Taking care of the diverse and diminishing species of wild animals in Africa requires constant management of populations for their own good. You can imagine that moving a rhinoceros from one area to another is a massive undertaking, no matter how you do it. Believe it or not, veterinarians and scientists have determined that the best way to move rhino is the method you see above: hanging by its feet from a helicopter.  

“We’ve been picking animals up by their feet for 20 years now,” says Pete Morkel, a wildlife veterinarian who is considered the world’s foremost expert in black rhinos. The options were either moving the animal by the feet or flat on its side—and placing straps around the feet was much easier than hoisting a sometimes-enormous animal onto a stretcher for transport. The animals sport a blindfold and earplugs to help limit stimuli. “We started small, with zebra and antelope, and then moved on to the big stuff,” Morkel says. “There was a lot of trial and error—and luckily, we haven’t had much error.”

While ease of movement plays a part in determining best practices, the effect on the animal is the top priority. Read about the experiments that revealed it was safe and effective to hang a rhino by its feet at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine)

A video posted on Twitter is showing how Disney handled its animation process during its hand-drawn animation era. The clip shows various clips of different Disney films side-by-side, showcasing instances of recycled animations. Same movement or actions, different characters or movies. The video has been viewed over 11 million times, and people have mixed reactions to it: 

The montage beings with a clip of Winnie the Pooh's Christopher Robin alongside one of The Jungle Book's Mowgli, both clambering over rocks. Although the films were released 10 years apart (1977 and 1967 respectively), the characters' actions are eerily identical. The clip also reveals the Jungle Book also borrowed animations from The Sword in the Stone, released a year previously.

It seems the responses fall into one of three categories: confused, indignant or impressed. Many are are simply stunned to see that some of their favourite childhood films recycled animations, while others decry the practice as lazy. But many point out how laborious the animation process was in the 1960s and 70s (if only a few of today's best laptops for video editing had been knocking about), and call the recycling practice efficient, and even inspired.

Image via CreativeBloq

Eighteen-year old Andrey Esipenko could not hide his huge smiles after beating the World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen in Round 8 of Tata Steel 2021.

It was a great opportunity for the young challenger to face Carlsen, and a greater one to beat him in his own game. 

I could also imagine the mental arsenal that Esipenko went through to vanquish Carlson’s great technique. In the end, it was a well-earned grin. 

“Yes, he defeated Magnus. But it looks like Magnus has shaved off 20 years of Andrey's life expectancy during that match,” said one in the comments.

(Image Credit: Chess.com/Youtube)

YouTuber Khalid SM Shahin digitally added the voices of Beavis and Butt-Head from the cartoon of the same name to the 1989 Legend of Zelda cartoon. Beavis is obnoxiously eager to develop a deeper relationship with Princess Zelda, daughter of King Butt-Head.

Beavis, an incarnation of the Hero with a Thousand Faces, prevails and acquires his reward. It is, perhaps, not what he expected. Then, in the final two minutes of the cartoon, things get really weird.

-via Geekologie

Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy Romeo and Juliet has been adapted for the big screen a million times, but in 1996, one such adaptation, styled Romeo + Juliet, became a big hit. Maybe it was the guns and drugs. Maybe it was Leonardo DiCaprio. Maybe Screen Junkies can explain it better with this Honest Trailer.

A new study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior has suggested that countries in hotter climates feature more spicy food is not because of a stomach-lead adaptation to our natural environment. In other words, the frequently used spices in these countries don’t serve as a medicine against food-borne illnesses. The study debunks the Darwinian Gastronomy theory, the theory that food scientists have held on for years: 

Using this theory, it seems obvious that hot countries with higher levels of foodborne illness must be warding off illness with all the extra spices they add in comparison to cooler countries who tend to use fewer spices.

But Lindell Bromham, the study's first author and professor of ecology and evolution at the Australian National University, argues this theory simply doesn't hold up when you expand the datasets you're looking at.

"The theory is that spicy foods helped people survive in hot climates where the risk of infection from food can have a big cost in terms of health and survival," Bromham explained in a statement. "But we found that this theory doesn't hold up.

"Spicier food is found in hotter countries, but our analysis provides no clear reason to believe that this is primarily a cultural adaptation to reducing infection risk from food."

they found that the road accident prevalence was a better predictor of spice use than the prevalence of foodborne illnesses — an explanation Bromham points out as being unlikely.

"This doesn't mean that spicy food shortens your life span or makes you crash your car," explains Bromham. "Instead, there are many socioeconomic indicators that all scale together, and many of them also scale with spice use."

Image via Inverse

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