In 2008, a farmer in the Chita region of Russia (north of Mongolia) found that a new litter of kittens had been born in his barn. They were unlike any kittens he'd seen before. He called the office of the Daursky Nature Reserve, and an officer came who identified the kittens as Pallas's cats, also called manul. They waited for the mother to return, but she didn't, so the kittens were taken to the wildlife office. The Fedotov family volunteered two nursing mother cats, and brought them in (with a remaining kitten) to feed the wild kittens.

The nature reserve sheltered the kittens for six months, then released them with radio collars. But it was autumn, and the hand-raised Pallas's cats had trouble hunting in winter, so they were found and brought back to the preserve.

Once spring arrived, and the cats were older, they were released again, this time successfully. The source of the story is in Russian, but there's an English version here both with more pictures.  -via reddit

(Images credit S. Balzhimaevoy)

Rachel and Jun (previously at Neatorama) already had two cats, but then they found Poki, injured and malnourished, on a highway. After his recovery, he showed his true personality. Poki is annoying, selfish, persistent, obsessive, and won't take "no" for an answer. Those traits are fairly typical of cats, and we find them endearing up to a point. Poki takes them to extreme.  

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In this video, Poki has become obsessed with the plastic recycling bin, in addition to his other annoying habits. What can Rachel come up with to keep him out of it? Nothing, it seems. Poki is going into the garbage bin again. -via Metafilter

You don't see snowboarding and cosplay together in one video too often, but it makes sense. Those costumes can be quite warm, particularly if they involve armor. And you're already wearing a helmet, so why not?

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A group of costumed characters went flying down the slopes at the Hirugano Takahara ski resort in Japan, and put on quite a show! -via Geeks Are Sexy

First off: if you have been putting off seeing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, this post contains spoilers. Then again, if you've put it off this long, you probably don't care about spoilers. If you've seen the film, you probably have an opinion on how it ended. So do the folks at HISHE. They've also changed some of the beginning and middle, too.

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Along the way, they have a bit -or a lot- of criticism picking at everything about Rogue One. That's okay, I think the movie is just fine at is. -via Uproxx

There's nothing better than a nice fresh hot cup of coffee in the morning. If you love coffee that much, you might want to try it on your toast! Or not. When people talk about coffee that's way too strong, they sometimes say it sticks to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter. That's the joke I thought of when I heard that spreadable coffee is now available in Japan.

According to Curazy, Snow Brand Milk is releasing a spreadable version of its coffee to mark the 55th anniversary of its release.

If you’ve ever had Snow Brand Milk’s Coffee, you’ll know it’s rather creamy and sweet, so it should make a good toast spread.

Ah, so it's from a milk company! The "spread" is probably mostly milk and sugar with some coffee in it for flavoring. That might not be bad at all, if you like that sort of thing. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Maia Weinstock)

Science writer Maia Weinstock submitted a proposal to LEGO Ideas for a LEGO set honoring some of the women of NASA who pioneered space exploration, with settings and accessories that go along with their stories. The set garnered many votes from the public, and LEGO has chosen to manufacture it! The set should be available to purchase later this year. The LEGO company will tweak the design somewhat, so the finished product will look a bit different from Weinstock's images in her proposal. Continue reading to see those images of the five women featured in the set.

Newcomb Mott was a 27-year-old world traveler in 1965, accustomed to using his summers to learn about far-flung countries. That summer, he traveled to the Arctic town of Kirkenes, Norway. The border between Norway and the Soviet Union was temptingly near. Norwegians crossed the border to visit the small town of Boris Gleb to purchase vodka. Mott didn't have a visa to visit the USSR, but he figured the border guard might at least stamp his passport before he was turned away.

Mott was, as one U.S. ambassador would later describe him, “a kind of innocent abroad,” who had come to this isolated place, north of the Arctic Circle, on a whim. He had a confidence characteristic of young, educated, American white men in the 1960s—a feeling that everything would probably work out, because, the great majority of the time, everything did. But when Newcomb Mott illegally crossed the border into the USSR in 1965, aiming to collect a new stamp on his passport, everything did not go right for him.

Within a year of crossing the border, Newcomb Mott was dead, killed either by fellow prisoners or by government agents, although the Soviet government officially ruled his death a suicide. Under different circumstances, he might have been given a fine and set free after a few days or weeks. But borders are fraught places, where the rules can shift quickly and individual choices, the power of the state, and politics can turn small mistakes into tragedies.  

Read the story of Newcomb Mott at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Tass)

When Susan La Flesche entered medical school in 1886, she had two strikes against her: she was a woman, and she was a Native American. She couldn't vote, and as a member of the Omaha tribe, she was not even considered an American citizen. But she spoke four languages and graduated at the top her class from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania three years later.  

None of the challenges of her education could fully prepare La Flesche for what she encountered upon her return to the reservation as physician for the Omaha Agency, which was operated by the Office of Indian Affairs. Soon after she opened the doors to her new office in the government boarding school, the tribe began to file in. Many of them were sick with tuberculosis or cholera, others simply looking for a clean place to rest. She became their doctor, but in many ways their lawyer, accountant, priest and political liaison. So many of the sick insisted on Dr. Susan, as they called her, that her white counterpart suddenly quit, making her the only physician on a reservation stretching nearly 1,350 square miles.

She dreamed of one day building a hospital for her tribe. But for now, she made house calls on foot, walking miles through wind and snow, on horseback and later in her buggy, traveling for hours to reach a single patient. But even after risking her own life to reach a distant patient, she would often encounter Omahas who rejected her diagnosis and questioned everything she’d learned in a school so far away.

