Many people believe high-tech problems require high-tech solutions. It’s not quite so. Complex technologies sometimes require simple, low-tech solutions that may cost next to nothing.

Cheap here doesn’t mean inferior since these solutions are often better than the more expensive, high-tech solutions. This list is evidence that the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle is sometimes the best way to go. As the principle states, most things work best when they are kept simple.

10 Ways Technology Is Changing You For The Worse

10 Ostrich feathers and carmakers

Carmakers put a lot of effort into ensuring your new vehicle rolls out of their factories with a spotless paintjob. That’s why they heavily invest in state of the art equipment like high-tech painting stations, industrial robots and ostrich feathers. Did we just say ostrich feathers? Yes, female ostrich feathers actually.

The smallest dust particle can destroy the best paintjob and no one knows that better than carmakers. This is why they demarcate their painting departments from the main factory. They even blast workers and visitors to the painting departments with air to remove dust and loose fiber that may be hanging on their clothes.

However, that isn’t enough since minute dust particles still find their way in and stick on vehicles awaiting painting. Carmakers get rid of these particles by running the vehicles through giant dusters made out of female ostrich feathers right before painting.^[1]

9 Mirrors and elevators

Early elevators did not have mirrors. Manufacturers only added mirrors because they did not want to invest their time, effort and money into making faster elevators.

It all began several decades ago, at a time when elevators were still a new invention. Users often complained the elevators were too slow. Most elevator manufacturers returned to the drawing board to design faster elevators, which was expensive. However, one company decided to do things a bit differently.

It conducted a research and discovered most users thought elevators were slower than they really were. People only complained because they had nothing to do other than stare at the walls of the elevators while thinking about the many bad things that could happen if the cables snapped and the elevator fell to the ground.

The elevator company concluded they needed a way to distract people. They added mirrors so people could think about their appearance while in elevators. Users instantly lost track of time and now thought elevators were faster than they were.^[2]

8 Angled runways and aircraft carriers

If you’ve seen an overhead photo of a modern aircraft carrier or even seen one up-close, you will notice the runway is always angled and never straight. This contrasts with the World War II era aircraft carriers that had straight runways. Why is this so?

This has everything to do with the invention of the jet engine. World War II era carriers carried propeller-driven airplanes, which required shorter runways to take-off and land. This meant the carriers could launch and recover airplanes simultaneously. However, this changed when jet powered airplanes came along.

Jet engines require longer runways for take-off or landing. This meant the carriers were either launching or recovering airplanes and couldn’t do both at the same time. On top of that, landing jets that missed the arresting wire (which helps in rapidly decelerating a landing airplane) would not have enough runway space to taxi and take-off to attempt another landing.

One solution to these problems was to build larger aircraft carriers with longer runways. This suggestion was cast aside because it did not solve all the aforementioned problems. A second suggestion was to leave landing airplanes hovering above the carrier while other airplanes took off. However, this too was abandoned because jets do not carry enough fuel.

The third option was to tilt the runways on existing carriers to maximize runway space. The angled runways were longer and solved every issue the navy had with shorter airways.^[3]

7 Playstation 3 consoles and supercomputers

A few years ago, the US Air Force used 1,760 Sony Playstation 3 consoles to build the most powerful supercomputer in the US Department of Defense and the 33rd most powerful supercomputer in the world.

The supercomputer was so powerful that it could perform 500 million mathematical operations in one second and analyze over a billion pixels in one minute. The Air Force used it to process high-resolution satellite images, identify unclear objects in space and research into artificial intelligence.

A Playstation 3 cost $400 apiece at the time the air force built the supercomputer while a similar part from a “real computer” cost around $10,000. This put the cost of the entire project at $2 million, which is between 5-10% the price of a regular supercomputer of similar capability.^[4]

6 Xbox 360 controllers and nuclear submarines

A periscope is one of the defining features of a submarine. It’s that tube-like instrument submariners use to see above water while submerged. Periscopes have seen an upgrade of late and have evolved from the traditional tube-like pole with 45-degree mirrors into high-resolution cameras that can see 360 degrees above the submarine.

