Humour Cafe

This is what our world would look like without people

Welcome to Planet Earth: Population 0.

This is what our world would look like without people.

The images were created to illustrate what would happen if human life ceased tomorrow, if, for whatever reason, mankind was obliterated.

The question it raises is: how long would the remnants of our civilisation remain?
Washed away: Harrods, London's premier department store, rots among derelict double-decker buses in flood waters caused by the bursting of the Thames barrier

How much would we leave behind? What would an alien visitor learn about us upon landing on our planet a century or more after we had disappeared from it?

The answer, astonishingly, is: almost nothing.

Within a hundred years most traces of our modern-day lives would be so destroyed by weather, corrosion, earth tremors, surviving animals, insects and bacteria that the monuments and hieroglyphics of ancient civilisations would be better preserved than our buildings and our billions of books and electronic records.

An alien visiting Earth might well believe that the last civilisation on the planet were ancient Egyptians.

The prophetic forecast for the longevity of our 21st-century civilisation is contained in research for a TV documentary, Life After People.

And it's not guesswork. The two-hour special uses scientific expertise and understanding of history in order to predict the future.

Principal advisor on the TV programme is a 53-year-old Scot, Gordon Masterton, former president of the Royal Institution of Civil Engineers.

He says: "The lights will start going out around the world almost immediately. The last power will be produced by wind turbines but, after a few weeks, the planet will be plunged into a deep darkness it has not experienced since primitive Man huddled around camp fires."
Rust in peace: Made of steel, the Eiffel Tower, France's monument to the industrial age, teeters

After only six months, urban areas will begin to be repopulated - by animals, including former domestic pets.
Within 20 years wolves and bears will be the master species, roaming the streets. Any buildings made of wood will start to crumble, especially where termites flourish. But concrete and steel structures will also begin to be affected.

Looking 40 and 50 years into the future, the corrosion of steel, incursion of vegetation roots and effects of the weather mean that modern buildings will start collapsing.

Within a century nearly all automobiles will have rusted away.

Eventually glass buildings will topple, stone buildings crumble; successive freezing and thawing would turn streets to rubble, ground water will rise, underground railways flood, sewers crack and lightning will ignite overgrown grasses, engulfing cities in flames.

Central London, of course, will be largely under water. Without power, the Thames Barrier will leave the city defenceless.

Some myths are exposed. For instance, with no heating in buildings, the "invincible" cockroach would succumb to the cold; and rats would starve or become lunch for hawks and falcons.

Ultimately, the larger animals would take over again: within 100 years, the half-a-million surviving African elephants would have multiplied to their pre-colonial population of ten million or so.

Livestock such as cows and sheep will be killed off by more aggressive predators.

Meanwhile, the most precious records of our history and culture which are stored in archives that are temperature and humidity controlled, will also vanish.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, remained intact for 2,000 years in desert caves.

"Rescued" and placed in a modern environment - but without the power to protect them - they wouldn't last 100.
Last civilisation: The ancient Sphinx and Great Pyramid of Gaza would remain, while modern buildings would crumble

Almost all of the records of our human experience - books, photographs, electronic data - will fade away, leaving little evidence that we ever existed.

This apocalyptic forecast is justified in Life After People by astrophysicist and author David Brin, who says: "Every civilisation has its tales of Armageddon or apocalypse, but we are the first generation that could, by deliberate action, cause its own doom."
Fall of Rome: The Colosseum is destroyed as Italy's capital is engulfed in flames
Moss-grow: The Russian capital's famous St Basil's Cathedral lies in ruins, overgrown with vegetation

Bizarre: Thousands of dead starfish

For five miles they stretched along the beaches, a gruesome line of dead starfish.

Fishermen and bird-watchers at Pegwell Bay near Sandwich, Kent, discovered a "carpet" of thousands of the creatures lying on the sand just above the water line.

And on the beach at nearby Sandwich Bay, thousands more were photographed by Tony Flashman.
Bizarre: Thousands of dead starfish have been washed up on the Kent coastline after they ventured into shallow waters because there was a shortage of mussels

"The dead starfish stretched as far as you could see in both directions," said Mr Flashman, of Kingsdown, Deal.

Environment Agency officials are investigating what could have killed the starfish, which had been feeding on mussel beds.

They do not believe the deaths were linked to the recent storms because they were first reported to them last week.

They have also ruled out pollution or anything to do with climate change as the cause.

The agency said officials would investigate if the starfish were discarded by fishermen after the mussel beds were dredged.

A spokesman said: "Starfish congregate in vast numbers in some areas and feed on shellfish, so if the seabed was dredged then the starfish would inevitably have been caught in huge numbers."

Another theory is that the starfish had run out of mussels to eat and had moved into shallow water in the search for food.

The starfish bodies are not harmful and will probably be eaten by seagulls, the agency said.

Accidental Inventions that Changed The World

As anyone with a knack for clichés knows, necessity is the mother of invention. However, it could also be said that while good inventions are often the product of necessity, great inventions are accidental. To demonstrate the importance of serendipity, we’ve put together a list of 10 examples of unintentional discoveries that too often we find ourselves taking for granted. In no particular order.

