The endangered gorillas that Dian Fossey studied and worked to save are still there in the Virunga Mountains of central Africa. They are still under threat from poachers and habitat loss, but some populations have actually grown in the past ten years. One of the reasons is a group of ten dedicated veterinarians of the organization Gorilla Doctors. They head out into the bush with armed guards and trackers to check on the health and welfare of the gorillas. They treat illness to keep it from spreading through the population, and often care for wounds caused by animal traps.
Atlas Obscura interviewed veterinarian Jean Bosco Noheri, known as Dr. Noel, about Gorilla Doctors' work. He told a story about a desperate mission to save a baby gorilla that had a snare around its neck. The gorilla family was guarded fiercely by several silverbacks that didn't trust the humans. That story shows the great lengths these doctors will go to in order to save one gorilla at a time. Read how they accomplished that at Atlas Obscura.
In 1984, Weird Al Yankovic released "Eat It," a parody of Michael Jackson's mega-hit "Beat It." The official video for "Eat It" was a shot-for-shot remaking of Jackson's video, only funnier. But it wasn't the only version recorded. Recently, a friend of Yankovic's came across a "B-roll" as he was digitizing footage of the video shoot. From Yankovic's YouTube page:
Basically this is a take where the director just points the camera at the star of the video, who just does anything they feel like doing for the duration of the song. It's insurance, in case for some reason the production runs out of time and doesn't get all the shots they were hoping to get. I'm pretty sure NOTHING from this take got used in the final video, but I still thought it was stupid/amusing enough to share.
Indeed it is. It's basically three minutes of Yankovic playing with food as he lip-syncs, just as you'd expect. -via Digg
Norway is home to many ancient petroglyphs showing boats dating back 3000 years and more. The conventional wisdom about these petroglyphs was that they were religious icons, a fantasy showing people departing for the afterlife. But great leaps in archaeology over the past few years lead scientists to believe that these were real boats that carried large crews all over Europe, as far as Italy, for trade. Advances in precise dating of the petroglyphs, along with discoveries of settlements and DNA sequencing, show that Norway had a rather Viking-like Bronze Age society 3000 years ago, long before the Vikings who ruled for just 300 years around a thousand years ago.
The Bronze Age saw a great leap forward in civilization, as societies learned the many uses of metal. There is no evidence of tin or copper mining among Bronze Age Norwegians, but they had bronze. Previously thought to be nomads, recent digs have revealed that people lived in elaborate settlements of the era, complete with tools and jewelry made of bronze ands other metals brought in from far away. DNA from 3000-year-old remains indicate that while almost all men were local, many of the women came from other nations. This indicates a booming trade between Bronze Age Norwegians and other countries of Europe.
A recently-discovered boat dating back to just after the end of the Bronze Age is very much like the ancient petroglyphs, and shows that ancient Norwegian boats were fairly sophisticated, made from planks of wood instead of only shaped logs as was previously thought.
So what happened to this Viking-like Norwegian Bronze Age society? The petroglyphs of the later Bronze Age depicted smaller ships and more illustrations of conflict. Temperatures dropped, and made travel more difficult. And as the Iron Age began, the ingredients for bronze no longer had to be imported, because iron was available in Norway. And so Norwegians kept more to themselves for another two thousands years until the Vikings struck out to conquer the world. Read about these recent findings and what they tell us at Science Norway.
(Image credit: Erik Irgens Johnsen/Museum of Cultural History)
Tim Peake (left), a British astronaut who stayed on board the International Space Station in 2016, isn't pointing fingers at anyone in particular. Nor is he inviting anyone to pull his finger. He's just explaining that the human digestive tract works differently in microgravity.
The tabloid Daily Star reports that Major Peake was asked what it was like to burp with a space helmet on. He explained that people don't burp in space because burping--the rising of gas in the the digestive tract--doesn't happen in microgravity. The air doesn't go up. It exits the body the other way.
As a result, Peake explains, the space station is a stinky place. It smells "like a barbecue that’s gone wrong. Burnt meat, scorched, metallic smell."
