Next time you’re going to drive while under the influence of alcohol, be like this woman. Yes, you’ve heard it correctly. This woman just avoided DUI charges “because her vehicle of choice was a toy truck.” Although, the police would instead charge her of public intoxication.
(Image Credit: WTSP)
"It looked like a steak knife that was sticking out of his head," Erin Weaver told CNN affiliate KTRK.
In her six years living in the neighborhood where alligators are frequently present, Erin stated that she has never seen one of these gators attack, and is unsure why someone would do this to one of these alligators.
"I feel that somebody did this on purpose."
A Texas wildlife agency is expected to check out the gator next week, but until then, Weaver and her neighbors are acting as its advocates.
More details of this news on CNN.
(Video Credit: KPRC 2 Click2Houston/ YouTube)
Half as Interesting tries to answer the question, "What is the fastest manmade object?" As you can figure, first they have to clarify the parameters of the question, defining the terms and such. But that leads us to a truly bizarre story of an experiment that is still somewhat classified. I really want to know if we have a 1957 manhole cover orbiting the earth, or possibly some other heavenly body.
Most of us can’t get enough of our smartphones. All day long, we stare at it, perhaps waiting for messages from our friends, or just randomly watching funny cat videos. This may be the reason why we’re developing a weird bony spike at the base of our skulls. This is especially true for the younger generation.
The bony skull bump — known as an external occipital protuberance — is sometimes so large, you can feel it by pressing your fingers on the base of your skull.
"I have been a clinician for 20 years, and only in the last decade, increasingly, I have been discovering that my patients have this growth on the skull," David Shahar, a health scientist at the University of The Sunshine Coast, Australia, told the BBC in a fascinating feature about the changing human skeleton.
[...]
These bony spikes are likely here to stay, Shahar said. "Imagine if you have stalactites and stalagmites, if no one is bothering them, they will just keep growing," he told the BBC. Luckily, these spikes rarely cause medical issues. If you are experiencing discomfort, however, try improving your posture, he said.
(Image Credit: Averyanovphoto/ Pixabay)
It's Father's Day and it's time for us to give some love to our dear fathers and father-figures out there who showed us how to love and be loved. So, maybe just for this day, we could indulge them even with just the little things. Like say, listen to their sometimes funny, sometimes cringy, innocent humor we call 'dad jokes'.
The thing about dad jokes is that it seems everyone has some kind of experience with them. Though the term only became widespread in the last five years, corny jokes have been around for quite some time. However, why they are mostly associated with dads today is something worth investigating.
Bad jokes have come to be strongly associated with middle-aged men with children. Though it’s mostly since 2014 that the mildly pejorative term “dad jokes” really caught the attention of the general public enough to enter dictionaries, the idea of an uncool father regaling his kids with corny jokes seems to be widely relatable to lots of people.
Though dad jokes may be perceived as just bad jokes, if you look at them closely, they represent something that actually tries to subvert the idea of humor without it being its primary goal. Dads genuinely find such jokes funny and when they tell it, they do it with full expectation that others will think it's funny too.
Humor researchers don’t always agree, but one thing seems clear. So-called “dad jokes” take what we know about joking and turn it upside down—and not just because they’re horrendously bad. Dad jokes are a kind of anti-joke, different from other ways of joking in their performance, even formulaic jokes.
No special kind of comedic performance or timing is needed—so anyone can tell a dad joke. The jokes aren’t new, they’re the easiest jokes to understand, and no one can possibly fail at getting them. A listener is meant to groan at what is obviously a bad joke… yet if they do laugh, all the better.
(Image credit: Isaac Mehegan/Unsplash)
This is the northern pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea), a carnivorous plant known for chowing down insects. But it seems that they don’t only chow down on insects. Apparently, they also eat vertebrates such as baby salamanders.
According to the study authors, this is the first research showing that carnivorous pitcher plants, also known as turtle socks, make vertebrates a regular part of their diets.
"This crazy discovery of previously unknown carnivory of a plant upon a vertebrate happened in a relatively well-studied area on relatively well-studied plants and animals," study co-author Alex Smith, an associate biology professor at Ontario's University of Guelph, told Live Science in an email. "I hope and imagine that one day the general public's interpretive pamphlet for the bog will say, 'Stay on the boardwalk and watch your children — here be plants that eat vertebrates!"
