Twitch category Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches is now dominated with swimsuit-clad streamers ready to have fun in the water. However, the category, which was recently introduced to the platform, is now welcoming a new kind of content creators: rescued otters! Otters from the Marine Mammal Rescue Centre in Vancouver can be seen under the new category doing some adorable shenanigans, like splashing around and flipping underwater: 

While it’s hilarious to see them next to all the people hanging out in their swimsuits, it’s actually a really clever use of the category. The grouping is new, and while many probably go to it looking for conventional hot tub streams, it seems to be grabbing attention for the otters. At the time of press the little otters had roughly 1,700 viewers with the channel being the third most-watched under the category.

But part of what sets the otters apart is that the handler managing the Marine Mammal Rescue Centre stream has leaned into the controversial hot tub category. The title of the broadcast jokes that the animals have the “THICCEST FUR” and that it’s the “HOTTEST” stream, referencing how human streamers format their broadcasts in all caps, if not endless emojis. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons 

A handwritten letter by Albert Einstein was sold for a whopping $1.2 million at an auction. The letter, which was sent to a rival physicist, included Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation. Adding to the letter’s value is the fact that it is one of the four known written records that has the equation in the physicist’s own handwriting. No wonder it sold for such a huge amount of money! Live Science has more details: 

The one-page letter, written in German on paper with Einstein's blind-stamped personal Princeton letterhead, was sent to Polish American physicist Ludwik Silberstein, a well-known critic of some of Einstein's theories at the time. The document is signed "A. Einstein" and is dated Oct. 26, 1946.

The letter remained in Silberstein's archives and was recently auctioned off by his family. The document was expected to sell for $400,000, but ended up going for three times that after a late bidding war between two parties on May 18, according to RR Auction, the Boston-based company that sold the letter.

"E = mc2 is the most famous equation in the world," Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction, said in a statement. For that reason, it is "an important letter from a physics point of view."

Image via RR Auction

It is often said that before working out, one should stretch first to prevent injury. However, this piece of advice seems to contradict decades of scientific research, which say that static stretching prior to exercising does not help. In fact, it might make performance worse and increase one’s chances of getting hurt. At least, that’s how it is for runners.

“If the goal is to improve performance, then you usually don't do static stretching prior,” says Nick Kruse, an exercise physiologist at the University of Iowa. Instead, it might be better to swap in another warm-up before your run, and maybe move the static stretches to another part of the day.

But for those who aren’t athletes, static stretching is a big help for the body. There is growing evidence that this activity could improve cardiovascular health.

More details about this over at Discover Magazine.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Pyramid Lake in western Nevada offers excellent trout fishing. But if you want to access deeper water and more fish, then you need to move away from the shore. Some enterprising sportsmen began setting up ladders into the water. Standing on top of these ladders was more comfortable than standing in the cold water for hours at a time.

Then some outfitters began modifying ladders to hold fishing gear. And then some mounted chairs on top of the ladders. In the New York Times (paywalled), Chris Santella writes:

Our ladders seemed pedestrian next to the local models — custom contraptions made by a Reno craftsman which included a platform and a padded seat.

“When people first started fishing the lake, they used milk crates,” recalled Joe Contaldi, principal guide with Pyramid Lake Anglers. “This helped them cast far enough to reach the drop-offs where the fish cruise looking for food. And it also helped them get above the cold water.” The crates gave way to conventional ladders and then to chair ladders.

-via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: Pyramid Lake Guides

Want something cute or wholesome to complete a long week? Well I believe I’ve got something for you to check out: meowlfunctioning cats. Don’t worry, the cats I’m talking about are perfectly fine, they’re just acting weirdly. Internet users post their weirdest cat photos in the subreddit ‘What’s Wrong With Your Cat', and some of the posts there are just downright hilarious. Bored Panda compiles some of the best in their article here!

Image credit: JeniBean7 on Reddit

Jordan Rudess, a master keyboardist, owns a Pocket Piano. This is an electric keyboard that breaks down into segments. It will continue to play even when segments are removed. With the help of his friend Maddi, Rudess played a ragtime song while losing piano segments. In the end, he's playing on only three keys!

