The Petronius Rig in the Gulf of Mexico, operated by Chevron and Marathon Oil. Photo: Extra Zebra

Shell plans to drill more than two miles underwater in the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of new sources of oil and gas. If successful, the Guardian reports, the project will rank as the world’s deepest offshore facility.

The move is being viewed in the oil industry as a demonstration of Shell’s confidence that its technology can deliver returns on expensive and risky offshore projects, despite a recent downturn in oil prices.

Although BP recently put its Gulf of Mexico project—called “Mad Dog Phase 2″—on hold, Shell is not alone in its endeavors in the Gulf. ExxonMobil is planning a $4 billion project in the region, as well.

Shell’s executive vice president, John Hollowell, told the Guardian that the new project demonstrates the company’s ongoing commitment to meet U.S. energy demands. “We will continue our leadership in safe, innovative deepwater operations,” he said. The Guardian:

The move comes despite ongoing controversy over offshore exploration – especially in the Gulf of Mexico, where in April 2010 a fire and explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and started a leak that took three months to cap. Last month BP said it had paid $25bn (£16bn) of the $42bn it has set aside to cover the damage caused by the spill.

Shell expects its new well to produce 50,000 barrels of oil per day once it reaches peak production. It estimates that the well, located in an oil field discovered eight years ago about 200 miles southwest of New Orleans, contains around 250 million barrels of recoverable oil total—just over three percent of the 6.9 billion barrels of oil the U.S. currently burns through each year.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Oil Pipeline Spills Heavy Crude in Arkansas 
Victims of the Oil Spill 

Photo: WilliamNYC

It took a while for Americans to get comfortable with the idea of shopping for groceries online. The first ventures into online groceries through sites—like Webvan, founded in the 1990s, closed in 2001—flopped. But as consumers bought more books, movies, shoes, clothes, toys and everything else online, companies like New York-centric FreshDirect made web grocery shopping and delivery work.

Services like FreshDirect don’t just cut down on hassle of having to drive to the grocery store. New research shows that they can also be good for the environment. Ordering online cuts carbon emissions on average by half when compared with traveling to the store by car, the researchers found, especially when delivery trucks were filled to capacity. 

This is how a delivery truck can save on mileage when compared with personal vehicles driving to and from a store. Photo: Goodchild/Wygonik, UW

In their analysis, the researchers randomly sampled Seattle households. To calculate emissions, they included data such as the type of car families owned, the roadway type, the distance to the grocery store and the speed limit.

They found that grocery delivery trucks produced 20 to 75 percent less CO2 emissions than the corresponding number of personal vehicles would have. If households were targeted based upon established routes rather than individual delivery time requests, that figure jumped to 80 to 90 percent fewer emissions. This finding held true in both Seattle’s dense downtown and in the suburbs.

Nothing beats walking or riding a bike, however, for those shoppers living close enough to the grocery store to enjoy that option.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Shopping Gets Personal 
A Week Without Groceries 

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo during yesterday’s test. Photo: MarsScientific.com and Clay Center Observatory

In an early morning flight yesterday, SpaceShipTwo, the passenger-carrying spacecraft of private spaceflight company Virgin Galactic rocketed through the sky above the Mojave Desert at a blistering mach 1.2 (around 913 miles per hour). It was the first rocket-powered test flight of the craft, an event heralded as the dawn of the commercial space age. More than 500 people have bought tickets to ride the ship, says the New York Times, and their wait, says Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson, might nearly be over.

“We will be going to space at the end of this year,” Mr. Branson said in a telephone interview after the test flight over Mojave, Calif. Or, he added, possibly in the first quarter of next year.

Branson’s confidence, just like his ship, is soaring. He’s so confident, in fact, Virgin Galactic has decided to raise their rates: formerly $200,000, a trip to space with the company will now cost $250,000. But that confidence may be a bit misplaced, if the company’s track record in this regard is considered.

2004

After years of work, the original SpaceShipOne, designed by the company Scaled Composites, took home the $10 million bounty of the Ansari X Prize.