The US Navy uses these modern periscopes in its latest Virginia-class nuclear powered submarines. However, this high-tech equipment has the most low-tech controls ever, the Xbox 360 controller.

The use of Xbox controllers in US Navy submarines is a recent development. Until a few years ago, the navy controlled its digital periscopes with $38,000 joysticks. It only swapped them for Xbox controllers after junior officers complained the joysticks were huge, heavy and required extensive training.

Xbox 360 controllers on the other hand, cost around $39.95 apiece. They’re light, easy to use and do not require extensive training. They’re also easy to replace since they can be purchased from the nearest game store.^[5]

10 Dangerous Misconceptions About Nuclear Technology

5 VELCRO and NASA

The absence of gravity is one of the most obvious problems NASA encountered in the early days of space travel. As we all know, gravity is the reason everything stays on the ground. In a weightless environment like space, anything that isn’t secured to the ground or walls will just keep floating around.

NASA needed a way to keep tools and equipment from floating around without necessarily bolting them to the ground or wall. So it turned to VELCRO, the inventor of hook-and-loop fasteners and both worked together to perfect a hook-and-loop fastener that will not only keep stuff from floating around but will also survive the extreme environment of space.

NASA uses lots of VELCRO in its projects. It even added them to spacesuit helmets so that astronauts can scratch their noses while spacewalking. Little wonder many people erroneously think NASA invented hook-and-loop fasteners. NASA did not invent hook-and-loop fasteners but as it said about VELCRO in 1969, “We couldn’t fly without it”.^[6]

4 Rats and landmines

Landmines are a huge problem in former warzones. Considering they only explode when someone or something steps on them, they can remain active for decades, even long after the war is over. Every year, thousands of people lose their lives after stepping on forgotten landmines.

Finding and deactivating these landmines is a very difficult and dangerous job, even with bomb detection equipment. Some organizations replace the bomb detection equipment with bomb detection dogs but these dogs are often expensive to transport and complicated to use.

In 1997, an anti-landmine NGO called APOPO stepped in with a cheaper and better solution, rats. These aren’t your regular subway rats but the African giant pouched rat, which are as large as cats. The rats have terrible eyesight but excellent sense of smell, which they use to detect the TNT in the landmines.

African giant pouched rats are faster and better than humans and dogs. A rat will cover 2,000 square feet in just 20 minutes. A human equipped with bomb detectors will cover the same distance in four days. The rats are also light enough to walk over landmines without triggering them. APOPO’s rats have detected over 13,200 landmines in several countries so far.^[7]

3 A $10 domain name and WannaCry

A few years ago, the world experienced one of the worst ransomware attacks ever seen. WannaCry as it was called, infected over 300,000 computers in 150 countries. The virus locked owners out of their computers and instructed them to pay hundreds of dollars in Bitcoin as ransom.

WannaCry continued ravaging the world until a man identified as Malwaretech bought a domain name. Domain names are not expensive. They cost around $10 on average. However, that simple action was enough to render WannaCry docile. It instantly stopped spreading and removed itself from every computer it had infected. How did this happen?

This happened because Malwaretech exploited the same thing that made WannaCry successful. Unlike regular viruses, ransomwares always maintain a communication channel that links the attacker to the victim. While this may sound dumb, the attacker actually needs this channel to send payment information to their victims, collect ransoms and unlock their computers after payment.

However, this communication channel works both ways because law enforcement agencies could use it to track the attackers. Attackers counter this by building kill switches into their virus. This allows them to shut down their viruses the moment they suspect they’re being tracked.

For WannaCry, that kill switch was a domain name. The attackers programmed the virus to check the internet for an unregistered domain name at intervals. The virus would continue spreading if the domain remained unregistered but will instantly stop the moment it was registered. Malwaretech found that kill switch and registered the domain name, stopping the virus.^[8]

2 Speed tape and airplanes

We all know airplanes require regular maintenance since pilots cannot park on the nearest cloud whenever they run into issues. However, maintenance is a big word here since it could refer to something as basic as holding the airplane together with speed tape.

