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Photo: Adolf Northern, Wikicommons

200 years ago, Napoleon’s army took on the Russians in the Battle of Maloyaroslavets. Though a French victory, the battle marked a major strategic setback, as the Russians moved to block Napoleon’s path of retreat out of their country. In the end, only 10,000 Frenchmen out of an initial half a million made it out of Russia alive.

Why did this happen? Historians still puzzle over this military catastrophe today, Big Think reports, but a new theory points to an unlikely culprit: the army’s buttons.

Ainissa Ramirez, a materials scientist at Yale University, explains that the bonding structure of tin atoms begins to change when temperatures drop below 56°F, and tin was the major metal used to make buttons in the French army’s uniforms. As the severe Russian temperatures approached -30°C, the buttons may have turned to dust.

In other words, the harsh Russian winter, combined with the chemical properties of tin, may have led to “the greatest wardrobe malfunction in history.”

Here, Ramirez explains the unfortunate gaff, plus some fun facts about tin:

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Photo: Flickr user *Psycho Delia*

Since August, bees around the town of Ribeauville in northeastern France have been turning up with abdomens swollen in colors of blue and green, an unnatural rainbow that is also reflected in the color of their honey. Now, beekeepers are pointing fingers at a nearby biogas plant that processes waste from an M&M’s factory.

Though the colorful honey seems to taste identical to the normal amber variety, the apiculturalists are not amused. ”For me, it’s not honey. It’s not sellable,” one bee keeper told Reuters.

The company in question said they’ve adopted new cleaning procedures to try and deter sugar-seeking bees and that they will also start to store incoming candy waste in a covered hall.

The curious case of the blue and green honey recalls a similar incident in New York City in 2010, when some local Brooklyn and Governor’s Island bees began producing honey in “a garish bright red,” according to the New York Times. The culprit? Red Dye No. 40 from the Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company.

The Times pointed out the sinister irresistibility of such sweet treats for both bees and humans alike:

Could the tastiest nectar, even close by the hives, compete with the charms of a liquid so abundant, so vibrant and so cloyingly sweet? Perhaps the conundrum raises another disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist those three qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?

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Images of Paris the researchers used to tease out the city’s essence. Photo: SIGGRAPH 2012

Software developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University automatically identifies key elements of any city, in this case honing in on Paris’ emblematic street signs, balustrade window and balcony supports and street lamps. When the same program is run on data from London, it singles out the ubiquitous neoclassical entryways, Victorian windows and cast iron railings that make London ‘London.’

The researchers point out that any resident or visitor to the City of Light, for example, would likely agree that certain elements contribute to the city feeling remarkably, well, Parisian. These may include promenades along the Seine; the ever-present Tabac signs; the towering plane trees lining the classy boulevards and reflecting the changing seasons. Indeed, most major metropolises have a certain individualized ‘feel’ about them. But even if these features are all around, it may be difficult for a human observer to list exactly which ones create that unique aesthetic

The researchers used a machine learning program to chew through more than 250 million visual elements gleaned from 40,000 Google Street View images of Paris, London, New York, Barcelona and other major cities. After crunching the data, the program presented at a set of geo-informative visual elements unique to each city, including New York’s fire escapes and San Francisco’s bay windows.

They admit that this analysis requires a significant amount of computing time, keeping 150 processors working overnight. But this may be preferable that running around a city taking snapshots for a week straight, as Pixar’s art directors did in Paris for “Ratatouille.”

And the authors’ ambitions don’t stop with movies. In a statement, they declared, ”In the long run, we wish to automatically build a digital visual atlas of not only architectural but also natural geo-informative features for the entire planet.”

Here, they explain a bit more about how their software works:

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A French postcard issued around 1900, predicting La France’s future. Photo: WikiCommons

Well, perhaps not. But visionary postcard artists like Jean-Marc Côté are allowed to dream. As the Public Domain Review points out, Côté and others illustrated around 90 of fanciful cards between 1899 to 1910 that imagined what the future held in store for France in the year 2000. Amongst their predictions were flying fire fighters and postmen, books that can be loaded directly into students’ brains and underwater croquet. Of course, they also envisioned machines that automatically cleaned laundry and aviation police, ideas that turned out not to be so crazy after all.

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Photos: reverendtheef & Mellagi

July 24 marks double jackpot for the intrepid explorers of years past, as well for as fans of the trend in “ruin porn.” The fine city of Detroit was founded 311 years ago, and the spectacular ‘lost city of the Incas,’ Machu Picchu, was “discovered” on this day 101 years ago. Little did the explorers know as they were hacking through the bush or laying their first stakes that their grand achievements would become staples of Tumblr’s latest pic fad. But before the rot and decay, before the industry crashes and hoards of backpack-toting tourists, there were two men: the self-absorbed, swindling Cadillac and the buccaneering womanizer Hiram Bingham.

History Today has the scoop on both of these celebratory explorers:

A French settler with a promising future ahead of him was Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac, a Gascon adventurer of tremendous charm and matching unscrupulousness, in his forties. He added de Lamothe Cadillac to his name to make himself sound aristocratic, equipped himself with a bogus pedigree, coat of arms and army commission, and concealed his origins so effectively that his early life has remained obscure ever since.

Cadillac made his splash in the New World scene in the 1680s and immediately got busy illegally selling Brandy to the Native Americans and taking bribes from the rowdy beaver pelt traders.

In order to better exploit this trade, he talked the French authorities into letting him found a new settlement – Detroit! – situated between Lake Erie and Lake Saint Clair.

A small settlement developed, though both the colonists and the local Indians objected to Cadillac’s tyrannical and extortionate administration. In 1710, more or less in disgrace, he was packed off to be governor of Louisiana, which was considered a thoroughly undesirable post.

Cadillac eventually escaped the mosquitoes, ending his days in the comfort of his native Gascony. Besides establishing Motown, his legend lived on for years as his fake coat of arms adorned generations of Cadillac cars.

Fast forward 200 years and meet Hiram Bingham, a Hawaiian-born explorer who preferred football to missionary work. After attaining a pedigree degree at Harvard, Bingham married an heiress of Tiffany’s jewelry and promptly used his wife’s fortune to fund exploratory galavants through South America. His lady was left at home, of course, and his enthusiasm for exploration reportedly extended to foreign women as well as ancient ruins.

In 1911, pursuing whispered rumors of a lost city, he hit the motherload in Peru.

They soon came to what Bingham called ‘an unexpected sight, a great flight of beautifully constructed stone terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and 10 feet high.’

The ruins were overgrown by trees, bamboo thickets and tangles of vines and covered with moss, but the white granite walls were ‘carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together’ and the scene ‘fairly took my breath away.’

He took thousands of photos and carted boxes and boxes of temple objects back to North America, exposing Machu Picchu to the Western world. (Incidentally, he believed until his death that he had discovered a different lost city, Vilcabamba.) Eventually, his wife came to her senses and divorced him.

Today, we celebrate Detroit and Machu Picchu as icons of ruin porn; as meditations on bygone eras, on lives and dreams lost to the weight of history. We love the wistful nostalgia and crumbling romanticism of Detroit’s ruined factories and Machu Picchu’s moss-covered splendor precisely because they remind us of our own inevitable decline, a meditation that is both thrilling and terrifying to contemplate, but that, apparently, we can’t get enough of.

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