Following that win, Richard Branson partnered with Scaled Composites to form Virgin Galactic, says CNN. At the time, the company announced that they planned to have people riding into space by 2007. Space Daily:

Addressing reporters in central London, Branson said that the new firm — Virgin Galactic — would launch its maiden flight in only three years, and that he would join the very first trip into space.

“Within five years, Virgin Galactic will have created over 3,000 new astronauts from many countries,” Branson said, speaking alongside US aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, who designed and built SpaceShipOne.

2005

Talking to the BBC, Branson walked back his estimate a bit, now gunning for 2008. “Space tourism is less than three years away, Sir Richard Branson has claimed.”

2008

The 2008 schedule came and went, and according to the BBC, the deadline for launch was pushed to 2010.

2009

The first unveiling of SpaceShipTwo, the ship that underwent its first real test flight yesterday.

2010

With construction of SpaceShipTwo complete, Richard Branson tells Agence France Press that “We are 18 months away from taking people into space.”

2011

The year saw another bump, wrote this author in Discover Magazine: “Virgin Galactic refuses to set a date for when it will begin flying its paying customers to the edge of space, but some are hoping to see flights start as early as the end of 2011.” But 2011 came and went with no avail.

2012

Flights should start by 2012, or early 2013 at the latest, says Aviation Explorer.

You see the pattern.

Getting into space is an incredibly difficult and expensive task, and delays are commonplace. Yesterday’s rocket-powered test was an achievement worth celebrating, but a skeptical eye can be cast on Branson’s claims that you’ll be riding the ship within the next year.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Sneak Peek at the First Commercial Spaceport
October 4, 2004: SpaceShipOne Wins $10 Million X Prize

A house in Lancaster, California gets a solar power retrofit. Photo: KN6KS

A desert terrain, a southerly latitude and a “colorful mayor” have joined forces to turn Lancaster, California, a city of around 150,000 that lies northeast of Los Angeles, into the solar capital “of the universe” says the New York Times. The city, says Geek.com, “now officially earned the distinction of being the first US city to mandate the inclusion of solar panels on all new homes built within the city limits.”

Technically the solar powered mandate isn’t so hard and fast, and builders have a bit of wiggle room. Starting January 1st, either they can build solar panels into their designs, producing one kilowatt of electricity for each city lot, or the builders can buy a “solar energy credit” to offset their non-energy-producing ways—money which would go to fund larger solar developments.

The city’s push into solar, says the Times, is being spearheaded by its Republican mayor Robert Rex Parris.

His solar push began about three years ago; City Hall, the performing arts center and the stadium together now generate 1.5 megawatts. Solar arrays on churches, a big medical office, a developer’s office and a Toyota dealership provide 4 more.

The biggest power payoff came with the school system. After the Lancaster school board rejected an offer from SolarCity, saying it was unaffordable, the city created a municipal utility. It bought 32,094 panels, had them installed on 25 schools, generated 7.5 megawatts of power and sold the enterprise to the school district for 35 percent less than it was paying for electricity at the time. Another 8 megawatts now come from systems operating at the local high school and Antelope Valley College.

Parris’ goal for Lancaster, says a 2010 story from the Los Angeles Times, is to see the city “produce more energy than we consume before 2020.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Island Nation Now Runs Entirely On Solar Power

If all goes to plan, a new deal inked by two of the world’s biggest companies could give rise to a sustainability advocate’s paradise: a resort near the South China Sea that gets all of its power from the heat of the water nearby through a new type of renewable energy.

The deal, says a news release issued by Lockheed Martin, will see the defense giant partner with the Reignwood Group—a massive company that does everything from selling Red Bull in China to operate hotels and golf courses, managing properties and operating a private aircraft service—to develop the first commercial plant for a new type of renewable energy generation system known as ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC).

Ocean thermal energy conversion draws on the natural temperature gradient that forms in tropical oceans worldwide. The surface of the ocean, heated by the Sun, is much warmer than the water deeper down. OTEC plants use the warm surface water to boil a liquid with a really low boiling point in a low-pressure container to form steam. This steam then drives a turbine, generating electricity. Colder water from deeper down is pulled up in a pipe, and by having this cold water pass by the pipe containing the steam, the steam is condensed back into a liquid. The liquid flows around, is heated by the warm surface water, and turns into steam once more—on and on, generating electricity from the temperature gradient in the ocean.