How do these plants catch their prey? Find out over at Live Science.
(Image Credit: Patrick D. Moldowan/Algonquin Wildlife Research Station)
Why is it that we're celebrating Father's Day on the third Sunday of June every year for the past 100 or so years? Well, it's thanks to Sonora Smart Dodd, who suggested and campaigned for such a holiday to be held, in honor of her father which later became a national celebration.
Dodd had the idea to begin a national day for dads while listening to a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909. Her father, a Civil War veteran and widower, had raised Dodd and her five brothers by himself.
A year later, Dodd’s plans to host a day-long celebration honoring her dad came to fruition. On June 19, 1910, the city of Spokane honored its first official Father’s Day at a local YMCA. Dodd had originally hoped to celebrate the day on June 5, her father’s birthday, but it was pushed back until the third Sunday of June. -Atlas Obscura
(Image credit: Spokane Public Library)
If our eyes constantly move around to see, then how come our vision doesn't get blurry as they move? Knowable Magazine's Tim Vernimmen got that question handled:
There are a number of reasons why these movements don’t transform our view of the world into a blur of motion. One is that the most distinct things in our field of view may render us blind to other stimuli that are fleeting and faint: Objects that are in clear sight when our eyes don’t move are likely to make a more vivid impression than the blur in between. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as visual masking, and it is thought to be very common in real-life situations where a lot is going on at the same time.
But visual masking - or transitioning from one angle to another can get unsettling and does not explain enough stability in our vision. Vernimmen cites Robert Wurtz (United States National Eye Institute) as he elaborates:
A kind of remapping happens even before we move our eyes. In experiments with macaques that were trained to make predictable saccades, brain cells that receive signals from one particular spot in the retina switched from responding to things currently in view there to things that would show up only after the saccade. In this way, Wurtz thinks, the current image is gradually replaced by the future one.
Head on over to Knowable magazine to know more about how we keep our vision: (a)not blurry, and (b) stable regardless of the consistent eye movement. Via The Smithsonian
image credit: Weekend Way via Giphy
Last June 8, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History opened an exhibition called, “Hall of Fossils—Deep Time”. The muse of the exhibit is the shining sequoia tree slab, preserved and polished.
Scot Wing, the Paleobotanist who studied the said sequoia tree, said that he came up with about 260 rings. Though he notes that there's always a little bit of uncertainty in the count, he said that he doesn't mind it if someone one day write him saying, "You're off by three," and even added that it's a good thing for it'd be an opportunity regarding the ongoing conversation about time.
"Each yearly delineation on the sequoia’s surface is a small part of a far grander story that ties together all of life on Earth. Scientists know this as Deep Time. It’s not just on the scale of centuries, millennia, epochs, or periods, but the ongoing flow that goes back to the origins of our universe, the formation of the Earth, and the evolution of all life, up through this present moment. It’s the backdrop for everything we see around us today, and it can be understood through techniques as different as absolute dating of radioactive minerals and counting the rings of a prehistoric tree. Each part informs the whole."
Wing says, people can play the classic game of comparing the tree’s life to a human lifespan. If a long human life is about 80 years, Wing says, then people can count 80, 160, and 240 years, meaning the sequoia grew and thrived over the course of approximately three human lifespans—but during a time when our own ancestors resembled gibbon-like apes. Time is not something that life simply passes through. In everything—from the rings of an ancient tree to the very bones in your body—time is part of life.
-via Smithsonian
Image Credit: Smithsonian / NMNH
“This tree was alive, photosynthesizing, pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, turning it into sugars and into lignin and cellulose to make cell walls,” Wing says. After the tree perished, water carrying silica and other minerals coated the log to preserve the wood and protect some of those organic components inside. “The carbon atoms that came out of the atmosphere 16 million years ago are locked in this chunk of glass.”
Image Credit: DAVID MCNEW / Smithsonian
Benedetto Bufalino, an artist from Lyon, France, is known for transforming ordinary objects into whimsical work of art. His famous arts include playable ping pong table made from upside down cars, aquariums built from telephone booths, and many more.
