Mike Wilson and Megan Hanneman went to the Humane Society to adopt a third cat. They met and fell in love with a polydactyl cat named Bronson, who weighed 33 pounds! All the shelter knew was that Bronson's original owner had passed away.

Since he was all the way up to 33 pounds and only three years old, they suspected it was an elderly person who may have been feeding him table scraps or something. We went in to meet him and instantly fell in love. I remember my cheeks hurting from smiling for so long.

Bronson was so affectionate and sweet and was happily kneading his cat bed when we first petted him. All of a sudden, we noticed that he was a polydactyl cat with extra fingers and had very pronounced thumbs! Even more adorably, his paws oddly resembled our home state of Michigan. He was the sweetest cat we had ever met and he seemed so happy to be home and have a big space of his own.

Bronson is on a diet of only 375 calories a day, with the goal of losing a pound a month until he is deemed healthy. He's already lost 1.6 pounds. Read Bronson's story at Bored Panda, and follow his weight-loss process at Instagram.

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In 1949, Hong Kong was a British colony, China was a newly communist nation, and all of Asia was recovering from World War II. Two million island inhabitants were trying to accommodate floods of refugees from the mainland. Michael Rogge went to Hong Kong as a young man and took 16mm home movies of what he saw over his six years there. He added commentary 60-odd years later. There are plenty more of these vintage personal movies at Rogge's YouTube channel. -via Digg

When is the optimum time to leave a baseball game? I'm not much of a sports fan, and have never been to a professional baseball game, so it seems to me a bit strange that anyone would pay for tickets and then leave before the game is over, but apparently people do.

Baseball is probably the one major sporting event where there is no shame1 in leaving a little early. For starters, the games typically range from long to comically long. The average nine-inning Major League Baseball game in 2017 took three hours and five minutes, setting an all-time record. With a new rule to limit mound visits, the average 2018 game is hovering at an even three hours, which is still longer than “The Godfather” start to finish and would tie for the third longest mark in history.

And unlike the current marathon affairs in college football, baseball is not exactly packing the extra minutes with scoring and excitement — unless pitchers jogging in from the bullpen is exciting to you. Plus, the stakes are low. They play 162 of these things. Add it all up and you understand why lines of fans hit the exits to beat the traffic home.

Well, that explains why fans leave early, but it doesn't explain why they bought tickets in the first place. Anyway, FiveThirtyEight crunched the statistics and calculated the odds of missing anything exciting if you left during a particular inning. For example, "you should leave after the sixth inning if the leading team is ahead by four or more runs." Charts and graphs have this information for each inning under difference circumstances. If you bother to go to the game at all. -via Metafilter

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The most famous mime ever was Marcel Marceau. Let's face it, he's the only mime you know by name. But the French performer had more on his resume than his stage act. During World War II, Marceau harnessed his acting talent to aid the French Resistance. Great Big Story lets us in on a bit of Marceau's wartime activities. -via Laughing Squid

While the term "robot" is less than a hundred years old, the urge to build a working artificial human has been around for as long as anyone can tell. Automatically animated replicas of human beings occurred in all parts of the world throughout history. These automata were powered by weights and pulleys, falling water, or hidden operators, and then later by clockwork springs which only needed to be wound up. For some engineers, the goal was to replicate, and therefore learn, how biological systems worked. For others, the invention of such machines was aimed at making human work easier. But the real value in ancient automata was their ability to impress and entertain people.

In the 600s, Chinese engineer Huang Kun, serving under Sui Yang Ti, described an outdoor mechanical puppet theater in the palace courtyards and gardens with 72 finely dressed figures that drifted on barges floating down a channel. To impress his guests, the emperor’s automata would stop to serve them wine. In Science and Civilization in China, Needham quotes Huang’s manual: “At each bend, where one of the emperor’s guests was seated, he was served with wine in the following way. The ‘Wine Boat’ stopped automatically when it reached the seat of a guest, and the cup-bearer stretched out its arm with the full cup. When the guest had drunk, the figure received it back and held it for the second one to fill again with wine. Then immediately the boat proceeded, only to repeat the same at the next stop. All these were performed by machinery set in the water.”