In space, no one can hear you scream. But they can smell you.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: NASA Johnson
For any given geographic point in the world, which peoples and nations have lived there? Point in History, a project by professional data visualizer Hans Hack, informs us. Just click on any spot on a map of the world and the site creates a timeline dating back to prehistoric times.
For my example above, I chose the modern Italian city of Brindisi. The application tells us that after the Stentinello Neolithic culture, the heel of the Italian boot saw the presence of Greeks, Romans, Ostrogoths, and Byzantines, followed by the rule of Sicily, Aragon, Naples, the odd-named Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and, finally, unified Italy.
-via Flowing Data
Trey Anastasio, guitarist, singer, and songwriter with Phish, performed a solo show in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Monday. In the audience was a little barefoot girl with a sign that said, "Can I sing Bug with you?" Anastasio called her up on stage and let her perform, and the crowd loved it. So will you. Jovi is confident yet a tiny bit hesitant, and doesn't really know what to make of the applause, but she keeps her adorable smile on and keeps going with the song. You don't have to be familiar with the song or even with Phish to enjoy the sweet interaction between Anastasio, 7-year-old Jovi, and the crowd. -via Metafilter
In any era, there is the end of an era. We don't know what event will be the last until long afterward, but the last Old West train robbery turned out to be quite a story. By the turn of the 20th century, the outlaws of the Old West were becoming more outnumbered by law-abiding folks every day. And with more people, better communication, and more advanced law enforcement procedures, it was pretty hard to make a clean getaway after a crime. On February 15, 1900, five men boarded the train that had stopped at Fairbank, Arizona. They aimed to take the contents of the safe, but absconded with only $42 and two of them wounded. They left behind an injured train guard and plenty of witnesses. Three lawmen, all from different counties, gathered posses and set off to find the perpetrators, their professional reputations at stake.
One of the bandits, severely wounded, was left to die in the desert after he could no longer sit on a horse. He was found and brought back to town in a delirium. Wells Fargo detectives got involved in the case, as it was their safe and their guard who was targeted. And you won't believe what they found out. The whole story, with an unexpected twist, is told at Truly Adventurous, in both text and in podcast version.
This seems like a really weird question, but Tom Scott had it in the back of his mind since childhood. We get a quite detailed explanation why, which involves a bonkers old TV show, and then he has the opportunity to try it himself. The idea of driving while facing backwards was just a weird idea from the show, but can it be done in real life? Sure, as anyone who ever used a backup camera in a modern car will tell you. But Tom does it the hard way, by having a sponsor build him a vehicle in which all driving would be done by watching a video camera instead of the road. And it can go 50 miles an hour. What could possibly go wrong?
If you've been in Hong Kong anytime in the last 40 years, you've no doubt noticed Jumbo Floating Restaurant, part of a tourist attraction in the city's Aberdeen Harbor. The restaurant on a boat had an area of 45,000 square feet and could accommodate 2,300 diners at once. One has to wonder how they fed that many people. In 2020, the restaurant closed due to the pandemic. In 2022, the cost to maintain the boat in the harbor was determined to be too high, and it was towed away last week. The plans were to dock the restaurant at a less expensive location to continue maintenance. Those plans are kaput, as the restaurant capsized on its journey.
The tow boat and restaurant encountered "adverse conditions" on Saturday and took on water. On Sunday the 260-foot-long restaurant completely capsized and sunk into the South China Sea where the depth is around 1000 meters. That makes it highly unlikely that there will be any salvage operation. There were no injuries.
(Image credit: Michal Osmenda)
There is a monument in the cemetery of Pinner Church in the northwest part of London that is unlike any other. In fact, it dominates the tiny graveyard. The triangular monument has a coffin right in the middle-several feet above ground! This is the grave of William and Agnes Loudon, and the monument was erected on orders from their son John Loudon after William died in 1809. Agnes joined him in 1841.
There’s a legend attached to the monument, because, of course there is.
It’s claimed, roughly, that the descendants of William Loudon, a Scotch merchant, retain the property bequeathed by him so long as he remains “above ground.”