The idea for ocean thermal energy conversaion has been around for a really, really long time. “The concept of deriving energy from ocean thermal gradients was a French idea, suggested in 1881 by Jacques d’Arsonval, and French engineers have been active in developing the requisite technology,” says Marine Energy Times.

According to energy reporter Tyler Hamilton, famed engineer Nikola Tesla even tried his hands at making it work.

While Lockheed has been working on this for four decades, one of the first in-depth discussions of the concept came from Nikola Tesla, who at the age of 75 outlined how such a plant might be built in the December 1931 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics journal. Tesla spent considerable time devising a way to improve the efficiencies of such a power plant, but he determined that it was too great an engineering challenge at the time. “I have studied this plan of power production from all angles and have devised apparatus for bringing down all losses to what I might call the irreducible minimum and still I find the performance too small to enable successful competition with the present methods,” he wrote, though still expressing hope that new methods would eventually make it possible to economically tap the thermal energy in oceans.

So the idea is old, but recent technological developments have driven ocean thermal energy conversion into the realm of possibility. Interestingly, some of the most troubling issues facing OTEC were solved by the oil industry, says the Marine Energy Times:

Ocean thermal is the only remaining vast, untapped source of renewable energy, and is now ripe for commercialization.  The near market-readiness of this technology is largely attributable to the remarkable ocean-engineering innovations and successful experience of the offshore oil industry during the past thirty years in developing, investing in, and  introducing mammoth floating platforms.  That achievement has inadvertently satisfied ocean thermal’s key operational requirement, for a large, stable, reliable ocean platform capable of operating in storms, hurricanes and typhoons.

Consequently, adaptations of those offshore-ocean-platform designs can be spun-off  to supply the proven ocean-engineering framework on which to mount the specialized ocean thermal plant and plantship heat exchangers, turbomachinery, cold water pipe (CWP) system, and other components and subsystems.Those offshore engineering achievements have greatly reduced the real and perceived risks of investing in ocean thermal plants.

Lockheed Martin has been working on the technology behind OTEC, too, and the deal with the Reignwood Group will see them build a test plant. If they manage to pull it off, the work could open the door to increased investment in this new form of renewable energy.

According to Green Tech Media, there are some potential environmental issues to look out for: if the cold water brought up from depth is pumped out into the surface waters, you could trigger a huge algae bloom that is really bad for the local ecosystem. But, if you release the cold water further down, around 70 meters depth, you should be able to avoid this dilemma. Having a small-scale test plant will give researchers a way to learn about any other unforeseen issues before moves are made to implement this new type of renewable energy on a larger scale.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Clean Energy Can Come From Dirt
Catching a Wave, Powering an Electrical Grid?

Photo: Orbital Sciences Corporation

Usually, residents of Florida and California have a leg up over the rest of the country when it comes to one of America’s most favorite past times: watching rockets soar into the sky. But in the early evening today, the Northeast coast will be treated to a special show. At around 5 p.m., from Maine to South Carolina, look up in the sky and you just may see the brand new Antares rocket climbing into the sky on its maiden voyage as it blasts off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.

Wallops has seen launches before, in 2006 and 2007, but the Antares launch, says Universe Today, will be “the biggest, loudest and brightest rocket ever to launch” from the site. CBS News:

“We’ll lift off with approximately 750,000 pounds of thrust, weighing about 600,000 pounds,” said Frank Culbertson, a former shuttle commander who oversees Orbital’s advanced programs group. “So it’ll not race off the pad, but it will accelerate very quickly once it gets going.

 

The launch will appear lower on the horizon the further you are from Virginia. Photo: Orbital Sciences Corporation

For those not in the northeast, or if clouds mar your view, NASA will be streaming the show live starting at 4 pm.

