Well, this is certainly fascinating. On the surface, this incident just seems to be done by a woman who is crazy in love. 

A woman who lives in Brazil has defied all the odds of modern romance. Not only has she met, dated, and married a ragdoll that looks like someone’s mom DIY-ed them in just a few hours for a school project, but she also gave birth to their baby. 

You’ve read that right! A woman has delivered an equally ragdoll baby in an actual hospital, with an actual doctor overseeing the delivery. 

But the story actually starts when she brought home the doll and did a live stream on Facebook. Friends suggested naming the mysterious ragdoll boyfriend Marcelo, and that’s where it all started. 

The amount of people she pulled into this stunt is incredible. Her wedding day was grand and around 300 people showed up. Not only that, but she also got some free stuff from different corporations! 

Check out Kurtis Conner’s breakdown of the whole event in the video linked above. Personally, we believe it was a fun, harmless thing that everyone enjoyed. 

We’re definitely rooting for her, but we’re more curious as to how she was able to get the doctors on her side in pulling the birth of her ragdoll son!

Maybe it’s because we’re pressured to sleep? This might sound a bit confusing, but hear us out. We can’t sleep because we’re thinking about it. 

Many of us are obsessed with keeping track of how many hours of sleep we are getting. Some have tried to extend their hours of sleep, from meditating to valerian root supplements to moon milk, and have had no results. 

At some point, their obsession with ensuring they get a lot of sleep becomes an immense pressure on their psyche. Having a tracker can add to the pressure, especially with people emphasizing the need to sleep. 

Did they get any sleep? Sadly, no. According to a 2017 case report in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, there is a term for this phenomenon, called orthosomnia, the condition refers to people who obsess over their sleep. The researchers further explain why people get this disorder, "because the perfectionist quest to achieve perfect sleep is similar to the unhealthy preoccupation with healthy eating, termed orthorexia".

While not being recognized as a disorder, Dr. Nicola Barclay, lecturer in sleep medicine at the University of Oxford, believes otherwise. "Orthosomnia is a genuine condition and a real worry, especially as people rely increasingly on sleep trackers, most of which are wildly inaccurate, giving a very poor estimate of your real sleep. If your sleep tracker tells you you’ve had four hours of poor quality sleep — even if the truth is far from this — the chances are this will psychologically impact your mood, energy levels and productivity the following day. It’s this reliance that creates a vicious cycle and will negatively impact on your sleep," she explained.

Image credit: Ivan Oboleninov

最近のマクドナルド、手洗い場のみならずスマホ洗い場まであるぞ。。。 pic.twitter.com/sL6D4mZWoE

— shao as a service (@shao1555) October 26, 2022

For most of us, washing our hands after using the toilet is a reflexive act ingrained by long habit. But how often do you wash your phone? I think that I intentionally do about once a month, but that probably isn't enough.

The news website Japan Today reports that the Japanese company WOTA recently introduced the WOSH system of sanitation stations. It's a portable, stand-alone barrel-shaped hand washing sink that includes a phone washing tool that uses ultraviolet light. The company claims that in just 30 seconds (long enough for you to wash you hands), it will sterilize your phone of 99.9% of pathogens.

-via Massimo

Wildlife photographer Jennifer Hadley snagged the top prize in the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography competition. The above image, titled 'Not so cat-like reflexes' was declared the overall winner for 2022. You can go ahead and laugh; the cub was okay. Hadley was in Tanzania and saw two lion cubs in a tree. One was acting like he wanted to get down, but didn't know how. He found a way. You can see the entire sequence of photos here. 

After much agonizing he went for it and hilarity ensued. There was a collective gasp as he fell but don’t worry, he landed on his feet and walked away unscathed, perhaps with just a bruised ego. I imagine him thinking, I hope no one saw that. Oh kitty, I got it all on camera.

We hope it was a learning experience for the cub. The same photograph also won Hadley the Alex Walker’s Serian Creatures of the Land Award. Hadley also won the Affinity Photo 2 People's Choice Award with this image entitled 'Talk to the Fin.'



You can see all the award winners and highly commended photos, too, in this year's winner's gallery.

People had plenty to worry about in 1929, like the Wall Street crash that ushered in the Great Depression and the difficulty of getting a drink. On top of that, people who owned parrots started dying. When word got out, people were very concerned, and even started abandoning or killing their parrots, which were a very popular pet at the time. The culprit was psittacosis, which scientists knew very little about at the time, and had no cure.

The news media had a field day with the illness, first stoking panic, then pulling back to say the disease was overblown, then stoking panic again. Scientists worked overtime, and research into parrot fever led to the establishment of the National Institute of Health. Cracked tells the tale of parrot fever and the 1929 panic over the disease, strangely, in a series of pictofacts images.  

