13th Archives - usatoday24

the sensation of jumping from the 13th floor at 100 km/h

May 26, 2026 by usatoday24

With summer almost (almost) knocking on the door, it’s time to think about what to do on vacation and how to take advantage of the sun, the heat and the long days that provide light until late in the afternoon. There are those who choose the beach, the mountains, a cold beer on a terrace or, in the case of people hooked on adrenaline shots, jumping into the void from 13 stories high, without ropes or parachutes. It sounds strange, I know, but that’s precisely it. the experience featuring Verti-Go, one of the tallest water slides in Europe. Its owners assure that when descending it they are easily reached. 100 km/h. As I said: an experience suitable only for people who really like adrenaline. Who said vertigo? Spain offers many ways to cool off in summer, but few (none) like Vertigohe megaslide aquatic Aqualandia Benidorma huge water park located on the Costa Blanca. Whoever gets on it is guaranteed a dip, but first must face an experience that is not very advisable for people with vertigo or those who do not like strong emotions. Before reaching the water you must climb several dozen meters and then drop into the void and travel, in a matter of three seconds, the equivalent of a multi-story residential tower. “It’s like jumping off a 13-story building,” they assure those responsible for the park, who specify that the level of inclination exceeds 60%. Is it that big? Yes. And it comes with taking a look at your file to check it. According to Aqualandia Benidorm, the slide is 33 meters high and more than 100 m long, allowing those who slide down it to reach more than considerable speeds. Those responsible speak of more than 100 km/halthough they clarify that this information depends, among other things, on the body mass of the person jumping. To enjoy the experience you must meet certain conditions: measure at least 1.4 m and not exceed 120 kg. If you want to release adrenaline, but with a somewhat more moderate experience, the same park has a second water slide 28 meters which extends over 95 m in length. It is a smaller version located right next to its ‘big brother’, although it still far surpasses the majority of water slides in Spain. Is it new? No. Verti-Go was introduced to the world a few years ago, during summer 2013. At that time it was announced with great fanfare as one of the riskiest (and most attractive) bets of Aqualandia, a water park that also accumulates a long story. The venue opened its doors in 1985presenting itself as “the largest in Europe”, with a dozen attractions. from the park they explain which maintained that status for just over two decades, until 2008. That year opened in Tenerife Siam Park. If Verti-Go is in the news these days it is because Aqualandia has just premiered its new season. It did so on Saturday the 23rd, with more than twenty attractions that include rapids, soft slopes, a wave pool, several slides, Verti-Go, children’s areas and another highlight: Cycloneinaugurated in 2019 and, depending on the park“holds the record for the longest water roller coaster in Europe.” The truth is that it reaches a greater height than Verti-Go (36 m) and travels more than 200 m, although the average speed is much lower (60 km/h). @aqualandiabnd And if you then end up in a capsule that launches you at 100 km/h from a height of 33 meters… I won’t even tell you. 😏 Raise your hands 🙋 those who have already experienced the Verti-Go madness. 🔥 #vertigo #waterslide #giantslide #capsuleslide #aqualandia #waterpark #waterpark #waterpark #benidorm ♬ Vidrado Em Você – Dj Guuga & Mc Livinho Do you have any Verti-Go records? If you search on Google you will find a good handful of articles in which Verti-Go is referred to as “the water slide highest in Europe” or the “capsule slide fastest in the world“. The reality is more complicated. When it opened, in 2013, showed up as a unique case and the largest attraction of its kind on the entire continent. The truth is that for years in Caribe Baya park in Veneto (Italy), there is a water slide that allows you to jump from a height of 42 m. His name: Captain Spacemaker. According to the Italian venue, it is “highest in Europe” in his style. If we look further we find facilities still most surprising. In Meryal Park in Qatar, there is a slide that “reaches a height of 76.3 m.” Its name leaves little room for doubt: Vertigo. In Brazil there is also another mass to take into account, Kilimanjaro, built more than 20 years ago and offering a drop of 49.9 m. According to the Guinness Book it is “the tallest water slide”. Have they overcome it then? If we talk about water slides, Vertigo or Kilimanjaro are much higher than Verti-Go, but if we talk about Europe things are a little more complicated. The rankings They usually place the Caribe Bay structure in Italy first, because exceeds 40 meters in height. However, some media indicate that the complete structure of Verti-Go is also around those dimensions. Aqualandia itself assured in 2016 that the attraction has a 42m high. Are there more categories? Yes. The Alicante park also boasts that Verti-Go is a unique copy “capsule slide”, a label that identifies a very specific type of slide. Basically, users enter a capsule with a trapdoor in the floor that, after a brief countdown, opens to let them fall. In 2016 Aqualandia claimed that Verti-Go was “the tallest in the world.” Now keep defending which, at the very least, is “one of the tallest capsule slides.” “Only the bravest dare with this attraction suspended on a 42 m high platform, where the tower has 250 steps to its highest point, simulating the height of a 13th floor and which is accessed through an airtight and transparent capsule,” clarify the company. … Read more