Think of speed tape as the duct tape for airplanes. Like duct tape, they can fix everything even though aviation authorities limit them to holding noncritical parts of the airplane together. They’re considered a temporary solution and the fault will be usually sorted out the next time the airplane goes into maintenance.

Speed tape costs a few hundreds to thousands of dollars. While that may seem expensive, it is cheaper when compared to the thousands or even millions of dollars airlines will lose if airplanes were taken out of service every time they have issues.^[9]

1 iPhones and the US Army Special Operations Command

The US Army Special Operations Command uses many specialized mobile apps during top military operations. However, instead of developing expensive devices to handle those apps, they turned to a cheaper alternative, iPhones.

While we do not know what the majority of these apps do, we know of one that uses the split screen feature of the iPhone. The operator sees a live footage shot from a flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on one part of the screen and a map showing the route taken by the UAV on the other.

A Business Insider report revealed the army previously used Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Note smartphones before switching to the iPhone 6s. The switch was necessary because the apps often froze on Samsung, constantly requiring the operators to restart the device. On top of that, the iPhone 6s also had better screen resolution, which made photos and videos sharper.

Before this turns into another Samsung-iPhone, Android-iOS or Google-Apple war, we should add that the Department of Defense pitched the older Samsung phones it was using at the time against the newer iPhone 6s during tests.^[10]

10 Pieces Of Technology That Won’t Exist In 20 Years

Urban heat islands (UHI) are areas with significantly higher temperatures than the regions surrounding them. The retention and generation of heat in the urban core contributes to climate change and lower air quality for people living in and near the heat islands. They also have a negative effect on rainfall downwind of the UHI. UHIs are also a leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States. Cities which have insufficient cooling at night during periods of hot weather have shown increases in heat related deaths, much of which has been attributed to UHIs.

There causes are many, but fortunately solutions exist to counter their negative effects on the population and on the environment. Several of these solutions are doubly attractive as they simultaneously address other urban issues, such as quality of life and eliminating food deserts. They help make cities more attractive and livable for residents and visitors alike. Here are ten ways to mitigate the detrimental effects of UHI and create better cities for the present and for future generations.

This is an encore of one of our previous lists, as presented by our YouTube host Simon Whistler. Read the full list!

Urban heat islands (UHI) are areas with significantly higher temperatures than the regions surrounding them. The retention and generation of heat in the urban core contributes to climate change and lower air quality for people living in and near the heat islands. They also have a negative effect on rainfall downwind of the UHI. UHIs are also a leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States. Cities which have insufficient cooling at night during periods of hot weather have shown increases in heat related deaths, much of which has been attributed to UHIs.

There causes are many, but fortunately solutions exist to counter their negative effects on the population and on the environment. Several of these solutions are doubly attractive as they simultaneously address other urban issues, such as quality of life and eliminating food deserts. They help make cities more attractive and livable for residents and visitors alike. Here are ten ways to mitigate the detrimental effects of UHI and create better cities for the present and for future generations.

10. Creating more pocket parks

Converting disused or abandoned urban properties into small parks, called pocket parks by urban planners and architects, has proven effective in combating the heat island problem. Post World War II Athens, Greece, underwent a housing boom, during which row upon row of apartment blocks replaced detached homes with surrounding greenery. Beginning in the late 1990s, Athens undertook projects to create pocket parks from small abandoned lots and in alleyways and mews. Roads designed to accommodate automobiles have also been converted to green spaces lined with paths for pedestrians and automobiles. The expanded greenery helps cool the city, as well as improves the air quality.

Other cities have seen the value of pocket parks, including their contribution to an enhanced quality of life by offering convenient opportunities to ease out of urban stress. Chicago has dozens of such small parks, with more planned. Mexico City has built about 3.5 acres of small pocket parks scattered across the city, including in disused spaces under bridges and overpasses. Paris is known for its wide boulevards and open spaces, but it too has adopted pocket parks as part of long term urban planning.

