Interesting Things with JC

Interesting Things with JC #1801: "Projectiles Launched at an Angle" — Throw 2 baseballs at different angles, using exactly the same speed, and both can land at the same distance. Discover why a higher throw doesn't always travel farther and what gravity has to do with it.

Interesting Things with JC #1800: "The Siege of Yorktown" — On October 9, 1781, George Washington fired an American cannon at Yorktown as 8,000 British troops faced a massive American and French army. But the British had an even bigger problem: their escape by sea had been cut off.

Interesting Things with JC #1799: “Horizontal Projectiles” — Launch one ball sideways and drop another from the same height. Ignoring air resistance, they hit the ground at the same time, even though one traveled across the room.

Interesting Things with JC #1798: "Oh, God! starring George Burns as God and John Denver" — On October 7, 1977, George Burns appeared as God opposite John Denver, playing an ordinary grocery store manager suddenly expected to convince everyone that God had actually spoken to him.

Interesting Things with JC #1797: "A Reversible Weakness in Alzheimer’s Gene" – Scientists found a way to reverse some damage linked to the strongest known genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s. Instead of changing the gene, they blocked one of the signals it sets off.

Interesting Things with JC #1796: “Free Fall Kinematics” — Drop a baseball and gravity increases its downward velocity every second, but throw it upward and something unexpected happens at the top: its velocity reaches zero while its acceleration does not.

Interesting Things with JC #1795: “Do Redheads Have Special Powers for Survival?” - Tennessee tried to execute Christa Gail Pike with pentobarbital, but she survived. An online theory pointed to her red hair, where real genetic differences involving anesthesia and pain offer an unexpected scientific connection, but not an explanation for surviving lethal injection.

Interesting Things with JC #1794: "Best of Both Worlds" — David Lee Roth was gone, Sammy Hagar was in, and Van Halen responded with 5150, the first number one album of its career, while “Best of Both Worlds” became an unexpectedly fitting title for the band's new era.

Interesting Things with JC #1793: "Velocity & Acceleration vs. Time" — A car can be moving fast with zero acceleration, while negative acceleration can actually make something speed up. Velocity and acceleration graphs reveal what an object is doing through their slopes, areas, and direction.

Interesting Things with JC #1792: "The Compact Disc Era" — CDs went from replacing records and cassettes to dominating music sales, appearing in nearly every car, and then losing the dashboard slot to the digital music they helped make normal.

Interesting Things with JC #1791: "The Night Lake Erie Rose" — In October 1844, powerful winds reversed across Lake Erie and sent water surging into Buffalo, flooding neighborhoods, destroying buildings and driving canal boats into city streets in one of the region’s worst early maritime disasters.

Interesting Things with JC #1790: "Physics: Position vs. Time" — A car moves down a road, stops, or turns around, and a simple position versus time graph records it all, while the slope reveals something the position itself does not.

Interesting Things with JC #1789: "The Lake Michigan Circle" — Drive 1,100 miles around Lake Michigan through 4 states, or board a steamship where an official spur takes the Circle Tour off the road.

Interesting Things with JC #1788: "What the Gateway Process Actually Proved" — An Army officer examined Gateway in 1983. Decades later, his report circulates as CIA proof of manifestation. Somewhere between those two events, an assessment became an answer it never established.

Interesting Things with JC #1787: "Does Apple Cider Turn Into Alcohol?!" – Fresh apple cider starts bubbling. The sweetness drops. Alcohol is forming, and the process may not stop there.

Interesting Things with JC #1786: "9 to 5 - The Movie" – Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton worked inside a fake office built around problems real working women were reporting: low wages, blocked promotions and sexual harassment. The comedy exaggerated the revenge, but the workplace problems came directly from women who had been organizing for change since the 1970s.

Interesting Things with JC #1785: "Why the Desert Floods So Fast" – A desert thunderstorm drops rain faster than the ground can absorb it, sending excess water downhill into channels that were dry minutes before. Runoff from across the watershed combines in arroyos, where floodwater can arrive from a storm several miles upstream that never reaches the people standing downstream.

Interesting Things with JC #1784: "The Hydrogen Peroxide Mistake" – Hydrogen peroxide foams on a scraped knee, but the bubbles don't prove germs are dying. The same chemical reaction that attacks bacteria can also damage healthy skin cells, even as people keep pouring it onto wounds to help them heal.

Interesting Things with JC #1783: "Humanity is Unprepared for AI" – A student spends years preparing for a career while AI changes the work before graduation. Machines can already help people research, solve problems, and produce results, but employers may need fewer workers as those capabilities expand. Students must choose careers and decide when to trust AI systems that can still invent evidence.

Interesting Things with JC #1782: "Why Sound Would Break Apart on Mars" – A human voice travels through Mars’s thin atmosphere, but its higher frequencies move faster than its lower ones. Over 100 meters, the higher frequencies arrive about 17 milliseconds earlier, while the atmosphere absorbs them more strongly with distance. The voice grows quieter as its frequencies separate and fade.

Interesting Things with JC #1781: "The Carnyx" – Celtic warriors raised bronze carnyxes nearly 10 feet high, blasting sound through open animal jaws above the battlefield. One surviving boar head had a hinged jaw and movable tongue that could rattle as it played, while seven carnyxes later found at a Gallic sanctuary showed the same instrument belonged beyond war.