-via The Awesomer

British artist Matthew Simmonds carves miniature architectural models out of hunks of marble. Most of his models feature ancient ruins and older architectural styles, with grand archways, detailed ceilings, and some even come with mini-statues on display in their halls. Colossal has more details: 

Within the spaces, Simmonds contrasts the rough, jagged edges of the stone with precise angles and detailed flourishes. “Drawing on the formal language and philosophy of architecture the work explores themes of positive and negative form, the significance of light and darkness, and the relationship between nature and human endeavor,” he says in a statement.

See more of the artist’s carved interiors, which are often less than a foot wide, on his site.

Image credit: Matthew Simmonds via Colossal

There are many ways that the intersection of poverty and childcare end in tragedy. Before state-run orphanages and foster care, before licensed daycare centers, there were baby farms, a profit-making industry that preyed on poor mothers.

In an era when the most prevalent form of contraception was abortion, for working-class Victorian women who found themselves unable to care for a child, a less dangerous alternative was to surrender their newborn or, “put them out to nurse” at baby farms for a small weekly fee. Most women who chose this route assumed that their child would be properly cared for and receive a wet nurse, attention, room and board at the very least. After all, as referenced heavily in the writings of Jane Austen, wealthier women were also known to put their infants in the care of wet nurses – women who were not the childrens’ biological mothers, but who would breastfeed the children. The fictional character Grenouille of Perfume, as well as the titular character of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist were both residents of baby farms.

Behind the scenes, there were plenty of practices that boosted profits, like taking in way too many babies and neglecting to feed them. But even worse was the trend to take a one-time fee from the relinquishing mother, which relieved the entrepreneur of the necessity of keeping the child alive at all. Read about the gruesome era of baby farms at Messy Messy Chic.

They say that we should not judge a book by its cover. From the outside, this piece of technology looks like a regular Nintendo GameCube to an unsuspecting person, and I wouldn’t blame him if he made that remark; it does look like a regular Nintendo GameCube. But, as the title says, this is, in reality, a gaming PC made by modder Cityle.

Cityle shared pictures of his one-of-a-kind gaming rig on Reddit..., which is outfitted with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, a Ryzen 5 4500u processor, a 2TB Samsung 860 QVO solid-state drive, and 16GB of HyperX DDR4 RAM.

Cityle published his build log here, and it seems it was no easy feat fitting so many intricate parts into something the size of a GameCube. Though clunky by today’s standards, the console measures just 5.9 × 6.3 × 4.3 inches (150 x 161 x 100 mm). Since it’d be nothing short of impossible to fit a top-tier gaming motherboard inside a case this tiny, they transferred one from a disassembled Asus PN50 Mini PC.

Who would have thought that a powerful computer could fit inside a GameCube? I sure didn’t.

(Image Credit: Cityle/ Reddit/ Gizmodo)

"If It's Got Ugly Babies, It's Medieval"

Melbourne art historian Mary McGillivray found the perfect way to fill her time during lockdown, and went viral with it. She started making TikTok videos about famous artworks and how to easily identify them.

"If It's Got Cute Babies, It's Baroque"

Bored Panda interviewed McGillivray about her viral videos, and gives us a rundown of how to identify art. The list does not require you watch videos, but if you want to they are here. As for the madonna images, the baby at the top isn't nearly as ugly as his mother, and the second baby isn't nearly as cute as his mother.  

In 1899, Mrs. Lester ran a boarding house in Brooklyn. She had three cats, named Tom, Dick, and Harry. Nobody ever suspected that it would be Harry who turned out to be the hero of the family.

Until that fateful day, Harry was never the favorite of the three brother cats. In fact, he was reportedly “so big and fat that its owners never thought it would rise to the occasion of becoming a hero.” Instead of playing with his brothers, Harry preferred to coil up on the bearskin rug in front of the dining room fireplace.

