Akron, Ohio, was a booming city in the mid-20th century. They built a highway through the middle of town called the Innerbelt to ease commuter traffic. But more than 50 years later, the road was barely used, and was closed in 2015. What to do with the city space now? Residents wanted it turned into a green space. Designer Hunter Franks went to work to make the Innerbelt National Forest a reality.

At first, the city insisted that he plant trees in pots, so his “Innerbelt National Forest” would be easier to remove. In time, he was allowed to plant them in the ground, while also putting in a stage, a children’s play area, a mulch trail and other amenities. The park, which opened in August, was an immediate hit. Although it was originally seen as temporary, talk soon started up about extending its life, or even making it permanent. “Some or all or most of it may end up staying,” says Jason Segedy, Akron’s planning director.

Residents, posting pictures of the park on Instagram, keep comparing it to an old Joni Mitchell song, noting that it’s the reverse of her 1970 lyric about paving paradise to put up a parking lot. The fact that a disused freeway can become a pop-up forest makes it easy to envision turning practically any area into green space, Franks says.

Read more about the Innerbelt National Forest project at Governing. -via Metafilter

Children often grow up to enter the same profession as their parents, and that goes for criminals, too. Studies in different countries show that a small number of families account for an outsized number of people in prison. But criminality doesn't get passed along genetically. The case of the Bogle family illustrates how a penchant for crime is learned.

I met the Bogles through an official at the Oregon Department of Corrections, who called me to say he knew of a family with what he thought were six members in prison. Little did I know that, after 10 years of reporting, the real number of people in the Bogle clan I found who have been incarcerated or placed on probation or parole would turn out to be 60.

The Bogles had a story to tell about what happens in a criminal family. “What you are raised with, you grow to become,” says Tracey Bogle, who served a 16-year prison sentence for kidnapping, armed robbery, assault, car theft, and sexual assault. “There is no escape from our criminal contagion.”

While Tracey’s father, Rooster, was the most malevolent member of the bunch, the family’s history of criminality stretches back to 1920, when Rooster’s mother and father made and sold moonshine during Prohibition. Since then, members of the family have committed crimes including burglaries, armed robberies, kidnapping, and murder.

All ten of Rooster Bogle's children ended up incarcerated at least once. Read about the Bogles, and some innovative programs that are trying to stop the transmission of criminal behavior through family ties, at the Atlantic.

(Image credit: Oregon Department of Corrections)

The US Embassy in Australia sent out invitations to a meeting accompanied by a picture of a cat lounging in pajamas with a plate of cookies. That is a sure way to get people to show up for a meeting! But alas, the invitation was a mistake. Embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall said it was a "training error." And everyone was disappointed, as they had hoped to attend a pajama party with cats. Diplomats on Twitter had a great time with the story.   

We are actually LOLing here in NZ @USAembassyinOZ https://t.co/WziJ8TTiUh pic.twitter.com/26qWgMo5ll

— US Embassy NZ (@usembassynz) October 15, 2018

The cat in the Cookie Monster jammies is Joey, who belongs to Jennifer Stewart. You can see more of her dressed-up cats at Instagram. -Thanks, WTM!

We're not in Kansas anymore ... we're actually in La, a district in Accra, the capital of Ghana.

Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey created carpets of stitched together yellow square pieces of plastic from a jerrycan as an art installation.

BBC has the details:

Each of the squares is cut from a distinctive type of jerrycan, known in Ghana as a "Kufuor gallon" - named after former President John Kufuor - and then sewn together to form plastic carpeting.

In the early 2000s, when Mr Kufuor was in power, there were water shortages and the large yellow containers began to be seen around the country as people used them on their long treks to collect water.

Some are still in use, but many now lie discarded and Clottey repurposes them for his art, which he calls "Afrogallonism".

Read the rest over at the BBC.

Photo: Nii Odzenma

In 2013 diver Curtis Lahr sank a full-scale replica of Jason Voorhees in a Minnesota lake popular among other divers.

Every few years he checks on it, and the latest terrifying video of him doing so is below

Ainee Fatima remembered that when she was a student, she had "immense anxiety" over getting back her 'red-marker'-graded papers.

So, when she became a high school teacher, Fatima decided to grade her students' papers a bit differently: with meme stickers!

"Everyone uses them in some aspect of life," Fatima told OprahMag.com over email. "It's a part of our texting culture now, and we use them to react to everything. I thought, why don't I use this for grading? My kids need to know how ridiculous their answers are sometimes."