A medieval poet and some buried trees have just revealed something very strange to us about the 13th century Sun

May 26, 2026 by usatoday24

At the beginning of the 13th century, the Sun was passing through a solar cycle much shorter than those that exist today, but extremely intense. Having such specific details is complicated for such a distant time, when scientists did not have instruments to measure this type of activity. However, there is something that today’s scientists do have and that has helped them detect this event: a book of poetry and many trees. Art and science. A team of scientists from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology has described this event using two types of data. On the one hand, a poem written in 1204 by the Japanese writer Fujiwara no Teika. On the other hand, the observation of the rings of buried tree trunks in northern Japan. The conclusion is clear. While today solar cycles are usually around 11 years, back then there were some 6 or 7 years, but the activity was high enough to lead to the formation of auroras in Japan. A proton explosion. When solar activity is very intense, phenomena such as solar flares or the coronal mass ejections. The first is a sudden release of electromagnetic radiation from the solar surface, while the second consists of the expulsion of matter, normally charged plasma particles, from the Sun’s corona. Associated with these phenomena, proton explosions occur, in which these charged particles move at high speed. rare isotopes. Normally, a good part of these charged particles and cosmic rays fail to pass through the Earth’s magnetic field. However, when they are very intense they can reach our atmosphere in greater quantities and interact with the gases in it. In this reaction, isotopes such as beryllium-10 or carbon-14 can be formed. These are beryllium or carbon atoms with a different number of neutrons in their nuclei than the beryllium and carbon that are most abundant on Earth. Knowing this process is useful, because it can give us clues on two levels. On the one hand, beryllium-10 is deposited in ice sheets, while carbon-14 It oxidizes, transforming into carbon dioxide and becoming part of the carbon cycle. In this cycle, living beings incorporate it into their cells in different ways. For example, plants do this through photosynthesis. And this is where what has been so useful to these scientists begins. Solar dating and meteorology. Carbon-14 is often used to date fossils, since they come from living beings that once incorporated that isotope into their tissues. The moment a living being dies it stops incorporating carbon-14. From that moment on, it begins to disintegrate at a known rate, so it can be estimated approximately when it died. The point is that, beyond that, if carbon-14 levels are unusually high, it can also be determined if there was an extreme solar event. The poem describes a dawn The poem. in his diary Meigetsukithe poet Fujiwara no Teika described the observation of “red lights in the sky over northern Kyoto.” This city is at a latitude too far south for auroras to form, but that is clearly what it describes. The auroras They are the result of a type of interaction between the gases in the atmosphere and the charged particles of the Sun that causes the emission of visible light. They are normally formed at the poles, as they are the points on the Earth where the magnetic field is most vertical, so that it acts as a funnel, so that these particles can pass through it. When they occur far from the poles it is because solar activity has been very intense and the resistance normally opposed by the magnetic field has been exceeded. What the trees tell. The rings of tree trunks are a kind of natural calendar. They are formed from the inside out, so we can count them and calculate how the years have passed. For this reason, the authors of the study that has just been published They wanted to analyze the equivalent buried tree rings at the beginning of the 13th century. In the rings from the period from winter 1200 to spring 1201 they found an increase in carbon-14 levels. This also agrees with the levels of beryllium-10 found in ice deposits from that same period. Everything agrees. Also in China. There are historical records from the time when Chinese astronomers also described red lights in the sky. Therefore, it seems clear that there were auroras at unusual latitudes. A very rare case. The most curious thing about all this is that this phenomenon did not occur at the peak of the solar cycle. It possibly took place around its periodic minimum. If there was less activity, why so much aurora and carbon-14? This is something that, at the moment, scientists have not been able to explain. Perhaps there were also many auroras at the peak, but no poet stopped to write about them. Tree rings would have to be analyzed to see what carbon-14 tells us. What is clear is that the Sun was burning in those medieval times. Image | Masaaki Komori (Unsplash)/Wikimedia Commons | Kush Dwivedi (Unsplash) In Xataka | A sunspot 17 times larger than Earth caused red auroras across half the world. It is a very rare event

