A Brief History On May 27, 1962, a landfill above a coal mine in Centralia, Pennsylvania caught on fire probably due to someone intentionally burning trash. The landfill located right above a seam in a former strip mine ignited the coal seam which led to an underground fire that has been burning ever since. Digging Deeper Incredibly, authorities have never been able to extinguish the flames, and the abandoned mine continued to burn, making most of the town of Centralia above the mine uninhabitable. With a population of 1400 in 1962, the ghost town boasted only 7 residents by 2013.…
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A Brief History On May 19, 1845, Sir John Franklin set off from Greenhithe, England in command of two British Royal Navy ships, the HMS Erebus and the fatefully named HMS Terror, on a voyage of discovery searching for the final leg of what he hoped would be a Northwest Passage around Canada to the Pacific. The tragic expedition is chronicled on the outstanding AMC television series, The Terror, which first aired in March of 2018. In the series, Irish actor Ciarán Hinds portrays Captain Sir John Franklin as seen in the comparative image above. Digging Deeper Since Franklin and…
A Brief History On May 8, 1794, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the man generally regarded as the Father of Modern Chemistry, was put to death on the guillotine during the Reign of Terror period of the French Revolution. It seems this man of noble birth who had such an enormous impact on the sciences of chemistry and biology was more than merely a scientist, but also a businessman and an agent of the Ancien Régime, the monarchy of France prior to the Revolution. Digging Deeper Born in Paris in 1743, Antoine was given a fine education (earning a degree in law…
A Brief History On May 7, 2018, while the latest movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Infinity War, is breaking box office records, we stop to ask about the main premise of the film, the arch villain Thanos and his plan to reduce life in the Universe by half in order to prevent an overpopulation catastrophe. Our question is, “Has anyone tried this plan in real life?” In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich published a book titled, The Population Bomb, a dire warning about the catastrophic consequences of overpopulation of people on Earth. So far, those predictions have not…
A Brief History On May 1, 2018, we celebrate another Save the Rhino Day by telling you a little about the “Holiday” and a little about Rhinoceroses. (If people asked me, can you speak rhinoceros, I’d say, “Of courserous, can’t you?” from the song, “If I Could Talk to the Animals” an Academy Award winning tune from the 1967 movie, Dr. Dolittle, music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse.) Digging Deeper Of the 5 species of Rhinoceros alive today, 3 are listed as critically endangered. The Northern sub-species of the White Rhino of Africa may already be extinct in the wild,…
