The long-toothed dart moth is the 11,000th species to be added to National Geographic’s Photo Ark, a project that aims to document every species living in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries around the world. The moth is a type of cutworm, moths that look almost the same, so much that it’s hard for scientists to tell them apart. This is one of the reasons why the dart moth hasn’t been studied that much: 

When Sartore and his team captured the long-toothed dart moth along New Mexico’s Pecos River in September 2020, they sent a photo of the mysterious species to Bob Biagi, an editor at the species-identification website BugGuide. His response: “We have been waiting for your image for at least 130 years.”

Cutworm moths are so named because their caterpillars emerge from the soil at night and snip the stems off plants, usually seedlings, toppling them over. Some species, such as the army cutworm, are considered agricultural pests, but most aren’t harmful to crops, Kawahara says.

Cutworm moths also help feed bats (they’re particularly “meaty,” Kawahara says) and pollinate night-blooming flowers. Moths’ role as pollinators is often overshadowed in the public eye by butterflies and bees, he says.

Earth is home to about 160,000 known species of moths and butterflies, but perhaps another 200,000 remain unidentified. “There are so many insects that we don’t know much about,” says Scott Bundy, a professor of entomology at New Mexico State University.

Image via National Geographic 

Apparently, sleep isn’t just enough. Sleep is great, don’t get me wrong, however, we haven’t really fully rested if we just sleep. There are other types of rest that we need so that we aren’t chronically tired and burned out. TED-Ed Blog’s Saundra Dalton Smith, M.D. lists the seven kinds of rest that we need to be fully refreshed and restored physically and mentally. Check the list here. 

Image via wikimedia commons 

The title of this list is 15 Food Origins That'll Make You Say "Huh. Wish I Hadn't Read That." However, it’s not that gross and will not turn you off eating the foods you already like. Longtime Neatorama readers will recall that we’ve covered many of these food origin stories, but there are a few that were new even to me.

Read all 15 in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

Would you like to listen to what’s going on around the world? Radio Garden is a map (actually a globe) of streaming radio stations around the world. Spin the globe, zoom in, and find treasures of world music, pop, metal, traditional music, and talk in many different languages. I looked up places where various family members have lived and listened to broadcasts from Ambilly, France; Windhoek, Namibia; Change Mai, Thailand; Trinidad, Bolivia; and Banjul, The Gambia. With Radio Garden, you’ll either find something you love or have fun exploring new places and sounds. -via Metafilter

Norman Rockwell used photos to create his illustrations, with his creative process starting with an actual camera. Rockwell used photos, taken by different photographers, that featured his neighbors and friends. Critics have dismissed his illustrations of the American life as idealistic, but this doesn’t mean that his artworks shouldn’t be admired, no! Whether or not you think that his pieces are realistic or unrealistic, he used photos for his art: 

The cameramen included a German immigrant named Clemens Kalischer: “An artist-photographer himself, Kalischer was at odds with the tracing techniques and saccharine subject matter in Rockwell’s work. After all, Rockwell never painted freehand, and almost all of his paintings were commissioned by magazines and advertising companies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shutter, Rockwell directed every facet of every composition,” as you can see by examining his paintings and reference photos together, featured as they’ve been on sites like Petapixel.

Image via Open Culture

Male Chef is a character played by artist Chris Maggio. Several years ago, he made a Christmas spread for his friends. The results are wonderfully horrifying. The best of them is the sauerkraut snowman, which is an excellent project for those of us who live in snow-free areas.

-via Totally Gourmet

"I'm here live . . . I'm not a cat." Well, that's what attorney Rod Ponton insisted upon when he logged into the Zoom court of Judge Roy B. Ferguson of Texas. Ponton, like a true professional, was willing proceed despite his feline transformation.

Fox 13 News quotes the Judge's prudent advice to all people working from home from shared computers:

"If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off."

Now for my sitcom pitch: Kitten Attorney tells the tale of a lawyer who, despite a terribly cute accident, continues his legal career with a cat's body. I want Clancy Brown in the lead role.

-via Twisted Sifter

UPDATE 2/9/20: Slate has an interview with cat attorney Rod Ponton:

Are you worried that it made you look unprofessional?

No, no, it’s just one of those little computer snafus that happens in our age where we’re trying to take care of everything by Zoom. It’s now apparently gone viral, so that’s pretty funny.

