Katie McBride Newman of Newman, Georgia, tells the story of the Christmas owl. Her family bought a cut Christmas tree, brought it home, set it up, and began putting ornaments on it. Coincidentally, they were hanging owl ornaments when they found a real owl had come with the tree! The owl did not show any desire to leave.  

In the days that followed, Newman and her husband, Billy, posted videos, shared details of trying to feed the bird, and added a bit of mystery by noting it would vanish and reappear in the tree.

“Last night we shut all the interior doors, turned off all the lights and came to initiate owl removal – and he was NO WHERE to be found. Gulp,” the family posted Dec. 13. “At 1:30 am, Billy came out to check, and was roosting on the tip top of the star.”

On Dec. 14, the couple sought professional help from the Chattahoochee Nature Center, which sent a wildlife tech to examine the bird for injuries (it was unhurt) and get it into a crate.

Read the story of the owl in the Christmas tree at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. -via Boing Boing

Department stores will try any promotion to get people inside to do their Christmas shopping. After all, that's how we got the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Wannamaker's, one of the earliest department stores in America, had a foolproof Christmas promotion in 1897. They had a "bargain day for cats," in which they displayed and sold the hot Christmas gift of the year, angora cats, priced from $10 to $40.  

According to an article in the Buffalo Evening News, each cat had a pet name tagged onto his or her cage, such as Peggy, Tammany, Romeo, Hamlet, Juliet, Maggy, Jack and Jill, and Fedora. Above the cats’ wire cages hung smaller cages filled with singing birds. A cat doctor was in constant attendance to ensure their well-being.

“What is the price of Tammany?” one news reporter asked the cat clerk. “Tammany’s sold,” the clerk replied. “He brought $20, and we can’t keep supplied with Tammany cats.”

The clerk continued, “Here’s Peggy. She’s marked $10, but if you want her I will let her go for $9.99. Jack and Jill together are worth $30, but as an inducement we will sell them for $29.99.”

The cat clerk had a sense of humor. The news reporter had $29.99, which he gave the clerk to purchase Jack and Jill.

It must have worked, as Wannamaker's repeated the promotion in 1898 and 1899. Read about the craze for Christmas angora cats at The Hatching Cat.  -via Strange Company

The Collatz conjecture, also known as the “3x + 1 problem,” is infamous for being so deceptively simple that for decades mathematicians have obsessively made attempts to crack the seemingly impossible problem. It’s named after German mathematician Lothar Collatz who posed the problem in the 1930s. Here’s how it works: 

The problem sounds like a party trick. Pick a number, any number. If it’s odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. If it’s even, divide it by 2. Now you have a new number. Apply the same rules to the new number. The conjecture is about what happens as you keep repeating the process.

But Collatz predicted that’s not the case. He conjectured that if you start with a positive whole number and run this process long enough, all starting values will lead to 1. And once you hit 1, the rules of the Collatz conjecture confine you to a loop: 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1, on and on forever.

Recently, Terence Tao presented a proof that is considered “one of the most significant results on the Collatz conjecture in decades.” But the sheer difficulty of the problem has led other mathematicians to believe that a perfect solution is simply unreachable and research efforts would be better spent elsewhere. 

What do you think about this? Read the full article from Wired. 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Long before December 25th was designated as the day to celebrate the birth of Jesus, northern civilizations celebrated the winter solstice. While the solstice doesn't mean much in the tropics, it is a big deal in colder places, because it means daylight will stop shrinking and begin to grow again. Watch a traditional solstice song and dance from Latvia celebrating the solstice the way their ancestors did. A machine translation from the description at YouTube says,

Everything is as it used to be.
Just like in fairy tales, it is the eve of the Winter Solstice and Goddess is standing by the door, a camomile.
Just as in the past, the night alternates with the day and the Sun gives his daughter the Velas to this land.
And just like in the past, we masquerade to pull up the feast on the hill and re-create the world.

Kaladoo!

-via Nag on the Lake

In October, Nick Noland took off on a solo hike that was only nine miles, round trip. But after watching the sunset from the mountain summit, he had to find his way back in the freezing dark. He lost feeling in his feet, and therefore did not realize when he lost his shoes.

I tucked myself under the roots of a large, fallen pine and scraped in as many leaves and branches as I could to cover myself. I settled into a fetal position, and planned to wait for daylight.