Everybody knows the story – or at least, should – the brilliant yet notoriously absent-minded biologist Sir Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteria called staphylococci. Upon returning from holiday one time in 1928, he noticed that one of the glass culture dishes he had accidentally left out had become contaminated with a fungus, and so threw it away. It wasn’t until later that he noticed that the staphylococcus bacteria seemed unable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mould.

Fleming didn’t even hold out much hope for his discovery: it wasn’t given much attention when he published his findings the following year, it was difficult to cultivate, and it was

s0low-acting – it wasn’t until 1945 after further research by several other scientists that penicillin was able to be produced on an industrial scale, changing the way doctors treated bacterial infections forever.

In 1945 Percy Lebaron Spencer, an American engineer and inventor, was busy working on manufacturing magnetrons, the devices used to produce the microwave radio signals that were integral to early radar use. Radar was an incredibly important innovation during the time of war, but microwave cooking was a purely accidental discovery.

While standing by a functioning magnetron, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. His keen mind soon figured out that it was the microwaves that had caused it, and later experimented with popcorn kernels and eventually, an egg, which (as we all could have told him from mischievous childhood ‘experiments’), exploded.

The first microwave oven weighed about 750lbs and was about the size of a fridge.


This story is a perfect example of serendipity, and a single chance encounter leading to worldwide repercussions. It’s also rather sweet.

Before 1904, ice cream was served on dishes. It wasn’t until the World’s Fair of that year, held in St Louis, Missouri, that two seemingly unrelated foodstuffs became inexorably linked together.

At this particularly sweltering 1904 World’s Fair, a stall selling ice cream was doing such good business that they were quickly running out of dishes. The neighboring stall wasn’t doing so well, selling Zalabia – a kind of wafer thin waffle from Persia – and the stall owner came up with the idea of rolling them into cone shapes and popping the ice cream on top. Thus the ice cream cone was born – and it doesn’t look like dying out any time soon.

While many know that Dom Pierre Pérignon is credited for the invention of champagne, it was not the 17th century Benedictine monk’s intention to make a wine with bubbles in it – in fact, he had spent years trying to prevent just that, as bubbly wine was considered a sure sign of poor winemaking.

Pérignon’s original wish was to cater for the French court’s preference for white wine. Since black grapes were easier to grow in the Champagne region, he invented a way of pressing white juice from them. But since Champagne’s climate was relatively cold, the wine had to be fermented over two seasons, spending the second year in the bottle. This produced a wine loaded with bubbles of carbon dioxide, which Pérignon tried but failed to eradicate. Happily, the new wine was a big hit with the aristocratic crowds in both the French and English courts.

The invention of the humble Post-It Note was an accidental collaboration between second-rate science and a frustrated church-goer. In 1970, Spencer Silver, a researcher for the large American corporation 3M, had been trying to formulate a strong adhesive, but ended up only managing to create a very weak glue that could be removed almost effortlessly. He promoted his invention within 3M, but nobody took any notice.

4 years later, Arthur Fry, a 3M colleague and member of his church choir, was irritated by the fact that the slips of paper he placed in his hymnal to mark the pages would usually fall out when the book was opened. One service, he recalled the work of Spencer Silver, leading to an epiphany – the church being a good a place as any to have one, I suppose – and later applied some of Silver’s weak yet non-damaging adhesive to his bookmarks. He found that the little sticky markers worked perfectly, and sold the idea to 3M. Trial marketing began in 1977, and today you’d find it hard to imagine life without them.

In 1853, in a restaurant in Saratoga, New York, a particularly fussy diner (railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt) repeatedly refused to eat the fries he had been served with his meal, complaining that they were too thick and too soggy. After he had sent back several plates of increasingly thinly-cut fries, the chef George Crum decided to get his own back by frying wafer-thin slices of potato in grease and sending them out.

Vanderbilt initially protested that the chef’s latest efforts were too thin to be picked up with a fork, but upon trying a few, the chips were an instant hit, and soon everybody in the restaurant wanted a serving. This led to the new recipe appearing on the menu as “Saratoga Chips”, before later being sold all over the world.

What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, and makes a slinkity sound? Well, originally it was just a spring falling off a desk. To be more precise, it was the desk belonging to marine engineer Richard James, who sometime in 1940 noticed that when the spring fell, it stumbled and tumbled across the floor for a while before laying to rest. After a few prototypes, the Slinky was ready to be introduced to toy stores in 1948, where it became one of the most popular and iconic toys of all time.

James’ wife Betty was the one who came up with the name “Slinky”, and has been CEO of the company since 1960. Over 250 million Slinkies have been sold worldwide, and they were even used as mobile radio antennae during the Vietnam war.

Like penicillin, here is another accidental invention that continues to save lives to this day. American engineer Wilson Greatbatch was working on a gadget that recorded irregular heartbeats, when he inserted the wrong type of resistor into his invention. The circuit pulsed, then was quiet, then pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch to compare this reaction with the human heart and work on the world’s first implantable cardiac pacemaker.

