Once upon a time, the Cook pine tree (Araucaria columnaris) was only found on New Caledonia in the Pacific. But over the last couple of hundred years, they were imported and cultivated in far-flung parts of the globe. As they grew tall, a peculiar behavior was noticed among these trees. They have a tendency to lean. It's not just because they are tall, as other, much taller pines manage to grow completely upright. Cook pine trees have their own agenda.

All the Cook pines that grow in the Northern Hemisphere lean to the south, and all that grow in the Southern Hemisphere lean to the north. Those that grow near the equator manage to stand up straight. What's more, the angle of the tilt also depends on location- trees that are further from the equator lean more. The reason for the tilt has not been scientifically proven, but common sense would tell us that the tree is looking for optimized sunlight. However, other pine trees prioritize standing straight for longevity. Something about Cook pine trees makes leaning toward the sun more important than balancing its weight. -via Nag on the Lake

You’ve heard of artists and writers getting replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), and these machines using their work to generate content— get ready for voice actors (VAs) getting replaced by AI who stole their voices. 

A troubling trend has arisen in the voice-acting industry. Companies are now asking professional VAs to sign contracts that would allow corporations to synthesize their voices using AI. This meant that companies now have these voices for as long as they want. They can use them to say what they want without paying additional compensation. Sometimes they have to deceptively hide these statements deep in the contracts. 

"The language can be confusing and ambiguous," Tim Friedlander, president of the National Association of Voice Actors, told Vice. "Many voice actors may have signed a contract without realizing language like this had been added. Some actors are being told they cannot be hired without agreeing to these clauses.”

Image credit: Dmitry Demidov

🐴 Catch me if you can, said the little pony who led Alabama's Tuscaloosa Police Department on a two-hour low-speed foot pursuit before surrendering and posing for selfies.

😂 "The seagulls don't work for us"

🎬 Sure, movies have fancy sets and talented set designers but what if the film or TV series call for a banquet of human flesh for cannibals? Meet Hollywood's horror chef who make food "horrible AND delicious" (because the actors are supposed to eat 'em).

🕹️ Turns out, Puss in Boots mashed up with Elden Ring works out quite nicely.

(Image: Tuscaloosa Police Department)

🏠 Take a look inside this magical Beverly Hills witch house. Enchanting!

🥤 TIL that bottled water has expiration dates not because of the water. Instead, it's the bottle that expires.

📺 Remember when MTV used to play music videos, then one day it doesn't anymore? It's because of channel drift: the phenomenon where TV channels change what they show until their original mission is completely forgotten.

🤤 Woman bravely tried all 23 food items at Super Nintendo World and lived to tell about it.

(Image: Kafziel/Wikimedia)

💊 Has John Wick finally met match? Here's "John Sick" by indie artist Olipop - via Shirt Stack

👻 ICYMI: 9 Ghostbusters Tees and Big & Tall T-Shirts that are Out of This World

When Abraham Lincoln was a presidential candidate in 1860, it had been more than ten years since he served in the House of Representatives, so he had to be introduced to the national electorate. His campaign staffers were afraid that voters would find him just too ugly to vote for. His opponents had indeed spread talk of Lincoln's looks, calling him grotesque and worse. Photography was fairly new at the time, and Lincoln's advisors raced to get ahead of the game before the other side did.

Lincoln turned to the most famous photographer of the era, Matthew Brady, for a portrait that could be disseminated. Brady took the image above, but there were some tweaks made. While it didn't make Lincoln look like a movie star (it couldn't, because there were no movies then), it did improve upon his actual appearance, and staved off the rumors of his hideousness. It wasn't the last time photo manipulation was used on Abraham Lincoln.  

Read the entire story of Lincoln's portrait and the stories behind a dozen other iconic historical photographs at History Collection. -via Nag on the Lake 

Pizza delivery drivers are humble heroes who do more than merely provide us with delicious pizzas. They can save customers'  lives and rescue children from burning buildings. Tyler Morrell of Cocco's Pizza Aston of Brookhaven, Pennsylvania fits perfectly into that mold.

Yahoo! News reports that on Sunday, Morrell was delivering a pizza when police chased down a suspect who fled his car on foot through a residential neighborhood. Morrell tripped him, sending the suspect down to the ground, where police restrained him within seconds.

What's even more impressive is that Morrell did this without dropping the pizza! He fulfilled both duties of the pizza delivery guy: bringing pizza and taking down criminals.

-via Dave Barry

The University of Konstanz in Germany has created a virtual world- for insects! They study locusts' movements and brains at the same time by attaching scanners to their heads while they walk about on a movable sphere, following the virtual locusts projected on the walls. They also study these insects in crowds, using little tags they've glued onto thousands of bugs. It does seem like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, but don't feel too bad for these locusts. They were bred to be eaten, so working in a virtual lab is probably the best life they could hope for. Who knows? Maybe these bugs think they're playing the coolest video game ever. They still give Tom Scott the heebie-jeebies. But maybe you could think about these locusts the next time you put on your virtual reality headset and step into another world.  

