years. That's how long the biggest Moeraki Boulders took to grow They're concretions, formed as calcite cemented Paleocene seafloor mud into spheres up to 2.2 m across. Coastal erosion later freed them onto this New Zealand beach [📷 Beast from the Bush]

That boat on the horizon keeps changing shape A Fata Morgana. Warm air over cold air bends light like a lens, stacking upright and upside-down copies of the boat. It's named after Morgan le Fay, blamed for the castles seen over the Strait of Messina [📹 Brocken Inaglory]

The carriage at Compiègne where the armistice was signed, 11 November 1918 Signed around 5 a.m., it took effect at 11, so fighting went on. A minute before 11, US private Henry Gunther charged a German machine gun. The gunners waved him off, then fired [📷 Wikimedia Commons]

Meet the rainbow eucalyptus. Its bark peels away in strips and leaves streaks of pale green, red, orange, grey and purplish brown. The species name, deglupta, is Latin for "peeled off." It's the only eucalyptus that usually grows in rainforest [📷 Forest and Kim Starr]

This is a basilisk lizard running on water. Each foot slaps down and strokes back to open an air pocket, then lifts out before the water closes in. A 2012 study found people could run in place on water too, in Moon gravity with small fins [📹 Tonia Hsieh, Lauder Lab]

A New Zealand glowworm and its fishing lines The light comes from the larva of a fungus gnat, not a worm. It hangs up to 30 silk threads beaded with sticky droplets. Midges fly to the blue-green glow, get stuck, and the larva hauls the line up and eats them [📷 Markrosenrosen]

A Venus flytrap snapping shut One touch of a trigger hair isn't enough. A second has to land within about 20 seconds, so raindrops don't set it off. Once closed it keeps counting, and digestion starts only after five touches in total [📹 Scott Schiller]

On 10 November 1975 the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a Lake Superior storm with all 29 men aboard. Just after 7 p.m. Captain McSorley radioed "We are holding our own." No distress call followed, and ten minutes later she was gone from radar. [📷 Greenmars]

Morning Glory clouds seen from a plane near Burketown, Australia Each roll rides on a solitary atmospheric wave and can stretch up to 1,000 km. From late September to early November, glider pilots gather in town to surf them. [📷 Mick Petroff]

In 1950 peat cutters in Denmark found this face and called the police, thinking it was a recent murder He had been hanged about 2,400 years ago. The acidic bog kept his skin, stubble and eyelashes, and even his last meal of barley porridge and fish [📷 Sven Rosborn]

The Devil's portrait in the Codex Gigas, from early 1200s Bohemia Legend says a monk wrote this 74.8 kg book in one night with the Devil's help. The handwriting barely changes from start to finish, but scholars estimate it took over 20 years [📷 World Digital Library]

This is an axolotl egg turning into a larva, in time-lapse Axolotls skip metamorphosis and keep their larval gills for life. Most axolotls in labs and homes today trace back to 34 shipped from Xochimilco to Paris in 1863 [📹 Micro.Cosmonauta]

East Berliners at Bornholmer Straße on 10 November 1989 The night before, Günter Schabowski was asked on live TV when the new travel rules began. He paused and said "immediately, without delay." Within hours the crowd here made the guards open the gate [📷 Bundesarchiv]

On 20 February 1943 Parícutin began rising in Dionisio Pulido's cornfield in Michoacán It erupted for nine years and buried two towns. The church towers of San Juan Parangaricutiro still stand in the lava [📷 Diegoromch]

A tardigrade waking up after drying out In dry moss it pulls in its legs and shrivels into a "tun" with no metabolic activity, and it can stay that way for years. Goeze called them little water bears in 1773. Tardigrada means slow walkers [📹 Micro.Cosmonauta]

An archerfish in an 1890s engraving, shooting an insect off a leaf Real ones hit prey up to 3 meters above the water. They correct for refraction, and the jet's tail moves faster than its front, so it bunches into a blob just before impact [📷 Popular Science Monthly]

Slow-motion calving at Eqi glacier in western Greenland The ice front is about 3.2 km wide and up to 170 meters above the water. A Swiss expedition measured its flow in 1912, and it has pulled back about 4 km since 1920 [📹 Giles Laurent]