According to the origin of birds scientific hypothesis, birds are modern-day dinosaurs - and this photo by JJJFrank shows how a baby Great Blue Heron looks just like an Archaeopetryx.
This is simply marvelous: as the Sun set, Hawaiian artist Christy Lee Rogers submerged her models in water and photographed them using the last rays of light.
The billowing cloth in the water made the heavenly photos in the series titled "Muses," look like Baroque paintings.
Photos: Christy Lee Rogers - via Ignant
Villas Las Estrellas is one of the few settlements in Antarctica where people live for years and raise children. The core population is made up of scientists and workers from Chile's military, but they stay long enough to bring their families along. There's a school, a post office, a bank, and a Russian Orthodox church. But the nearest hospital is 625 miles away, so if you want to live there, you must have your appendix removed first -children included. Getting pregnant is not prohibited, but discouraged. See what life is like in Villas Las Estrellas in a gallery from BBC Future. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: SnowSwan)
Jason Gendron was on Bove Island, Yukon, Canada witnessing northern lights and a wild fire. Nice he had a camera with him.
You may recall the tragic tale of the Hunley, a Confederate submarine that sank a Union ship and led to the deaths of three submarine crews. You might be surprised to learn that it wasn't the first submarine used in battle. That would be the Turtle, an underwater vehicle conceived by Yale student David Bushnell in the 1770s. Bushnell was interested in underwater bombs, and built the Turtle to deliver them in service of the Revolutionary War.
Over the next year, the Turtle began to take shape. (A local clockmaker, Isaac Doolittle, helped design and construct some of the most ingenious parts.) About seven feet across in each direction, the whole thing was basically one giant cockpit. The pilot—or, as one admirer put it, “the adventurer concealed within”—sat on a chair in the middle. He was accompanied by half an hour’s worth of breathable air, which he could replenish by bobbing up to the surface and uncapping a couple of bronze tubes in the ceiling.
A complex series of pedals, cranks and hand rudders allowed said adventurer to move in all three dimensions: to sink and rise, move forwards and backwards, and turn. For daytime visibility, he could peer through a series of glass peepholes.
Read about the Turtle and its military missions at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Zenit)
Joe Hutto has spent so much time with turkeys that he's learned their language. He can interpret the individual calls they use for other species, requests, and warnings. Hutto understands turkey language more than he can speak it, which is quite an accomplishment. This clip is from the BBC Earth series Natural World: My Life as a Turkey. -via Tastefully Offensive
When Jose Manuel Martinez was arrested for the murder of an Alabama man in 2013, he made a decision not to involve his family in an investigation, and admitted to killing more than 35 men over several decades.
Martinez, who was born and spent most of his life in California, said that for three decades he had worked as a gun for hire, collecting debts and killing people across the United States. Police say that work was often for Mexican drug cartels, though in a few cases he also killed people just because they pissed him off. Martinez refused to say anything about the drug business, including whom he worked for or with. But he was more than happy to talk about bodies. And about his own prowess in killing. They called him El Mano Negra, he said — the Black Hand.
The dead were young and old, drug dealers and farm laborers, fathers and husbands. But always men. They were scattered across as many as 12 states, but his primary killing ground was Tulare County, a little-populated land of vast green fields and listless, sunblasted farm towns in California’s Central Valley, where Martinez had been born and raised.
“You want to know who killed them all?” he asked at one point. “I killed them all.”
The stunning part of Martinez's crimes was that so many of the unsolved murders had received scant attention and little investigation. Read about the 30-year career of a hitman who almost got away with it at Buzzfeed. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Matt Rota for BuzzFeed News)
Maybe you've changed the kind of cooking oil you buy because some are healthier than others, or you've at least thought about it. But it's hard to keep up, since what's "good" for us changes with new research. When you heard that olive oil is better for you than generic vegetable oil, you switched, but then someone in your family was horrified that you weren't using canola oil instead. It makes a difference, since the average American gets 400 of their daily calories from cooking oil. Dietician Dana Hunnes helped Mel magazine rank cooking oils by the amount of various types of fat, so you can decide what to use. They also note that oils have different uses depending on how well they perform at high temperatures. Keep in mind that "every kind of cooking oil" does not include butter, lard, or bacon grease, because they just assume we know better.
