You know John Muir as the adventurer who helped create America's national park system. In 1897, Muir wrote about his 1880 exploration of Alaska, a trip during which he found a new best friend, a dog named Stickeen. The dog was not demanding; rather he was independent and aloof, giving no benefit to the team, yet he followed Muir everywhere. That included a solo exploration of a glacier during a storm.

The weather was now making quick changes, scattering bits of dazzling brightness through the wintry gloom at rare intervals, when the sun broke forth wholly free, the glacier was seen from shore to shore with a bright array of encompassing mountains partly revealed, wearing the clouds as garments, while the prairie bloomed and sparkled with irised light from myriads of washed crystals. Then suddenly all the glorious show would be darkened and blotted out.

Stickeen seemed to care for none of these things, bright or dark, nor for the crevasses, wells, moulins, or swift flashing streams into which he might fall. The little adventurer was only about two years old, yet nothing seemed novel to him. Nothing daunted him. He showed neither caution nor curiosity, wonder nor fear, but bravely trotted on as if glaciers were playgrounds. His stout, muffled body seemed all one skipping muscle, and it was truly wonderful to see how swiftly and to all appearance heedlessly he flashed across nerve-trying chasms six or eight feet wide. His courage was so unwavering that it seemed to be due to dullness of perception, as if he were only blindly bold; and I kept warning him to be careful. For we had been close companions on so many wilderness trips that I had formed the habit of talking to him as if he were a boy and understood every word.

On the way back, the snow worsened, and the original path was lost. Muir found himself on an ice island, with wide crevasses surrounding. There was one small ice bridge, so Muir carefully chipped handholds and footholds in it until he could cross, although he was well aware that it might be his last adventure. But what about Stickeen? It was at that moment that the dog seemed to realize that ice was slippery. Read the adventures of John Muir and Stickeen at Longform. It is a beautifully-written story. -via Metafilter

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Have you ever wanted to dance like a professional? Of course! New motion capture software developed by a team at Berkeley can transfer body moves from one person to another- on video. You can read the particulars in their paper here. Sure, it's a breakthrough in video technology, but you can see right now that this will be used to produce big musical production numbers without hiring a full set of dancers. And it won't be limited to dancing. Someone, somewhere, will produce videos of people going places and doing things that they never did in real life. -via Digg

Mother Ship

In 1959, Jackie Gleason had a home built in Cortland Manor, New York, that resembled a flying saucer. It was completely round, and everything in it was round as well: the counters, bar, fireplace, staircase, even the shower doors curved along with the building. That house, dubbed "Mother Ship," along with a guesthouse (also round) called "Spaceship," and a third house that isn't round, on eight acres is now for sale. Gleason's eight-foot diameter round bed is included. Jackie Gleason was interested in UFOs for quite some time, although he wasn't quite a believer.

Spaceship

Despite a fear of flying, Gleason developed a fascination with UFOs and flying saucers, possibly as part of his attraction to parapsychology, witchcraft, extrasensory perception, reincarnation, mental telepathy, clairvoyance and all things paranormal. An avid reader, Gleason amassed a vast library (over 1,700 titles) of paranormal books and materials which now reside in the University of Miami library and are catalogued at LibraryThing. Gleason appeared regularly on a paranormal-themed overnight radio show hosted by John Nebel, where he revealed his skepticism by offering $1 million to anyone who could offer physical proof of aliens visiting Earth.

No one ever took the million, but there is a story involving Richard Nixon that got some traction despite Gleason wanting to keep it secret. There is no evidence that it's true, but you can read the story at Mysterious Universe. -via Strange Company

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People who grew up with video games look at a pinball machine and think that there's no strategy, it's just a matter of keeping the ball in play and listening to random noises. Those of us who grew up playing pinball know better. I was never the greatest pinball player, but I managed pretty well to keep the ball in play long enough to score points, but not nearly as well as someone who had studied a machine and maximized his/her strategy. Roger Sharpe knows how to do that, and gives us some tips on the intricacies of scoring big in pinball. -via Boing Boing

The pavement fell into a sinkhole on Poplar Plains Road in Toronto. City workers placed cones around it, but months went by with no repairs in sight. Then someone planted tomatoes in it! The neighbors began taking care of the garden, providing tomato cages and water for the plants. The plants grew and began producing tomatoes. The city continued to ignore the hole, until pictures were posted at reddit. Then CBC got hold of the story. The publicity got the attention of city officials. Last week, one day after the story hit the news, city officials were out repairing the hole. The tomato plants will be transferred to a community garden. -via Mashable

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Last year, we posted about a plan to train crows to pick up litter, specifically, cigarette butts. Here's a way that can happen. The Crowbox is a vending machine for crows. It's set up in stages, to train birds how to use it, and crows are pretty smart and learn quickly. This demonstration video uses quarters, but there's no reason you can't use cigarette butts or something else that crows can easily find. If you'd like to make your own Crowbox, the plans and instructions are here. -via Metafilter  

Looking for an affordable place to live in Manhattan? If your concept of "affordable" is flexible enough, you might check out this 140-square-foot apartment on the Upper West Side. Yes, that's 140 square feet. For $1375 a month. The bed barely clears the door, and the refrigerator is stacked above the bed. There is a toilet and a shower stall, tucked into different corners, without doors. Windows? Fageddaboudit! See more pictures, and a floor plan, at the real estate listing. -via Digg

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There's no doubt this is a much-loved dog. But humans can't be there all the time, school and all. Bear has figured out how to harness the power of the trampoline to toss a ball for him to catch! Yes, Bear is pretty smart. -via Tastefully Offensive

Not long ago, we posted Ashley Newman's People Pot Pie. Newman is a special effects artist, and her pies are made of latex. Tons of friends sent that video to baker Andrew Fuller of Guy Meets Cake, who already does gruesome cakes featuring monsters and body parts. It inspired him to go ahead with an idea he'd been considering: making an edible pie with a creepy face! This is a mint cherry pie with edible decorations. Yes, even the hair is edible. If you want to order one, check with him through Facebook for availability. See more views of this pie at Instagram. Read about Fuller's work (and Newman's) at Atlas Obscura.