But on the morning of December 10, while  he was lounging in the smoking room of his home, one of the male boarders carelessly threw a lit match. Instead of falling into the cuspidor, it landed on the bottom folds of a lace curtain. In just seconds, the entire curtain was on fire.

Read how Harry saved the day, and how the house on Remson street underwent another disaster only a couple of months later at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Like the previous entries in the franchise, Age of Empires III did not disappoint in its music when it was released way back in 2005. But of all the tracks in this game, the track that almost made me cry was the credits track, titled “There Is Weather/ Decisions Are Made”. It just sounds so… beautiful. And apparently, this piece also is a particular favorite of Stephen Rippy and Kevin Mcmullan, the composers of the game’s music.

Try to give this track a listen.

If you want to hear the original version, click here.

(Image Credit: Kevin Mcmullan/ YouTube)

Over a decade ago on an internet forum for mineral collectors, Alysson Rowan stumbled upon a post from another user. The man said in his post that he’s terrified because some of the mineral specimens that he bought were apparently radioactive. Fortunately, Rowan is a radiation safety professional, and, in response to the man’s post, she wrote an article about nuclear safety and the reality of radioactivity. Naturally, Rowan’s article became popular for many radioaction enthusiasts, but with more readers came more follow-up questions. Rowan could have answered these questions one by one, but she followed someone’s advice.

‘Look, forget about these bits and pieces: Just compile this all into a book,” Rowan says. “And so that’s what I did.”

And so, Rowan wrote a book titled Here Be Dragons: The Care and Feeding of Radioactive Mineral Species. The better news? The book is free!

Just like her article which introduced people to nuclear safety, Rowan’s book also became popular and is now the “go-to resource for the radioactive rockhound community.”

Learn more about the book, as well as stories from various collectors, over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Andrey Stoev/ Atlas Obscura)

About 18 years ago, entomologist Andrea Colla received a strange request to survey the secret tunnels under the Italian city of Trieste. The said secret tunnels were a Nazi-raid shelter during the Second World War, and it eventually became a museum managed by cave enthusiasts of the Trieste Alpine Club. But what was inside the now not-so-secret tunnels aside from the usual tourists and school groups? That’s what Colla went to find out.

Colla did not expect much from his investigation. And he was right. What he found out inside the bunker were “standard basement crickets and spiders.”

So he was taken aback in 2019 when one of the air-raid tunnel guides sent him a snapshot of a cartoonishly evil-looking creature — like a cross between a tarantula and a crab, with skin-crawlingly long legs, barbed pincers, and a brownish coat of armor. To Colla, it was unmistakable. This was a harmless arachnid called an amblypygid, sometimes known as a whip spider or tailless whip scorpion, which was neither spider nor scorpion. And it was not supposed to be in Italy at all.

Amblypygids were popping up elsewhere, too. In 2018, an undergraduate in suburban Athens found a few scuttling through his bathroom and kitchen — now he’s credited with uncovering the species’ presence in continental Europe. In 2019, there was the first confirmed record of amblypygids in Jordan, also in a bathroom. In both cases, the person who helped identify the critters was Brazilian arachnologist Gustavo de Miranda. And he’s just outdone himself: Last year he submitted a paper, the publication of which is forthcoming, describing 33 new amblypygid species, one of which has only ever been seen in the pipes and storage sheds of a Rio de Janeiro museum.

The question is, where are these whip spiders coming from?

Learn more about this story over at Undark.

(Image Credit: Graham Wise/ Wikimedia Commons)

Javier Báez.
El Mago.
The Magician. pic.twitter.com/yZX7HgUFCU

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) May 27, 2021

The Pirates infielders were not on their game Thursday. There were two outs in the third inning when Javier Báez of the Cubs got a hit. First baseman Will Craig only had to tag the base, but he did not. The rest of the play needs a Yakety Sax soundtrack! See it from different angles here. If you don't know how baseball works, here's a layman's explanation. 

The Cubs ended up beating the Pirates 5-3. This video induced Mefites to reminisce about the dumbest play they remember from their Little League games.