"The memes push students to look at what they got wrong. Instead of shoving the exam in their bag from embarrassment, which is something I used to do because I didn't want anyone to see the red marks I got, it allows them to correct their mistakes for a better grade," she says.

Read the full story over at The Oprah Magazine

Martin Stanton lives in Ireland, and his neighbors down the road have a donkey named Harriet. Harriet never learned how to heehaw like other donkeys, but she's got an operatic soprano voice with occasional vibrato. I am not making this up. -via Laughing Squid

Living in Boston it's easy to see living space is at a premium. It's made me in love with the idea of living in a tiny home, & these 5 great shipping container homes featured on Curbed are perfect.

Made from the thousands of surplus containers worldwide, these beautiful homes are an eco-friendly alternative to traditional building materials, and super durable to boot.

Containers typically come in 2 sizes, either 20' x 8' or 40' x 10', where the small of the two equals 160' square feet of living space & the larger features 320'.

Read more about each of these models at Curbed.

(Image Credit Backcountry Containers)

If the name Eugene Shoemaker means anything to you, it's probably because he, along with his wife Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy, discovered the comet that was later named Shoemaker-Levy 9, which crashed into Jupiter in 1994. That was only one part of Shoemaker's scientific career.  

Shoemaker enjoyed a celebrated career combining his main discipline of geology with more astronomical applications, helping to create the field of planetary science. He studied a number of craters here on Earth, and in the early 1960s, he founded the Astrogeology Research Program within the United States Geological Survey. Shoemaker used his knowledge to train a number of Apollo mission astronauts about what they could expect to find on the surface of the Moon, in terms of terrain.

His fascinating life came to an abrupt end on July 18, 1997, when he died in a car crash while exploring a meteor crater in Australia. But even in death, as it turned out, his journey was far from over.

Shoemaker wanted to be an astronaut, but was eliminated from the NASA flight program over medical concerns. Still, he went to the moon, or at least his earthly remains did. Read how Eugene Shoemaker became the only man buried on the moon at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: NASA)

An amazing woman named Janelle Lassalle recently had an epic vacation in Cancun, where upon finding her hotel offered a menu featuring 150 margaritas, decided she would try each one of them over the course of the trip - meaning sh would need to drink 50 each day, a feat she somehow thought would be possible.

The part that makes me want to visit is that each margarita there has it's own small pipette, so you can taste the tequila on it's own before mixing. And now I almost have to try to make a Romerita margarita - a rosemary lemon-based cocktail with smoked rosemary sea salt.

Read more on Munchies

When Thomas Jacob was 10 years old, he was taught writing with an ink pen at school. At that time, ink pens leaked a lot and students were given small pieces of chalk to blot up the ink. That's when Jacob discovered that he could carve his small piece of chalk into a sculpture.

Today, Jacob is a "micro artist" who creates fascinating sculptures and artwork with sticks of chalk, grains of rice and and pencil lead.

Take a look at more of Jacob's chalk sculptures over at his website, Thomasartworld - via Crookedbrains

Leave it to New York-based artist Tom Sachs to bring us a pair of sneakers that are out of this world. Behold, the Nike Mars Yard Overshoe.

From Dezeen:

Sachs initially designed the shoe for a mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, which created the airbags used in the Mars Exploration Rover missions.

The shoe was later updated in 2017 to include a polyester meshing, instead of the previous Vectran, a material used to make these airbags.

How a dandelion seed can fly far away - often a kilometer or more - with its parachute-shaped bundle of bristles, was a mystery ... until now.

Here's what scientists from the University of Edinburgh found:

Their study revealed that a ring-shaped air bubble forms as air moves through the bristles, enhancing the drag that slows each seed's descent to the ground.

This newly found form of air bubble - which the scientists have named the separated vortex ring - is physically detached from the bristles and is stabilised by air flowing through it.

The amount of air flowing through, which is critical for keeping the bubble stable and directly above the seed in flight, is precisely controlled by the spacing of the bristles.

Butterflies are gorgeous ... down to their chitinous wings!

From Colossal:

To photograph with such precision, the photographer uses a 10x microscope objective attached to a 200mm lens, which presents an almost non-existent depth of field. “The lens must be moved no more than 3 microns per photo to achieve focus across the thickness of the subject which can be up to 8 millimeters,” Perani explains to Colossal. “This yields 350 exposures, each with a sliver in focus, that must be composited together.” In total this accounts for 2,100 separate exposures combined into a single image.

Check out more over at Perani's website.

We've never seen the Pringles Guy (actually, he has a name: "Julius Pringles") look this good before!

Japanese papercraft enthusiast named Haruki turned an empty can of Pringles into a 3D mascot - via grapee