Pocket parks alone do not present the solution to UHIs, but they can and do contribute to the reduction of the urban core’s heat retention. At the same time, they offer little oases of peace and relaxation without leaving the urban area. Their use is influencing urban planners, both for quality of life and attempts at creating less heat-retentive urban cores. Whether in a large, international city or a mid-sized town, they are an effective tool against UHIs.

9. Create heat reflecting, rather than absorbing roofs

Dark colors absorb heat, while light colors reflect it. Thus, it makes sense that dark colored roofs absorb heat in daylight and release it during the relatively cooler hours of night. The slowly released heat remains, for the most part, in a bubble over the area, the very image of the UHI. On a day when the ambient air temperature is at 90 degrees, the temperature of a dark, heat absorbing roof can exceed 190 degrees. A dense concentration of such roofs traps a lot of heat, which is a significant contribution to the increased temperature of the UHI in comparison to the rural areas which surround it.

Heat reflective roofs are an obvious solution to the heat retention problem. And, as with pocket parks, they offer other advantages as well. They can reduce internal temperatures of the building, reducing the need for air conditioning. Absorbed heat is damaging to roofs; reflected heat reduces wear on roofs and contributes to a longer service life. Cool roofs thus benefit the community as well as the owner and occupants of buildings on which they are installed.

Beginning in 2012 in New York, volunteers began painting dark roofs white, in an attempt to reduce the city’s heat retention. As of 2018 they had painted almost 7 million square feet of formerly dark tar roofs, a lot of paint and a lot of time. Even with that effort, 99% of the city’s roofs remained untreated, an indication of the severity of the problem.

8. Creating rooftop gardens and farms

Painting roofs white, or treating them with a reflective coating, isn’t the only way to achieve a cooler roof. That’s a lot of wasted space up there. Putting it to use as areas where greenery is grown reduces heat absorption, improves air quality, and offers another benefit as well. Greenery in the form of fruits and vegetables can offer locally grown fresh produce within the urban core. It is neither far-fetched nor a vision of the distant future. In a growing number of cities urban rooftop gardening and commercial farming is a reality.

In Montreal, a grocer converted his 25,000 square foot roof into a produce farm, growing tomatoes, herbs, beets, lettuce, and other vegetables. Grown in soil, and watered by the store’s dehumidification plant, the rooftop farm’s produce is packaged and sold in the store below. In Tel Aviv, Israel’s Dizengoff Center, a large shopping mall, the flat roof supports two huge greenhouses which grow vegetables hydroponically. During the growing season it produces about 10,000 heads of lettuce per month, for sale to customers outside the mall. It grows a slew of other vegetables as well, and as in Montreal, provides a cooler roof for the buildings below.

Eagle Street Rooftop Farm sits above a three-story warehouse, across the East River from Manhattan in Brooklyn. Its 6,000 square feet of growing space supplies produce for sale at its own farmer’s market, as well as to restaurants in the area. Like the facilities in Montreal and Tel Aviv, it also maintains beehives for the harvesting of fresh honey. Cooling UHIs by growing fresh food on the roofs is a simple and easily achievable means of reducing urban heat, improving the air, and giving access to locally produced fresh fruits and vegetables.

7. Lighter pavement in streets and parking lots

As anyone walking across an asphalt parking lot on a hot sunny day can attest, dark pavements absorb a lot of heat. And pavement is an essential part of any city, for vehicles and pedestrians to move about. An American Environmental Protection Agency report suggests that anywhere from 35-40% of an average city’s urban area is covered in pavement, making it a major contributor to UHIs. And cooler pavements are more difficult to achieve, since they cannot be covered with greenery. Other factors also need to be considered, such as driver and pedestrian safety, visibility, and pavement durability.

Current types of pavements can be treated with materials, such as coatings, to increase the amount of light which is reflected, rather than absorbed. Other types have been studied for suitability for future repaving of streets, roads, and parking lots. One is permeable pavement, which is coarser in density, allowing for greater convection during the daylight hours, and reduces the amount of heat which is stored in the pavement for later release. It also allows for more absorption of water, reducing storm runoff during heavy rains. Lighter colored pavements also reduce the need for candlepower in street lighting.

