If the sky fell,

we’d be royally screwed:

All the oxygen, nitrogen and other stuff in Earth’s atmosphere has a whopping combined mass of 5 quadrillion tons, so a falling sky would mean that nearly 10 tons of molecules — roughly the heft of a school bus — would drop on every square meter of Earth’s surface.

Or better still—instead of the sky falling on us, what if it suddenly disappeared?

As all the birds and airborne insects plummeted to the ground around us like rocks, lacking an atmosphere to beat their wings against, and as the world fell eerily mute, lacking the air that normally carries sound, we would all die of oxygen deprivation in less than three minutes.

The site is called Life’s Little Mysteries. It is extraordinary.

To live alone, in paradise, with tortoises…

I am flabbergasted. 

Included in the history of chairs…

…was this interesting tidbit:

After the Visigoths sacked Rome, their habits of squatting and sitting on the ground became the predominant ways for commoners to sit and until the Renaissance even wealthy feudal households had very little furniture because they had to keep moving around to avoid getting sacked themselves. The richest families would have had a single massive chair for the exclusive use of the master of the house; this chair was typically too heavy to move (to keep it from getting stolen when the house got sacked). Tables were boards on trestles, which were set up in front of the chair rather than the other way around, a practice that we still reference today in the phrase “chairman of the board.”

Ladies and gentlemen,

Cornelia Konrads

But … don’t you want to cure cancer, or something?

A board-certified anesthesiologist with a medical degree from the University of North Carolina, Dr. Burke is, according to his website, the “first physician in the United States to formally dedicate his career to the treatment of hangovers.”

Earlier this month, he unveiled his new treatment clinic, a 45-foot-long tour bus emblazoned with soothing blue and white graphics and his business’s name, “Hangover Heaven.” Inside the bus, it looks like a cross between an ambulance and a conference room at Embassy Suites. IV drips hang from the ceiling, patients are swathed in blankets, but there are also spacious leather sofas with built-in beverage-holders and flat-screen TVs. EMTs administer relief to patients in the form of branded medical cocktails. The $90 Redemption package contains one bag of saline solution, vitamins, and an anti-nausea medication. The $150 Salvation package includes a double shot of saline solution, the vitamins, the anti-nausea medication and an anti-inflammatory as well.

Ludicrous. 

YYEEESSSSSSSS

The largest-ever study of coffee drinkers find those who imbibe are less likely to die.

If the Earth orbited the sun “upright”

at a 90º angle to its orbital plane, the sun would never set at the poles, and instead endlessly circle the horizon.

But we have a tilt. Interestingly, the tilt changes each year. The Tropics of Cancer and Capricon—the northern- and southernmost points where it’s possible to stand under the sun without casting a shadow—are moving 15 meters closer to the poles with each passing year.

WOOF.

More than a quarter of all the meat produced worldwide is now eaten in China, and the country’s 1.35 billion people are hungry for more. In 1978, China’s meat consumption of 8 million tons was one third the U.S. consumption of 24 million tons. But by 1992, China had overtaken the United States as the world’s leading meat consumer—and it has not looked back since. Now China’s annual meat consumption of 71 million tons is more than double that in the United States. With U.S. meat consumption falling and China’s consumption still rising, the trajectories of these two countries are determining the shape of agriculture around the planet.