There are three types of dingos in Australia: tropical, inland, and alpine, not including dogs that are a mix of dingos and domestic breeds. The alpine dingo is the rarest, and the most threatened. So it's quite surprising to find one in a backyard in Wandiligong, Victoria. The residents who found him just considered him a lost puppy.  

At the time the residents thought the animal may have been a fox or dog, but after looking after the animal for 24 hours they took the pup to the Alpine Animal Hospital.

"He was a puppy when he was brought to us, so about eight to ten weeks [of age]," Veterinarian Dr Bec Day said.

"He had a mark on his back [from what is believed to be an eagle's claws] and there were no other pups nearby. The resident hadn't heard any [other dingos] calling. So he was just a lonely little soul sitting in a backyard.

The pup was named Wandi, after the town, although he should have been named Lucky after surviving a kidnapping by eagle and then the drop to the ground. A DNA test shows that Wandi is a purebred alpine dingo, which makes him valuable to the Australian Dingo Foundation. Wandi has a new home at their sanctuary, where he gets to live among other dingos and will become part of their breeding program. Read Wandi's story at ABC.  -via Metafilter

The golden age of piracy was between 1650 and 1730, when plenty of sailing ships were at sea with valuable cargo to plunder. Most of the pirates listed were executed by gunshot, hanging, or beheading, although one drowned. What's really interesting is the varied stories of their lives, like this guy.

Stede Bonnet owned a large sugar plantation in Barbados. He was a wealthy, married man with children, but the lifestyle did not sit well for him and it was recorded that his marriage was rather loveless.

In 1717, Bonnet bought a 10-gun sloop, instead of stealing one like most pirates, and manned his ship. He had no experience at sea, but he was determined to become a pirate. Historians today joke that Bonnet was going through some sort of midlife crisis at this point, but some historians believe he was mentally unbalanced.

His crew did not respect him and eventually they abandoned him to join the crew on Blackbeard’s ship. Bonnet was allowed to remain on Blackbeard’s ship as a guest until he returned to piracy in July 1718. By September, Bonnet was arrested for piracy and transported to Charleston, South Carolina where he was hung at White Point Garden on December 10, 1718.

Read of the lives and deaths of nine other pirates at Strange Ago.  -via Strange Company

The month of November is here, and that bring three totally-foreseen changes to the internet. 1. You see a ton of great Halloween costumes that you cannot use, either as your own costume or for publishing, since Halloween is over, 2. Mariah Carey is singing that Christmas song non-stop, which will continue the rest of the year, and 3. the movie Blade Runner is no longer set in the future. Yes, as the intertitle told us, Blade Runner takes place in Los Angeles in November 2019. Back in 1982, when the movie was released, that may have seemed to be far in the future, but here we are.

Blade Runner depicts a November 2019 where mega-corporations rule the world with little resistance from the government and the institutions of civil society have been effectively crushed under their boot heels. Instead of scientific advances that benefit humanity, technological innovations in the world of Blade Runner are channeled into fantastical wastes of resources for the sole benefit of an ever-narrowing class of elites who consider themselves akin to living gods. And people themselves? In Blade Runner, human laborers are almost completely devalued, replaced by hostile, artificially engineered simulacra. This should all sound pretty familiar!

But still no flying cars. Or at least no flying cars that anyone can afford. And what about replicants? Tom McKay believes they already walk among us. See an example at Gizmodo.

A while back, we told you how they were going to raise the 11foot8 bridge in Durham, North Carolina. Now we can watch Norfolk Southern and the NC Railroad Company doing it. How do you raise a railroad trestle? They are jacking it up with a dozen hydraulic jacks resting on top of trellises. Really. Just scooch the whole railroad up eight inches, slip some metal shims in the space between the plinths and the bridge, and then set it down. Next, they have to regrade and align the tracks for some distance from the bridge to make it usable to trains. They have some remarkably specialized machinery for those jobs. I guess we'll have to call the this 12foot4 bridge from now on. -via Boing Boing 

Relatively speaking, private bedrooms--or even bedrooms--are a modern invention. A house might have only one room or just a few, none of which could be set aside for sleeping.

So if an amorous couple desired, uh, privacy, then they needed a box bed. Amusing Planet describes the other purposes of the box bed:

 Aside from privacy, the small enclosed space of the box bed trapped body heat keeping the sleeping person warm during winter. It’s also possible that the beds offered some degree of protection against intruders, especially wolves and other animals, that might have entered the house. It has been suggested that peasants kept their children inside box beds while they went to work in the fields.

In Europe, box beds continued to be common until the Nineteenth Century, when the practice declined for hygienic purposes.

Photo: Wolfgang Sauber

Excalibur M982 is a precision weapons that can hit a target with a single shot. The main feature of this new weapon is the presence of a fully autonomous guidance system. This has reduced the number of misses to almost zero. A 155 mm long-range guided projectile Excalibur is launched from the howitzer barrel and is capable of hitting a target at a distance to 60 km with a deviation of up to 6 meters.

We eat chickens, ducks, pigeons, geese, and turkeys. But we don't eat swans. In fact, mention eating a swan and people will look at you like you've lost your mind. Swans aren't all that different from the birds we eat. In fact, once upon a time it was normal to cook and eat swan.