Yeah, I think a lot of people were pretty amused.

We have a sense of humor out here in West Texas. If I can make everybody smile for a moment, today I’m happy to do it, even at my own expense.

Even though I’m not a professional photographer, I will stick to using my phone, thank you very much. Sure, you could make things look pretty enough with your skill, but let’s not forget that the quality of an artwork, or in this case, a photograph, is also dependent on the camera or gadgets a photographer decides to use as he takes the photo. There is of course, no shame in not using a very expensive professional camera, as some photos taken by phones look really good. But can photographers really make it work with a cheap camera, let alone a children’s camera? Well, check the video to find out!

The A-12 is an aircraft built for strategic, high-altitude reconnaissance. It’s a spy plane, of course! The airplane is meant to outrun enemy air defenses to bring back intelligence for the CIA. The aircraft flew until 1968, and now, the public can see photos of the intelligence aircraft that have been shared by Thornton “TD” D. Barnes, who worked on the spy plane at Area 51. Check more photos of the A-12 here. 

Image via Popular Mechanics 

The quarantine has most of us stuck at home trying to do other things or take up hobbies that we didn’t have the time for pre-Covid. It is a good time to put your creative mind to test and try to conceive, plot, and write a story or a novel. But creating an original story is easier said than done. Sometimes, the inspiration doesn’t hit you when you want it to, but Esquire’s tips might help you along as you create the next literary masterpiece! Check the full list of tips, straight from established and emerging writers, here. 

Image via Esquire 

Even without the implications and other scientific explanations surrounding this animation of the long history of how the Earth’s tectonic plates moved around, the animation is still very pleasing to watch. However, the animation is a result of the efforts of scientists, as they combined magnetic data and geological data to create the high-fidelity simulation:  

In the past decade, similarly painstaking plate tectonics reconstructions have been made but only for limited windows of geologic time. This is the first time this type of full-blown plate tectonics reconstruction has been assembled for an uninterrupted fifth of Earth’s history.

“A lot of things we look at and care about in the present day are dependent on 10- to 100-million-year time cycles in plate tectonics,” said Andrew Merdith, a geoscientist at the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in France and the study’s lead author. By looking further back in time, more cycles are revealed, allowing scientists to unravel the planetary-scale processes that made the world we live in today.

“Plate tectonics is that really big picture that you can put other things into,” said Lucía Pérez-Díaz, a structural geologist and tectonics expert at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the work. And a lot of things have happened in the past billion years that this new recreation can help contextualize.

It includes the time Earth was a giant snowball 700 million years ago; the proliferation of complex animal life 540 million years ago; the greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history 252 million years ago; the evolution of flowering plants 130 million years ago; the creation of the Himalayas 45 million years ago; and — right at the last geologic second — the appearance of modern humans.

Its scientific uses aside, the animation also resonates with people on a visceral level.

“It’s quite hypnotic,” Dr. Pérez-Díaz said, “even for me, and I see them all the time.”

Image via the New York Times

How is this a metaphor for love? Well, you've got to have the billiard balls to say how you really feel about someone you care for. And your execution must, sometimes, be perfect.

-via Born in Space

Aside from their biological role, which is to prevent stuff such as sweat and water from falling down to the eye socket, eyebrows also can make your face more attractive. This is why people spend money in shaping their eyebrows. And then there are those who overdo it, like these people in these mugshots, which Sad and Useless collected.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

You know that the music that you’re listening to is great music when even a two-year-old kid can be moved to tears upon hearing it. This Swedish kid was overcome with emotion when he heard Giacomo Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” (O my dear papa) from the opera Gianni Schicchi.

The aria is sung by the young Lauretta, who begs her father to help her get hitched to Rinuccio, the love of her life.

And it seems this tiny tot really sympathises with poor Lauretta – because he literally cannot stop bawling when his dad plays it to him at the kitchen table.

[...]

His dad said: “It shows what kind of emotions beautiful music can create.”

(Image Credit: Newsflare/ Classic FM)

If you think that your vacation photos are already the best, then you clearly haven’t seen these photos of dogs on vacation yet. Even without trying, they already look fabulous!

See more of these photos over at Dogs Addict.

(Image Credit: Dogs Addict)