Before the implantable version was used on humans from 1960 onwards, pacemakers had been based on the external model invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These were about the size of a television and dealt out considerable jolts of electricity into the patient’s body, which often caused the skin to burn. Greatbatch also went on to devise a lithium-iodide battery cell to power his pacemaker.

More sticky stuff, though this one was famous for its high adhesive value, unlike Silver’s Post-It Notes. Superglue came into being in 1942 when Dr Harry Coover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights for handheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals known as cyanoacrylates, which they soon realized polymerized on contact with moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. It was obvious that these wouldn’t work, so research moved on.

6 years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized the potential of the substance when they were testing the heat resistance of cyanoacrylates, recognizing that the adhesives required neither heat nor pressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercial refinement, Superglue (or “Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Composition”, to give it its full name) was born.

It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam – the adhesive could be sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easier transportation of soldiers; adding a delicious layer of irony to the story in that a discovery made during an effort to improve the killing potential of guns ended up saving countless lives.

The unintentional discovery of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-LSD-25 led to a cultural revolution – nobody today can deny that the hallucinogen uncovered by Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman in 1938 helped shape the hippy movement of the 1960s and sparked worldwide interest, having a massive impact on neuroscience research and treatment.

The actual discovery of LSD as a hallucinogen occurred when Dr Hoffman was involved in pharmaceutical research in Basel, Switzerland, hoping to produce drugs that would help ease the pain of childbirth. Having synthesized what would later become known as LSD; Hoffman catalogued the untested substance and placed it in storage, after finding nothing particularly interesting about it during the initial analysis. It wasn’t until a Friday afternoon in April 1943 when Hoffman discovered the true properties of the compound, inadvertently absorbing a healthy dose of it when handling the chemical at work without wearing gloves. On his bicycle ride back home he observed “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors”.

Criminalized throughout the USA in 1966 (and most others following suit soon after), further research into LSD was (and still is) constantly hampered by its illegal status. Early researcher Dr Richard Alpert claimed to have administered LSD to 200 test subjects by 1961, and reported that 85% of his test subjects said that the experience was the “most educational” of their lives.

Baby Instructions For New Parents

Electron Micrograph picture

An electron micrograph is an image taken using electrons to illuminate a specimen and create an enlarged picture of it. Some of these photos can magnify specimens up to 2 million times.

The Picture shows Pollen of the Common Ragweed. It is the most widespread plant of the genus Ambrosia in North America. Pollen is a fine to coarse powder consisting of microgametophytes, which produce the sperm cells of seed plants. The pollen grain with its hard coat protects the sperm cells during the process of their movement between the stamens of the flower to the pistil of the next flower.

Head of a Crab Spider. They are also commonly called "flower spiders" because they are most often found on flowers, lying in ambush for prey. Crab spiders do not build webs to trap prey, but are active hunters much like the jumping spiders.

Butterfly eggs consist of a hard-ridged outer layer of shell, called the chorion. It is the lined structure with a thin coating of wax which prevents the egg from drying out before the larva has had time to fully develop.

These rod-shaped bacteria are enterobacters, which are part of the normal content of human and animal digestive systems. However, under certain conditions they can cause gastroenteritis and urinary tract infections.

The head of a flea, an external parasite living by hematophagy off the blood of mammals and birds.

A section through human skin. The skin layers, from top to bottom, are the stratum corneum, composed of flattened, dead skin cells that form the surface of the skin. The dead cells from this layer are continuously being shed and replaced by cells from the living epidermal layer below (red). The lowest layer seen here is the dermis. In the middle, a sweat gland can be seen.

Soybean cyst nematode and its egg. It is a small plant-parasitic roundworm that attacks the roots of soybeans.

A Microfilariae (larval worms) of a parasitic nematode roundworm being attacked by cells of the immune system. Numerous nematodes cause disease in humans, living as parasites of the intestines, blood, lymph, subcutaneous & connective tissues.

Color-enhanced scanning showing Salmonella typhimurium (red) invading cultured human cells.

Scales from the skin of a shark. These sharply pointed placoid scales are also known as dermal teeth or denticles. They give the shark's skin the feel of sandpaper. The tip of each scale is made of dentine overlayed with dental enamel. The lower part of each scale is made of bone. The scales disrupt turbulence over the skin, considerably reducing the drag on the shark as it swims. This design has been investigated by engineers for use on the surfaces of aircraft and boats.

the world's most expensive toy car

The world's most expensive toy car has been unveiled - but it will set you back a staggering £72,000.

The miniature motor is cast in 18-carat white gold and decked out in more than 2,700 blue diamonds.

Underneath the fully working bonnet, the tiny engine is covered in black and white diamonds.
The £72,000 toy car: Covered in diamonds and the most expensive miniature motor ever

Created by manufacturer Hot Wheels to mark the company's 40th anniversary, the car's tail lights are red rubies while the tyres are set with yet more diamonds.

A spokesman from Mattel, who owns Hot Wheels, said: "This car is the most expensive toy car we have ever made."

The valuable vehicle was unveiled by former Newlyweds star and singer Nick Lachey at the 105th American International Toy Fair.