World Gorilla Day has been celebrated on September 24 every year since 2017. That date was chosen because it was on that day in 1967 that the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda was founded by gorilla researcher Dian Fossey.

Gorillas are the world's largest primate. There are two species, the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla. All gorillas are classified as Critically Endangered, with the exception of the subspecies called the mountain gorilla, which is classified as Endangered. This weekend many zoos are holding special programs so you can learn more about gorillas. This includes the Los Angeles Zoo, the Cincinnati Zoo, the Little Rock Zoo, the Oklahoma City Zoo, the Louisville Zoo, the San Antonio Zoo, the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, and possibly at another zoo near you.

And if you can't get to your local zoo for the festivities this weekend, you can read about gorillas and see a gallery of enchanting photos of them at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Robert from Uganda gorilla safari tours)

We've talked about kopi luwak a lot here on Neatorama, and we know that it comes from the poop of the civet. But did you know that this comes at a cost to the said animal?

Researchers from Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and the London-based nonprofit World Animal Protection assessed the living conditions of nearly 50 wild civets held in cages at 16 plantations on Bali. The results, published Thursday in the journal Animal Welfare, paint a grim picture.

Some of the civets were very thin, from being fed a restricted diet of only coffee cherries—the fruit that surrounds the coffee bean. Some were obese, from never being able to move around freely. And some were jacked up on caffeine, D’Cruze said.

And that's not all. Check this article on National Geographic to learn more about the most disturbing secret behind the world's most expensive coffee. - via Metafilter

(Image credit: Victor Loh/Unsplash)

Dogs can be quite mischievous as any dog owner can attest, and that's not limited to just within the confines of their own homes. In these four stories shared by an emergency veterinarian, you'll get to read some antics that might make you chuckle or smile. 

Dr. Laura de Armas, the medical director at Veterinary Emergency Group (VEG), shared some of her funniest ER memories with The Dodo, and although the ER is usually a serious place, these stories definitely show that there’s always room for a bit of laughter!

Read more at The Dodo.

(Image credit: Veterinary Emergency Group/Instagram)

It has been five years since Stephen Hawking, world-renowned physicist whose work on black holes and singularities opened our horizons to what could be out there in space, passed away into stardust. Two years after that, poet Marie Howe was inspired to write an ode about singularities and our place in the cosmos. - from The Marginalian

(Video credit: Maria Popova/Vimeo)

Sometimes it's quite difficult to figure out what cats think, isn't it? I don't own any cats, but I've seen enough to know that it might take some time before cats get used to you and become more affectionate.

For any cat lovers or cat parents out there, has it ever occurred to you whether your cats find your home perfectly suited to their preferences? Perhaps, they might not look it, and they might not show their true feelings. But what if there was a house that was designed exclusively for cats? Tan Yamanouchi, an architect of AWGL, shows us what he calls "A Cat Tree House":

Inside this unique abode, you’ll discover concealed hideaways, bedrooms, a studio, a kitchen, and more—all strategically positioned to cater to the cats’ comfort and entertainment. As for the exterior, it comprises wooden decks, and carefully selected flora that enhance the view for both our feline friends and passersby.

Spoon and Tamago tells us more about the design specs and intricacies of Yamanouchi's Cat Tree House.

(Image credit: Tan Yamanouchi/Instagram)

Several years ago, when cryptocurrencies and blockchain erupted, many thought that these new technologies would be the solution to our current economic woes and the dawn of a new era in digital finance. However, analysts now say that majority of NFTs, one of the more promising blockchain creations, are worth nothing.

According to a recent report by crypto platform dappGambl called "Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market," 95 percent of the tokens are practically worthless today. The company found that 69,795 of the 73,257 NFT collections analyzed now have a market cap of zero Ether.

Perhaps it's not surprising as crypto and blockchain only fueled people's greed without taking into consideration whether there is actual value there or not. Maybe in the future, people may find a means of making these technologies more ubiquitous and versatile, but as of now, they're worthless.

So, for NFT collectors, this may be bad news, but it might be best to rethink whether you should hold onto your NFTs or even invest in them at all. Read more about it on Futurism.

(Image credit: Traxer/Unsplash)

A guy in my flight apparently plays the bagpipes. He has a little electric bagpipe he plugs his headphones into and only he can hear. He has been silently (to everyone but himself) ripping his bagpipe for 5 straight hours. I have no choice but to respect this. pic.twitter.com/2Vqn2kK0Hv

— DC Unhilist (@Vamos_DCU) September 7, 2023

All music is always improved with the inclusion of bagpipes -- and the louder, the better. The are the ideal instrument for not only playing music but also distinguishing between people of refined tastes and uncultured primitives employed at this Whataburger restaurant.

Ideally, one should play analog bagpipes, but sometimes electronic bagpipes serve a role (warning: electronic bagpipes are vulnerable to EMP attack). Twitter user DC Unhilist recently encountered a man playing a set on an airplane. The musician selfishly kept his earphones plugged in so that only he could hear the music.

Electronic bagpipes are real and have apparently been around for many years. They can include simple chanter and blowstick, as well as one at least one model with an actual bag to squeeze. Verily, we live in an age of wonders.

-via Super Punch

In the latest edition of Ze Frank's True Facts series, we learn about reef coral. Yeah, it's an animal, although what we see of them are their shells, which make a reef. One animal of coral is called a polyp.

You might wonder how Ze could ever make a bawdy, silly, joke-filled video about coral, but he manages to do so. What we would call building a reef, he describes as a polyp "farting crystals." You get the idea. Yeah, it's a ridiculous way of telling a story, but that makes it much easier to learn how coral works. Or at least more likely to be remembered. See, already I am impressed that coral reproduces both sexually and by cloning themselves. And they have several ways of eating. The images in this video are beautiful to look at, but gross when you find out what's really happening. There's a one-minute skippable ad at the five-minute mark.

