Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 282
March 28, 2019
A Black Belt Does Not Mean Mastery
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
While obtaining a black belt in the martial arts is a huge accomplishment, the recipient is not a master of the art. In fact, the rank is just the beginning of the journey towards mastery.
In many styles of martial arts, it takes four to five years to obtain the rank of black belt, which in Japanese is called “shodan.” This translates to “first step.”
If you examine the Japanese kanji for shodan, the left side of the symbol for “sho” means clothing. The right side of the symbol means sword or knife. When making clothes, the first step is cutting out the material. Therefore, the kanji translates to “begin.”
The right side of the symbol for “dan” means action or movement. The left side of the symbol means ability, skill, grade or rank. Together, the symbols for “sho” and “dan” represent the first senior rank a student achieves in martial arts.
In the Korean martial art Tang Soo Do, students are promoted to a navy blue/midnight blue belt instead of a black belt. The reason is because the color black does not change when more color is added to it; it stays black. However, more color can be added to midnight blue to make it darker—just as more knowledge can be added to a Tang Soo Do practitioner’s repertoire. He or she never stops learning, practicing, or improving their techniques.
A student who earns a black belt has learned their basic blocks, kicks, and punches. He or she has become proficient in the self-defense aspects of the art in which they practice. Yet, there is still much to master.* Just like a student who graduates from high school, additional training is needed to gain a more in-depth understanding of the subject.
Children and adults of all ages have obtained the rank of black belt. In 2009, a five-year-old Indian child named Varsha Vinod became the youngest girl in the world to achieve the rank of black belt. She began studying Bunjinkai karate at the age of two. It’s impossible for anyone to be master a martial art after just three years of training, particularly one who is so young. Mastery is defined as having “a comprehensive knowledge or skill in a subject or accomplishment.”
Vinod may have had a firm grasp on executing her style’s techniques, but that’s far from knowing everything there is to know about karate. It takes years to grasp many of the nuances in martial art techniques. In addition to being able to skillfully perform various stances, blocks, attacks, joint locks, etc., you need to know each and every application. You also need to learn the history. All of this cannot be mastered after just a few years of practice.
Training doesn’t stop after achieving the rank of first-degree black belt. Many students work their way up to a second-degree black belt, third-degree black belt, and so on. They recognize that there is still much to learn mentally and physically even after they first tie their black belt around their waists.
By Noelle Talmon, contributor for Ripleys.com
*This writer is a fifth-degree black belt in Tang Soo Do, having achieved the master instructor rank after 20 years of training. She also holds the rank of first-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and Chon-Tu Kwan Hapkido. She is still learning.
March 27, 2019
How Do Some Animals Achieve Biological Immortality?
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Immortality has been sought by mankind for millennia, but the secrets may not lie in sorcerous stones or face creams. Believe it or not, some organisms exhibit this oft-sought trait. The oldest known individual lifeforms on Earth were born nearly 5,000 years ago, and some sealife has the ability to seemingly reverse the aging process!
Biological immortality doesn’t mean that an organism can’t die, but instead means that they aren’t more likely to die the older they get.
A similar, perhaps more apt term for this trait, is negligible senescence. This is used to describe life that does not appear to biologically age.
Turtles and tortoises were long thought to be biologically immortal because of their long lifespans and reproductive health well into old age. Perhaps the greatest example is a tortoise on the island of Santa Cruz, in the Galapagos, named Diego. Diego was one of just two males on the island in the 1970s. Despite being over a hundred years old, he is now responsible for more than 800 offspring on the island.
Tortoises have since become a grey area in the world of biological immortality since some researchers suggest an eventual—albeit slow—loss of fitness in old age. Some species suspected of biological immortality are suspected to just age too slowly for modern science to accurately observe them losing steam. True biological immortals, however, all seem to have a trick to their longevity.
Bristlecone Pines
A tree in the White Mountains of eastern California has lived for more than 5,000 years. It was alive long before the appearance of Egyptian hieroglyphics and stood through the rise and fall of the Greek, Roman, and Mongolian empires. It stands today, surrounded by a handful of other bristlecone pines that are nearly as old. These trees have weathered eons of abuse, situated in the cold, windy, and dry basin of the White Mountains. They grow so slowly in this harsh environment that some years don’t even add up to a ring of growth. Their expansion, however, means they are incredibly dense—so dense that pests and fungus find it almost impossible to affect them. Though their trunks may seem gnarled and twisted, scientists have observed through pollen analysis that their interior cells are identical to when they were thousands of years younger.
