In 1939, Kent Knowlton of Randsburg, CA, assembled a curious meal of petrified food for his amusement and that of others.
We have a record that it was still being exhibited a year later. Then, the "Original Rock Dinner" vanishes from history--until this very year!
An article on the "ghost town" of Randsburg features what appears to be a photo of the petrified food, nearly 75 years after its debut. I'd recognize that "cauliflower" anywhere!
Apparently there are some beaches that sing. More specifically, the sand on these beaches makes a "singing, squeaking, whistling, or barking" sound when you walk across it or run your hand over it. From Wikipedia:
On some beaches around the world, dry sand will make a singing, squeaking, whistling, or barking sound if a person scuffs or shuffles their feet with sufficient force. The phenomenon is not completely understood scientifically, but it has been found that quartz sand will do this if the grains are very well-rounded and highly spherical. It is believed by some that the sand grains must be of similar size, so the sand must be well sorted by the actions of wind and waves, and that the grains should be close to spherical and have dust-, pollution-, and organic-matter-free surfaces. The "singing" sound is then believed to be produced by shear as each layer of sand grains slides over the layer beneath it. The similarity in size, the uniformity, and the cleanness mean that grains move up and down in unison over the layer of grains below them. Even small amounts of pollution on the sand grains reduces the friction enough to silence the sand.
The sand here in San Diego definitely doesn't sing, and all the pollution we get from Tijuana guarantees it'll never make a squeak! Lake Michigan has some of the most famous singing sand. Some videos below.
Oysters will grow on almost any surface, including false teeth, if that's what happens to be available. The tooth-growing oyster shown above was found in the Chesapeake Bay in 1898, and sent to the Smithsonian where they were put on display and became quite a popular attraction. But soon a paternity battle erupted around them. From The Strand magazine, 1903:
A man from Iowa claimed the teeth, saying that he had lost them, under not wholly peculiar circumstances, from a steamer passing that way. The object was too great a curiosity to be parted with, and the difficulty of the authorities in deciding whether or not to surrender the teeth was solved by a later claim for the teeth from a Philadelphia woman, and by a third claim from someone who saw the oyster on exhibition.
Half a century later, in 1954, yet another guy insisted the teeth were his, but in this case the Smithsonian was able to definitively rule out his claim since the guy hadn't even been born yet when the teeth were found. I'm guessing the Smithsonian probably still has this famous oyster hidden away somewhere in its archives.
Cartoonist Gus Mager is well-respected for his pioneering newspaper strips. But he seems to have let his fertile and fanciful brain trespass into his supposedly scientific feature for Popular Science. Some of the "facts" given in his column appear somewhat dubious, to say the least. The business about the grapefruit was all settled well before Gus was working in the 1930s.
People have long reported that they've heard strange clapping sounds coming from the Northern Lights. But scientists tended to ignore these reports. The people hearing the sounds were told they were imagining them, or that the sounds were coming from sources such as trees or falling ice. But now Finnish researchers at Aalto University have recorded the Aurora Borealis actually making these snapping/clapping sounds, and have confirmed (to their satisfaction) that the sounds couldn't have been coming from anywhere else. More info at space.com and at the researcher's website.
This child is Mike Grost, as he appeared in a 1965 article in Life magazine. At the time, he was said to have an IQ of 200+.
Whatever happened to Mike? A 2005 interview from the MSU State News had this to say:
Michael Grost was only 10 when he began at MSU in 1964.
Grost declined comment for this story, but in a 2002 interview with The State News, the Southfield
resident described his life in college as similar to having "40,000 brothers and sisters."
Grost held his first job on campus working with computers his freshman year, which propelled him into
software design after his 13-year college career - five of which were spent at MSU. He also attended
Yale University and U-M, earning a doctorate degree in mathematics at age 23. Grost currently is a
system architect at a computer company in Detroit.
"I really owe (MSU) a lot for the huge chance they took on me as a kid," Grost said in the 2002
interview.
Gee, I don't know. Kinda underwhelming. Shouldn't he be a Silicon Valley zillionaire by now?
Category: Performance Art, Natural Wonders