The Antares rocket is a huge machine, a two-stage booster rocket that stands 131 feet tall, says Space.com. The rocket is designed to carry cargo to the International Space Station, and will be the first direct competitor of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket in the burgeoning private space race. This evening’s launch will be the rocket’s first.

According to CBS News, the weather may not play nicely with Orbital Science Corp’s test. If the launch is scrubbed, they’ll have openings to try again through the end of the week.

More from Smithsonian.com:

SpaceX Launches the First Commercial Rocket Into Space [video]
Elon Musk, the Rocket Man With a Sweet Ride

Photo: Doug88888

Imagine you burned your arm with boiling water fresh from the stove, or your child was born with a clubfoot, or you got a deep cut at work. Now imagine you don’t have health insurance. But not just that, you don’t have access to the health care or surgery you need. You’re turned away entirely.

A new online crowd-sourcing venture known at Watsi, says the New York Times, is looking to give people with money a way to help those who are trapped in such medical circumstances by providing a portal for micro-loan donations. The organization is focusing on “low-cost, high-impact” treatments, says the Times.

The procedures range from relatively simple ones like fixing a broken limb to more complicated surgery — say, to remove an eye tumor. But the treatments generally have a high likelihood of success and don’t involve multiple operations or long-term care.

Watsi joins a slew of other recent websites designed to let people fund the individual projects or causes that strike a chord: Kickstarter and Indiegogo are home to products and creative projects, and Kiva works with micro-loans to entrepreneurs.

Unlike many existing charities where large portions of donations can go to administrative fees and overhead, Watsi says that the entire donation goes toward the surgery. They cover office expenses with money raised from donors.

As much as Watsi’s story is a tale of the new global economy, with people with money individually picking and choosing to fund what they feel is important, it’s also a testament to the power of the New York Times. Two days after the Times‘ profile of the non-profit, every single case Watsi had lined up is now fully-funded – for now.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Kickstarter Works Best for Game Designers
Crowdfunding a Museum for Alexander Graham Bell in 1922
This Plastic-Printing Pen Lets You Draw In 3D

Photo: violinha

The internet’s complexity has given rise to dedicated cartographers who try to map the cyber world in order to better understand its users, geography, behavior, and potential weak points. Mapping the internet, however, is no small task, the New Scientist writes:

Previous attempts to map the internet have been from within, using “sniffer” software to report the IP addresses of devices visited along a particular route, which, in theory, can then be translated into geographical locations. But this approach doesn’t work, says Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “After 15 years nobody can show you a map of the internet,” he says.

Sniffer software gets sidetracked by internet service providers and router shortcuts, the New Scientist writes, meaning this technique gives only a partial view of the internet’s true scope. Instead, Barford and his colleague Matthew Roughan are going old school, searching through ISP databases to find network information to stitch together manually. Eventually, they hope to connect the dots around the world.

Roughan’s Internet Topology Zoo is a growing collection of maps of individual networks. Barford’s Internet Atlas expands on this, adding crucial buildings and links between networks to flesh out the map. So far the Internet Atlas, perhaps the most comprehensive map of the physical internet, maps 10,000 such structures and 13,000 connections.

If they succeed, the two researchers think their Atlas will play an integral part in finding vulnerabilities—including the location of hubs of activity, servers and cables—and preventing them from ever becoming a problem. Banks, governments, businesses and nearly every other facet that keeps society up and running depends upon the internet. Understanding its potential weak points is an important step in protecting against cyber terrorism and natural disasters that could shut modern society down.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Robots Get Their Own Internet  
Have You Ever Wondered How the Internet Works? 

Photo: Martin Cron

A new company called Genius.box wants to help keep science-obsessed kids up to their ears in fun experiments. Aimed at kids from 8 to 12, Genius.box—still looking to get off the ground after coming second place in a recent entrepreneur contest—wants to deliver a fun science experiment to your house each month for around $20 a pop,  says Engadget.

[T]he projects inside each package teach a basic lesson in science, technology, engineering or math through a hands-on experience. All of the materials needed for each experiment are included, along with a lesson plan, instructions and “factoid” cards with tidbits of interesting trivia, such as the number of elements on the periodic scale.

