Laurie Wolf found a screech owl sharing nest with a duckling in her backyard in Jupiter, Florida.
The scene looked awesome but somewhat concerned Wolf as the predator owl might hurt the duckling.
“The two of them were just sitting there side by side,” says Wolf, a wildlife artist and amateur photographer. “It’s not believable. It’s not believable to me to this day.”
According to Christian Artuso, of the Manitoba director of Bird Studies Canada, wood ducks have been living with eastern screech owls before but it is not commonly documented.
You see, wood ducks are known to practice brood parasitism. This means that parent ducks will sometimes lay an egg or two in someone else’s nest—usually another wood duck or another closely related species.
Melbourne artist Kitt Bennett paints huge murals that can only be seen properly from above, because they cover a lot of ground -literally. His art often covers parking lots, roofs, and wide-open spaces where they can be seen from high-rise buildings.This has Bennett pouring gallons of paint on asphalt and spreading it with rollers after he works out the outline -which cannot be easy. A figure that covers a couple of acres is not easy to visualize in the small space where you stand, but it looks good from ten stories up.
A post shared by KITT (@kitt_bennett) on Aug 26, 2018 at 3:29am PDT
All these photos show more when you click to the right. This is real street art! Yeah, Bennett does walls and buildings, too. See more of Bennett's art at his website and at Instagram. -via Colossal
James Charles Bond died in 1995 and kept the secret of his past to grave.
His grandson, Stephen Phillips, found out that he was a member of the elite Special Operations Executive (SOE) after searching through WW2 documents years following his death.
Bond worked under Ian Fleming, who served as Naval Commander before the became a writer of James Bond novels.
Mr. Phillips believed that Fleming used his grandpa's name for his fictional agent and had the code carved on the headstone.
"Seeing the headstone standing proud recognising grandad's '007' status and proper birth name has been so important to our family."
Simon Nogueira is one of those crazy urban climbers/freerunners. Last year he climbed Notre Dame in Paris. Thanks to his craziness we can have a glimpse of the beautiful details that have been lost.
"La peur existe, tout le temps. Si je n’ai pas peur, je ne peux rien faire."
Two Norwegians have a sing-along with their cat. To be more precise, the cat is yammering "Are we there yet?" every ten seconds, so the humans decided to work around it. -via Digg
If you want some deep thoughts about consciousness and what it means to be conscious, consider the activity of dreaming. Our mind does not control our thoughts, but our brain comes up with plenty of them. -via Nag on the Lake
Friendships can be born through sharing in other people's struggles, rivalry can spark the deepest bonds, and just being open with oneself to others can draw people toward you as you are surrounded by those who share the same things and who give you the support you need.
For the Gotham Volleyball League, they wanted to create a safe space for LGBT people not only to develop friendships through sports but also to give support to those who are going through mental health issues. It has been through difficulties and victories throughout its 40 years in existence and this is their story.
The US has had strained relations with Cuba for the past several decades only restoring the diplomatic relations that existed way back before being severed during the Cold War. But now, as the Trump administration issues some new restrictions regarding travel to Cuba, this leaves many confused with the state of affairs.
To get some clarity regarding the new rules, check out this short guide from Conde Nast that will help explain the vague policies.
We all know it's a bad idea to flush anything that's not biodegradable down the toilet. Even things that are supposedly biodegradable can cause enormous problems if too many people discard them into the sewers, like the wet wipes and grease that form fatbergs. But battling a fatberg is child's play compared to what's in London's sewers now.
People pouring concrete into sewers has led to a “concreteberg” forming in central London that weighs 105 tonnes, as heavy as a blue whale.
The 100-metre-long mass is blocking three Victorian-era sewers in the heart of the capital. Thames Water’s operations manager, Alex Saunders, said it was the largest mass of concrete the company had seen, and could take two months to remove at a cost of at least several hundred thousand pounds.
Not that pouring concrete into a toilet has become a fad in London, but some construction company somewhere used the sewers to dispose of the building material. The concrete, apparently liquid at the time, has set rock-hard against the Victorian bricks of the sewage tunnels, and must be chipped away carefully. Read the particulars of this disaster at the Guardian. -via Gizmodo
Great white sharks like to hang around where the eating is good, but studies of tagged sharks reveal that when a pod of orcas shows up, the sharks flee and won't return for a month or more.
In October 1997, fishing vessels near Southeast Farallon Island observed a young white shark interrupting a pair of orcas that were eating a sea lion. One of the whales rammed and killed the shark, and the duo proceeded to eat its liver. More recently, after orcas passed by a South African beach, five great-white carcasses washed ashore. All were, suspiciously, missing their liver.
A great white’s liver can account for a quarter of its body weight, and is even richer in fats and oils than whale blubber. It’s “one of the densest sources of calories you can find in the ocean,” Jorgensen says. “The orcas know their business, and they know where that organ lies.”
