Oh, dear! A new epidemic has hit multiple bird species in North America. Birds across the United States have been hit with mysterious illnesses since April, DW reports. Experts stated that the affected avians had swollen eyes and neurological issues that caused them to lose balance. It isn’t unusual to see birds with eye problems, and it took experts a while to realize that the phenomenon was unusual: 

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) published a report on the mysterious bird deaths in early June. Details remain hazy, but experts are trying to trace the epidemic back to its origins.

"The first one we saw was in April. In the beginning of June, that's when we started sending birds to an animal center, where they were alarmed to hear our numbers at the time. Now, we're up to just under 200 that are infected," Monsma reports.

[...]

Animal centers have been examining the birds for a possible cause of death or illness, but tests have been inconclusive so far.

"West Nile [disease] is ruled out. . . Everything has been ruled out. To date, we still do not know," says Monsma, citing tests conducted by Wildlife's clinic director, Cheryl Chooljian.

Image credit: Vincent van Zalinge (Unsplash) 

Utagawa Hiroshige is an artist that was known for his mastery of ukiyo-e, the art of woodblock-printed “pictures of the floating world.” Hiroshige is the last of the form’s masters, producing more than 8,000 works-- that’s a lot! Besides his inclination to produce prints of urban and rural landscapes, Hiroshige also created a set of instructional pictures for children on how to make shadow puppets: 

Hiroshige explains in clear and vivid images “how to twist your hands into a snail or rabbit or grasp a mat to mimic a bird perched on a branch,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert. “Appearing behind a translucent shoji screen, the clever figures range in difficulty from simple animals to sparring warriors and are complete with prop suggestions, written instructions for making the creatures move — ‘open your fingers within your sleeve to move the owl’s wings’ or ‘draw up your knee for the fox’s back’ — and guides for full-body contortions.” The difficulty curve does seem to rise rather sharply, beginning with puppets requiring little more than one’s hands and ending with full-body performances surely intended more for amusement than imitation.

Image credit: The Minneapolis Institute of Art 

I, too, would love a big cat to greet me during my everyday commute. Just outside Shinjuku station, a billboard hosts a cat that happily greets visitors and passers by in the area. Commissioned by Cross Space, the cat is a 4K 3D moving image created MicroAd Digital Signage and Yunika Vision: 

Backed by an impressive sound system, 4K image quality and 3-D imagery created using curved LED screens, the display gives the impression of a living, breathing cat prowling the rooftop above the thousands that pass by each day!

During the day, the cat will appear periodically between ads, so if you’re lucky you’ll be able to catch sight of it, and you don’t have to be in Japan to see it either, thanks to this livestream of the building on Cross Space’s YouTube channel.

Image credit: cross_s_vision

The 19th century was a unique time for archaeology, with wondrous treasures being unearthed all over the world and sent back to the discoverer's home country (or sponsoring country) to be kept in a museum. Museums became very competitive in acquiring ancient artifacts, which sometimes led them to be too trusting as to an artifact's provenance.

For the better part of a decade, the widely celebrated and esteemed Louvre Museum of Paris proudly displayed a supposedly ancient tiara made of solid gold. Experts at the Louvre identified it as belonging to the Scythian king Saitapharnes who ruled sometime in the 3rd century BCE. An inscription on the tiara mentioning that it was a gift from Olbia, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast, to King Saitaphernes left no doubt about the item’s authenticity and great age. But later it became clear that the tiara's new owner had been a little haste in acquiring the item. The exhibit is now locked away in storage—an embarrassment, for the tiara was proved to be a hoax perpetuated by two Russian art dealers.

Embarrassing for the museum curator, but the incident turned out to be quite lucrative for the goldsmith who made the tiara. Read the story of the Scythian tiara hoax at Amusing Planet.

UFOs are easy to explain -they are unidentified flying objects, and are unidentified because we don't know what they are. There are often several possible explanations; we just don't know which one is correct. However, when you start talking about aliens and flying saucers and extraterrestrials, suddenly everyone is interested. While odd things have been seen in the sky since ancient times, they've only been publicized, recorded, and studied since around 1947. Penn State historian of science Greg Eghigian is writing a history of American UFO sightings, and tells us how it all got started.

What happened in 1947?

A pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold was flying his small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington state. As he was flying around he said he saw some sort of glimmer or shine that caught his eye and was concerned that maybe he was going to have a collision with another aircraft. When he looked, he saw what he described as nine very odd-shaped vessels flying in formation.

