Jill Hicks of Chattanooga, Tennessee, saw a kitten running across a road and captured it for its own safety, as one does. When she showed the rescued kitten off to a neighbor, she was informed that she had actually picked up a bobcat kitten! Hicks then took the bobkitten to For Fox Sake Wildlife Rescue. The organization posted the story and a picture of the bobkitten, now named Arwen, and some of the responses were rather strange.

On September 26, For Fox Sake mentioned that they had received a lot of requests about people wanting to adopt Arwen. "There is a 0 percent chance that Arwen, or any other bobkitten, will grow up to be a suitable house pet,” they wrote. “Even when raised by humans, bobcats are unpredictable, territorial wild animals with a powerful prey drive and no desire to please human beings.”

In other words: Sorry, but you won’t be able to adopt a bobkitten. And if for some reason Arwen won’t be able to be re-released into the wild, the rescue said she would go to a zoo or a nature center.

For future reference, "Wildlife Rescue" is very different from "Animal Shelter." You can read that story at Mental Floss. You can keep up with Arwen, who is battling anemia, in daily updates at Facebook.

(Image credit: For Fox Sake Wildlife Rescue)

The Panama Canal was one of the largest engineering projects undertaken during its time. It stretches from the Port of Balboa which borders the Pacific Ocean to the Port of Colon on the other side, connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.

It shortened the time it took for ships to cross South America without having to pass through the notoriously hazardous Cape Horn on the southernmost tip via the Drake Passage or Strait of Magellan. And since it's been almost 40 years since the process to transfer ownership of the Panama Canal took place, it's time to test our knowledge on it.

Check out the quiz on Inside Sources and see how well you do.

(Image credit: MrPanyGoff/Flickr; Wikimedia Commons)

The standard distance between the rails on a railroad in the United States is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. It seems like an incredibly odd measurement to have. It probably would have been easier to simply make it 5 feet or 4.5 feet. But why is the standard that way and how did it happen?

Bill Holohan explains the history of the US standard railroad gauge in this Twitter thread. It's intriguing to say the least and the answer at the end is interesting, if not a little surprising though if there's one thing we should know by now, it is that history matters. A lot.

(Image credit: Tom Barrett/Unsplash)

Apart from emissions from fossil fuels, other ways we contribute to global warming and climate change is through the food we eat. In particular, the way we produce our food. There have been several initiatives proposed and undertaken to manage food production such that it would reduce the greenhouse gases being emitted during the process. But will it be enough?

"Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods, such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced food produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change," Debra Roberts, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II, said in a press release.

But how much difference can such choices really make? A wealth of research supports the idea that adopting a low- or no-meat diet is a significant way to lower an individual's greenhouse gas footprint. The IPCC report cites data showing that livestock production accounts for the greatest portion of ice-free land on Earth's surface, and contributed to over half of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions in 2014.

(Image credit: ja ma/Unsplash)

Vanesssa Mckeown's Instagram posts are the kind of photos that will make you stop scrolling and look again.

Once I had a few pictures, I shared them on Instagram and it sort of took off quite quickly and I haven’t stopped… thankfully !

I’ve always loved to create things and make colorful stuffs. I love products that people make, just stuffs that I find visually fun. I could just take pictures of objects and that’s it, but annoyingly, it doesn’t fill with me as much as put a barbie shoe on a cigarette or fill a bag with beans !

Vanessa studied graphic design communication at Chelsea College of Art of London, and she had practiced graphic design, illustration, video editing and a bit of animation, but there wasn't a connection with her. It’s only when, during her weekends, she loved to realize simple still life at home. 

Photo Credits: Vanessa Mckeown / Instagram

By the standards of aircraft carriers, that's quite cheap!

The São Paulo began its career in 1963 in the French navy. The French sold it to the Brazilians in 2000, where it became that nation's flagship.

It was mostly a disappointing experience for the Brazilians, as the ship required very expensive and repeated upgrades and overhauls. The Drive explains that the Brazilians grew weary of this incessant work that prevented the ship from sailing actively most of the time. In 2017, they decommissioned the carrier.

It's now up for auction. You (or, perhaps, the State of Wyoming) can become its next owner. So start digging through the couch cushions for loose change.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Rob Schleiffert

It's been ten years since we had the story of the 6-year-old boy who floated away in a flying saucer-shaped hot air balloon by himself. The whole USA was on edge until we found out Falcon Heene was in the attic of his home the whole time. Was it a mistake or an elaborate hoax? Officials began to suspect it was a publicity stunt for Richard Heene's reality TV plans.

Today, the Heenes live in a camper trailer parked on the side of a twisting country road. A 160-year-old farmhouse slumps just a few yards away, a spray of mold running up the white siding. The house is a renovation project the Heenes are working on for an investor in Florida, where the family had been living since Richard pleaded guilty to one felony charge of attempting to influence a public servant in relation to what came to be known as the Balloon Boy Hoax. Richard served 30 days in jail and 60 nights of work release, and in August 2010 he moved his family 1,900 miles from Colorado to Florida. Now in the New York countryside for the summer and fall, the Heenes were, in all likelihood, the most famous people in their zip code.

