Cats don't normally swim. Tigers will, and fishing cats swim a lot, but lions prefer to stay on dry ground whenever possible. The story of two lions in Uganda have researchers thinking about the pressures our modern world puts on wild animals, even in their own habitat. Jacob the African lion only has three complete legs after his rear foot was caught in a poacher's trap. He is accompanied by his brother Tibu. The two ventured out of their normal territory to find mates in another part of Queen Elizabeth National Park. They were rebuffed by other male lions, surviving at least two fights. To get back to their territory, they had to cross the Kazinga channel, a river populated with crocodiles and hippopotamus.

The lions turned back a couple of times, but then swam 1.5 kilometers, or .93 miles, across the dangerous waters at night. A team led by Griffith University scientist Alexander Braczkowski recorded the lions on a thermal camera carried by a drone as they swam the river. Those cats were desperate. Read about the recording and what it means at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Dr. Alex Braczkowski)

Humans have been looking for evidence that we are not alone in the universe ever since we started looking at the stars overhead. While most of the investigations have been speculation abut events and objects we don't understand, or else wishful thinking like science fiction, large scale projects like SETI are seriously scanning distance space to intercept any signals that might come from some cosmic intelligence. At the same time, we have beamed signals out into the cosmos, hoping that someday, intelligent extraterrestrials will find them. There have been at least a dozen such programs so far.

They started with the Soviet Union sending Morse code signals to Venus in 1962. It continued with the plaques on the Pioneer space probes and later the Voyager probes that are now in interstellar space. The image above is the Arecibo message, send from the (now defunct) Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974. The messages got more sophisticated over time, although no one knows if they will ever be found or deciphered by anyone. Even SETI is sending out signals now. Read about 12 projects that aim to communicate with extraterrestrials we don't yet know of at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Arne Nordmann (norro))

The more we learn about volcanos, the more obvious it becomes that they had a big hand in shaping the world as it is.  They build mountains, they form rock, and they even preserve some of the wildlife they kill. Volcanic ash can bury and preserve animals hundreds of miles away from an eruption! Even those who survived the ash later had their footprints preserved as the ash hardened, and that gives us clues about those creatures' movements in life.

Closer to the volcano, pyroclastic flow, in addition to ash, can kill and create negative images of whatever it buried. The case of the Blue Lake Rhino is a further method of preservation, when a strange confluence of conditions left a rhino-shaped cave. Even stranger are dinosaur footprints that formed in magma underground! How did that happen? The story is a little complicated, but SciShow explains it in simple terms. Volcanos are crazy. -via Damn Interesting

Found a very cool bookstore in Tokyo! Each square on the bookshelves is rented to a different person. The renters are free to curate and sell whatever books they want in their shelf space. My favorite was the shelf filled with handmade photo books of the renter’s cat pic.twitter.com/ySLQG6HMOR

— grace ౨ৎ (@suzuranfairy) May 18, 2024

X user Grace (@suzuranfairy) shares photos of a unique bookstore in the Kichijōji neighborhood of western Tokyo. The area is home to unique shops and restaurants and is thus very popular with tourists. Close to the famous Ghibli Museum is a bookstore where people can sell their own books in sections of shelf space.

-via Super Punch

A lot of the Star Wars universe doesn't make any sense, but fans will find ways to work around those things. The explanations are nested in a vast universe of Star Wars facts that get more ridiculous the deeper you go. Sure, this entire franchise has humor built into it, and you can enjoy the minutia if you don't take it too seriously.

ok i need everyone's personal favourite world-shatteringly stupid star wars lore decision that is small enough to fit into a single tweet. mine is that they decided famous han solo quotes were due to a near deific belief in beating the odds as enshrined in corellian culture

— yuuko from nichijou (@headfallsoff) June 10, 2024

Twitter user yuuko from nichijou, also known as Jackson, is a Star Wars fan, but also has a snarky sense of humor. The vast universe of Star Wars has a backstory for every character, no matter how minor, and explanations for how a galaxy far, far away works in the most minute detail. And everyone has their favorite fact that is memorable for being so ridiculous. A megathread from a few days ago invited everyone share theirs.

THEY WHAT

— yuuko from nichijou (@headfallsoff) June 10, 2024

There are 1,700 replies, including some from Star Wars itself.

Also in Attack of the Clones? A canon character with the surname Sleazebaggano.

— Star Wars (@starwars) June 11, 2024

But my favorites are those tidbits that try to explain why the Star Wars universe uses references from our world. George Lucas used plenty of common idioms in his original trilogy with barely a thought of how that wouldn't make sense in another galaxy. So later Star Wars tales took crazy tricks to make them work.