Rather than ripping their prey apart, it seems that orcas can extract livers with surprising finesse, despite lacking arms and hands. No one has observed their technique, but the wounds on otherwise intact carcasses suggest that they bite their victims near their pectoral fins and then squeeze the liver out through the wounds. “It’s like squeezing toothpaste,” Jorgensen says.
Too bad they didn't have fava beans for a side dish. Read about the intelligence and ferociousness that make orcas the real apex predators of the sea at the Atlantic.
Quality ingredients and an extended stay in a low oven are the keys to the best Italian-American Red Sauce. This is the kind of sauce you make with open windows to make sure that the neighbourhood knows what you're making for supper!
There are so many measures we can take to cut down on our carbon emissions in order to turn the tides on climate change and save our world. But there are some things that we might not have as much control over.
Most greenhouse gas emissions come from human activities and it's mostly carbon dioxide. But there are other gases as well like methane, which is produced as we digest food and comes out as gas. That shouldn't be a big problem since we can contain the gas somewhat. When it comes to livestock, however, things get complicated.
Cows and other ruminates, like deer, giraffes and goats, tend to eat highly fibrous material like grass. Those microbes in cow stomachs break down some of that food into carbon dioxide and hydrogen — while other microbes turn the carbon dioxide and hydrogen into methane. The cows belch out the gas, and it wafts up into the atmosphere. Since the methane is produced in cattle stomachs, the vast majority of the gas comes out of the cow's mouths, not the rear.
So far the emissions coming from cows are minimal but not negligible. And as demand continues to spur livestock production, scientists predict that by the year 2050, greenhouse gas emissions from livestock will account for 70% of the allowable emissions to keep climate change in check.
Several options are being considered to address this issue. The first is for people to stop eating meat which is near impossible. Another solution is to create an alternative to meat, something that tastes like meat but produced in a different way. In other words, use plant-based substitutes. It's possible but not everyone might be on board with that.
Far more promising is the chance to change how cattle process their food. That's where seaweed comes in.
"It has an active ingredient called bromoform," Kebreab says. That natural ingredient inhibits the conversion of the hydrogen in the cow's stomach into methane. By adding about 3 to 7 ounces of seaweed to the cow's diet a day, his research has shown, you could reduce the amount of methane emissions by up to 60 percent.
Of course, this is not a cut and dry solution. There are still challenges that need to be considered like how much seaweed do you need to feed all the livestock just in the US? And how will you get that much seaweed?
Has anybody ever wondered what Wi-Fi means? I have, though I never got a satisfactory answer to it and I still have no idea why it's called Wi-Fi.
Actually, I kind of thought the "Wi" part stood for wireless since it is a wireless connection but I couldn't wrap my head around the "Fi" part and what it could be in relation to the whole term.
Wi-Fi Alliance founding member Phil Belanger shared the history of the term with Boing Boing back in 2005. It seems the wireless industry was seeking a user-friendly name to refer to technology that adhered to standards known as IEEE 802.11.
“We needed something that was a little catchier than ‘IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence,’” he explained. The Wi-Fi Alliance hired Interbrand to come up with ideas, and the brand consultancy proposed 10 names, including Wi-Fi (which sounds lot like “hi-fi,” AKA “high fidelity”).
Faith in humanity is restored. Turns out the whole incident was a simple misunderstanding. A woman thought that Lucy, the pet rat of Chris, had been abandoned and so decided to bring her home. Police were able to track Lucy and reunite her with Chris.
You know cooties- if you're a little girl, boys have them. If you are a little boy, girls have them. The imaginary bugs were horrible, and you didn't want to catch them. So the rule was hands off, unless you were a contrary child and used a show of bravery against cooties as an excuse to touch the opposite sex. You know who you are.
The most familiar incarnation has features of a real infectious disease even as it says a good deal about what 6-year-olds think of the opposite sex. Every little girl knows that boys have cooties, and vice versa. One catches cooties by—eww!—touching. Shrieking games of cooties tag transmit the contagion rapidly. It can be treated with an origami “cootie catcher,” but it is better to be vaccinated.
This requires a friend and a retractable pen. Your friend clicks the pen onto your arm while chanting “circle, circle, dot, dot, now you have your cootie shot.” Folklore archives and internet forum threads show that regional variations of the therapeutic regimen have emerged. In Louisville, the charm is “line, line, dot, dot, operation cootie shot”; in Los Angeles, kids “pinch, pinch” in lieu of the “dot, dot”; in Hawaii, the process is known as an “uku shot.”
Cooties varied from place to place and featured in at least three kinds of games. But where did the term come from, anyway? Read the history of cooties at Smithsonian.