After Arnold landed, he reported his sightings to authorities at a nearby airport and eventually talked to some reporters. When a reporter asked Arnold to describe how the things moved, he said, “they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across water.” Some very clever enterprising journalists came up with the headline “flying saucers” and from that point forward they were flying saucers – even though Arnold never uttered the phrase himself.

A Gallup poll six weeks after the event discovered that 90% of Americans had heard the term flying saucer. This was the beginning of the phenomenon that some call the flying saucer era and the contemporary idea of UFOs.

Eghigian gives us an overview of UFOs in the public eye and the in military studies in the interview at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: George Stock)

An international team of geologists have found a geological secret under Iceland. Meet ‘Icelandia,’ a sunken continent hidden underneath the country and the surrounding ocean. Scientists now believe that the sunken land mass covers an area ~600,000 km2 . The discovery challenges scientific ideas about the extent of continental crusts in the North Atlantic region, as Phys Org details:

Speaking about the new theory, Professor Foulger said, "Until now Iceland has puzzled geologists, as existing theories that it is built of and surrounded by oceanic crust are not supported by multiplegeological data. For example, the crust under Iceland is over 40 km thick—seven times thicker than normal oceanic crust. This simply could not be explained.

"However, when we considered the possibility that this thick crust is continental, our data suddenly all made sense. This led us immediately to realize that the continental region was much bigger than Iceland itself—there is a hidden continent right there under the sea.

"There is fantastic work to be done to prove the existence of Icelandia but it also opens up a completely new view of our geological understanding of the world. Something similar could be happening at many more places.

Image via wikimedia commons

This website has some cool noise machines you can tinker with.

Take your dreams of building an island getaway to a board game! Bear with me, I know that statement doesn’t make sense at first, but hear me out: Animal Crossing Monopoly. Thanks to photos initially shared by reddit user calysunflower, we now know that a Monopoly game has been made inspired by Animal Crossing: New Horizons! The board game will be released in August 2021, and can be preordered here. 

Image credit: calysunflower

This is an interesting story. However, it happened twenty years ago, and there is apparently no video footage from the actual incident -just still photos. So they pulled up a bunch of stock footage of "leopards" and ended up with mostly cheetahs, at least one ocelot, and possibly a margay. Just so we're clear, cheetahs live in Africa, and ocelots and margays live in the Americas. The producers assumed we wouldn't know the difference. Also, there are quite a few different kinds of cows pictured, many of which do not live in Pakistan. Sure, it's a sweet love story, but would this video have racked up three million views in a week without the cheetahs? -via Digg 

There’s no harm in spending a lot of hours on your favorite gadget, provided that you’re doing it in your free time. However, if you’re casually browsing on your phone during work-- then that’s a different story, especially if you’re a politician. An AI is now out for politician’s necks as they call out political figures who spend time on their phones during parliament sessions. The AI, called The Flemish Scrollers, is a computer program that uses facial recognition to automatically call out politicians in the Flemish province of Belgium:

Launched Monday, Depoorter's system monitors daily livestreams of government meetings on YouTube to assess how long a representative has been looking at their phone versus the meeting in progress. If the AI detects a distracted person, it will publicly identify the party by posting the clip — on Instagram @TheFlemishScrollers, and Twitter @FlemishScroller.

The accused representative will be named and shamed with their social media handles. The bot also politely requests they "pls stay focused!"

According to Depoorter's website, if there is no session in progress, the software will begin analyzing and learning from archived livestreams instead. Whether this means the software will routinely post evidence of past distraction wasn't clear. Depoorter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Image credit: Dries Depoorter 

It's true that an army moves on its stomach, since troops who aren't fed won't be able or willing to fight. While there is plenty to complain about in modern-day MREs and the C-rations that came before, those are luxuries compared to what was fed to soldiers of the American Revolution. The rebels had no government infrastructure behind their supplies, but they did the best they could. At the beginning, the Continental Congress declared how much of different foods each man should be allotted, and Washington ordered that each soldier carry two days worth of provisions. But as the war dragged on, food was harder to come by.  

In situations when rations were scarce, which was more often than not, many Continental Army soldiers had to resort to subsisting on what was known as biscuit, fire cake, or hardtack. This simple flour and water dough was baked into hard, flavorless cakes that were often so dry that soldiers had to soak each bite in water, broth, or tea in order to eat it. If Continental soldiers were lucky, the mixture wouldn’t be absolutely ridden with insects. They often weren’t.