Robert Sanchez visited the family, and also combed through documents from the balloon boy saga to find the truth. Whether he found it or not, the story is a compelling read at 5280 magazine. -via Digg 

(Image credit: Sgt. Benjamin Crane)

Paul Krapivsky and Sidney Redner crunched the numbers and published a paper on the optimum strategy for choosing a parking space in a parking lot. Since the paper is paywalled, the Santa Fe Institute give us an overview in a short video. However, the study makes a lot of assumptions, the first of which is that walking is something you want to minimize. Honestly, I don't care about parking far out, since I'll probably walk twice as far inside the store anyway. And sometimes it's worth walking further to get a space in the shade. -via Metafilter

While Star Wars fans built a holiday around a pun (May the fourth be with you), Disney launched their own Star Wars holiday three years ago, called Force Friday. That's the day that the new Star Wars toys and merchandise are unveiled, giving you enough time to decide what you want to ask Santa Claus to bring you. Or your kids, we won't judge. This year, Force Friday is October 4th, but we already can see the new toys that will go on sale in October, because io9 has a rundown of them. Pick your favorites, or perhaps your price range, and you won't be taken by surprise when they're all sold out in November.  

(Image credit: Hasbro, Funko, Mattel)

When Indras Govender first set foot in the United States, he was astonished by the welcoming attitude he encountered whenever he went. “To come to a country and just walk into any restaurant or go anywhere you want, it was like, ‘Whoa,’” he stated as he recalled that moment.

Coming from apartheid-era South Africa, Indras and wife, Tilly, (now an assistant dean in the social sciences division of the College of Letters & Science) lived a life fraught with overt racism and discrimination due to their Indian heritage. It was the early 1990s. Nelson Mandela had just been freed after 27 years in state prison, and South African president F. W. de Klerk had just signed a peace accord to end the oppressive system. Still the effects of the 50-year-long regime lingered.

The life of the Govenders, however, was entirely different from where they came from.

“California’s quite the melting pot,” he said. “There are people from every country in the world here. And so you don’t feel out of place, and people are welcoming.”

It’s the feeling of that first welcome that Govender pays forward every day in his role as food and beverage manager at The Club & Guest House. Joining the campus in 2016 to head the newly revamped fine dining facility formerly known as the Faculty Club, Govender brings more than 10 years of experience as a restaurant owner, combined with his formal training as a certified public accountant and his genuine passion for the epicurean experience.

Learn more about Indras and The Club & Guest House over at The Current.

(Image Credit: Jeff Liang)

There are a lot of games available in the App Store of your smartphone, and you probably don’t have all the time in the world to play them all to see which ones are the best. Thankfully, EnGadget gives some of what they think are the best games, so that we’ll know when to start.

See their recommendations over at their site.

(Image Credit: tagechos/ Pixabay)

The aim was to unload a ton (probably several tons) of steel beams from a railroad car. Maybe it was too expensive for these guys to get a proper crane, but they did have four forklifts. Just coordinate them all at once and lift that load out! Hmm, what could possibly go wrong? A better question might be: Have you ever seen a train derailment at zero miles per hour? -via Digg

It took a lot of guts to undergo surgery in the days before anesthetics and antibiotics, when the pain was intense and the survival rate was abysmal. The decision pretty much had to be a matter of life and death. It's difficult to imagine how horrific surgery was for the patient, but we can get some idea from a professional writer who lived through a mastectomy. English novelist Fanny Burney put off surgery for breast cancer as long as she could, but in September of 1811 allowed herself to be put under the knife- while wide awake in her living room. She later wrote about the experience.

“I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision—and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, and the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp and forked poniards, that were tearing the edges of the wound—but when again I felt the instrument—describing a curve—cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left—then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.”

There's more. Read the story of Burney's operation at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

A second interstellar object had made its way into our solar system a few weeks ago, but Yale astronomers Gregory Laughlin and Malena Rice were not surprised to hear it.

Their research, which has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest that these strange, icy visitors from other planets will keep on coming.

We can expect a few large objects showing up every year, they say; smaller objects entering the solar system could reach into the hundreds each year.

“There should be a lot of this material floating around,” said Rice, a graduate student at Yale and first author of the study. “So much more data will be coming out soon, thanks to new telescopes coming online. We won’t have to speculate.”

More details on YaleNews.

(Image Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Watch as this star comes too close to a black hole and get ripped apart and then becomes gas. An amazing spectacle, if you ask me. A NASA satellite is reported to have witnessed the event.

It is one of the most detailed looks yet at the phenomenon, called a tidal disruption event (or TDE), and the first for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (more commonly called TESS.)

The milestone was reached with the help of a worldwide network of robotic telescopes headquartered at The Ohio State University called ASAS-SN (All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae). Astronomers from the Carnegie Observatories, Ohio State and others published their findings today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Amazing!

(Video Credit: Ohio State News/ YouTube)