Mechanical robots have an extensive history, and many of those built hundreds of years ago are still around to amaze us. A fascinating article at Collectors Weekly takes us through the history of automata from around the world with plenty of pictures and videos.

Teaching your child to speak and understand two (or more) languages is a great way to give him a leg up in life. He or she will be able to communicate with more people, do well with a common college requirement, and may have a head start in employment. But how do you get started? Recent research shows that the conventional wisdom about bilingualism in kids ain't necessarily so.  

Most books and articles aimed at families raising bilingual children claim that the best way to teach a child a language is OPOL, or the one-person, one-language method. According to this approach, one parent speaks one language (often the majority language) while the other speaks the minority language. For many reasons, this method is not ideal. In fact, when De Houwer analyzed a huge sample of bilingual children living in the Flemish part of Belgium, she found that only a part ended up speaking both languages. The success rate was especially high when both parents spoke the home language while the children learned the other language at school. Moreover, even if the parents spoke more than two languages, the children acquired only the ones that the parents actively used at home.

Studies show other surprises, too. Read the latest findings about raising multilingual kids at The Week.

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We have a new animated music video from DoodleChaos, who brought us a Line Rider version of the classic Hall of the Mountain King and a Rube Goldberg version of Waltz of the Flowers. This time, he's got two (and sometimes three) riders on sleds illustrating Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. Not only is it clever, it might cool you off a bit to hear a song that's traditionally associated with Christmastime. -via Metafilter

Alchemists worked for centuries to achieve the production of gold, in order to enrich themselves and their sponsors. It finally happened in 1980, but didn't change the world much at all. Glenn T. Seaborg was a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project, ran the Atomic Energy Commission, and discovered ten new elements and more than 100 isotopes.  

In 1980, the Seaborg and a group of other scientists used a particle accelerator to propel beams of carbon and neon nuclei at nearly light speed into foils of the heavy metal bismuth- you know, the stuff you find in relatively large quantities in Peptol-Bismol, used for shotgun pellets, and a variety of other applications.

Why bismuth, rather than the originally planned lead? It is simply easier to isolate gold from bismuth than it is from lead. However, producing gold from lead would have been no more difficult.

As for the result, when they were rifling through the carnage that was the result of the high speed collision between neon, carbon, and bismuth, the physicists discovered the they had successfully made several isotopes of gold.

Was it worth the effort? Certainly not financially. Running a particle accelerator isn't cheap. But the experiment showed that it could be done, and considering the other work at such facilities, doesn't need to be done again. Read the story of the alchemist dream come true at Today I Found Out. 

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Does life really look better in a movie shot on Super 8? It appears to. Maybe that's because it has an old, nostalgic look, since Super 8 film ruled for several decades starting in 1965. I think it's more likely because when you shot motion pictures -or even still pictures- on film instead of a digital format, you only shot the good parts. It was way too expensive to film anything or everything like we can today. This short film is brought to you by the Royal Ocean Film Society.  -via Digg

"How much is that in dog years?" We are used to assuming that for every calendar year, a dog will age the way a human will in seven years. That makes some sort of sense according to a dog's expected life span, but it doesn't tell the whole story. For example, the dog in this picture has one candle on her birthday cake, but she's old enough to have puppies. Veterinary professor Jesse Grady explains the life stages of dogs and cats.

Dogs and cats age differently not just from people but also from each other, based partly on breed characteristics and size. Bigger animals tend to have shorter life spans than smaller ones do. While cats vary little in size, the size and life expectancy of dogs can vary greatly – think a Chihuahua versus a Great Dane.

Human life expectancy has changed over the years. And vets are now able to provide far superior medical care to pets than we could even a decade ago. So now we use a better methodology to define just how old rule of thumb that counted every calendar year as seven “animal years.”

