io9: fire

A Case of Spontaneous Combustion from 1916?

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:30:00 PDT

This photograph from 1916 is of a fire at the Treasury Dept.'s "Bureau of Engraving and Printing," presumably in Washington, D.C. Mysteriously, however, whomever labeled it described the fire as "spontaneous combustion."

We may never be sure what our anonymous archivist really meant by that. Perhaps an engraver suddenly burst into flames, setting the whole building on fire. Or maybe the building itself suddenly caught on fire for no reason. Either way, Dave posted this intriguing image on Shorpy (above), and a commenter noticed that it looked like this (below) present-day intersection in D.C., on Raoul Wallenburg Place.

via Shorpy

A World On Fire, As Seen From Space

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:16:37 PDT

Over the past few days, hundreds of wildfires in Laos, Burma and Thailand have grown so large that their smoke can be seen from space.

In this image taken by NASA today, you can see each fire marked in red, and smoke hovering over everything. NASA explains:

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite passed over head and captured this image. Scores of active fires (red outlines) were detected. During the winter dry season, intentional fires for agriculture, brush clearing, and trash disposal are common in Southeast Asia. Intentional fires also get out of control, however, and some of these fires could be accidental forest fires.

Here are more fires in India, below. This image was also taken today.

Fires in India via NASA, and fires in Laos via NASA.

What To Do With Thermite On a Friday

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:50:12 PST

So the thought police are on their way to your underground control chamber, and you need to erase your hard drives fast. They can break the crypto on your secret docs, and even if you overwrite them with a bunch of junk data, they've got forensic techniques that could pull an erased file out of a shark's ass. What do you do? Take Hackaday's advice, and use a little thermite.

Here's your hard drive. Stick that in your evidence case, authoritarian scum! In late September, Jason Rollette figured out the best way to preserve your Fourth Amendment right to privacy when the data police come knocking was to use the pyrotechnic mixture of aluminum powder and metal oxide known as thermite. Keep this in mind when the Terminators are coming too. Rollette writes:

Our goal was to completely destroy the drive while it was still in the computer case. The theoretical application is to destroy the disk at a moments notice so it won’t fall into the wrong hands. After testing multiple methods, placing about 1 pound of thermite in a clay flower pot and lighting from the drain hole in the bottom yielded the best results. This could easily be placed in the 5.25″ bays above the drive.

Good to know! Also, it just gives me a nice, visceral thrill to watch hard drives burn and explode after a long day slaving over a not-hot-enough keyboard.

How to: Thermite Hard Drive Destruction [via Hackaday]

Hurricane Ike as Seen from the International Space Station

Annalee Newitz — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 15:23:54 PDT

Here is the outer edge of Hurricane Ike, as seen from the International Space Station. The hurricane hit Texas yesterday, and news stories are claiming a fairly low death toll compared to the disastrous Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans in 2005. There have been just over 100 deaths reported so far. We hope it stays that way. But just to remind you that not all great disasters come from water and wind, we've got an amazing vintage photo for you below that looks like the post-hurricane apocalypse but is actually the result of the 1904 Baltimore fire.

This image was taken in the "electric railway powerhouse" after a fire ripped through Baltimore and destroyed about 1500 buildings over 70 city blocks. For those of us in the U.S. watching Ike rip through Texas, there's a comfort in knowing that our cities have been surviving disasters for a long time.

What's the worst disaster your city or town has survived?

Top image via ISS; bottom image via Shorpy (thanks Joshua Glenn!).

The Periodic Table of Elements, in Videos

Michael Reilly — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:00:00 PDT

What do you get when you mix a frizzy-haired, grandfatherly chemist with his younger, cackling, explosion-loving sidekick? The Periodic Table of Videos! Put together by a team at the University of Nottingham in the UK, this gargantuan effort of 118 short vids chronicled everything from Hydrogen (very explosive) to Oxygen (also very explosive) to Sodium (not explosive...until you add water!) on down the list all the way to Ununoctium, element 118, of which only three atoms have ever been observed. Check out the oxygen pyrotechnics below.

