Camouflage for ships and other naval vessels was widely used in both the First and Second World Wars, but the crew of one Dutch ship – a Second World War minesweeper of the Royal Netherlands Navy named HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen, which was operating in the Java Sea – took the concept of naval camouflage to the next level. Read all in this War History Online post.

Kiki, a gorilla at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, saw Emmeline Austin through the glass and was drawn to her five-week-old son Canyon. You might guess that Kiki is a new mother, too, and you'd be right. It's a shame that Kiki and her son Pablo are living behind glass, but conditions in the wild aren't all that great for gorillas these days, either. -via Boing Boing

Animator and illustrator Elizabeth Fijalkowski did this digital painting of Doctor Who's the Doctor (Richard E. Grant) from the 2003 serial "Scream of the Shalka".

Source: Twitter

Are you considering a road trip to celebrate your vaccine status and re-enter the world of travel? Star Wars fans now have a valid argument for visiting the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, which is an extension of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian has acquired Luke Skywalker's X-Wing fighter!

The famous but fictional spacecraft of the blockbuster Star Wars film franchise is on long-term loan to the Smithsonian from Lucasfilm Ltd. Fans can now watch while the X-Wing undergoes conservation at the Restoration Hangar alongside World War II aircraft and other historic airplanes and space vehicles. Late next year, the famed film prop will go on display outside the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

“We are thrilled to have an X-Wing on exhibit,” says Margaret Weitekamp, space history chair at the museum. “It is a real screen-used vehicle from the 2019 film Rise of Skywalker. This display speaks to that crossover connection between people who are excited about space flight and have been inspired by the visions Star Wars has been putting out since 1977.”

Read about this particular model of X-Wing and what the Smithsonian is doing with it at Smithsonian magazine.

(Image credit: Jim Preston, NASM)

A common theme of apocalyptic movies is a small set of survivors trying to build thriving communities after a worldwide disaster. But how small could that number of survivors really be in order to repopulate the earth? Scientists, as well as scriptwriters, have been studying the issue.

The short answer is, it depends. Different catastrophes would create different doomsday conditions for surviving human populations to endure. For example, a nuclear war could trigger a nuclear winter, with survivors facing freezing summer temperatures and global famine, not to mention radiation exposure. However, putting some of these conditions aside and focusing on population size, the minimum number is likely very small compared with the approximately 7.8 billion people alive today.

"With populations in the low hundreds, you can probably survive for many centuries. And many small populations of that kind have survived for centuries and perhaps millennia," Cameron Smith, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University in Oregon, told Live Science.

An article at LiveScience looks at the numbers, by looking to the past and how small populations worked in prehistory, and by looking to the future when people may travel to other planets. -via Damn Interesting

Finally, a gym I agree with! Esports Gym (seriously, that’s the establishment’s name), located in Tokyo, lets its members take lessons from esports professionals. Founded by Tokyo Metro and esports start-up Gecipe, the gym aims to train a new generation of players. The business will open this May, according to Kotaku. 

Image via Kotaku 

Meet the Salton Sea, a lake in California known as one of the biggest disasters in California history. Ouch. The largest lake in California is murky, and full of toxic materials and algae. For decades, the Salton Sea has been semi-abandoned thanks to disagreements, errors, and bureaucratic bottlenecks, and the continuous debates over what people could do to actually restore the lake. The Daily Californian’s Landon Iannamico and Sage Alexander travel to the area to learn about the events that made the Salton Sea the worst lake in the world. Check their full piece here.

image via the Daily Californian

Personally, I don’t think so. However, it would be nice to know how the phenomenon actually works. Did you know that more than 50 per cent of students regularly procrastinate? Procrastination is so widespread that scientists found pigeons displaying the same behaviour! According to  Dr Fuschia Sirois, a researcher who dedicated 20 years to learning about the phenomenon, procrastination is not the result of poor time management:  

“There hasn’t been any convincing scientific evidence to say procrastination is the result of poor time management. But we can easily say it’s all to do with mood management,” Sirois says.

“At its core, procrastination is about not being able to manage your moods and emotions. Although many think impulsivity and self-control are the problems – and they do play a factor – underneath is a poor emotional response.”

As Sirois explains, every person faces stressful situations, demanding tasks that trigger brain activity that involves a brain region known amygdala. And it’s the amygdala that processes emotions and signals threats, capable of prompting a ‘fight or flight’ response linked to procrastination.

“Interestingly, people who say they are chronic procrastinators tend to have larger grey matter volume in the amygdala,” says Sirois.

“This means they will also be more sensitive to the potential negative consequences of their actions, leading to more negative emotions and procrastination.”

