Daniel Solis created a whole new order of birds with the help of artificial intelligence. He fed images from old public domain bird illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library into the program called LookingGlassAI 1.1. The results range from "you might believe this is a real bird" to "what kind of mess am I looking at?"

Only some of these images are named. Maybe Solis should consult with the weird Twitter account semi-plausible birds, which actually names birds that do not exist.

Illegal Eagle, seen here in its natural environment under witness protection pic.twitter.com/hovlrgrODH

— Daniel Solis, birds suddenly appear (@DanielSolis) January 31, 2022

See them all in this extensive, image-heavy Twitter Thread. The pictures will be easier to see at Threadreader. Don't stop scrolling when he says "That's it for tonight, y'all." The thread takes up the next day for quite a few more birds. Solis says he has hundreds of them! -via Metafilter

The earth exerts gravitational force on the moon all the time; otherwise, it would fly off into space. But if something were to go wrong with our moon's orbit, what would be the effect on earth? Kurzgesagt gives us the rundown, but starts off assuaging our fears over this by insisting that it's not going to happen. As if they know for sure. Okay, the moon's been there a long time already, so let's assume that it's not going to fall anytime soon.

The good news in this theoretical scenario is that it takes a year for the moon to fall. The bad news is that conditions on earth get horribly bad really fast. This fantasy is truly apocalyptic, but stay with it; there's a surprise ending. And the video isn't quite as long as it seems, because the last two minutes are an ad. -via Digg

Bored Panda unearthed an AskReddit post about the "most interesting, bizarre, offensive, surprising" things contains in wills. The original thread contained many stories about petty and vindictive wills and family secrets revealed, but also some rather funny bequests that are worth sharing. I got a laugh out of this one:

Not a Lawyer, but an aging woman my family knew left her house(large, and in a very affluent neighborhood) and estate to family friends for so long as her cats were alive and taken care of in said house. After they died, the house was to be sold and the remaining estate donated.

The weird thing is, it's been like 20 years and the cats are still alive.

Also, they've changed color.

Ahem. While there are still some entries that smack of revenge beyond the grave or just don't make any sense at all, the funniest replies managed to float to the top in a ranked list of weird bequests you'll surely get a kick out of.

❓ What is this strange screaming animal with huge cartoony eyes and webbed hands? And what is it doing clinging onto a man's back?

🍺 Blue beer is a now thing: French brewery Hoppy Urban Brew makes a blue-colored beer thanks to the algae spirulina. It's so popular that the beer is already selling out (sacre-"blue"!)

🕹️ What 24 video game consoles would look like if they rendered themselves.

❄️ Hearty meal and pandemic isolation: This Japanese restaurant serves its customers in socially distanced igloos.

👮 Arby's with a side of law enforcement: After this Sioux Falls police officer arrested a DoorDash driver, he decided to deliver the food that was ordered.

🖥️ Artist Hidreley Diao used AI to show what cartoon characters would look like in real life.

🎬 Bruce Willis dominates the 2022 Razzie Awards so much that he got his own special category.

Images: @Rubber0Cement/Twitter, Restaurant Kamakura Village, @hidreley/Instagram

Tons more neat posts over at our new sites: Supa Fluffy, Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus and Pop Culturista. Please check 'em out!

Featured art: Stinky Kittens by indie artist Hillary White

See also: Funny T-Shirts from the NeatoShop.

Now that’s amazing!

The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated series adaptation of Critical Role’s first Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Critical Role is a web series featuring a group of voice actors playing the tabletop role-playing game. They are currently on their third campaign while the adaptation is airing. The show is currently airing on Amazon Prime Video and has a perfect 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

The Legend of Vox Machina covers the story of a group of misfits as they end up on a quest to save the realm of Exandria from dark magical forces to pay off their mounting bar tab. The show was produced after raising $12 million in a Kickstarter campaign. Amazon Prime Video then picked up the series during production. 

Image credit: Prime Video

A 50-year-old bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and dropped a municipal bus along with it. Thankfully, no deaths were reported, but ten people were evaluated and treated for minor injuries. In addition, three people were taken to local hospitals for their injuries. The collapse caused a large gas leak due to ruptured lines. Because of this incident, federal investigators vowed to put the bridge under the microscope to see how the collapse happened and what could have possibly caused it. According to Jennifer Homendy, investigators may take back pieces for laboratory analysis. Read more about the incident here. 