Quaking Aspens
Another tree—this one spread across Canada—achieves immortality not by weathering time with slow growth, but by cloning itself! A quaking aspen tree may appear to die, but that’s actually just one of many trunks shared by a single root system. This particular tree may have multiple trunks above the ground at once and continues to produce new ones as the old ones expire. Though experts say this theoretically makes them immortal, they do note that the trees suffer mutations over time, and may eventually lose the ability to proliferate through pollen.
Ming the Clam
When scientists found a 507-year-old clam in the North Atlantic, dubbed Ming, they began considering quahog clams a candidate for biological immortality. Though the clam had lived since the 15th-century, biologists didn’t get much of chance to study it, because Ming died while they were performing a recount of his growth ridges. Ming’s secret to immortality may have been lost, but the researchers did note that Ming was one of just a small sample of clams taken, and that there are likely even older ones still at large.
Lobster
Lobsters are perhaps one of the most well understood biological immortals. Aging, in most organisms, is accompanied by a decay of telomeres. Telomeres, simply, protect the ends of DNA. As we age, however, these telomeres wear away, and eventually, DNA loses functionality as it can be more easily damaged. Lobsters, however, have a compound that restores their telomeres.
Lobsters clocking in over 100 years old are fairly common, and the creatures continue to grow for much of this time. Unfortunately, though a lobster’s DNA is immortal, their exoskeletons become increasingly dangerous as they get older. Most old lobsters die from exhaustion when molting their old shells, and the oldest lobsters eventually stop molting all together. Their shells aren’t meant to last forever, though, and will eventually degrade.
Hydra
Hydra, a tiny soft-bodied animal that lives in freshwater, exhibits no aging at all. Though these tiny organisms don’t usually survive for long in the wild, one kept in a lab lived for four years under close observation with no sign of aging. Possessing superior regenerative abilities, their tiny bodies are loaded with stem cells. Hydra also don’t reproduce sexually. Instead, they clone themselves. Seeking the secret to their amazing abilities, scientists experimented on hydra by removing certain proteins. One protein, called FoxO, was identified as the secret to their immortality. Without the protein, the hydra visibly aged.
Immortal Jellyfish
The aptly named immortal jellyfish doesn’t just appear to peak in maturity and live forever, but instead is able to reverse its development. Jellyfish actually go through a number of stages in their lifecycle from polyp to mature jellyfish. The immortal jellyfish, however, can actually revert back to its juvenile form from adulthood. No other jellyfish has been observed with this unique ability, and scientists compare it to a butterfly being able to change back to a caterpillar.
March 26, 2019
Vintage Football Protection Could Do More Harm Than Good
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
The first game of American football is said to have taken place on November 6th, 1869. Though it bore little resemblance to the sport showcased at the Super Bowl every year, it marked a departure from the mob sports of Europe, combining kicks and forward passing. As participation in the sport at East-coast schools grew, rules meant to standardize the game emerged. After six years of scattered play, Harvard faced off against Yale in what’s referred to as The Game.
Harvard and Yale renew their rivalry at The Game every year./CC Henry Trotter
Nearly 2,000 people showed up to spectate the first Harvard versus Yale game, and America’s love affair with football took root. While today’s teams are made up of professionals athletes practicing the sport nearly their whole lives, early football players were a smattering of elite college sportsmen arranged into teams where the rules were sometimes decided just before play. Though they would likely stand little chance against 312-pound linemen and 60-yard field goal kickers, turn of the century players had little of the modern technologies today’s players enjoy.
Before the advent of polycarbonate helmets equipped with face braces, impact indicator chin straps, and air pads, most players wore a simple leather cap—if anything at all. Believe it or not, it took 24 years of brutal injuries before anyone sought head protection. The first documented case of a football helmet being used in a game was in 1893. The helmet was worn by Joseph Reeves, who had a crude leather cap made by a local shoemaker because his doctor told him another kick to the head could be fatal.
Even with a handful of players beginning to take safety seriously, it wasn’t until 1943 that the National Football League required all players to wear helmets. Before that, the headgear was optional on the field!
While the official rules committees may not have taken head trauma seriously throughout the first half of the 1900s, players eventually did. As football became ever more popular, players became ever more valuable. A few shoemakers and butcher companies eventually began specializing in leather helmets.
Wilson Sporting Goods began as a meatpacking company. With ample access to leather, Thomas E. Wilson entered the sports world by manufacturing footballs and basketballs, but the leather helmet proved a much more competitive product. Designers had to balance protection and comfort. Ventilation became a major selling point, as a helmet was no good if a sweaty player decided to stop wearing it.