Well, that's not true, as it has been ascertained that there is no body in the above-ground coffin. There are two coffins buried in a vault underneath the monument. So why the floating coffin? Could it be that John Loudon wanted people to talk about his parents and wonder about the monument? Read about the mysterious floating coffin of Pinner at Ian Visits. -via Nag on the Lake
Here's a question that never occurred to me before- why are there big cats, but no big dogs? At one time, there was a very big canid ancestor, but it wasn't Clifford the Big Red Dog, and that one's extinct anyway. While there are wild canine species left that differ from our human-bred domestic dogs, the biggest of them top out at about 175 pounds. Meanwhile, adult male tigers can easily weigh 600 pounds!
This video explains that the difference is in an animal's hunting strategy. Dogs are pack animals, and almost all cats are solitary ambush predators (the lion being an outlier). The size of the cat has to do with its preferred prey, which varies widely from house cats chasing mice to tigers taking down water buffalo. A dog's size matters less when they have an army of relatives hunting with them. The difference in hunting strategies also explains quite a few other differences between cat and dog anatomy, from their teeth to their shoulder articulation.
The board game Reversi was invented in the late Nineteenth Century in Britain, but became enormously popular in Japan during the Twentieth Century. The modern version of the game most commonly played around the world is Othello. It's not as complex as chess, but the game has depth. Now it's even more complex with this 3D variant recently unveiled at a toy show in Tokyo.
Sora News 24 reports on this development. The new Othello comes with two platforms that can be placed anywhere on the board, so as long as the corners line up with all diagonal lines facing the right way. The Japanese-language video embedded above explains the rule changes. If I understand the diagrams correctly, placing tiles on opposite vertical sides of the platforms can flip all chips between them on multiple or single levels, depending upon which rules the players agree to.
Photo: Sora News 24
Thanks to constant wars, there were plenty of widows, orphans, and excess single women in 13th-century Europe. Some of these women became nuns, but many of them teamed up to form local mutual aid groups. Wealthier women helped to keep poorer women and children sheltered and on their feet, and their numbers provided security. As these groups grew and consolidated, they became known as the Béguines. Although they were religious, they were not officially tied to the church, took no religious vows, and were free to leave any time. The Catholic church, busy attaining not only religious but political and economic power, tolerated the independent Béguines as long as they helped alleviate the church's social welfare obligations and didn't threaten the church's power.
In this environment, the Béguines were able to study, serve the poor, hold jobs, and direct their own lives. They still mostly kept to themselves, as the medieval church was known to accuse women who stepped out of line of heresy or even witchcraft. But some of the Béguines began to write religious treatises. Marguerite Porete wrote a book called The Mirror of Simple Souls that became a best seller. The church condemned the book as being full of "errors and heresies." Porete was arrested and eventually burned at the stake in 1310. That was the beginning of the end of the Béguines, although the "order" held on for several hundred more years. Read of the rise and fall of the Béguines at Messy Nessy Chic.
Airbnb and its competitors let you rent out your house to strangers in search of a place to stay. This real estate aspect of the sharing economy is expanding. The New York Times (paywalled article) reports that new businesses let people offer up their household pools, living rooms, and backyards. The article focuses on Sniffspot, a company that turns ordinary household backyards into dog parks.
This company is thriving in suburbs outside of large cities, such as New York and Seattle. Wealthy dog owners who live in crowded apartments in the city will pay $35 an hour or more for access to fenced-in backyards. This large fee encourages hosts to make their yards especially appealing to dogs, such as adding agility equipment, play structures, and shallow pools.
-via Althouse
We see skateboarders do amazing tricks and we are impressed with their talents. But it doesn't come easy. Every trick takes endless practice, and you have to be willing to fall a lot to achieve success. In other words, it's hard and dangerous work, for just a sense of accomplishment when you succeed. Najeeb Tarazi made an experimental video titled One More Try to show how skaters practice to master a new trick, and the many falls they endure to get it right. Warning: This video might make you feel a little pain in places, but to the guys doing the falling, it's all in a day's work. -via Nag on the Lake