I have a friend who is a casual SW fan that, to this day, still brings up that line as an example of what he hated about the prequels. Me telling him to watch Clone Wars for this explanation did not help.

— Fiev Funb (@FievFunb) June 11, 2024

Lol they get all upset by normal species being mentioned like the galaxy isn't mostly full of humans and dagobah wasn't filled with normal zoo reptiles

— New California Neighbor! (@NewCaliNeighbor) June 13, 2024

Yeah we know, it's...The Empire

— Aditya Devavrat (@theamericandesi) June 11, 2024

You'll enjoy reading through the entire thread, or you can see a list of 17 Star Wars facts that really stood out at Cracked.

In the early 1950s, French soldiers fighting the Viet Minh in French Indochina called in a battlefield casualty. The military sent in a helicopter, an insect-like contraption the soldiers had never seen before. When it landed, they saw the pilot was a woman! It was just another chapter in the amazing life of Valérie André.

André had two passions from a young age. She wanted to fly, and she wanted to become a doctor. She learned to pilot an airplane, although she had to pay for her lessons, unlike boys. Her education was interrupted by World War II, but when she got her medical degree in 1947, she joined the military and spent five years doing surgery in Indochina before becoming a helicopter rescue pilot. In the meantime, she volunteered to parachute into dangerous territory to bring medical help to both soldiers and locals. That's how she got the nickname "the woman who came from the sky."

André flew 127 rescue missions in Vietnam, then moved on to serve in Algeria. She was the first woman to achieve the rank of brigadier general in the French Army before she retired. And this spring, she turned 102 years old! Read about the amazing medical and aviation career of Valérie André at Military History. -via Strange Company

The internet's two favorite things, cats and Star Wars, have been combined in myriad videos, many that you've seen here, and we won't pass up the opportunity to post more of them. Instagram cats Badger and Ellie, along with their friends Lucy, Ziggy, Bo, Usopp, Luke, Linus, Tamari, and Teddy, are fashionistas with a costume for any and every event. Now they are actors, too, as they recreate the original 1977 movie Star Wars, now known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Oh yeah, and The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as well. They have their lines down purr-fectly. I wonder what kind of fish paste they've been eating, because it's obviously lip-smacking good. Chewbacca has especially emotive dialogue. Don't miss Yoda observing in amazement as Luke raises his X-wing fighter using the Force ...and some fishing line. These are all good cats. (via Boing Boing)

The Inspiration4 space launch in 2021 conducted by the private space travel firm SpaceX carried four humans into Earth orbit. The astronauts stayed for two days before they safely splashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

The New York Times reports that the crew performed medical and cognitive tests. One of them was a test of attention span. The astronauts stared at a box displayed on an iPad. When a stopwatch icon appeared on the screen, they pressed the icon. The program assessed how long it took for them to press the button and therefore how long they were paying attention to the game.

The results of the study revealed significantly decreased attention span while in space.

-via Dave Barry, who blasphemes "Exhibit A: Star Trek" | Image: Paramount

Henry Worsley, inspired by his ancestor Frank Worsley, who was captain of Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance, went to Antarctica to hike across the continent. It wasn't Worsley's only Antarctic adventure. He first recreated Shackleton's 1907-09 Nimrod Expedition, when he came close to the South Pole, then Roald Amundsen's successful expedition to the South Pole. In 2015, Worsley's goal was to hike across Antarctica solo, without any vehicle and with no airdropped supplies. But before we get to this difficult expedition, Weird History gives us the short version of the entire history of Antarctic exploration. About half way through, we get into Henry Worsley and his solo hike. It did not turn out well.

This solo feat only became plausible once the road, or maybe it's better called a path, from McMurdo to the South Pole was completed in 2007. Since Worsley's attempt, both Colin O'Brady and Louis Rudd completed the same route alone on skis in 2018.

What do you see in this image? It appears to be a mishmash of overlapping or intertwining circles, or maybe even a spiral of some kind. But when you try to follow those circles individually, you'll find that there are four concentric circles that do not overlap at all!

This is called Pinna’s Intertwining Illusion. The reason you see intertwining circles, or a spiral of some sort, is due to the orientation of the squares, which varies from circle to circle. The squares are uniformly close together, but because they are squares, they appear more angular in the smallest circle. The overall effect makes our brains see overlapping circles. It's like if you took a Twist-O-Flex watchband and tried to roll it up tight until the links separate enough to pinch you, which is the only example I could find within reach at my desk. In other words, we are squaring the circle.    

