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  The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana

  Posted: August 24th, 2009, 1:11pm EDT by Matt Castle

  Tags:  Miscellaneous  

  The humble banana almost seems like a miracle of nature. Colourful, nutritious, and much cherished by children, monkeys and clowns, it has a favoured position in the planet’s fruitbowls. The banana is vitally important in many regions of the tropics, where different parts of the plant are used for clothing, paper and tableware, and where the fruit itself is an essential dietary staple. People across the globe appreciate the soft, nourishing flesh, the snack-sized portions, and the easy-peel covering that conveniently changes colour to indicate ripeness. Individual fruit—or fingers—sit comfortably in the human hand, readily detached from their close-packed companions. Indeed, the banana appears almost purpose-designed for efficient human consumption and distribution. It is difficult to conceive of a more fortuitous fruit. The banana, however, is a freakish and fragile genetic mutant; one that has survived through the centuries due to the sustained application of selective breeding by diligent humans. Indeed, the "miraculous" banana is far from being a no-strings-attached gift from nature. Its cheerful appearance hides a fatal flaw— one that threatens its proud place in the grocery basket. The banana’s problem can be summed up in a single word: sex.
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  The Wrath of the Killdozer

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 3:05pm EDT by Jason Bellows

  Tags:  Miscellaneous  

  Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado was a profoundly frustrated muffler repair man. In the late 1990s--after years of protests, petitions, and town meetings--it became obvious to the 52-year-old that he was entwined in a gross miscarriage of justice. His business was ruined by some shady zoning changes, and Heemeyer contended that mayor and city council were corrupt. Even as he was forced to give up his legal fight and sell his land, he hatched one last plan to secretly retool his muffler shop to serve a single malevolent purpose: to construct a machine that would allow him to exact his revenge upon those who had wronged him.
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  Steely-Eyed Hydronauts of the Mariana

  Posted: July 21st, 2009, 6:17pm EDT by Alan Bellows

  Tags:  Miscellaneous  

  On 21 December 1872, the British naval corvette HMS Challenger sailed from Portsmouth, England on an historic endeavor. Although the sophisticated steam-assisted sailing vessel had been originally constructed as a combat ship, her instruments of war has been recently removed to make room for laboratories, dredging equipment, and measuring apparatuses. She and her crew of 243 sailors and scientists set out on a long, meandering circumnavigation of the globe with orders to catalog the ocean's depth, temperature, salinity, currents, and biology at hundreds of sites--an oceanographic effort far more ambitious than any undertaken before it. For three and a half long, dreary years the crew spent day after day dredging, measuring, and probing the oceans. Although the data they collected was scientifically indispensable, men were driven to madness by the tedium, and some sixty souls ultimately opted to jump ship rather than take yet another depth measurement or temperature reading. One day in 1875, however, as the crew were "sounding" an area near the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, the sea swallowed an astonishing 4,575 fathoms (about five miles) of measuring line before the sounding weight reached the floor of the ocean. The bedraggled researchers had discovered an undersea valley which would come to be known as the Challenger Deep. Reaching 6.78 miles at its lowest point, it is now know to be the deepest location on the whole of the Earth. The region is of such immense depth that if Mount Everest were to be set on the sea floor at that location, the mighty mountain's peak would still be under more than a mile of water. Nothing was known of what organisms and formations might lurk at such depths. Many scientists of the day were convinced that such crevasses must be lifeless places considering the immense pressure, relative cold, total lack of sunlight, and presumed absence of oxygen. It would be almost a century before a handful of explorers finally resolved to go down there and take a look for themselves.
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  Something’s Afoot at Damn Interesting

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 5:54am EDT by Alan Bellows

  Tags:  Announcements  

  A foot.We at Damn Interesting are happy to announce that we have officially returned from our spontaneous hiatus. One might describe the sensation as “delighted” if one were prone to fits of gleeful hyperbole. We also bring news: The Damn Interesting book Alien Hand Syndrome is now available at fine bookstores everywhere. Discerning [...]
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  The Total Perspective Vortex

  Posted: January 16th, 2009, 11:37am EST by Christopher S. Putnam

  Tags:  Gray Matter  

  Despite rumors to the contrary, we will be back as soon as we are able. In the meantime, please enjoy this very appropriate entry from our archives (which was originally published on 14 June 2007). Most people think of the “mentally disordered” as a delusional lot, holding bizarre and irrational ideas about themselves and the [...]
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  Living in the Moment

  Posted: December 6th, 2008, 3:14am EST by Alan Bellows

  Tags:  History  

  In memory of the infamous and mysterious “H.M.”–who sadly passed away last Tuesday–we re-post this elderly article from the archives. R.I.P., H.M. This article was originally published on 06 June 2007. “I don’t remember things,” Henry explained to the unfamiliar female interviewer. She seemed very curious about how he spends a typical day, and [...]
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  A Series of Unfortunate Hacks

  Posted: November 21st, 2008, 7:15am EST by Alan Bellows

  Tags:  Announcements  

  For the past several weeks, Damn Interesting has been repeatedly violated by a gaggle of Russian hackers. Their strange probes sought out all unprotected orifices of our elderly version of WordPress, and injected each one with a caustic slurry of pharmaceutical links and online casino spam. We erected a brisk and makeshift defense, [...]
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  The Remains of Doctor Bass

  Posted: November 6th, 2008, 12:08pm EST by Alan Bellows

  Tags:  Medical Science  

  Please enjoy this regurgitated article as we scramble to deal with a parade of unrelated but time-consuming crises. This item was originally published on 29 October 2007. Dr. Bill Bass, forensic anthropologistUnder normal circumstances, one would expect a wandering throng of students to demonstrate animated displeasure upon encountering a human corpse in the woods; particularly [...]
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  In Soviet Russia, Lake Contaminates You

  Posted: October 17th, 2008, 1:36pm EDT by Alan Bellows

  Tags:  History  

  In late 1945, along the banks of the Techa River in the Soviet Union, a dozen labor camps sent 70,000 inmates to begin construction of a secret city. Mere months earlier the United States’ Little Boy and Fat Man bombs had flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving Soviet leaders salivating over the massive power of [...]
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  Mediterranean be Dammed

  Posted: September 25th, 2008, 10:23pm EDT by Jason Bellows

  Tags:  History  

  In the 1920’s the people of Europe feared the future as a dark, despairing place. Despite the loss of over five million Europeans in the Great War, the region was still plagued with the social maladies which had led to the conflict. The humans were maladjusted to the Industrial Age and the changes in [...]