More from damm interesting

[TheMercenary]

Lucid Decapitation
Written by Alan Bellows on July 9th, 2008 at 1:01 am
From DamnInteresting.com
On 08 April 2006, we published this article. Due to some kind of violation of the space-time continuum, it has appeared again on our front page instead of the shiny new article we had hoped for. Imagine our surprise!

For thousands of years, the forceful removal of the human head has been used as a form of capital punishment. In fact, the word "capital" in the context of punishment was coined to describe execution by decapitation, derived from the Latin word caput, which means "head." Since the very beginnings of the practice, there has been much speculation and debate regarding the length of time that the head can remain conscious after its removal. Many argue that a beheaded person will almost instantly lose consciousness due to a massive drop in blood pressure in the brain, and/or the heavy impact of the decapitation device. But there are countless eyewitness reports in history describing a few moments of apparent awareness in the victim.

Beheading has been discontinued as a form of execution in much of the world due to the suspicion that a severed head remains conscious and able to experience pain, so there have been no recent scientific observations of human decapitation. However studies of decapitated animals has lent some credibility to the massive number of stories regarding a head's brief consciousness after being separated from the body. Under certain circumstances, it is very possible that a head so removed may remain lucid long enough to know its fate.

Continued:
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=495#more-495

[TheMercenary]

And another very good one:

The Pit of Life and Death
Written by Richard Solensky on July 1st, 2008 at 3:09 pm
From DamnInteresting.com
Just outside Butte, Montana lies a pit of greenish poison a mile and a half wide and over a third of a mile deep. It hasn't always been so - it was once a thriving copper mine appropriately dubbed “The Richest Hill in the World.” Over a billion tons of copper ore, silver, gold, and other metals were extracted from the rock of southwestern Montana, making the mining town of Butte one of the richest communities in the country, as well as feeding America’s industrial might for nearly a hundred years. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Anaconda Mining Company was in charge of virtually all the mining operations. When running underground mines became too costly in the 1950’s, Anaconda switched to the drastic but effective methods of “mountaintop removal” and open pit mining. Huge amounts of copper were needed to satisfy the growing demand for radios, televisions, telephones, automobiles, computers, and all the other equipment of America’s post-war boom. As more and more rock was excavated, groundwater began to seep into the pit, and pumps had to be installed to keep it from slowly flooding.

By 1983, the hill was so exhausted that the Anaconda Mining Company was no longer able to extract minerals in profitable amounts. They packed up all the equipment that they could move, shut down the water pumps, and moved on to more lucrative scraps of Earth. Without the pumps, rain and groundwater gradually began to collect in the pit, leaching out the metals and minerals in the surrounding rock. The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

In 1995, an analytic chemist named William Chatham saw something unusual in the allegedly lifeless lake: a small clump of green slime floating on the water's surface. He snagged a sample and brought it to biologist Grant Mitman at the nearby Montana Tech campus of the University of Montana, where Mitman found to his amazement that the goop was a mass of single-celled algae. He called in fellow Tech faculty Andrea and Don Stierle, experts in the biochemistry of microorganisms. The Stierles had recently been trekking about the northwest, looking for cancer-fighting compounds in local fungi with great success. Coincidentally, the Stierles’ funding had just run out, and they needed a new project. They leapt at the opportunity to study these bizarre organisms.

continued
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=961

[Griff]

That pit story really is damn interesting.

[TheMercenary]

It lends credence to the fact that there are still good people out there trying to do good work for others at great expense and effort. Bravo.

[jinx]

Be nice if he'd (Alan/Hot Pastrami) stop in occasionally....