Interesting Things with JC #1780: "The Hoover Dam Angels" – Visitors rub the bronze toes of Hoover Dam's 30-foot angels for good luck, unaware that the floor beneath them contains a star chart designed to reveal the dam's dedication date thousands of years in the future. The figures stand above an astronomical record that accounts for the slow wobble of Earth's axis.

Interesting Things with JC #1779: "The Encryption Keys Inside the Camera" – Hackers examine a stolen Flock camera and find an encryption key stored inside the device. Recordings meant to remain protected after theft become accessible, including approximately 1.6 million images and more than 27,000 video clips.

Interesting Things with JC #1778: "The Waffle House Hero" – James Shaw Jr. is trapped inside a Waffle House as a gunman fires through the restaurant, then the shooting stops. Shaw rushes the gunman, grabs the hot rifle barrel with his bare hand, wrestles the weapon away, and later turns the attention on him into more than $240,000 for the victims’ families.

Interesting Things with JC #1777: "Your Mind Controls Your Age" – Adults who viewed their own aging more positively lived an average of 7.5 years longer in a long-running Yale study. Across other studies, people who felt younger also walked faster and declined less over time, while researchers continue to examine how expectations about aging interact with behavior, health, and longevity.

Interesting Things with JC #1776: "Ellen Langer - Counterclockwise" – In 1979, elderly men entered a retreat rebuilt as 1959 and were told to live as though twenty years had disappeared. Days later, researchers measured changes.

Interesting Things with JC #1775: "The Signal Einstein Thought We Might Never Hear" – Two LIGO detectors register the same gravitational-wave signal seven milliseconds apart as two black holes merge 1.3 billion light-years away. The signal lasts about two-tenths of a second, while the instruments measure changes smaller than the width of a proton after decades of attempts failed to detect one.

Interesting Things with JC #1774: "Uncle Sam Day" – Samuel Wilson is supplying beef to American troops in barrels marked “U.S.” when people begin connecting the initials with the Troy businessman they call Uncle Sam. The nickname spreads beyond the barrels, becomes a name for the U.S. government, and eventually turns Wilson’s September 13 birthday into an officially designated Uncle Sam Day.

Interesting Things with JC #1773: "The Clock Behind Instant Replay" – Two instant-replay feeds showing the same moment can reach officials milliseconds apart. Every step through processing, switching, transmission, encoding, and decoding can add hidden latency, so replay has to determine when each frame actually occurred instead of trusting when it arrived.

Interesting Things with JC #1772: "Staten Island Remembers" – At Staten Island’s Postcards memorial, 274 individual plaques face across New York Harbor toward the place where the Twin Towers once stood. Many families represented there received no identifiable remains, making the waterfront memorial the closest thing they had to a gravesite, while a second memorial records first responders who died years later from illnesses associated with World Trade Center rescue and recovery work.

Interesting Things with JC #1771: "Debut of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" - The original Fresh Prince theme was much longer. In the video for the opening, Will packed and then flew first class, landed in LA and met his ride before there was ever a famous cab. Most of that trip was left on the cutting room floor!

Interesting Things with JC #1770: "When a Parasite Rewires Behavior to Spread Itself" – Infected Texas field crickets were sterile or producing barely moving sperm, but they kept mating, and infected males courted females sooner than healthy males. The virus was disrupting the immune signals that normally slow courtship during illness while still spreading through sexual contact.

Interesting Things with JC #1769: "Football Brain Injury Cover Up" – Dr. Bennet Omalu found CTE in Mike Webster’s brain, and the NFL’s concussion committee challenged the published finding and called for its retraction. More former players were diagnosed after death, and twelve years later researchers found CTE in 110 of 111 donated brains from former NFL players.

Interesting Things with JC #1768: "The Science of Jealousy" – Jealousy can fire before there is proof: attention shifts, suspicion locks in, and the brain starts tracking details and possible rivals. The threat may not be real, but the alarm already is.

Interesting Things with JC #1767: "The Spider-Man of Paris" – A four-year-old boy hangs from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. Mamoudou Gassama climbs the building with his bare hands and reaches him in about 30 seconds.

Interesting Things with JC #1766: "Autistici/Inventati - The Network Behind the Network" – Autistici/Inventati runs encrypted email, private chats, websites and other infrastructure designed to make users harder to monitor. By 2026, violent radical groups and the PKK were among those using its services, while U.S. authorities say the collective screened applicants and provided access to groups it believed shared its politics.

Interesting Things with JC #1765: "The FBI Surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr." – The FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. without a criminal charge and failed to establish that he or the SCLC was controlled by communists. The surveillance expanded into hotel microphones and private recordings, and FBI officials began using what they collected in efforts to discredit King and weaken his influence.

Interesting Things with JC #1764: "The Treaty of Paris" – Britain signs the Treaty of Paris recognizing all thirteen American states as “free sovereign and Independent States” and giving up its claim to govern them. The United States controls its own government and territory extending west to the Mississippi, while Britain agrees to withdraw its forces and deal with the new nation as an independent power.

Interesting Things with JC #1763: "Looking for Quantum Gravity with Light" – Scientists are firing lasers through interferometers to detect quantum gravity without reaching the Planck scale. QUEST found nothing, now more sensitive experiments are looking for fluctuations hidden in the light.

Interesting Things with JC #1762: "The Man Who Guarded the Skies During the Cold War" – In 1975, Daniel “Chappie” James Jr. took command of NORAD as its radar and warning systems searched North America’s approaches for Soviet bombers and missiles. Thirty-two years after earning his wings at Tuskegee in a segregated military, he was now responsible for forces guarding the skies over the United States and Canada.