Image credit:  AP Photo/Keith Srakocic

Aiken Spring, located in China’s Gobi Desert, is also known as the “Devil's Eye.” Its memorable moniker may have been derived from its stark difference from the land surrounding it. Because of the sulfur content of the body of water, the land around the spring is barren. When looking at maps or photos, the spring looks like an eye surrounded by reddish brownish skin. 

Jonas Daley perfectly captured the beauty of Aiken Spring and the land surrounding it. The photographer took aerial photos that show the bright colors of the area and made it seem like the location was from a fantasy world. Learn more about his work here. 

Image credit: Jonas Daley 

Core77 introduces us to the KBT-100 toaster, an unusual kitchen appliance from the defunct company Modern Maid. It's for people who were very serious about their toast.

You see, you don't just slap it down on your countertop and plug it in. It slides into a hole in your kitchen wall (or bedroom wall--I'm not going to judge your private activities) and is hardwired into the household electrical system. Slide the drawer out to insert sliced bread or remove toast.

What's uncertain to me is if the hole was a custom size that would have to be cut into the drywall or if it could fit within a standard wall-hole that could be swapped out for other, more useful appliances, such as chocolate fondue fountains.

Photo: WorthPoint

The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, but the territory had been on the real estate market for a decade. Russia wasn't making money from it and, as a result of the Crimean War, Russia was also reassessing its overseas committments. The United States was a preferred buyer, but not the only customer that Russia was considering.

The Liechtensteiner Vaterland, the largest daily newspaper in the tiny Alpine nation, passes along an oral tradition within the ruling house of Liechtenstein. Prince Hans-Adam II, the current monarch, says that one of his predecessors spoke fluent Russian, had strong ties with the Tsars, and sponsored an institute in Vienna that focused on Russian and Slavic affairs. He was a special ambassador from the Austro-Hungarian Emperor to the Tsar in St. Petersburg.

At one point in conversation, the Tsar offered the personal sale of Alaska to the Prince, who was in a financial position to afford it.

There are no documents to support this oral tradition within the princely family, which Hans-Adam II blames on the destruction of documents during the revolutions and wars of Twentieth Century Russia.

Another problem that I see in the story is that Hans-Adam II attributes the incident to Prince Franz I, who was born in 1853. That makes him a bit young to be conducting such high level negotiations prior to 1867.

At its present borders, Alaska is 10,698 times the size of Liechtenstein. Can you imagine what it would be like today if the Prince of Liechtenstein had purchased it?

-via Mark E. | Images: TUBS/Alexk2

In 1964, three Polish women in Tel Aviv approached acclaimed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal about a particularly sadistic concentration camp guard they had encountered during World War II. Hermine Braunsteiner, also known as Kobyla, worked at Majdanek and would kill children on the spot. After hearing their stories, Wiesenthal vowed to find Braunsteiner. The trail was twenty years old, but over the course of time, Wiesenthal traced Kobyla from Poland to Austria to Canada to the United States. That was a problem, because the US did not extradite Nazi war criminals.

Twenty years and several thousand miles removed from the post-war tribunals overseen by the Allied powers, the U.S. legal code contained no laws that covered Braunsteiner’s actions. Heinous as the allegations might be, the U.S. government had no way to sentence her in an American court for her crimes, which had been committed neither on American soil nor as an American citizen. If Europe wanted to hold the ex-Nazi accountable, that was Europe’s business. The only thing the U.S. could do would be to kick her out of the country, and even that seemingly straightforward matter was sneakily complex. Braunsteiner wasn’t a fugitive or an undocumented alien. No one⁠⁠—save for Simon Wiesenthal⁠⁠—was on the hunt for her. And then there was the minor matter of her American citizenship.

It was only in 1973 that Braunsteiner became the first Nazi extradited from the US, and her trial in Germany lasted until 1981. Read what happened during those long years as the wheels of justice turned slowly in a new longform article at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to the story in podcast form at the same link.

The Harry Potter movies are beloved, but they do seem quite 20th century. This original fake trailer brings the franchise into the world of virtual reality and The Matrix! The magic is still there, but it comes in a form that's quite familiar to those who grew up on the internet. In this version, 11-year-old Harry Potter enrolls at the Hogwarts School of Hackercraft and Coding, where he learns the secrets of the deep web. The video editing and special effect are so seamless that you might be convinced that this is a real movie possibility, until you stop and realize that Daniel Radcliffe is 32 years old now. -via reddit

The United States had a spate of airline hijackings in the 1960s that gave us the term "skyjacking." They were mostly perpetrated by people who wanted to go somewhere specific, and relatively few people were hurt or killed before 2001. Norway had no such incidents before 1985, and therefore used no security measures for those boarding planes.