But lying under that downed tree, I began to wonder if I had dug my own grave. I started thinking I might never get home. I thought about the sparkle in my oldest kid’s eye, the way my one-year-old says “Daddy,” and of my wife.

Noland make it back to his truck, but there was still plenty of trouble ahead. Read his story at Outside Online. -via Digg

(Image credit: Nick Noland)

People lie most of the time, from lying to save themselves from shame or harm, or the subtle lies that they just happen to blurt out. Regardless of the type of lie, there is the underlying question on the inner mechanisms of lying. Allure enlists the help of Robert Feldman, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Michael Slepian, a social psychologist and professor at Columbia Business School, and Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a journalist who has written about lying, talk about truth, lies, and the gray matter in between to further understand the concept of lying: 

Lying is so much a part of everyday discourse that we do it without thinking about it. What’s really interesting is you can ask somebody to look back on a conversation, and invariably they’ll say, “I was totally truthful.” Show them a video, and they’ll find that’s just not the case. In 10 minutes you probably tell three lies to someone you’re just getting to know. We lie less to the people we know the best, but those tend to be very big lies—usually lies about fidelity.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

The world’s first 3D-printed houses will be built in Mexico, and for a good cause. Nonprofit organization New Story established a housing project, teaming up with ICON and ECHALE to build fifty 500 square-foot 3D homes in Tabasco, Mexico. The families that will be given the house will be selected based on need, as USA Today details: 

The nonprofit teamed up with ICON, which developed the 3D-printing robotics, and ÉCHALE, a nonprofit in Mexico, which is helping identify local families living in extreme poverty and "makeshift, unsafe shelter" to live in the homes, New Story says.

Families are selected based on need. The median family income in the Mexican community is $76.50 a month and the community has some of the lowest-income families in Mexico as a whole. 

image screenshot via USA Today

In Qatar, falcons serve important roles as pets, family icons, and racing athletes. Falcon owners prize them dearly, so when one is sick, it goes to the Souq Waqif Falcon Hospital in Doha. It's a luxurious and technologically advanced veterinary hospital that spares no expense for falcon care. Tariq Panja of the New York Times talked to Dr. Prasoon Ibrahim, a molecular biologist on staff who, even after 8 years of working at the hospital, still marvels at its facilities:

“In my lab, I saw a gene sequencer for the first time,” he said, his eyes widening.

Set over multiple floors, the facility, subsidized by Qatar’s ruler, treats about 150 falcons a day. Most of the birds come for checkups after being bought in the many shops selling falcons nearby, or to have what staff members nonchalantly describe as a mani-pedi, the falcon equivalent of a manicure in which its beak and talons are sharpened while under general anesthesia. Others arrive to have radio transmitters and GPS devices fitted so their owners can keep track of the expensive birds when they take them out to hunt. The devices are typically attached to tail feathers, though some require invasive implantation surgery.

The most serious work — orthopedic surgery to mend broken bones that in the wild would mean certain death — takes place in an inpatient unit housed on another floor.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Nina Dietzel

The Japanese theme park called Western Village in Tochigi prefecture, filled with animatronic cowboys, came and went long before the TV series Westworld debuted, but could it have been inspired by the 1973 movie Westworld?

In 1975, Kenichi Ominami transformed his family ranch into a cowboy town called Western Village (鬼怒川 ウェスタン村).  He hired performers and hosted cowboy shows.

The Old West theme park continued to grow and add attractions in the 80's and 90's.  In 1995, construction began on a 1/3 scale replica of Mount Rushmore.  Ominami decided to build "Mexico Land" across a stream from Western Village.  A bridge was constructed to connect the two areas, and the stream was dubbed "The Rio Grande."

Years after the crowds faded away, Western Village officially closed in 2007.

Western Village has fallen into disrepair in the 12 years since. While the performers are gone, many of the animatronic characters still remain as if to haunt the place. Take a tour of the abandoned park through video. -via Laughing Squid

Emily Williams, a wildlife ecologist in Alaska, needs to get to work. She's got a novel excuse, although one I wouldn't try here in Texas. Her SUV has become a moose's salt lick. The moose appreciates her sacrifice.