The use of cool pavements can reduce heat retention, leading to a reduction of the temperatures of UHIs, as well as offer better visibility to drivers at night. There are cost concerns. Replacing or modifying existing pavements in cities is a seriously complicated proposal, and implementation affects traffic patterns, commuting times, and other complications of urban life. But the potential advantages to be gained may well outweigh the costs, when overall adverse effects of UHIs are considered.

6. Create better blue spaces in urban areas

Blue spaces are water within an urban area, whether running streams, lakes and ponds, or fountains and pools. Properly designed and maintained they mitigate heat islands. Improperly designed or maintained they may make matters worse. Water cools primarily through evaporation at the surface. But it also absorbs heat, with standing water temperature rising during the course of the day as sunlight warms the surface.

Man-made blue spaces such as fountains run by pumps can actually add to the heat retention effect, since pumps create friction while operating. They also contribute to power demand, another source of heat retention. The cooling effect of blue spaces in cities is enhanced when it is combined with the use of green spaces, which in effect creates an island within an island, or a cool space surrounded by a larger UHI. More such islands reduce the overall heat retained by the UHI.

More blue spaces in urban areas have been shown to produce other benefits beyond temperature reductions. Living near blue spaces has been shown to reduce stress, improve physical exercise, and lower obesity rates, all considerable advantages. Of course, to gain the full benefit of natural blue spaces, such as rivers, centuries of effluents into the water needs to be cleaned up in all too many urban areas.

5. Plant more shade trees in the urban area

The larger the shade canopy, the less sunlight reaches the heat retaining surfaces of a city. This includes not just pavements and rooftops, but the exterior walls of brick, stone, and concrete buildings, as well as the interiors of those sided with glass. Shade trees can also protect large areas of blue spaces, and the combination of increased blue and green spaces is one of the most effective ways of reducing heat retention during daylight hours.

Urban parks and forests offer other advantages as well. Both quality of life and the quality of the air are improved by large, shaded, forested areas in cities. A 2014 study by Georgia Tech revealed Louisville, Kentucky, as one of the fastest growing UHIs in the United States. It also revealed that a major contributor to the increased heat was the lack of shade trees in many areas of the city, including the downtown area. The relationship between shade trees and heat retention is clear. More trees = cooler city.

Cities typically lose trees to a variety of causes, including pests, blight, new construction, and natural activities such as thunderstorms and winter blizzards. The Georgia Tech study found that planting more trees and increasing the shade canopy is the single most effective method of reducing heat buildup and the resulting UHIs. Simply put, trees and shade offer natural protection from the potentially damaging rays of the sun and the heat they produce.

4. Vertical gardens improve air quality and lessen heat retention

Vertical gardens are becoming more and more popular in cities around the world, both for their esthetic value and for their cost-effective impact on heat retention. In Singapore, 18 towers built for the purpose are covered with growing plants, and backed with solar powered lights. The result is a dramatic display of vegetation which helps cool the city at the same time it provides a major tourist attraction. In Mexico City, officials took a more practical approach. Columns supporting bridges and elevated roadways are lined with felt, through which plants grow, watered by their own rainwater collection system.

In Paris, the façade surrounding the entrance to the Musee du Quai Branly is covered with more than 15,000 plants covering its vertical walls, framing the entrance in greenery. The Athenaeum Hotel in London has seven stories of plants climbing an exterior vertical corner of the building. Vertical gardens, besides offering dramatic displays of plants, cool the air, improve air quality, and also protect the structure on which they are grown from absorbing heat during sunlit hours.

Beirut, as well as other communities in Lebanon, has also turned to vertical gardens to address the issues of UHIs, air quality, and beautification. Vertical gardens are a part of the solution for all three, but only when used in conjunction with other attempts at mitigation. They also help reduce city noise for residents, and plants act as a natural filter for rainwater. They can also be used to produce herbs and other consumable plants, though as of this writing they have yet to gain favor in the United States.