Bufalino’s latest work of art is a skateboard made from street signposts. He calls this “le poteau cédez le passage skateboard”.
To create the artwork, bufalino worked with skateboarders from besançon, a city in eastern france which has a burgeoning culture for urban sports. It recently opened the CCUB (center for urban cultures in besançon) which saw a €500,000 renovation of an old tennis club to accomodate various kind including skateboarding, rollerblading and breakdancing.
Learn more details of Bufalino’s art over at DesignBoom.
Video: Vimeo
Cartoonist Grant Snider of Incidental Comics drew this fantastic panel explaining a writer's routine.
I'm very well acquainted with P and X!
Penn Museum in Philadelphia had the epic task of relocating the 12.5 ton sphinx to its newly redesigned entrance hall.
Moving the iconic statue—which is the largest sphinx in the western hemisphere—takes more than a dolly and a few burly movers. The carving was first 3-D scanned to determine its weight and density to make sure the hulking beast could be properly rigged. A safe, manageable 250-foot route was then mapped that took the sphinx through doorways, out a second-story window, through a courtyard, and back through another window on the other side, Brian Houghton, the museum’s building engineer, tells WHYY’s Peter Crimmins.
In 1912, the Sphinx of Temple of the God Ptah in the ancient city of Memphis was excavated by archaeologist W.M. Flinders Petrie. One of his backers, Penn, wanted the statue. So, the Sphinx was wrapped in burlap and shipped overseas to the Penn Museum. As of the present day, the Egyptian government has not called for its repatriation.
Learn more about the Sphinx at the Smithsonian.com
Image: Penn Museum
Winston Smith Illusion: The 70th anniversary of the publication of Orwell's 1984 is perhaps a good time to remember that according to Gestalt psychology, 2+2 doesn't always equal 4. (blog post with demo: https://t.co/IWYCl0UEEk) #Orwell #1984 #1984at70 #TipsForSurvivingRoom101 pic.twitter.com/Xa9V3nQX7t
— Arthur Shapiro (@agshapiro2) June 8, 2019
Professor of Psychology and Computer Science Arthur Shapiro of American University tweeted this illusion, named after Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Since “post-truth” is the Oxford word of the year, let’s start off this new blog with an Orwellian twist. In 1984, the mathematical expression 2+2=4 is the centerpiece in a battle over Truth. After all, 2+2 obviously equals 4, and the Party’s final and most essential command is for Winston to reject the evidence of his eyes and ears. Winston therefore pleads in his journal, “[T]he obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended”; otherwise, the Party can control all of our thoughts.
I am not trying to soften your mind for Big Brother, but … is the mathematical statement 2+2=4 always true? Certainly, 2+2=4 is true for numbers and simple counting: 2 apples plus 2 apples equals 4 apples. However, not everything in the world follows the rules of simple arithmetic.
We often associate cereal with these words: “children” and “breakfast". So, is it possible to get wasted with Cereal?
On Thursday, three beers — Sling it out Stout, Throw Away IPA and Cast off Pale Ale — officially launched, the brewery and cereal giant confirmed.
Kellogg’s, a cereal company, is teaming up with Seven Brothers Brewery in England to produce beers from leftover cereals. Kellog’s Corn Flakes replaces wheat grain in the beer mix during the mashing process. Their Rice Krispies and Coco Pop replaces the malted barley.
"Kellogg's is always looking for innovative ways to use surplus food, the collaboration with Seven Bro7hers is a fun way to repurpose non-packaged, less-than-perfect cereal. This activity is part of our new 'Better Days' commitments which aim to reduce our impact on the planet."
We waste 1.3 billion tons of food annually, and roughly 30% of these are from cereals. I admire Kellogg’s heart to not let their food go to waste, and their passion for reducing impact on the planet.
Image: BeerStorkUK/Kelloggs
If you love Jeff Lee Johnson's Blue Plate Special (previously on Neatorama), then you'll love his next installment in the series: The Grand International Hotel (larger version here - you'll need it to fully appreciate Johnson's masterpiece).
See if you can find the gentleman with the goat hooves, the giant spider, and the giant rat.
Can't wait for the third installment!
Don't forget to visit Johnson's Deviant Art page for more neat artwork.