Read more about these experiments at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour.

Redditor ikedness found a kitten yesterday that was a complete mess. A woman told him that some kids had glued the kitten to an object a couple of days earlier! He turned to reddit for advice on removing the glue. Redditor Com_Trad_IsTime recommended using coconut oil, which worked, so the kitten, a female, was named Coco.



The glue was only one of her problems. Coco weighs less than a pound, although she appears to be about two months old. And soon she started showing symptoms of respiratory distress. She was taken to the veterinarian, where she tested positive for feline calicivirus (FCV), a common but dangerous infection.



She was prescribed a slew of medicines, but Coco again showed signs of difficulty breathing, and was taken to the vet again. This time, she got a nebulizer treatment and snot removal. Since then, Coco seems to be doing better, and even purring.  



Several redditors have reached out to help with the vet bills. Coco still has a long way to go to gain weight and be considered healthy, but she is on her way. The crucial part was finding a loving home.

(All images credit to ikedness)

Update: The latest on Coco. You can follow her progress here.

Latif Nasser is a writer in Los Angeles. He recently shared on Twitter the story of his discovery of and friendship with an Afghan refugee in the United States.

A friend asked Nasser to deliver an antique violin to a man in Los Angeles when he flew home from a trip to New York. He found it annoying to have this chore and burdensome to arrange a meeting to deliver the violin. But Nasser completed the task and was delighted with who he met. The violin's new owner is Ali Esmahilzada.

Prior to the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan in 2021, Esmahilzada was a famous musician in his own country. But the Taliban hates music and forced Esmahilzada to flee for his life. Nasser found him working part-time in a shopping mall warehouse.

You can read Esmahilzada's story and how Nasser helped him here.

-via Amanda Brennan | Photo: Latif Nasser

In the 1930s, the German government, controlled by the Nazi party, began confiscating all the gold they could, especially from Jews. In 1935, it became illegal for any German to accept or retain a Nobel Prize. At the time, a Nobel Prize medal was made of 23-karat gold and weighed 200 grams. They were embossed with the winner's name, and were therefore hard to hide. Max von Laue received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1914. James Franck received the physics prize in 1925. Both scientists sent their medals to fellow physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr in Denmark for safekeeping.

But in 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark. They approached Bohr's Institute of Physics in Copenhagen. If they found the medals, it would be evidence that would send von Laue and Franck to their deaths. Bohr turned to Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy to make sure the invaders didn't find the medals... with science! Read the story of how the medals were hidden, or more accurately, destroyed, and how they were eventually returned to their rightful owners many years later, at Today I Found Out.

The most mundane Wikipedia articles can end up being the most fascinating. The couple whose pictures illustrated the "high five" captured the public's imagination and they became a meme. Likewise for the guy you see if you were to look up "shrug." His is the only picture in that entry, and has been since 2007. He is illustrating a shrug, alright, but he's also wearing a paisley tie and holding a cocktail. And why is he wearing a tiara that says SCAMPER in on it?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sixteen years later, he is known as the Shrug Guy. His picture has illustrated innumerable reaction memes as well as "shrug" in many various language versions of Wikipedia. But he is not unknown. Comedian Annie Rauwerda reached out and connected with him, and got the story behind the original photo and the tiara, which is quite funny. His life has changed considerably since then, but he's still recognizable, and he's still okay with being the Shrug Guy. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dazzledog)

🍰 It looks like a slice of cake straight out of an animated Looney Tunes episode, but this cartoon cake is actually a real cake. Just see redditor u/Single_Disaster_2856 prove it to you by slicing into it. And don't forget the how-to video at the end. Yum!

🚽 Here's how to hide a toilet in your house: the Hidealoo Foldaway Toilet.

🦅 A 31-year-old bald eagle that's been building a nest and incubating a rock has finally gotten a baby eaglet. What a heartwarming story!

🦌 Here's why you should never yell at a moose. An Idaho man learned that lesson the hard way.

👖 Who says that jeans can't be haute couture? Behold the Spiked jeans by fashion artist Done by Doug. It's what to wear when you've got a point to make.

🕺 Needs more cowbell? All the movie scenes where Christopher Walken danced have now been compiled into one majestic music video clip.

🕹️ Zelda + Studio Ghibli mash-up is the video game we didn't know we needed.