3. Reduce traffic congestion

Automobile and truck traffic are a major contributor to UHIs. Reduction of their use produces obvious benefits to cities, reducing both UHI severity and pollutants in the air. Lighter colored cars also absorb less heat. Dark colored cars in bumper-bumper traffic obviously negates the benefit of lighter colored pavements.

But any attempt to reduce the use of the automobile is immediately controversial, especially in the United States. There, in major cities, it is common to sit in traffic for well beyond the length of the workday, and a decision of any governmental body to eliminate dark colors for cars would be met with howls of protests over infringements on personal liberty. Reducing automobile use would immediately reduce the temperatures of UHIs, but is unlikely to happen any time soon.

It is a scientific fact that automobile emissions contribute to both air pollution and UHIs and in hot weather conditions the contribution is multiplied. Reducing traffic congestion is therefore desirable if one wishes to reduce the impact of UHIs. There are other methods of reducing congestion without restricting the number of vehicles on the road. In the UK, these methods are being explored and, in some cases, implemented.

2. Create cooler storm water runoff to improve water quality

Stormwater runoff from hot roofs and pavements has been shown to increase temperatures of streams and lakes. Increased temperatures induce negative effects on aquatic life, both plant and animal. The result is unhealthy waters which become lifeless and lose much of their ability to cool and filter. Deteriorating water quality is another result of UHIs which affects the lives of those in the urban area, as well as the lives of those who live downstream.

One solution is the creation of bioswales, constructed dips in the features of the landscape which can hold water temporarily, allowing it to cool, before routing it to streams. Permeable pavements, which cool the surface of the urban area, also absorb and diffuse more water, rather than directing it to storm drains. All of the mitigation efforts so far listed have a positive impact of cooling storm runoff, which would benefit streams and lakes.

Because water in rivers flows downstream, the effects of UHIs on water quality extends beyond the urban area, impacting aquatic biodiversity far from the heat center. The adverse impact of UHIs on water quality is a major incentive for cooling urban environments.

1. More efficient air conditioning could reduce UHIs

Air conditioning cools interiors by absorbing heat which is released to the outside air. Cooling interiors are heating the city where the interiors are located. In essence the heat (and humidity) internal to a building is ejected outside. In a densely populated area on a hot day, massive amounts of heat are added to the air outside, creating a dome which traps sunlight creating heat.

Yet air conditioning and refrigeration are facts of modern life. More efficient methods of cooling the air within buildings and vehicles would go a long way toward mitigating the effects of UHIs. Research to attain more efficient air conditioning is underway. If and when attained it will be just one of the several weapons deployed by future generations to combat the dangers of UHIs.

None of the strategies in this list will succeed in eliminating UHIs alone. But in varying combinations, depending on local politics, community involvement, and environmental factors, combinations of several could have a mitigating effect on UHIs, making cities more comfortable, and thus livable, across the globe.

When it comes to mysteries of science, even the experts can be stymied sometimes. And then, with a little contemplation and testing, a simple solution can present itself. And every so often, the solution is so simple it makes the whole problem look a little goofy. 

10. Europe’s 300-Year Vanilla Problem

Vanilla comes from an orchid native to Mexico where the plants are pollinated by wild bees. Today the price of vanilla can get up to $600 per kilogram. The reason is that it’s hard as heck to harvest vanilla. 

To start with, of all the hundreds of orchid species, just one grows vanilla. And if you don’t have the bees to pollinate it, then you have a very uphill battle ahead of you. Even today, pollinating vanilla by hand needs to be done by experts who have been in the industry for years. The flowers bloom for only a single day. Then the process of growing, drying and processing the vanilla takes about a year. And that’s today. So what happened hundreds of years ago?

Europeans brought vanilla back to the continent in the 1500s, where it promptly did nothing. It literally took over 300 years before a Belgian horticulturist tried to look at things scientifically to determine why the vanilla in Europe wasn’t paying off. He was the one that determined Mexico’s Melipona bee was the natural pollinator of the plant and that nothing in Europe was doing the job. So what they were missing was bees. Just bees. 

It wouldn’t be until 1841 that a slave named Edmond Albius on an island in the Indian Ocean would figure out a method of hand pollination. Had it not been for a little horticultural science, who knows how long it would have been before anyone figured out a way to farm vanilla.   