Wooden artifacts from the Stone Age are very rare because organic material tends to break down over time. But in 2019, a pair of logs were discovered at a river bank in Zambia that seemed ancient. They were deliberately connected at a right angle by carved notches in each log, like putting together Lincoln Logs. Or a real log cabin, for that matter. Archaeologists think it may have been a walkway, or part of a pen for storing firewood or food. Or it could have been the base of a dwelling. Now the results of a luminescence dating test are in, and the logs are 476,000 years old! That makes them, linked together, the oldest manmade wooden structure ever found.

But what kind of man made this? The oldest Homo sapiens fossils are 300,000 years old, and they were found in Israel. The people that used tools to make these logs fit together had a brain sophisticated enough to plan their work and carry it out with stone tools over time. The discovery also hints that wood was a more common material for Stone Age life than we knew. Read about the discovery and what it might mean at CNN. -via reddit

(Image credit: Professor Larry Barham/University of Liverpool)

If you enjoy the dry humor of engineering nerds, wait until you see three of them together! A Finnish industrial company called Stalatube wanted to show off their stainless steel hollow sections. That's a pretty esoteric product, and their engineer Pekka is not all that charismatic (and likely fictional), so how will they draw attention? They team up with Finnish madman Lauri Vuohensilta (previously at Neatorama) of the Hydraulic Press Channel and and Mythbusters' Jamie Hyneman, now a professor at  LUT University in Lappeenranta, Finland.

They put different grades of steel through Lauri's hydraulic press test, with the results you might expect. Then they go on to test the steel with heat. But that's not enough, so they take their samples to a testing facility where the steel is further tortured. Hyneman is duly impressed with the product, but that's still not good enough for Pekka. There's more to come; the second episode of this ad series will drop on October 6. Yes, it's an ad, but if you are going to watch a ten-minute ad for anything today, you'd want it to be this one. -via Metafilter

Trying to inform members of the public about different products and the hazards of such products can be a tedious task, and more so, if you are trying to catch the attention of young people, whose attention spans nowadays are limited to perhaps a few seconds.

In response to the behaviors of teenagers and young adults today, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission has devised a new strategy of making the public aware about consumer products and the hazards that they pose, as well as the best practices and safety measures to employ to keep yourself out of harm's way. They have released an album:

We're Safety Now Haven't We packs in six genre-spanning, safety-focused songs (seven if you count the one that also got a Spanglish version). There's an EDM banger about wearing helmets, a K-pop number about firework safety, and even a reggaeton track about smoke alarms. The artists are officially anonymous, but more on that later.

The album is specifically targeted at teenagers and young adults, Social Media Specialist Joseph Galbo told NPR's Morning Edition over Zoom.

He says the CPSC aimed to address the products and hazards that are especially prevalent among people ages 13-24 based on its injury data — including bikes, ATVs, fireworks, cooking appliances and phones.

Read more about the new album on NPR.

Other Redditors chimed in and gave their own entry of movies missing the point they were trying to make:

Check out the complete list at Cracked.

(Image credit: Cracked)

It's true that we often don't take notice of the intricate details of things we see every day, especially those of the highly technical sort. Perhaps, it's just not in the purview of our interests. Have you ever noticed that there were different types of train railcars? Probably not, as we most often see only one type in our daily lives, if we use trains at all on our daily commute. But in this 15-minute video, Engineer Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering shows us the differences between every type of railcar and their respective design and functions.

A train is a simple thing at first glance: a locomotive (or several) pull a string of cars along a railroad. But not all those railcars are equal, and there are some fascinating details if you take minute to notice their differences. 

- via Laughing Squid

(Video credit: Practical Engineering)

Board games have been a great way for people to pass the time from as early as the ancient Egyptians and Romans. Even today, board games continue to evolve and incorporate new twists to tried-and-tested mechanics which give way to more fun and complex strategic or tactical battles of wit.

Even in the 16th century, such games occupied the idle hours of people's leisure as evidenced by a recent discovery of a board game carved on the ruins of the Cmielow Castle in Poland.

This latest discovery isn't quite as old as that in terms of the actual carved board, but the game could be just as ancient. According to archaeologist Tomasz Olszacki, it's a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men's Morris, Merels, or "cowboy checkers" in North America.

A typical Mill game board is a grid with 24 intersecting points, and players must try to line up three of their nine men horizontally or vertically to form a "mill." When this happens, they can remove one of the other player's pieces from the board. There are also variations with three, six, and 12 pieces per player.

- via Ars Technica

(Image credit: Tomasz Olszacki)

It has been nearly 250 years since the gunboat USS Spitfire saw the fiery throes of war, when she brought a ragtag group of American soldiers, led by Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, against the British naval forces on Lake Champlain. It has remained intact since being shipwrecked after the American Revolution, but now she faces a new threat: the Quagga mussel.

This invasive freshwater pest loves to infest ship hulls, encrusting the delicate beams in as little as five years. Quagga have already overwhelmed many of the shipwrecks in the Great Lakes; the mussels’ eventual appearance in Lake Champlain is almost certain.

However, there is a possibility of recovering the Spitfire which will also shed more information on the events at the Battle of Valcour Island and on the Revolutionary War as a whole.The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum had announced a tremendous recovery effort that would haul the Spitfire out of the lake whilst preserving it. The plan is estimated to cost about $44 million and could take about 22 years to accomplish.

Learn more about the Spitfire and its battle against the Quagga at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: "Battle of Valcour Island", National Archives of Canada/Wikipedia Commons)