With over a hundred videos to choose from, there are going to be plenty of highlights to choose from. Make sure you hit the explosive vids (as noted above), as well as Mercury and Helium — no bangs there, but with Hg, Peter License talks about how he used to "play football (soccer) with it with our fingers back in school. We don't do that now because we care about our safety."

Take some time and noodle around through this awesome treasure trove of video chemistry, and whenever you find Peter License (he of the cackling) with a matchstick in his hand, you know a ball of fire is soon to follow. That's usually spliced in with Martyn Poliakoff soothingly delivering interesting tidbits about whatever element you're watching.

Source: The Periodic Table of Videos, via Creative Synthesis

Underground Fires that Burn For Decades

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:00:00 PDT

Sometimes a fire just won't go out. Uzbekistan is home to a place called Darvaz, nicknamed by locals "the door to hell." It's a semi-underground gas fire that's been burning nonstop for 35 years. Find out why, and see some close-up pictures of this hellmouth after the jump, plus another fire in Pennsylvania that has also been burning underground for over 30 years.

English Russia explains in a way that totally sounds like it could be dialog ripped from Alias:

The story of this place lasts already for 35 years. Once the geologists were drilling for gas. Then suddenly during the drilling they have found an underground cavern, it was so big that all the drilling site with all the equipment and camps got deep deep under the ground. None dared to go down there because the cavern was filled with gas. So they ignited it so that no poisonous gas could come out of the hole, and since then, it's burning, already for 35 years without any pause.

In the city of Centralia, Pennsylvania, locals accidentally ignited a huge coal mine that snaked underneath the town. Nobody knows for sure how or when it started, but many believe it was due to people burning rubbish near the entrance to the closed mine. Though many tried to put it out, the fire raged for most of the 1960s and some of the 1970s when the ground started collapsing and the roads began to buckle, like in this picture. A gas station owner discovered that the temperature in his underground tanks was hot enough to be extremely dangerous.

So the town was evacuated, and only a handful of holdouts live there still. Centralia's zip code has been rescinded, and the highway now routes around it. It's a ghost town. A ghost town that's still on fire.

Door to Hell (plus crazy video!) [English Russia]
The Burning Remains of Centralia [Damn Interesting] (Thanks, Wishnevsky!)

Buy Yourself A Truck-Eating Robocar

Kevin Kelly — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 08:40:30 PST

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! ROBOSAURUS LIVE! Ever felt like yelling that in a crowd? Now you can if you just purchase this real-life Robosaurus and a simple PA system. The 42-foot tall, car-eating, Transform-tastic, fire-breathing, automobile-automaton can be parked in your very own backyard. Find out how you can get the keys to the behemoth who was parodied as Truckasaurus on The Simpsons.

The owners of Robosaurus have decided to put the dragon-like robot car up for purchase because they're retiring him from car shows, the giant robot's bread and butter. Starting January 19th, Robosaurus and all of his materials will be up for auction. If you've been saving your pennies for a rainy day and you want a transforming robot that you can drive, this is it.

You can find out everything you need to know about Robosaurus at his private robo-website, and study up on what you'll need to know about the steely beast, even the tooth engineering. Plus, if you're thinking that you'd love to buy him, but you don't have any way to get him home... not to worry. He transforms into a fully functional tractor-trailer, Optimus Prime style.

Shiny, Badass Fire Fighting Machine for the Year 2025

Kevin Kelly — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:45:31 PST

Now this is a fire engine that kids from 5 to 105 would like to see under the Christmas tree next year. How sleek and shiny does this thing look? Instead of the boxy fire fighting vehicles of the past, this baby looks streamlined enough to win a race or two as well as do some good.

Artist Harald Belker created this red racer as a piece of concept art for a Fahrenheit 451 feature film that was canceled after a few weeks of development. It's a shame too, because we would have bought the toy version of this firetruck for sure. We just hope that all those rounded edges don't mean they'll be cutting corners when it comes to safety.

We thought fires in the future would be fought with foam-dispensing hoverpods and wormhole-powered oxygen suppression systems, but if the engines are going to look this great, then by all means keep all four wheels on the ground.