9. The Parkes Radio Telescope Mystery Signals

In New South Wales, Australia, you’ll find the Parkes Observatory, home to a very large radio telescope that famously relayed signals from the 1969 moon landing. Less well known was the mystery that astronomers on site had been dealing with for 17 long years. You see, every so often, the telescope would receive mysterious signals. But no one could figure out what was causing them.

The telescope was detecting something called perytons. These are incredible short burst radio signals of a terrestrial origin. They also share a name with a mythical beast in a nod to how mysterious they were. The physicists on site thought they might be caused by lightning strikes somewhere near the telescope. But that was not the case.

As it happens, some of the scientists on site would put in full work days and that meant they’d need to have a meal now and then. So they’d use the microwave to heat it up. The signals being received were coming in at 2.4GHz, the same frequency as a microwave. 

Someone put two and two together and discovered that, if you pull the microwave door open before the cooking cycle completes, for a second it will release those perytons. So for 17 years, they were haunted by people reheating their lunch. 

8. NASA’s Multi-Million Dollar Mars Probe

Did you ever get frustrated in a math class at school and wonder when you were ever going to need to know something like trigonometry or integers in real life? Maybe you never did need to know any of that, but some people do, in particular the kind of people who work at NASA calculating thrust on satellites.

In 1999, NASA was hoping the Mars Climate Orbiter would be able to provide useful scientific data about weather patterns on Mars. Instead, it was destroyed shortly after entering the atmosphere.

NASA launched an internal investigation to figure out what happened. A $125 million piece of hardware never even got to see service at all, so after all that money and months of preparation, something big had to have gone wrong. The truth, however, was something small. A simple mathematical conversion. Someone had forgotten to translate the math, controlling the thrusters of the orbiter. The software calculated the force of the thrusters in pounds of force. But some of the other software being used calculated it in newtons. 

Along the way, scientists realized something was wonky because they had to keep making adjustments. But by the time it arrived, it was too late. It hit the atmosphere at the wrong angle and quickly burned up on entry. Had someone double checked that the metric conversions, it all could have been avoided. 

7. The Folded Structure of an AIDS-Related Enzyme

For some of us, it can be hard on the ego when we’re very knowledgeable on a subject and are having difficulty figuring a related problem out, only to have a random person with no special insight stumble on the solution as if by magic. That’s sort of what happened when AIDS researchers got stuck trying to identify the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme.

For years, they’d been working at figuring out the structure with no luck. So they opted for a novel solution: let someone else figure it out. In this case, they used a puzzle game called Foldit. The game allows users to play with the structures of proteins and enzymes to find the most optimal ways they can be folded. 

Researchers had been trying to crack this particular enzyme for 13 years. Once they placed it in the game to let the gamer community try it out, users found the solution in just three weeks. The end result was not a cure for AIDS, by any means, but it was an important step towards understanding and treating conditions like AIDS. 

6. Why Flamingoes Stand on One Foot

Picture a flamingo in your head. Is it standing on one foot? That’s the common image we have of these exotic pink birds, perched on one long, thin leg. And for a long while, no one knew exactly why a flamingo chose to stand like that. It wasn’t until 2019 that science gave us an answer: it’s literally easier than standing on two legs. 

Flamingoes cannot balance or rest as easily on two legs, it throws their balance right off. Their bodies are designed to handle that single leg much better. Experiments with dead flamingoes further proved that it’s much harder to balance one on two legs, but on one leg they stand up surprisingly easily. 

5. The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle 

According to Karl Kruszelnicki, the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle is that we ever thought it was a mystery at all. The region is known for bad weather and that, combined with human error plus heavy traffic increasing the chance for more accidents, explains everything. No curses, no aliens, no mystery phenomena at all. 

Based on his research, he points out that, on a percentage basis, ships don’t go missing there any more than they do anywhere else in the ocean. It’s just that the high traffic numbers make it seem worse. 