💻 Tee for your favorite geek: Evolution of Storage by indie artist Jonz - via Shirt Stack

😱 ICYMI: 8 Wednesday Fan Art Tees and Big & Tall T-Shirts We Love to Death

👕 Don't miss: NeatoShop Sitewide Sale (ends tomorrow) - save up to 20% on all tees sitewide.

Don't forget to check out our new sites: TastyTastic (fun food stuff!), Artgonaut (weird and amazing art), and Grand Blog Auto (you can guess what this one is, I'm sure). Thank you!

The three Australian guys behind the YouTube channel How Ridiculous came into the possession of a two-ton axe.  Anything positioned under it is toast when it falls, so, uh, don't try this at home. Their goal here is to break into safes, from the cheapest to the more sturdy safes. However, they cannot resist the temptation to chop up all manner of other things just to see what it looks like. Or to experience major destruction in its purest form, which is the more likely motivation. Watch them destroy a piano, a brick chimney, bulletproof glass, a boulder, and a succession of ever-tougher safes. You couldn't pay me to set those things in place. The only way I'd even get near it is after it has fallen.  -via Born in Space

Every once in a while, we need to remind ourselves that our ancestors, even ancient ancestors, weren't stupid. They were just as smart as people today, but they lacked the number of advancements we inherited to build on. We have writing and books and instant communication. Pre-literate cultures had their own way of passing along crucial knowledge in the form of oral history. The stories of things that happened, people, places, and events that are important, were related over and over again by storytelling, until the next generation knew these things intimately.

Author and geography professor Patrick Nunn tells us about oral histories passed along by indigenous cultures that reveal important geological events that happened many thousands of years ago, when volcanoes changed the landscape and islands formed where there was once continuous dry land. These stories come from all over the world, and have been confirmed by geological studies. The ability to memorize and pass on such knowledge indicates how monumental those events were to the people who witnessed them. Of course, people remember only what they need to remember. You don't memorize a movie when you can see it again on demand, but in 1977, it was important to see Star Wars as many times as you could because it would eventually be gone from theaters. In pre-literate societies, memorizing everything about the land, the people, and their history was just what was done to preserve that knowledge.

Some of those stories became infused with mythology over time. Nunn explains that with the need to embellish stories with explanations that kept the audience's attention and helped them to understand difficult concepts. We can look beyond the supernatural embellishments to find the core nuggets of why these stories were crucial to pass along. Read about the oral history knowledge that is still being passed on today in a thought-provoking essay at Aeon. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Zainubrazvi)

Paul Klusman and TJ Wingard are engineers who are particularly interested in cats. You might recall them from An Engineer's Guide to Cats which established them as authorities in 2008, or from their subsequent videos. In this video, they examine how cats have always inspired humans to develop technology to make our lives easier. They also extrapolate about which tech developments may be in our future as inspired by cats. Then at the five-minute mark, they run out of inspiration and stage a Sweded Star Wars video starring cats and the tech they've already talked about.  

There are many clever inspirations in this video, but I was drawn to the idea of using a lint roller on a cat. It's been my habit to use a brush on a cat's fur, and a lint roller on the rug. I should just combine those two activities! But what really drew my attention was the YouTube description.

This video was ten years in the making. Getting it done was a big part of my incentive for beating cancer (stage IV Lymphoma, November 2020). Thank you TJ, Monica, Larry, Mark, Ben, Tom, Calyssa, David, Nick, Paulette, Eldon, Richard, and Mitch. Thank you sweet kitties. Thank you patrons and supporters. Thank you all our lovely fans watching all this these years!

We wish Paul all the best. As he says, imagination and cats are the most powerful force in the universe.  -via Laughing Squid

You know those signs in a bakery that say "Oops, we baked too much!"? This is story like that on steroids. Crystal Regehr Westergard started a business back in 2018 to bring back lost candy bars. She started with her mother's favorite, called Cuban Lunch. She bought the discontinued trademark and contracted with a manufacturer, and the candy was a hit among those who remembered it. That led to the formation of Regehr Westergard's company Canadian Candy Nostalgia. 

The next project was her husband's favorite candy from his childhood, called Rum & Butter. But by then the pandemic was causing delays in everything from raw ingredients to wrappers, and Regehr Westergard had trouble stocking Rum & Butter. Until now. When all the ingredients came together, she was inundated with way more back orders of Rum & Butter bars than she can sell. And they all have sell-by dates on them. The candy will be good after those dates, but grocery stores won't stock them. Regehr Westergard is willing to take a loss on the candy itself, but she doesn't want to waste them, and doesn't want to pay to dispose of them. She's already contacted food banks, but they could only handle 22,000 bars. Do you have any suggestions? Read about the candy bars and the dilemma of overstock at CBC.

My first thought was that she should sell them by mail order at a discount and charge for shipping, especially now that she's been in the news. The sell-by dates on the big shipment are still a couple of months away. -via Metafilter