The theme music to this classic television series, which aired between 1966 and 1973 is compelling and immediately recognizable. When Argentinian composer Lalo Schifrin wrote it for the series, NPR reports, it was an instant hit. That is endured into the modern film series, which has reworked the theme but found it irreplaceable.

In this remix, musician Jamie Dupuis uses a guitar and a banjo to perform the theme.

Although the banjo is traditionally associated with bluegrass music, it's appropriate for so many other pieces, such as "Sweet Child O' Mine," "Eine Kleine Natchmusik" and "Flight of the Bumblebee."

-via Born in Space

In showing us the world's creatures most worthy of a laugh, Ze Frank has encountered some very weird animals. Many have impressed him so much that they deserve an award, but for some superlative accomplishment that no other awards will cover, because they're being all sciency and back-to-nature. So he had to make up his own awards show.

With categories like Animals That Look Like Ants, Most Horrifying Orifice, Oh So That's What You Sound Like, Most Creative Use of Mucus, Most Adorable Thief, An Ass That's Happy to See You, and Least Likely to Become a Team Mascot, you can imagine some of these animals are pretty gross. Or if you've ever seen a True Facts video from Ze Frank. While technically SFW, this video contains jokes and images that you don't really want to discuss with your supervisor. Or your kids. The video has a one-minute ad at 4:24.

Once upon a time, there was a popular comedian who had a TV series. In the series, his high school teacher character ranted about government corruption and was secretly videotaped, leading to his unlikely election as president. Then the plot came true in the real world. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. His main qualifications were that 1. his showbiz career trained him to be a very effective communicator, and 2. he loves his country. Zelenskyy inherited a nation that had a chunk occupied by Russia, partisan fighting in another region, and a bureaucracy riddled with corruption. Then there was that unpleasantness that led to the impeachment of a US president.

Then in February of this year, Russia attacked all of Ukraine, including the capital of Kyiv. Zelenskyy could have evacuated, but he famously said, "I need ammunition, not a ride." Since then, he's been busy enlisting material help from other countries and rallying his own citizens in defense of Ukraine. An example is how he visited Kherson in person just two days after the Russians withdrew, despite security concerns. Knowing the danger, he also knew it would be an important symbolic gesture to Russia and the world, and a boon to the Ukrainians of Kherson. Read more about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Time's Person of the Year for 2022, at Time magazine. -via Fark

(Image credit: The Presidential Office of Ukraine)

Nature is brutal. About 50 species of ant engage in keeping slaves of another species. The most efficient and ruthless of them is Polyergus. Their main activity is raiding nests of Formica ants to take their babies and put them to work. Or at least the ones they don't eat. Sometimes they take over an entire colony of ants to make them slaves. Their two-tiered colonies consisting of a relatively few cruel bullies that don't even get along with each other and the many more who do their work may remind you of some human societies we've heard of. However, ants, lacking any kind of agency, are doomed to continue this because that's how they evolved. Kurzgesagt explains how Polyergus acquires and maintains their slaves. We also learn some pretty interesting, if disturbing, things about ants along the way. The last two minutes of this video is a promotion.

The Tasmanian tiger is no more, and it was never a tiger. The thylacine was the world's last predatory marsupial, and there were 5,000 or so of them in Australia, mostly in Tasmania, when Europeans colonized that country. Blamed for livestock deaths, the settlers hunted them in the 19th century until they went extinct in the 1930s. We have film footage of a thylacine supposedly named Benjamin at the Beaumaris Zoo, who was thought to be the very last Tasmanian tiger. But now we find that there was another.

A female thylacine was sold to the Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. This thylacine was not documented at the time because the transaction was illegal. But she was there, and she outlived Benjamin. When she died, a taxidermist preserved her skin and bones for educational purposes. No one knows how long it's been since those bones were seen, as they were stored at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and only recently uncovered. The discovery is important, but the fate of the Tasmanian tiger is no less sad for knowing one specimen lived a little longer. Read about this new discovery at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting 

Why buy Christmas yard decorations when you can use what you already have? Wild Bill Knowles has a spare Chevy S-10 that most likely doesn't run anymore, but he knew it would come in handy for something someday. The same with that garage door opener, which still works but isn't needed for the garage. He used the truck for a unique Halloween roasting spit display that you saw on Spooky Daily a couple of months ago, and he promised the truck would be back for Christmas. Bill is good to his word, and it looks like the neighbors didn't mind too much, because the pickup is now floating above his yard, flying some unnamed green Christmas character around. It doesn't matter that the truck doesn't run, as it's being pulled by a reindeer on a John Deere. I suspect there might be skeletons underneath those costumes. If you are near Berkshire County, Massachusetts, be sure to look it up! -Thanks, Bruce!