You'd be forgiven if you thought that the photos here are of a high end boutique store.
It's actually Starbucks' first location in Italy (opening inside the historic Poste building in Piazza Cordusio in Milan).
Nora Emily Fornario, known as Netta, was a young woman in England who had a lifelong fascination with magic. She studied occult subjects along with like-minded friends in the 1920s. Netta was drawn to Scotland, specifically the island of Iona, which was considered to be a place where the world of spirits was closest to the world of people. It was sacred to both pagans and Christians, and sported many fairy mounds.
Netta told her maid that she was heading to Iona to perform a magical healing ritual and would stay indefinitely. On the island, she found lodging at an isolated farm with an older woman named Mrs. MacRae. With her wild dark hair, clothing inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, and extensive silver jewelry, Netta had a distinctively metropolitan look that stuck out in rural Iona. MacRae reported that the young woman spent her days wandering the island's beaches and moorlands. At night, she would enter into mystical trances in hopes of contacting Iona’s spiritual realm. Netta told MacRae that she once fell into a trance that lasted an entire week, and should the same happen during her stay, under no circumstances was a doctor to be called.
MacRae had become used to Netta’s eccentricities, but one Sunday morning in mid-November, she noticed her lodger’s behavior had become frantic. She had the wide-eyed look of someone who was deeply frightened. Netta explained to MacRae that she believed she was being psychically attacked from a distance.
Netta's behavior was increasingly strange, until the day she went missing. Her body was found on November 19, 1929, naked and covered with scratches. Her cause of death was recorded as exposure. But how did she really die? Ninety years later, there are plenty of theories, which you can read about at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user IrenicRhonda)
Heinz (yes, the ketchup company) once ventured into the beverage market in the 1970s. They decided to make a fruit drink and called it "Concentrated Help Fruit Drink."
Don't ask me why.
Hungarian photographer Balint Alovits scoured the city of Budapest for amazing spiraling staircases for his photo series "Time Machine."
"The inspiration came from my addiction to architecture and abstract forms," explained Alovits to Dezeen. "I've always been fascinated by modern architecture, and also loved the geometrical shapes of art deco and Bauhaus buildings."
Alovits plays with the common representation of time as a never-ending spiral and for this reason named the collection Time Machine.
There's so much about the world that children are expected to just pick up from their environment. That means so many things are only half-learned because we don't realize what we are misunderstanding. Ross McClearly asked Twitter users to share the misconceptions they remember from childhood.
I thought the the Americans were fighting gorillas in the jungles of Vietnam called the Viet Kong, and their leader was King Kong. A peculiar problem of a 1960s childhood. I
— Rufus MacDufus (@RufusLongpaws) September 7, 2018
My daughter told me that when she was very young, she'd watch me do laundry. I would clean the lint filter out and put the lint in the "magic pink box" on the shelf. And after it got full, she'd look in and all the lint had disappeared! Magic!
"Honey, that's a waste basket. I emptied it."
"I know! I felt like an idiot when I got older and figured that out!"
My daughter stopped eating all ceareal as a kid. She told us years later she heard on the news a serial killer was on the loose. Thought he was in the cereal box. Didn’t want to take a chance. And she loved cereal.
— Diane Lander-Simon (@dishwithdi) September 7, 2018
Read some of the other things people completely misunderstood when they were children at Buzzfeed. There's more in the comments, too, and in the original Twitter thread.
Smart (and very eco-conscious): picking up trash in the canals of Amsterdam
Smarter: Get someone else to do it for you.
GENIUS: ... and make them pay to do it!
PlasticWhale of The Netherlands organizes "plastic fishing trips" where paying tourists get to collect plastic trash from the canals.