This illusion was discovered by by psychology professor Baingio Pinna. He has conducted research into the brain's processing of illusions displaying the rotating motion effect. That sounds like illusions that will make you woozy, and they do. -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Jochen Burghardt)

It's been years since we've seen a new animation from the folks at Birdbox Studio (previously at Neatorama), and this one is a delight. A mountain climber puts all his effort into reaching the summit, but when he gets there, it's already occupied. By a sheep. Now, sheep can be dumb or stubborn or both, but you'll have to watch the rest of this cartoon to know which one this sheep really is. Oh yeah, you can say the same thing about the mountain climber. The climber is determined to stand on the summit himself (and no doubt get a picture for social media), but the sheep keeps him inches away from his goal. The story seems like it is some kind of analogy for setting goals in life or something, but the real point is to make us laugh. So go ahead and laugh, and if you can think of a analogous proverb, leave a comment. -via the Awesomer

Many people have a vision of life in the 1950s that can be kind of comforting for them. Americans lived in the suburbs as middle class nuclear families with a stay-at-home mom, enjoying postwar prosperity in the company of many other housewives and neighborhood children, a vision that lasted until the mid-'60s. But that was on television. It was in the '50s that people began buying TV sets and watching television regularly, and those sparkling clean (and white) shows began to be recorded so that they can still be seen today. In the '70s, we even got a sitcom that played off the stereotype of the idealized 1950s, although that particular joke is almost lost today.

The idealized sitcom family isn't the only misconception that people today have of the 1950s. Read up on the interstate highway system, the McCarthy hearings, the Korean War, Jell-o recipes, and more in a list of ten misconceptions about the 1950s at Mental Floss. Or you can listen to the list in video form.

There are people who assumed that tennis balls were always yellow. There are also people who look at tennis balls and think they are green, but that's a whole other story. The color of tennis balls is officially "optic yellow," but up until 1972, they were white, or occasionally black.

In the 1960s, color television was starting to really take off, and the head of BBC Two, David Attenborough, was keen on color, and arranged for the 1967 Wimbledon tournament to be broadcast in color. Attenborough was pleased with the broadcast, but noticed that it was hard to follow the ball, especially when it was close to the white court lines. Something had to be done, like making the balls yellow. In 1972, the International Tennis Federation commissioned a study in visibility, and thereafter decreed that tennis balls were to be either white or yellow. Televised tournaments adopted yellow balls immediately, with one exception- Wimbledon. That ultra-traditional tournament resisted the change until 1986!

Today, tennis balls come in all colors, but if you are going to compete professionally, or on television, the balls will be optic yellow.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: Babolat)

 

Since 1982, people have admired the drawing by the late Patrick Nagel that graced the cover of the Duran Duran album Rio. But who was the model that inspired it? The mystery has been solved 42 years later. And the model didn't even realize it herself! The photograph Nagel used was from a 1981 issue of Vogue Paris. Model Marcie Hunt was the subject, and she retired from modeling never knowing that her image was the one on the album cover.

Instagram user nagel_angel, who runs a fan account about the artist, explained in a post how they found the source image for the artwork. When they finally found the photo, the photographer, hairstylist, and everyone involved was credited- except for the model! Further sleuthing revealed her name.

Marci Hunt was surprised to be identified, and revealed that she always loved Duran Duran's music, and even danced to "Rio" at her wedding 31 years ago. She still has that cherry ice cream smile. -via Metafilter

The Wright brothers are credited with the first airplane, but technically they made the first heavier-then-air powered and controllable flight. In an airplane. People had been flying for more than a century before that, in hot air or gas balloons, which are lighter than air. The problem with balloons was that the air itself guided them, and you never knew where you were going to land. Then came Charles Ritchel, an eccentric tinkerer who had more than 150 patents for all kinds of things. In 1878, he unveiled a flying machine that could be controlled by the pilot.

It was a balloon of sorts, a scary-looking contraption with a 25-foot gas bag over a carriage that resembled a boat. The pilot propelled the ship with a hand crank that powered a propellor, and his feet guided fins that changed direction. Ritchel couldn't pilot it himself, because he was too heavy, but he found Mark Quinlan, a brave man who only weighed 96 pounds. At its first demonstration, the dirigible ascended, flew around, and came back to the launching spot! That was a breakthrough in ballooning. However, Ritchel's design is barely mentioned in the history of aircraft, since it could never repeat that feat. Besides, who wants to spend their time in the air cranking a propellor by hand? Read about Charles Ritchel and his forgotten dirigible at Smithsonian.