Modern DNA sequencing is adding to our knowledge of human migration and evolution at an astonishing rate. Back 100,000 years or so, there were several hominin species wandering the earth: Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals, and Denisovans -and possibly others. We know that these humans interbred and left traces of DNA, but now we have an example of a human whose two parents were different species. A bone fragment of a girl found in a Russian cave in 2012 was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

The fragment was identified from among 2,000 bone fragments excavated from the Denisova Cave. With a technique called collagen peptide mass fingerprinting, Slon and her colleagues determined that the bone had a hominin origin, though they didn’t know the species. From the bone’s cortical thickness, they inferred that Denisova 11 was at least 13 years old at the time of her death; six DNA extractions and subsequent genome sequencing revealed her sex. Meanwhile, radiocarbon dating determined the bone was at least 50,000 years old, an estimate that was refined as more data were recovered. Slon says that “from genetic data, we can make a rough estimate of the individual’s age, and we think she lived around 90,000 years ago.”

Comparing her DNA to known gene alleles belonging to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and present-day humans in Africa revealed her unique parentage.

What's really amazing is that so much information can be gleaned from one fragment of a bone. Read about the discovery at Inverse. -via reddit

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Trying to keep up with the rest of the flock, this sheep went headfirst into a tire swing -but didn't make it out the other side. Any attempt to flee, in any direction, just lifts her off the ground. We assume the shepherd helped her escape, after having a few laughs and recording it so that the entertainment value spreads beyond the pasture. -via Laughing Squid

We've posted collections of bad album covers, but here's one full of LP cover art you probably haven't seen before. Maybe it's because they included albums from around the world, or maybe it's just the result of diligent searching, but these are hilariously awful.

Some are misguided, while others are sincere but low quality. And a couple are obviously parodies, yet still rank for their bizarreness.

See 30 such albums in a gallery at Vintage Everyday. -via Bored Panda

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You may have seen videos where an acclaimed musician plays Guitar Hero and messes up hilariously. In this video a trained surgeon tries a virtual reality program called Surgeon Simulator. Dr. Johnson C. Lee says he never got to use virtual reality during his medical training. They weren't going to make this easy for him: he's a plastic surgeon, and his mission here is to perform a heart and brain transplant! -via Buzzfeed

When there's a problem with a municipal water system, the utility agency issues an advisory to the public, usually telling us to boil our water for safety or to use only bottled water. People do that, and when the danger is passed, go back to business as usual. But when Washington, DC, had a boil water advisory last month, the National Zoo had a problem. Some of their rare and exotic animals require hundreds of gallons of clean water daily, and others live in water. It was time to get creative.

The Amazonia exhibition at the Zoo replicates a rainforest habitat and staff quickly realized that the exhibition’s 28,000-gallon reservoir was the key to getting the entire park through the event, which lasted about 48 hours, says Nick Little, Aquatic Life Support Systems (LSS) operator. He and dozens of other staff hustled behind the scenes while few, if any, Zoo visitors had any inkling of trouble afoot, the Zoo operated on a normal schedule through the duration of the incident.

“As Rick Quintero, curator of LSS, was talking with other curators Zoo-wide], we recognized that Amazonia’s huge reservoir was full of water drawn before the crisis and perfectly safe for animal consumption,” says Little. “Our only concern was how to get it out” to any part of the Zoo that needed it.

The entire zoo staff went to work. Read about how a zoo handles a water crisis at Smithsonian Torch.  -via Metafilter

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A science writer will often post about an interesting or important scientific discovery, and have a sentence like "The data is clear." That's a sure invitation for a pedant to show up and correct their grammar, insisting that "data" is a plural noun, so the phrase would be "The data are clear." Normal people don't talk like that, and even in print it just seems weird to the reader.

The controversy stems from whether or not data is to be considered a countable or uncountable noun. As an uncountable noun, it can be used with verbs conjugated in the singular form, but historically it is considered the plural form of the countable noun “datum”, which is Latin for a “thing given” (i.e., “There are 69 datums”).

When I spoke with Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer for the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, he told me that data’s transition between its historical roots and contemporary use is related to a lexical phenomenon called “semantic bleaching,” where a word’s original meaning is lost or diminished over time. An example of semantic bleaching include the contemporary use of the word “literally,” whose Latin root, littera, means “letter.” In the case of “data,” it has transitioned from “things given” to mean something like “a collection of information in aggregate” when used in everyday speech.  

To those who write about science, when there is a choice between being literally correct and communicating ideas, communication is the priority. Some readers will be distracted by awkward word usage, while others are distracted by the urge to post an immediate correction. Did those readers completely miss the point of the science post? After all, when you can't see the forest through the trees, there's no use rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. Read about the data controversy at Motherboard. -via Digg