-via Marilyn Terrell

You probably might have heard a person telling of a near-death experience in where it seemed that they were floating, and were separated from their physical body. They are, however, aware of their surroundings. But is that kind of experience possible? Is there awareness even after death? Some scientists say that there is.

Some scientists have studied near death experiences (NDEs) to try to gain insights into how death overcomes the brain. What they've found is remarkable, a surge of electricity enters the brain moments before brain death. One 2013 study out of the University of Michigan, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found they entered a hyper-alert state just before death.

Scientists are beginning to think an NDE is caused by reduced blood flow, coupled with abnormal electrical behavior inside the brain. So the stereotypical tunnel of white light might derive from a surge in neural activity. Dr. Sam Parnia is the director of critical care and resuscitation research, at NYU Langone School of Medicine, in New York City. He and colleagues are investigating exactly how the brain dies.

Dr. Parnia has conducted animal studies looking at the moments before and after death in his previous work. He has also studied near death experiences.

“Many times, those who have had such experiences talk about floating around the room and being aware of the medical team working on their body," Dr. Parnia told Live Science. “They'll describe watching doctors and nurses working and they'll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them."

Medical staff confirm this, he said. So how could those who were technically dead be cognizant of what's happening around them?

More details over at Big Think.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

“Hi, my dog died. Could I possibly have an extension on this assignment?”

When Ashley Laderer lost her tiny seven-pound chihuahua, she had to send several variations of that email to her editors. What she lost wasn’t just a dog; what she lost was a family member of 10 years. When sent that email to her editors, she felt as if she was like giving a lame excuse — “like a version of ‘my dog ate my homework.’” But it wasn’t a made-up excuse, for she cannot make any other sentences, let alone write full articles.

As badly as I wanted to get my mind off my dog’s death, I couldn’t. It was impossible to work. I stared at blank Google Doc sheets while nothing (usable) came up. All I could picture was replaying the exact moment I learned she died — the way it didn’t feel real, the way I couldn’t breathe, the way I felt so guilty for not being there with her that night.

[...]

Many people develop deep bonds with their pets. According to a 2018 survey, 72% of Americans consider their pets to be family members, and research on pet loss throughout the years has consistently shown that the loss of a pet can feel as detrimental as the loss of a human family member.

Society, however, does not take pet loss as seriously as human loss.

Find out more about this over at Medium.

(Image Credit: HG-Fotografie/ Pixabay)

The state of Washington will soon be home to the world’s first human composting facility, according to IFL Science. 

The facility is a project of Seattle-based company Recompose. As it opens in 2021, the company will be offering $5500 services that will turn a human body into a cubic yard of soil over a course of 30 days.

Families of the deceased can take as much soil as they like—any remainder goes to sustaining conservation land in the Puget Sound region.

Recompose is one of several organizations working to provide more eco-friendly after-death options.

As traditional choices such as embalming and cremation have their share of issues, this upcoming facility is a breath of fresh air, especially for nature lovers. What do you think?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

A malnourished dog seeking shelter stumbled upon the home of a family in Philadelphia. The door wasn’t shut properly, so the dog was able to enter with ease after leaving and coming back several times. Turns out the owner mistakenly thought the electric lock had secured the door. Thankfully, this was the opportunity for the ill dog to climb in and find warmth and safety indoors. It was around 3 a.m. after a storm blew past when the wife noticed the dog shivering and wet inside their home. 

The family named the dog “Suzy” and they are currently giving her medical treatment for her multiple health complications.

Jokinen says she walks on three legs due to a paw infection, she has an infection in her teeth, extremely underweight and a flea and tick infestation. She was also not chipped, veterinarians said.

The happy accident was captured on CCTV. Get the full story at ABC Action News. 

(Video: Jack Jokinen / Facebook)

Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council have warned people that having a standard of two alcoholic drinks per day is no longer safe. This news comes after a review of evidence revealing the lifetime risk of dying from alcohol-related disease or injury. 

Released just in time for Christmas, the National Health and Medical Research Council on Monday published a draft report which updated Australia’s alcohol guidelines for the first time since 2009.

The new guidelines warn that adults should have “no more than 10 standard drinks per week” to reduce the health risks from alcohol, or roughly 1.4 drinks a day. The maximum an adult should have on a single day is four standard drinks.

More about official health guidelines and effects of alcohol from The Guardian. 

Photo: Julia Nastogadka / Unsplash