Psychologists have discussed and searched for methods on how to stop or at least tackle procrastination. There are many quick-fixes that we could do to try and stop procrastinating, as Science Focus details: 

For example, one compelling Psychological Science paper described how downsizing larger metrics of time (think 48 hours instead of 2 days, or 10,950 days instead of 30 years) can make events seem more immediate, prompting people to engage in upcoming tasks. 

However, for Sirois, there are two primary ways of reducing procrastination at its root cause: self-compassion and cognitive re-framing.

“I think people don’t realise that procrastinators, especially chronic procrastinators, are extremely hard on themselves – before and after the task. And rather than getting on with the job, they just go round and round spinning their wheels,” she says.

“My advice is to not go full in overidentifying and becoming that frustration. Step back from it for a minute and just acknowledge that you’re not happy with yourself. And then move forward.

Image via Science Focus 

There's lots of work to be done at Sunshine Animal Refuge Agadir in Morocco, but everyone needs a break now and again. One commenter asked "Is this heaven?" and Recomemedur (the uploader) replied, "Damn near." -via Nag on the Lake

TikTok-famous ‘talking’ dog Bunny is now asking some heavy existential questions. The Sheepadoodle, who is popular for communicating using her augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device's buttons, is now interested in her own sense of self. Alexis Devine, Bunny’s human companion, shared that Bunny started questioning her existence when she stared at herself in a mirror and asked, ‘who this?’

Now, Bunny's followers have become obsessed with the notion that her language-learning is making her develop some kind of self-awareness. Is that possible? 

And if so, does learning language have something to do with it?

"The question here is, is this a behavior that has been trained — like, look, I'm going to show you this individual here, this is 'you' or 'dog,' and don't be afraid of it, and then over time the dog learns that," [Federico] Rossano told Salon. "Or to what degree is this spontaneous?"

If it is spontaneous, the research around the ethology for canines could get really interesting. Scientific evidence has previously suggested that dogs don't recognize themselves in the mirror. The so-called mirror test is used to determine whether an animal has the ability of visual self-recognition, and is considered a marker of intelligence in animals. Elephants, chimpanzees, and dolphins are among the animals who have passed the test, but dogs typically don't.

Image via Salon 

Serving bubble tea in a hot pot is something I didn’t expect to see. Instead of sipping it through straws, people can now treat it as a soup, thanks to the taro bell desert hot pot sold at Avery Restaurant in Canada! The desert option, which went viral after the restaurant started selling it, looks aesthetically pleasing and delicious. If you like bubble tea, that is! 

Image screenshot via Food Insider

Brian David Gilbert and Karen Han like to watch birds, and they've wrote a nice little song about it. How wholesome! If you think that's all this is, you are in for a shock. From Gilbert's Tweet introducing it:

we like watching birds!
enjoy our normal video about the normal birds that we like watching (normally)!

 -via Laughing Squid

This remix by the YouTuber known as There I Ruined It (previously) combined Sir Mix-A-Lot with Leonard Bernstein to produce this mess. It's not the first time that "Baby Got Back" has been given the classical treatment, far from it, but the world has room for one more such project. -via reddit

Cat owners know that they are the perfect pet, except for climbing the curtains, skewing the upholstery, waking you up early, and knocking everything into the floor from any elevated surface they can reach. Why do they do that? Are they jealous of any possessions their human might like? Are they doing it to piss us off? Or is it to exert dominance over their environment? The answer is simpler than any of that.

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that cats knock stuff over because it’s fun. That’s it—that’s the whole explanation. If you want to stop it, you need to know why this particular hobby is so enjoyable so you can give your cats better, less destructive outlets for that energy.

An article at Lifehacker goes on to explain in detail why cats find it fun to knock your stuff to the floor, and more importantly, what you can do to stop this madness.  -Thanks, WTM!

Believe it or not, the song "Stairway to Heaven" is 50 years old. Led Zeppelin first played it in public in March of 1971, and the recording was released on their fourth album in November of that year. The song quickly became a prog-rock favorite but eventually was overplayed. As it was discovered by succeeding generations, that cycle continued over and over again for 50 years -so far. You could say that "Stairway" has everything -a ballad at one end and a rocking climax at the other, the hipness of a permanent album cut, a killer guitar solo, and lyrics that were just confusing enough to act as a Rorschach test: everyone interpreted them in their own way.

What if the lyrics to “Stairway” are so strange and convoluted because they’re actually meant to be played backwards? That was the theory of televangelist Paul Crouch, who decided in 1982 that the verse beginning around 4:19 (“If there’s a bustle …") offers a satanic message when played in reverse. This, according to Crouch, is the hidden message: “Here’s to my sweet Satan/The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan/He will give those with him 666/There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.” In the book Hammer of the Gods, one of Zeppelin’s recording engineers offers this rebuttal: “Why would they want to spend so much studio time doing something so dumb?”

That's just one of 11 facts about "Stairway to Heaven" that you can read at Mental Floss. The last one makes it all worthwhile.