A flesh-eating fungus is on the rise in the US Midwest
From the Washington Post: "At some point, Erik McIntyre inhaled the fungal spores. He couldn’t see them, or feel them, and it was weeks before he began to lose energy, to drop weight, to cough up blood at a karaoke bar in Arizona. Now he’s paralyzed from Valley fever, in a nursing home at age 53. The antifungal injections are less frequent now, and the lesions where the fungus grew on his face and arms have faded. But he knows he will never walk again. Valley fever has long haunted the American Southwest: Soldiers, construction workers, and prisoners have all encountered the fungus. But the threat is growing. Cases have roughly quadrupled over the past two decades."
Why are there murals of angels holding guns in this Bolivian town?
From Amy Crawford for Atlas Obscura: "About an hour and a half south of La Paz, Bolivia, the town of Calamarca is in many ways a typical colonial settlement, a grid of houses and shops centered around a circa 1600 Baroque church that overlooks a small plaza. Inside this church, however, a remarkable gathering of angels has made the town a destination. Dressed in lace, feathers, and gold brocade—finery that resembled that of the Indigenous elites who administered Spanish colonial rule—these celestial beings are androgynous, posing like dancers with their wings discretely held behind them. What startles the viewer is that they are also bristling with weaponry: Each is armed with a musket—specifically, an arquebus, a common infantry gun of the 16th century."
It was the largest man-made explosion until the atomic bomb came along
From Dan Lewis for Now I Know: "On December 6, 1917, the SS Imo, an empty Norwegian passenger and freight ship, and France’s SS Mont Blanc, collided in the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Mont Blanc, which was loaded with munitions, caught fire; twenty minutes later the ship exploded, with an intensity roughly one-fifth that of the atomic bomb which struck Hiroshima. The Mont Blanc itself was instantly vaporized; a fire plume shot up over a mile in the air. The blast was so powerful that a half-ton piece of the ship’s anchor shaft shot through the skies, landing over two miles away. More than 2,000 people were killed."
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