On June 21, 1985, Stein Arvid Huseby boarded a flight from Trondheim to Oslo with an agenda. He wanted to protest the way Norway treated ex-cons like him. He pulled a gun during the flight and warned the crew of bombs placed in the restrooms. The plane was allowed to land at Oslo, but then Huseby kept the crew and passengers hostage while he negotiated with authorities. He wanted to speak to the prime minister, the press, and various other officials about his grievances. The glitch in his cunning plan was the decent supply of beer aboard the plane. Read how that figured into the ending of the hostage crisis in Oslo at Cracked.

(Image credit: Michel Gilliand)

 

The internet introduced us all to historic photographs that we wouldn't have seen otherwise, like this image of Theodore Roosevelt riding a moose in the water. We all know he was an avid outdoorsman, but when you see this, you automatically think "Photoshop!" Still, it's just appropriate enough to be intriguing. After all, we've seen some really wild photos of President Roosevelt in his younger days. The truth is, this wasn't Photoshopped. And it is historic. But it's not real. It was manipulated in the old fashioned way, with scissors and tape.  

The picture first appeared in the New York Tribune in September of 1912. It wasn't meant to fool anyone; it was an illustration of the top three presidential candidates all riding the animal mascot of their parties: William Howard Taft on an elephant, Woodrow Wilson on a donkey, and Teddy Roosevelt on a bull moose, which was the nickname for his new Progressive Party. Yes, all three men held the office at one time or another.

This story is just one of six presidential myths debunked at Mental Floss, to get you ready for small talk on Presidents Day on February 21st.   

Turbatrix aceti is a microscopic nematode that is also called the vinegar eel. They tolerate a wide range of acidity and alkalinity, so they can live on the microbes that turn juice into vinegar. An article at LiveScience shows us how they move inside a drop of water.

After roaming the droplet randomly for the better part of an hour, some nematodes began to cluster at the center, while others swarmed to the water's edge, racing around the rim like cars in a roundabout. Soon, individual nematodes began undulating their bodies — then, others nearby started to undulate in sync.

The video was taken by physicist Anton Peshkov of the University of Rochester in New York, so of course he is fascinated with the worms' movement and synchronization while the rest of us are thinking that these icky critters are just looking for something to eat, and when they don't find it, they dance. And when they get tired of dancing, they lean on their partners. Kind of like the dance marathons of the Great Depression.             

Watching this synchronized movement is all well and good, but seeing it makes me wonder if these vinegar eels are in our water supply, or in our vinegar. According to Wikipedia, they prefer feasting on mother of vinegar to anything else. They are neither parasitic nor dangerous, but American manufacturers of vinegar pasteurize the product and filter out nematodes before the vinegar goes to market. -via Damn Interesting

A quick thread on in the importance of being careful what data you share - even if you're the Queen. Today, Her Maj tweeted this lovely picture, gor bless er, etc. You might think that the contents of the red box would be official business. And you'd be right. 1/6 pic.twitter.com/y1RspNRUzy

— Adam Kay (@amateuradam) February 6, 2022

Queen Elizabeth is celebrating 70 years on the throne, which is a record for the British monarchy. They call this a platinum jubilee, although they could have called it anything since it's never been done before. There are a lot of celebrations and events planned, and the Queen has released quite a few photographs lately. Adam Kay noticed that there are some documents visible in this one. Can we possibly find out what they are?

A quick click of the Perspective Warp function on Photoshop gets it looking a little bit squarer. 3/6 pic.twitter.com/yWm2L2Ycnn

— Adam Kay (@amateuradam) February 6, 2022

The rule of thumb is to check the background of any photograph before you post it, because people will pick around in the corners. We really don't expect Her Majesty to use anything vulnerable to national security concerns as a photo prop, but we can't help but be curious. A shopping list? A fan letter? A will? Kay is working with a larger version of the photo, so he was able to enhance quite a bit to reveal the contents of the top document. Artificial intelligence may or may not have been involved. To see what was revealed, you'll need to read the 6-Tweet thread starting here. -via Fark