The name “Bermuda Triangle” was even in common usage until 1964 and if there is any mystery, it’s mostly just related to how many ships may have gone missing in that area, since true numbers are hard to come by. 

4. Why Wombats Have Square Poop 

We’re taking a deep dive into science for this one and looking into one of the greatest mysteries of modern biology and zoology. Namely, why does the humble wombat produce poop in cubes when no other animal on earth is able to do so?

In weirdly practical terms, wombats poop strategically to communicate messages to other wombats. What kind of messages? Probably about territory, so other wombats know where they are. And the reason it’s in a cube is, potentially, to prevent it from rolling away. And while that is a great answer for why the wombat has poop cubes, it does nothing to answer how. Because if you wanted to poop a cube to mark your own territory, it’s not like you could just will it to be so. So what’s going on in a wombat’s butt?

Things get a little grisly here and involve wombat dissection. A wombat that had died in an accident was examined and scientists discovered that the intestines of the animal features a pair of grooves that are more elastic than the rest of the intestine. A 2D rendering was made, showing that the intestines have varied layers of thickness and stiffness. As muscles contract over several days to pull out all possible moisture and nutrients from the food being digested, the intestines form those odd like cubes and shoot them out the backdoor when it’s done. 

3. The Mysterious Antarctic Bio-Duck Sound

For 50 years, researchers in the Antarctic have made note of a strange sound that is, for all intents and purposes, like the quack of a duck. But it’s underwater. It was first recorded by submarine crews and because it was repeated so often, the original thinking was that it had to be a man-made sound. Later, someone suggested fish, but the sound was too loud for any known fish.

As luck would have it, someone studying minke whales had affixed a pair of them with trackers that also had microphones. When researchers listened to what they recorded, they had front row seats to the mysterious duck sound. Combined with years’ worth of previous recordings, they were able to conclusively determine that it had just been minke whales the whole time. Of course, none of that explained why the whales do it, but at least we know it’s them. 

2. How to Break Dry Spaghetti into Just Two Pieces

Let’s say you’re in the mood for some spaghetti, but you only have one rather small pot in which to cook it. The whole noodles are much too long to fit, so you’re going to have to break the spaghetti in two. But can you break spaghetti in two? As in perfectly in two with no extra broken pieces flying around? If you have ever broken a handful of spaghetti in half before, you already know the answer. Of course not. When you break spaghetti, it shatters like your dreams of not having to pick up tiny, broken pasta pieces from the stovetop. 

Busted spaghetti was the fate of every spaghetti chef in the world until MIT scientists got involved. It turns out there is a scientific way to break spaghetti into just two pieces; no broken bits. 

Elongated, brittle objects almost always break into multiple pieces, pasta or otherwise. This happens when you apply pressure from either end, causing a bend in the center. This bend eventually breaks, which causes a snap-back reaction that vibrates the pasta and breaks off more pieces. 

Researchers were able to determine that if the spaghetti is twisted to 270 degrees and then carefully bent at 3 millimeters per second, it will snap perfectly in two. 

1. Why You Keep Losing Socks

How many socks would you say you’ve lost in your lifetime? This has been a recurring issue for many of us. Socks go to the laundry but never make it back to the drawer. The result is a handful of stray, unmatched socks that we have at the bottom of the drawer. And it’s a goofy problem that people laugh about because it’s not really a big deal. But why does it happen? Someone has tried to solve the mystery, and it’s far less mysterious than the internet might make it out to be. 

Samsung commissioned a statistician and a psychologist to figure this sock mystery out and it seems like the average person loses 15 socks per year, which seems oddly high, but who are we to argue with Samsung science? 

The two experts put their heads together and came up with a slew of reasons for the mystery sock migration that so many of us endure. Turns out, you lost them.

Sounds pretty simple, right? They may have fallen under the washer, or maybe behind a radiator. They got put in the wrong wash load; they fell off a clothesline.

Mathematician Rob Eastaway blamed Murphy’s Law and pointed out that, statistically, you just can’t have X number of socks and expect not to lose one at some point. In essence, the science boils down to the unavoidable nature of the universe itself. You lose socks because you can’t not lose socks.