The helmet alone wasn’t enough to protect a player’s face, and helmets wouldn’t include face bars until 1955. Instead, some football players wore metal nose guards. While these guards may have protected the nose, the were likely to mangle a player’s teeth. The top of the guards had a strap to loop around the forehead, but the bottom was held in place with the lips and teeth. It inhibited breathing and could be more dangerous than it was worth. This example is made from metal, but rubber would eventually be introduced alongside chin braces to protect the wearer’s teeth.
Source: Vintage Football Protection Could Do More Harm Than Good
March 25, 2019
That Time Scientists Thought Lambs Grew On Trees
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Imagine the embarrassment we could all save ourselves, if we could see how silly some of our ideas would turn out to be before we committed to them.
At the same time, though, that would make for one heck of a boring world. Where would we be without brilliantly outlandish theories? The legend of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary is a prime example. For centuries, people believed that lambs were an odd sort of animal-plant hybrid that grew on trees!
Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees, But Apparently, Lambs Used To
Clearly, a good dose of context is in order with this one, so let’s start at the beginning. The Middle Ages were a long and puzzling period of history, stretching from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. It was a time of political upheaval, of endless strife and conflict; both within nations and on the world stage. It was a time of new discoveries and technologies, and science attempting to run to catch up with it all.
Needless to say, science often found itself sorely lacking. Theories that should have seemed absurd just couldn’t be disproved, gained traction and became widely accepted as truth. The bizarre Vegetable Lamb of Tartary is just one of them.
At the time, Tartary was the name of a great chunk of Central Asia/Europe. This, according to the stories, was where this very special creature could be found. There were believed to be two distinct varieties of Vegetable Lamb: a bizarre plant that produced tiny lambs inside pods, and an equally-bizarre hybrid creature that consisted of a whole, full-sized lamb, which lived suspended from the ground by a small stem!
The Origins Of The Myth
Needless to say, it’s not easy (and it’s certainly not practical) to be a strange, stem-suspended lamb-plant. The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary was said to be able to move around, in a limited way, from its stem, allowing it to graze on vegetation. When there was none left within its reach, the poor, freakish thing would starve and die. Its stem (think of it as a sort of nightmarish umbilical cord) was also vital to its survival, and should it be cut, it would also die.
Absurd as it may sound today, the legend of the Vegetable Lamb endured for… well, much longer than it probably had any real right to. It’s been traced all the way back to 436, with a reference in Rabbi Jochanan’s Talmud Ierosolimitanum. In this early text, the creature was referred to as Adne Hasadeh (‘Lords of the Field’). People seemed to have a thing for eating their delicious lords, though; it was said to be popular among hunters for “its delicate flesh that tasted like fish and blood as sweet as honey.”
It wasn’t an easy beast to hunt, however (even aside from the fact that it doesn’t actually exist), as some records state that it needed to be separated from its stem with perfect precision. This would be done with a bow and arrow from afar, apparently. Alternative takes on the tale speak of the Jadua, a similar mythical creature with the characteristics of a human which grew like a plant! This aggressive beast would use its stem to seize and attack any who strayed within its reach.
As outlandish as this all may seem, it wasn’t until the 16th century that anybody really questioned the existence of this mythical plant/animal hybrid. Italian thinker Girolamo Cardano argued in the 1550s that an undersoil environment would be too cold for a lamb to survive the growth process. Nevertheless, travelers and explorers continued to claim that they had seen the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary for themselves, and so the belief persisted for a little longer.
Cutting The Stem, Once And For All
In the 1600s, this strange belief was finally disproven. Sir Hans Sloane brought a very special plant to the Royal Society. This specimen from China was covered in a sort of down and had a number of odd “protuberances.” Sloane himself said that the plant appeared “to be shaped by art to imitate a lamb, the roots or climbing parts being made to resemble the body, and the extant foot-stalks the legs.”
In short, forgeries seemed to be fueling continued belief in the phenomenon. “The myth had simply arisen from overactive imaginations and faked specimens, and probably a fair number of wine binges on the trade routes, to be quite honest,” Wired concludes.
In the end, it’s important to note that this whole thing isn’t as peculiar as it may sound. After all, the people of Ancient Greece had never experienced cotton before, until discovering the “trees that bear wool” that are its source.
It’s not as simple as just a case of people of past eras not understanding the world, either. As recently as 1957, the BBC broadcasted footage of people tending to spaghetti trees (which supposedly bore the pasta) as an April Fools joke. Brits, unfamiliar with pasta at the time, called into the show in droves, asking how they could grow their own spaghetti trees.
By Chris Littlechild, contributor for Ripleys.com
March 24, 2019
March 23, 2019
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