Nevertheless, she persevered. Read the story of Susan La Flesche at Smithsonian.

A cat was killed by a vehicle. Soon, a group of a more than a dozen wild turkeys formed a circle around the cat and marched around.

These turkeys trying to give this cat its 10th life pic.twitter.com/VBM7t4MZYr

— J... (@TheReal_JDavis) March 2, 2017

Were they paying their respects? Were they celebrating its demise? Trying to revive it? Did they even know the cat? This bizarre scene went viral on Twitter. Time to ask the experts.

They might be performing what’s called a “predator inspection,” says Alan Krakauer, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies the behavioral ecology of birds, in an email to The Verge. Sometimes, animals lower down in the food chain approach predators — a behavior that can be seen as risky, but can actually help the prey. Making the predator aware that the prey know it’s there can sometimes scare the predator away. The “inspection” also allows the prey to check how determined the predator is to attack, and can alert other animals to the danger.
...

What’s weird is that in the video the turkeys are circling a dead cat — definitely not a dangerous predator. And turkeys don’t usually eat dead animals, including dead cats, so it’s not like they’re doing some weird ritual dance before tasting their meal. What could be happening is that the turkeys are stuck in some kind of never-ending circle, with each bird following the tail in front of it. “It’s not unusual for them to get into those dances where they chase each other around,” Scott Gardner, a turkey expert with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, tells The Verge.

So it's very possible that the turkeys themselves don't know why they are doing this. -via reddit

The following article is from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Nature Calls.

Hey, wait a minute… is that plant eating your gerbil?

FLESH-EATING FLORA

Carnivorous plants developed a taste for flesh over 200 million years of evolution. Here’s how it happened: All over the world, in areas where the soil is low in nutrients (particularly swamps and marshes), some plants had to make up for the nutritional shortfall. So they developed the ability to capture and eat insects, fish, small reptiles, and even the occasional small mammal. Here are some of our favorites.

SNAP TRAPS

These plants have jawlike, hinged leaves that act like a trap. The leaves are lined with rows of fine trigger hairs that, when touched by an insect, cause the lobes of the leaf to close, capturing the prey inside. The two lobes then form a seal to create a temporary “stomach,” where the hapless bug is digested over a couple of weeks. When consumption is complete, the lobes reopen to set another trap. The leaves repeat this cycle three or four times and then become inactive as new leaves sprout and take over.

(Image credit: Noah Elhardt)

The best known in the snap-trap category is the Venus flytrap, native to the Carolinas in the United States. Another member of the family, the waterwheel plant (named for its shape), lives in the waters of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

LOBSTER-POT TRAPS

Ryan Shukis edited together clips from Tim Burton movies. It shows, on the one hand, how diverse those stories are, from Batman to Sleepy Hollow to Pee Wee's Big Adventure to Beetlejuice to Ed Wood. On the other hand, those diverse stories all had the unmistakable Tim Burton style.    

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None of the stop-motion animated films are included, but that still left plenty to work with. There are Tim Burton movies here you may have even forgotten about. -via Tastefully Offensive  

This year is the first time I've seen the trees on my street blooming in February. It isn't my imagination. Maps from the USGS-led USA National Phenology Network indicate where Mother Nature began thinking that spring arrived in February. The data, updated daily, comes from observations of budding trees, blooming flowers, and animal behavior. The map shown here is the Spring Leaf Index Anomaly for March first. The area in red indicates where the data shows spring arriving unusually early. -via Digg  

Disney's live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson will hit theaters on March 17th. While most of it is expected to be a shot-for-shot copy of the 1991 animated feature, some tweaking has resulted in one character designated as Disney's first openly gay character. Gaston's sidekick LeFou, played by Josh Gad, discovers his sexuality during the story. Director Bill Condon talked to Attitude magazine about LeFou.

“LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston,” reveals Condon.

“He’s confused about what he wants. It’s somebody who’s just realising that he has these feelings. And Josh makes something really subtle and delicious out of it. And that’s what has its payoff at the end, which I don’t want to give away. But it is a nice, exclusively gay moment in a Disney movie.” 

Read more about LeFou and the new movie (and see a video clip) at Attitude. -via Uproxx

(Image credit: Keith Allison)

From high-fives to air quotes, these smooth moves had to start somewhere.

1. THE FIST BUMP

The fist bump received its 15 minutes of fame most recently when President Barack Obama knocked knuckles with wife Michelle after clinching the 2008 Democratic nomination. Some credit the move to baseball Hall of Famer and apparent germaphobe Stan Musial, who bumped fists instead of shaking hands to avoid catching colds. But it’s more likely that the gesture took off during the Vietnam War, where it was one of a number of “dap” greetings—stylized handshakes—popularized by African American soldiers.

2. AIR GUITAR

(Image credit: Anitagraser)

In 1957, a dozen years before Joe Cocker established himself as a virtuoso on the invisible instrument, Bill Reed of the Canadian vocal group the Diamonds performed a short but suave air guitar solo halfway through the group’s rendition of Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love.” Today, some 10,000 people attend the Air Guitar World Championships in Finland.

3. PULLING A RABBIT OUT OF A HAT

The Okhotsk Tokkari Center in Monbetsu, Hokkaido, Japan, is a marine conservation facility that takes care of seals found injured or trapped in fishing nets, until they can be returned to the sea. They posted pictures of this adorable earless seal looking contented as can be while clutching his/her plush seal toy.  

Say it with me now- "Awww." -via Boing Boing

(Images credit: @mombetsu_land‏)