So, for their pitch to the start-up challenge, the folks behind Genius.box demonstrated a crystal-growing kit and a circuit-building kit. The monthly club could be a good deal for parents whose kitchen-science skills can’t keep up with their budding little Einsteins.

Like many other early-stage start ups, the program is not yet in full swing. If you’re interested and want to see it get off the ground, they have a sign-up page to help you keep up with the project as it unfolds.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Great Science Books for the Little Ones

Photo: PWood

Hurricane Katrina brought flood waters, destruction and tragedy to New Orleans. But it has also facilitated an entrepreneurial renaissance. Within three years after Katrina, the rate of new start-up launches in the city doubled, the Atlantic reports, and NOLA currently ranks only behind Austin and suburban Washington, D.C., in the speed of its population growth.

Several factors account for these trends, the Atlantic explains:

• Katrina did bring devastation, but the storm also offered an opportunity to reinvent the city. The school system’s experiment with charter schools is one of the clearest and best-known examples: Since the storm, the share of students enrolled in charter schools has jumped from 30 to 68 percent, making New Orleans the only major city in the country in which the majority of public school students are enrolled in charter schools.
• New Orleans is also an incredibly cheap place to live compared to other major cities. This is a plus for startups struggling to get off the ground, since the cost of labor and office space are so low.
• A host of startups have managed to make it big in New Orleans. iSeatz, a company that allows users to book multiple legs of travel on one platform, jumped from gross bookings of $8 million in 2005 to $2 billion in 2013. Another tech company, Kickboard, which helps tracks students’ education progress, raised a $2 million round of funding in February.

Of course, not everything is easy in the Big Easy. Demand for programmers far outstrips supply regardless of whether a startup launches in New York, Boston or Seattle. But New Orleans particularly suffers from a shortage of programming talent. The Atlantic:

There is no getting around this central fact: The city isn’t merely miles behind San Jose and Austin in attracting the nation’s top talent. It’s behind the national average. The share of New Orleans young adults with a bachelor’s degree has increased from 23 to 26 percent since 2000. That’s not just below the average city, but also it’s growing slower than the average city.

But, as the Atlantic points out, entrepreneurs tend to flock. If New Orleans can gain some momentum, the industry might just decide to make the city a new hub.

More from Smithsonian.com:

When Innovation Flows Uphill 
A Dispatch from the Future of Smart-Batch Manufacturing 

Pick your tax haven, any tax haven. Photo: CBC

“No one knows for certain how much of the planet’s private wealth is parked in tax havens,” says the CBC. “One estimate is that there’s $32 trillion stashed offshore; a more conservative calculation puts it at a minimum of $8 trillion. Either way, that means tens – if not hundreds – of billions of dollars in lost tax revenues for the world’s governments.”

A massive investigate project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists saw reporters dig through 2.5 million files, revealing “the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.”

The leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike.

ICIJ’s investigation is an incredibly thorough look at the global tax game, one played by “the wife of Russia’s deputy prime minister,” “Indonesian billionaires with ties to the late dictator Suharto,” along with “American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.”

Talk of tax havens, loopholes and secret bank accounts and international offices (not always illegal, mind you) comes up all the time when discussing how some extremely rich people or corporations avoid paying taxes. Perhaps you’re curious as to how this seemingly other world works. To that end, the CBC has put together a fun interactive that lets you walk through the steps of how to set up your own tax haven, everything from picking the kind of sham business you want, picking your favorite tax-friendly nation, and deciding whether to use your own name on the documents of one of a “nominee.”

No one is recommending that you actually do this. While holding money in offshore accounts, setting up businesses overseas and many of the other routes taken to hiding money from the tax collectors are not in themselves inherently illegal, moving money in and out of these holdings in ways that allow you to skirt taxes are, meaning that there’s little reason to go to all the effort if you just plan to keep things above board.