In the 13th century, some monks destroyed a valuable manuscript of the Bible. We just recovered 42 of your pages

April 27, 2026 by usatoday24

The one of ‘Codex H’ It’s an ironic story. Despite its enormous value, in the 13th century the monks of the Great Laura Monastery (Greece) They decided to dismantle it to reuse their materials in other works. Parchment was scarce and it was time to recycle, even if it was at the cost of destroying a manuscript that was already more than 400 years old at that time. Historians have always considered its content lost. Now, with the help of science, they have rescued more than 40 pages. And they are a real treasure. What is the ‘H Code’? A 6th century manuscript especially valuable for its content. Beyond its age, its heritage value or as a curiosity, the work is interesting because it offers us a copy of the Letters of Saint Paul made only a few centuries after the apostle himself wrote them. That is, the codex was written in Greek a few centuries after (VI) Paul of Tarsus wrote his epistles in the 1st AD. It may seem like a long time, but to scholars who study the New Testament it offers a valuable treasure: a clue to how those epistles were organized in the Early Middle Ages. The ‘Codex H’ also has another peculiarity: it is the oldest sample of the known as “Euthalian Apparatus”a system of divisions and annotations of the New Testament. And what happened to him? That the work ended up dismantled. Literally. In the 13th century, parchment was a scarce commodity, so in the Monastery of the Great Laura, on Mount Athos (Greece), they decided to sacrifice the manuscript to take advantage of your materials. Their idea was to use parchment to bind and create endpapers for other works, so they inked their pages again. This explains why researchers have found fragments of the work scattered throughout libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine and France. Other pages never appeared and were considered lost forever. And it wasn’t like that? Not quite. The monks of the 13th century may have recycled the parchment to make endpapers and bind other manuscripts, but that does not mean that the original pages (and their content) had been lost. Not at least when examined with the help of science of the 21st century. “We knew that, at some point, the manuscript was re-inked. The chemicals in the new ink caused ‘shift’ damage to the facing pages, creating a mirror image of the text on the opposite sheet, sometimes leaving traces of several pages, barely visible, but very clear with the help of the latest imaging techniques,” explains Garrick Allenprofessor at the University of Glasgow and one of the experts who have studied the codex. What exactly have they done? With the collaboration of the Electronic Library of Ancient Manuscripts (EMEL), the researchers used multispectral imaging and processed the preserved pages in search of “ghost” texts. The term may sound strange, but it basically allows experts to get the most out of a folio, looking for traces that allow them to reconstruct other pages that are no longer physically preserved. To guarantee historical accuracy, the team led by Professor Allen collaborated with experts from Paris who, thanks to radiocarbon dating, confirmed that the material they were working with was parchment from the 6th century. What did they find? Neither more nor less than 42 pages lost (so far) from ‘Codex H’. And that is much more important than it may seem at first glance. The recovered texts are fragments of the Letters of Saint Paul, writings that were already known and do not represent any historical novelty in themselves. What is really interesting is not so much his sentences but everything that surrounds them. What does that mean? That those 42 pages provide an enormous amount of information to researchers on issues such as the way the scribes worked, how they related to Paul’s work, how they organized them and (of course) how they reused the materials when the codices aged. Does it give you that much information? The University of Glasgow stands out especially how the 42 pages of the codex help us better understand the changes that the New Testament has undergone. “They offer a unique perspective on how it has evolved and been interpreted over the centuries,” notes the institution before stopping specifically at the “list of chapters.” “These pages contain the oldest known examples of chapter lists from Paul’s Letters, which differ drastically from how we divide these letters today,” they need in Glasgow. The Greek codex also provides information about how 6th-century scribes corrected, annotated, and interacted with the epistles of Saint Paul with whom they worked. Images | University of Glasgow In Xataka | The Bible has always been the most sacred book. Young Christians are filling it with post-its, underlines and cute covers

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