According to food historian Ivan Day, it has not always been frowned upon to eat our long-necked feathered friends. A harrowing recipe from the Victorian Handbook for Housewives recommended not only eating swan, but fattening up cygnets from birth to be consumed as teenagers. “This splendid dish, worthy of a prince's table, [is] a capital and magnificent Christmas dish,” the 1870 journal claims. The recipe suggests removing cygnets from their parents, fattening them up with grass and barley, then roasting them on a spit, garnished with turnips decoratively carved into tiny swans. A 1300 French cookbook, Le Viandier, includes a recipe for roast swan, while a 1685 cookbook used in 17th century England and colonial era America recommends a “swan pye” as a course in a festive banquet.

So why do people feel so strongly that eating swan is wrong today? That's a story that begins with historical facts and moves to feelings over time, which you can read at The Outline.   

(Image credit: Arpingstone)

Get ready for something truly ridiculous. Sean Patrick Daigle has a tradition of doing a couple's costume for Halloween every year. With his pug. This year, they tackled Beauty and the Beast. You may be really impressed by the setting, as I was. He explained that they went to the Driskill Hotel in Austin, and shot the whole thing in six minutes on an iPhone while security was busy trying to remove them from the premises. -via reddit

Within 100 to 300 milliseconds. That’s how fast the human brain can recognize a familiar song, according to a UCL study. In other words, your brain can recognize a song before you can finish blinking (as an average blink takes about 400 milliseconds).

Anecdotally the ability to recall popular songs is exemplified in game shows such as ‘Name That Tune’, where contestants can often identify a piece of music in just a few seconds.

For this study, published in Scientific Reports, researchers at the UCL Ear Institute wanted to find out exactly how fast the brain responded to familiar music, as well as the temporal profile of processes in the brain which allow for this.

More about this study over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

November 5, 1999. It was a historic day for those who have a grudge on GIFs, as it was Burn All GIFs Day. On that memorable Friday, the game plan was laid out as plainly as its name says: "On Burn All GIFs Day, all GIF users will gather at Unisys and burn all their GIF files." Alongside this declaration are PNG files — proudly anti-GIF.

Despite the obvious joke of setting files on fire, acknowledged with a winking plea to "extinguish all GIFs before leaving the vicinity," the anger was real and the mission was earnest: to free the web from the scourge of the GIF once and for all.

But it seems that they were not successful in their mission. Up until this day, the GIF still lives, and it rules the Internet.

Find out more about this over at Popular Mechanics.

Long live the GIF!

(Image Credit: Popular Mechanics)

New York, Washington, Boston, and other cities across the country have launched bike-share programs as sustainable transportation alternatives that have a number of benefits, such as easing traffic congestion, cut carbon emissions, and also improve public health.

Cyclists in those cities, meanwhile, have embraced bike-sharing to make their commutes faster, cheaper, and more fun. Last year, U.S. bike-share riders completed nearly 46 million trips—more than twice as many trips from the previous year.

Despite the popularity and the advantages of these programs, however, there are still significant operational challenges that remain.

Take, for instance, the distribution of bikes. Because of commuting patterns, residential neighborhoods face shortages of bicycles in the morning rush, while business districts have a dearth of bikes in the evening. What’s more, parking docks can be full at certain hours, making it difficult for riders to return the bikes once they’ve reached their destinations.

How do we, then, make the system more efficient?

More details about this over at Scientific American.

(Image Credit: yorgunum/ Pixabay)

It looks like a screaming skull to me.

Found above on the cosmos is this ghostly Veil Nebula, a large expanding cloud born of the death explosion of a massive star.

Light from the original supernova explosion likely reached Earth over 5,000 years ago. Also known as the Cygnus Loop, the Veil Nebula now spans nearly 3 degrees or about 6 times the diameter of the full Moon.

You really can find a lot of things in the cosmos.

(Image Credit: Anis Abdul)

Scientists have recently developed a new way of removing carbon dioxide from a stream of air, which could prove to be useful in humanity’s battle against climate change. This new method can work on the gas at virtually any concentration level, even down to the approximately 400 parts per million found currently inside our atmosphere.

Most methods of removing carbon dioxide from a stream of gas require higher concentrations, such as those found in the flue emissions from fossil fuel-based power plants. A few variations have been developed that can work with the low concentrations found in air, but the new method is significantly less energy-intensive and expensive, the researchers say.

Amazing!

Know more details about this over at Science Daily.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Beginning on November 22, Twitter will no longer post political ads, states Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The final policy, according to Dorsey, will be disclosed on November 15. As of this writing, Jack’s post has over 17,000 responses.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: PhotoMIX-Company/ Pixabay)

We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

Five-year-old Charlie had been following the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. For Halloween, her parents build her a Lunar Lander costume! Charlie's little sister, two-year-old Ellie, is an astronaut.

Charlie enters the costume by crawling underneath and there is a pair of shoulder straps that she uses to lift the entire costume.  The costume looks heavier than it is -- it's almost entirely made of foam and foamboard.  The front hatch magnetically closes and magnetically stays open, and doubles as a candy sample input port.  The ascent stage (top part) separates from the descent stage (bottom part with landing pads) as you'll see below.

You can see an image gallery of the lander and its construction at imgur. See a video of the trick-or-treaters in action. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: brandoj23)