More from Smithsonian.com:

In 2010 $600 Million in Guns and Ammo Were Exported from the US
Artists File Taxes Too!
The Man Who Busted the ‘Banksters’

Photo: entendered

Thieves are plundering Europe’s museums of their rhino horns and elephant tusks. First it was Haslemere Educational Museum and Norwich Castle Museum in England, then the Florence Museum of Natural History. Overall, the Guardian reports, more than twenty museums and auction houses in Britain, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Belgium have lost tusks and horns to poachers looking to turn a quick profit. Last weekend, Paris’ Museum of Natural History came close to becoming the latest member to join this growing list. The Guardian reports: 

Police were called to the museum in the early hours of Saturday morning where they found a chainsaw still whirring after a man in his 20s escaped over a wall with a tusk over his shoulder.

The thief, startled by the museum’s alarm system, tried to make a quick break for it but wound up fracturing his ankle.

The elephant in question once belonged to King Louis XIV. The animal was a gift from the Portuguese king in 1668 and was much beloved by Louis XIV and his visitors.

It lived for 13 years in the royal menagerie in the grounds of the opulent palace of Versailles where it became the star attraction. When it died, its skeleton was transferred to the natural history collection in Paris, one of the biggest in the world alongside London’s Natural History Museum.

The tusks, in fact, were added to the skeleton in the 19th century. The wildlife black market isn’t paying for historical value, though; buyers are purportedly interested in the value of animal parts in traditional Chinese medicinal. Elephant tusks currently fetch hundreds of dollars per pound while rhino horns go for much higher prices.

The Parisien museum curators say they’ll restore the sawed off horn to its rightful place. Curators at other institutions, such as London’s Natural History Museum, are not taking any chances, however. They replaced their horns two years ago with fakes.

More from Smithsonian.com:

State Department Takes on Illegal Wildlife Trade 
China Covertly Condones Trade in Tiger Bones and Skins 

Image: Jerry Knight

If you grew up in a house that got the funny pages, you might remember Garfield the cat. And you might remember thinking that he was…not that funny. Well, it turns out you’re not as humorless as you might have thought. Unlike New Yorker cartoons, in which you are actually missing the joke, Garfield is not even designed to be funny.

On Quora, someone asked this question and got a surprisingly interesting response from a woman who used to be bombarded with licensing proposals from none other than Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield. She dug up this Slate article that suggests that Davis really had no intention of making the strip funny at all:

Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation  of Garfield. (Davis) carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was “a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character,” Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in theWashington Post. “And primarily an animal. … Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not.” So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn’t a strip for the nation’s 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.

…

The model for Garfield was Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, but not the funny Peanuts of that strip’s early years. Rather, Davis wanted to mimic the sunny, humorless monotony of Peanuts‘ twilight years. “After 50 years, Snoopy was still laying in that dog house, and rather than getting old, it actually has the opposite effect,” Davis told the Chicago Sun-Times last year during the press blitz for Garfield‘s 25th anniversary.

Caroline Zelonka, the intrepid Quora answerer, also argues that, even without the strip, Davis could make tons of money from Garfield.* She writes:

 The strip isn’t what’s important: what with the movies, plush toys, branded pet food, even the “Garfield Pizza Cafe” in Kuala Lumpur.

And it turns out the Peanuts creater Charles Schultz hated Garfield, according to one other answerer:

About 25 years ago I met a woman who worked for United Features Syndicate. UFS represented Peanuts as well as Garfield and countless other cartoons.

We got to talking and she told me a story about her early days with the syndicate. She was hired to work on Peanuts business (licensing, merchandising) and one of her first assignments was to fly out to Santa Rosa, California, where Charles Schulz lived, stay in his house for a week, and establish a good relationship. After a couple of days she was distraught because Schulz did not seem to be warming up to her. Might she lose her job? She tried harder to make him like her. Finally after another day or so he casually asked her, “What percentage of your time will be devoted to the Peanuts property?”

“One hundred percent,” she assured him. “I was hired to work only on Peanuts.”

She could see the ice cracking already. He gave her a relieved look and said, “GOOD. BECAUSE I THINK THAT CAT IS STUPID.”

By the end of the week they had a warm and trusting business relationship.

Other comedians have taken up the challenge of making Garfield funny. There’s the Lasagna Cat site, and the existential crisis of John in Garfield Minus Garfield.

