Since the year 2007, more than twenty detached human feet have been recovered along the coastal boundaries of the Salish Sea, an area spanning British Columbia and Washington State, with the vast majority of these anatomical remains discovered securely enclosed within modern athletic footwear. The phenomenon initially drew widespread attention when the first two specimens were found just six days apart on separate islands in British Columbia, and because both discoveries consisted entirely of right feet, it became immediately evident that they belonged to different individuals, though the appearance of five more feet during the subsequent year temporarily fueled intense speculation regarding the potential involvement of a serial killer. Subsequent forensic examinations, however, definitively pointed to a completely natural taphonomic process, as the submersion of a body underwater causes marine scavengers to systematically consume the softer tissues and the delicate ligaments connecting the bones at the ankle, eventually allowing a foot to dissociate naturally from the main skeletal structure without any form of mechanical force. The coroners of British Columbia explicitly verified that none of the examined cases exhibited any physical evidence of cutting or mechanical severing, thereby confirming that the separation was entirely biological. The physical properties of the sneakers provide the primary explanation for why these specific remains manage to reach the shore, as the footwear effectively shields the enclosed organic tissue from marine life while the lightweight synthetic foam and structural air pockets inside the soles provide positive buoyancy. This allows a detached foot to float away and navigate marine currents until it washes ashore, while the heavier remains of the body stay resting on the ocean floor. To further analyze this specific degradation timeline, researchers monitored scavenger activity by placing pig carcasses in the Salish Sea, discovering that under deep and highly oxygenated conditions, the remains were reduced to clean skeletons in less than four days, whereas earlier experiments conducted under different environmental variables demonstrated that the tissues could persist intact for weeks or months. Through the systematic use of comparative DNA testing, investigators have been able to connect these recovered remains to missing persons, and by February 2016, British Columbia's coroners had successfully identified ten feet belonging to seven distinct individuals, reporting absolutely no evidence of foul play in those resolved cases while leaving the determination of who each person was and how they died to separate, ongoing investigations.

Some sounds you'll recognize if you were alive in the 1980s. All of the sounds are created by interacting with these then-everyday objects. [📹 rerunthe80s]

In 1951, Adelbert Ames created the mind-boggling ‘Ames Window’. It’s so effective that even when you know how it works you can’t break the illusion [📹 The Curiosity Show]