You'll find life stage charts for cats and dogs at The Conversation. According to the cat chart, I have two mature cats and one cat entering his prime.  -via Nag on the Lake

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The Soviet Union operated pretty much in isolation from the rest of the world from 1922 to 1991. They had their own nuclear weapons buildup and their own space program, plus manufacturing and technological advances like every other nation, but we didn't get to see them. When they were revealed later, the photographs of Soviet machinery, vehicles, and architecture seemed to come from some bizarro world where nothing is familiar to us. Take, for example, the snowmobile pictured above from the 1950s. It was the Sever-2 Aerosan, developed for the military, seemingly by plopping a sedan body on top of skis and powering it with an airplane engine. You can see a gallery of things made in the USSR, ranging from goofy car designs to scary military installations to Tetris, at Messy Nessy Chic.   

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President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958. That act transferred the duties of the  National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) from the military to a new civilian agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA came about as a response to the Soviet Sputnik program, and accelerated when President Kennedy challenged the US to go to the moon by the end of the '60s. NASA has accomplished a lot in 60 years! This video is one of a series celebrating big milestones in NASA's history. -via Digg 

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Darth Vader is at the top of many "greatest villain" lists, and near the top in the rest. Nerdwriter looks at the reasons why. You might think, duh, but there's a lot more to it than just a badass in a black mask. This video takes a close look at Vader's scenes in the original trilogy, which are fewer and shorter than we remember. -via Laughing Squid

The little triangle you see above is the result of the collision of New York City's street grid with New York City's attitude. And it happened over a hundred years ago. But the story begins a lot earlier, when Manhattan Island was a new and popular place to settle, long before city planners tried to make sense of the city.   

While most of New York City’s streets are laid out in a neatly ordered grid, Lower Manhattan—the oldest part of the city—is, cartographically speaking, kind of a mess. That’s because the city didn’t implement an official master plan for the layout of new streets until 1811, more than a century after the Dutch established a settlement at the southern tip of the island. The earliest-built parts of the city still maintain some of the quirks of a pre-plan settlement where property owners built their own streets with nearly no official oversight, resulting in a haphazard array of oddly shaped, variably sized blocks and narrow, crooked streets.

The bit of property now known as Hess’s triangle is located in this latter part of Manhattan, where the street grid is still a little wonky. It was even more so in the 1910s, when the city decided it needed to extend Seventh Avenue, a wide thoroughfare that was first built as part of that landmark 1811 master plan. In order to make room for traffic and for the construction of a new subway line, the city condemned an 11-block stretch of the West Village, demolishing hundreds of buildings starting in 1913. The extension was finished in 1916.

David Hess owned one of those buildings that was condemned, and he didn't like the idea one bit. Read the story of the Hess Triangle at Mental Floss, and see an explanation of the maps that led to it in this Twitter thread.

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Crowds of people were celebrating Anzac Day in Australia on April 25, 1935, including quite a few who visited Coogee Aquarium south of Sydney. Their festive mood was ruined by a shark with an upset tummy.  

There was a 14-foot tiger shark on display that had been caught the week before. The shark acted like it was in distress and was thrashing about.  Then, in front of horrified onlookers, it threw up a human arm.

In an effort to identify the arm’s poor owner, police published pictures and a description of the dismembered appendage in newspapers throughout the region.  The left arm had a tattoo of two boxers in a fighting stance, there was also a rope tied around the wrist.

The arm was identified by its tattoos and fingerprints as belonging to a former boxer named James ‘Jim’ Smith. The grisly public display by the shark would lead one to think that the fish had killed and eaten the man, but that wasn't the case at all. The shark was gutted and searched, and no other human remains were found. Furthermore, police determined the arm had been severed with a knife. The poor shark had not committed murder, but only presented evidence of one. Read the story of the shark arm murder investigation at Strange Remains.  -via Strange Company

Further reading reveals that the tiger shark didn't even eat the arm. The tiger shark had eaten a smaller shark that had eaten the arm.

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