The supply situation got so bad that soldiers were impelled to steal food from civilian settlements. The British had their own problems with food supplies as well. Read about the difficulties of getting enough to eat during the American Revolutionary War at The Drive. -via Fark

(Image credit: National Park Service Digital Image Archives)

Sharks get dandruff? Now that’s something I never knew until today! Smithsonian scientists revealed that a shark’s shedded dermal denticles can protect coral reefs from declining. The denticles are microscopic scales that cover a shark’s body, which protects them from abrasion by hard substances and ectoparasite attachment. Scientists hope that the denticles can be used for innovative reef conservation strategies: 

Just as humans shed dry skin and dandruff, sharks shed their denticles, which accumulate in marine sediments. The oldest denticles found so far, in the Harding Sandstone of Colorado, are about 455 million years old.

STRI paleobiologist, Aaron O’Dea, pieces together clues from fossil- and modern coral reefs to reconstruct baseline conditions before human colonization, and to understand how ecological and evolutionary processes change through time.

“Placoderms in the Paleozoic, and then marine reptiles in the Mesozoic, were larger and ate sharks.” O’Dea explained. “Placoderms ruled the oceans for around 70 million years and marine reptiles of the Mesozoic ruled for more than 100 million years. Sharks are only top predators now because extinction events preferentially took out other groups but allowed sharks to survive. Sharks seem to have remarkable evolutionary resilience and I was fascinated to work on a technique that would help us explore how sharks have fared more recently when humans step into the picture.”

Image credit: STRI

The Phoenician empire thrived as one of the most influential and advanced civilizations in the Mediterranean during ancient times. Phoenician merchants participated in trade by exchanging cedarwood, olive oil, metals, ivory, and Phoenician purple dye, the most coveted of their wares. Also called Tyrian purple, the dye was popular until the days of the Roman empire, symbolising  wealth, abundance, and royalty. The production of the dye took a lot of resources and manpower, as This City Knows details:

Production of fabric in antiquity demanded substantial labor, more so than other crafts. In the case of Phoenician purple, extracting this dye required tens of thousands of sea snails, called Murex initially. The process further demanded an army of laborers. 

The biological pigment was extracted from the snail mucus. It was pretty difficult to acquire, but the end result was various shades of lasting colors that hardly ever fade but instead become brighter with wearing and exposure to elements. 

The Phoenicians were generally secretive about their method of manufacture, however, some ancient sources such as the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder did account for it.

Pliny notes in his first century A.D. book Natural History that two types of sea snails, Murex trunculus and Murex brandaris, were used to extract raw muddy liquid the snails leeched from the mucus glands. The first type was used to make blue-purple dye known as royal blue, while the second gave the more distinctive Tyrian purple.

Image credit: TeKaBe, CC BY-SA 4.0

London’s police boxes are getting a redesign! Details for the new police box design have been unveiled by the government. A competition was launched to find a ‘modern and multifunctional’ replacement of the staple structures of the city. The winning design, called The London Stones, is from architecture and design studio Unknown Works, as Design Week details: 

Each hub will feature digital information screens, “essential” communication technology and space for the storage of life-saving emergency equipment.

Unknown Works’ winning design will also seek to celebrate the aesthetic and cultural heritage of the surrounding city.

Details from “buildings, stories and images of the past, present and future” will be collected and digitally carved into the stone exterior of each hub. The City of London says this will provide “an active and engaging addition to the public realm”.

“Our starting point was the London Stone [a limestone block landmark located on Canon Street], a humble fragment of the City’s past that’s been watching the City grow for thousands of years,” says Unknown Works director and co-founder Theo Games Petrohilos. “It’s mottled skin hums with myth and wonder – something we hope to echo in The London Stones.”

Image credit: Unknown Works

Don’t worry, it’s not literally a land made of Swiss cheese. Within a few weeks, a weird phenomenon has occurred in different villages in north-east Croatia. Sinkholes of varying depths and sizes have popped up suddenly and without warning in the villages of Mečenčani and Borojovići. While an earthquake happened before the appearance of the sinkholes, experts were still baffled as almost 100 sinkholes materialized a month after the earthquake: 

Sinkholes are not the most common consequence of powerful seismic shocks but they do occur, especially in the areas with hidden underground cavities. After the devastating earthquake near the Italian city L'Aquila in 2009, two sinkholes immediately opened on roads in the old part of the city. Experts at the time suspected that a previous excavation of vertical trenches for a sewage conduit weakened the conglomerate roof of the underground cave, contributing to the collapse.

"The real anomaly in Croatia's case is a very high number of sinkholes with significant dimension," says Italian geologist Antonio Santo at University of Naples Federico II.

Image credit: AFP/Getty Images