Other people on the Quora answers have different takes on why Garfield has the elements of humor, but isn’t funny. Joshua Engel cites Aristotle, saying:

The strips aren’t exactly uproariously funny, but the fundamental building blocks of humor are there. It’s kind of Aristotelian, actually. From the Poetics:

Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type—not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.*

We can definitely quibble with Aristotle’s definition, but it’s the essence of Garfield. Jon is both ugly and defective, but not generally in a painful way. Aristotle’s definition of comedy relied just on our feeling superior to him.

But no matter how you slice the lasagna, Garfield just isn’t that funny, and Davis is still incredibly rich—something comedians, many of whom have the first part down, could take a lesson from.

*Updated: This post originally reported, in error, that new Garfield strips were no longer being published

More from Smithsonian.com:

Dinosaur Comics Stampede
Science Comics Rule the Web

A 16th century illustration depicting smallpox victims. Photo: Florentine Codex

Planning for a bio-terrorism smallpox attack, the U.S. government just bought up enough smallpox medication supplies to treat two million people.  But given that smallpox was eradicated in 1980 and that the only known remaining samples of the disease are kept under lock and key in the U.S. and Russia, the New York Times points out, some critics are crying foul over the $463 million the government shelled out for the vaccines.

Experts fear, though, that terrorists may have secret stockpiles of the virus or could figure out how to reengineer smallpox in the lab. Two million doses of treatment, the Times writes, could contain an outbreak in a large city in the event of terrorists dousing an airport or stadium with pathogens. But around 12 million doses would be needed to combat a nation-wide epidemic.

Others argue that the spending is a bit extravagant since the U.S. keeps a stockpile of around 300 million smallpox vaccines, compared to just 15 million in 2001.

Left untreated, smallpox kills a third of victims. But prominent experts say the danger is overblown. Because it can take up to two weeks before an infected person becomes seriously ill, and up to five more days before he or she begins to infect others, there is time to respond, they said.

Also, they said, by the time smallpox victims reach the infectious stage, when their pox are erupting, they are too sick to wander around. That is why outbreaks in schools or factories were nearly unheard of.

Smallpox was eradicated by “ring vaccination” — finding each case and vaccinating just the 50 to 200 people closest to it.

If there were a lage-scale bioterrorism attack using smallpox, health officials could move quickly, some experts say.

Even if the U.S. doesn’t really need all of those treatments and vaccines, however, experts point out to the Times that the medications could be use to help other nations in need who come under a smallpox attack, since only the U.S., Japan and Israel reportedly have enough vaccine to cover their entire populations.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Brief History of How Vaccines Work 
Battling Smallpox; Renovating Paris 

This mural, called “Slave Labour,” was cut from the wall and sent to an auction house in Miami. Photo: DeptfordJon

Over the weekend, a mural thought to be painted by famed street artist Banksy—who Smithsonian Magazine profiled recently—was set to go up for auction, expected to fetch a price between $500,000 and $700,000. The mural, says Reuters “was painted on a building occupied by Poundland Stores, a British retailer that sells various items for only a pound,” in a North London neighborhood.

The work, titled “Banksy: Slave Labour,” shows a young boy kneeling at a sewing machine with Union Jack bunting.

The mural appeared in 2012 during Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee celebrating her 60th year on the throne. The Poundland chain was a focal point of controversy in 2010 because of allegations it sold goods made by Indian children as young as 7.

Though Saturday’s auction was to include two Banksy pieces, both were pulled at the last minute amidst public controversy. The whole spectacle, says PetaPixel, raises interesting questions over the ownership of public art.

The auction house, reports the BBC, “says that it was acquired legally, and it will be sold legally.” Frederic Thut, the owner of the auction house, told the BBC that “the work was painted on the private wall, and the owner of a private wall can do whatever he wants with his own wall.”

PetaPixel:

If the Banksy sale does go through and end up fetching a sizable figure, we may soon find many other examples of famous street art installations being ripped out of their original “canvases” and sold to private art collectors.

In this instance, however, says the Associated Press, the local council “will now try to bring the artwork back to the community.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Story Behind Banksy