Whether it's a huge federal government or a small village, democracy brings us the never-ending tension between following rules and procedures and actually getting things done. The yard of the municipal animal shelter in Manteca, California, has grass, weeds, and thorns growing out of control, as well as gopher holes. Volunteers have been bringing their own lawn mowers to cut the grass, but they are urging the city to do something about it. The problem is that the city's public works department doesn't have a small lawn mower appropriate for the job. After months of waiting for a solution, the shelter again requested action. City staff assured shelter volunteers that they are working on specifications and will hire a contractor to do the work. But the real kicker in the news article comes here.

The fire department has a residential style -lawn mower such as the one the animal shelter needs to cut grass at the Powers Avenue station.

The station, however, currently doesn’t have grass to cut as the city let it die to comply with its drought rules not to water ornamental grass.

There doesn't seem to be an easy solution to the problem. Maybe the shelter could confiscate a goat. -via Fark

(Image credit: DuffDudeX1)

My local hospital recently installed a system of pneumatic tubes. They send test samples to the lab and deliver drugs from the pharmacy with it, all in one building. This is a quantum leap above that. Tom Scott is at the University of British Columbia, where he's investigating the Rabbit Line that sends radioactive materials from a particle accelerator to a hospital a couple of miles away. Since these isotopes have a very short half-life, they are sent by underground pneumatic tubes because they'd never survive a car ride in Vancouver traffic. We find out what these isotopes are about and how they are used. It's a pretty neat system.

But what threw me was Tom's question that no one could answer, he says. Why is it called the Rabbit Line? Duh, has he never seen a Bug Bunny cartoon? The ones where the rabbit digs underground so fast he misses the left turn at Albuquerque? Makes plenty of sense to me.

By 1933, it was clear that Prohibition, the national experiment with outlawing the transport and sale of alcoholic beverages, was a failure. Although it was never illegal to drink, it had been illegal to provide alcohol since the 18th Amendment was passed in 1920. In the 13 years since, the country had plunged into the Great Depression. Without liquor taxes, both state and federal governments were suffering economically. Organized crime had taken over the business of supplying liquor, and public corruption ran rampant. Women had won the right to vote. Many thought that in itself that would doom the repeal of Prohibition, but mothers saw their children growing up without respect for the law, and women who flaunted the law were learning the joys of socializing with men over an illicit drink. Congress proposed the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution on February 20, 1933 to repeal Prohibition.  

The 21st Amendment is an outlier among the constitutional amendments because, for one thing, it is the only amendment that repealed a previous amendment. It is also the only time that state ratifying conventions were used instead of a vote in the state's legislatures. This idea alone would slow ratification down in the 21st century, as organizing a convention and selecting delegates would now take months at the earliest. But in this case, Michigan held their convention a mere 19 days after the amendment was proposed in Washington. In 1933, 36 states were required to ratifying an amendment, and the 34th, 35th, and 36th states held their conventions on December 5th (Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah). Just a few decades prior, it would have taken weeks for the results of those conventions to get back to Washington. But with instant communication by telephone, the amendment moved with astonishing speed. Utah's ratification, the 36th, came at 3:32 PM local time, 5:32 in Washington. It was only a few moments later that Under Secretary of State William Phillips signed the amendment's certification. One hour later, President Franklin Roosevelt issued a proclamation ending Prohibition.

Then it was party time. Bars had pre-applied for state liquor licenses to be triggered by repeal, and had been stocking up in anticipation of the 36th state ratification. See a gallery of images documenting the celebrations that ensued here. 

In 1628, the Dutch East India Company launched their new flagship the Batavia on a journey to, believe it or not, Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). The ship carried sailors, soldiers, and passengers, 330 people in all, as well as stores of silver coins to trade for spices, and provisions for the journey. Several of the men aboard longed for riches and adventure beyond the company's plans. There was an attempted mutiny on board, right before the Batavia crashed against a reef 70 kilometers off the coast of Australia. Most of the survivors were were evacuated to the nearby islands. The ship's commander Fransisco Pelsaert, skipper Ariaen Jacobsz, and 50 others set out on a longboat to find help. They left 225 people on the islands. The ship's officers would not return for three months.

With Pelsaert and Jacobsz gone, the highest-ranking officer on the islands was none other than Jeronimus Cornelisz, who, despite having no sailing or military experience, appointed himself leader and assumed command of an elected Council of survivors. While this might have made sense at the time, there was the minor problem that Cornelisz was a raging psychopath and would soon turn the tiny islands into hell on earth.

Cornelisz was paranoid about the mutiny, and set about eliminating all witnesses. But first, he exiled the remaining soldiers to a different island under a ruse, which eventually turned into a full-blown war between the islands. Only 92 people were left when their rescue arrived, and even fewer by the time they were all transported to civilization. Read the horrifying story of the Batavia at Today I Found Out.  

(Image credit: Gouwenaar)