If you look at the photo real close, maybe you can find the well camouflaged snake. This photo was posted a few years ago by Twitter user @SssnakeySci, a PhD student studying pythons, boas, and pit vipers, but has gained traction on Twitter because most users are trying their best to spot the snake hidden in plain sight. Can you see the snake? 

Image via Prevention

To be able to keep yourself awake for eleven days is nothing but amazing. To be able to keep yourself awake for eleven days while flying is even more amazing. A male bar-tailed godwit was just recorded doing those things as it migrated from Alaska to New Zealand. The bird flew over the Pacific Ocean and covered over 7,500 miles.

Last year, researchers from the Global Flyway Network, a conservation group that tracks the migration of shorebirds, tracked the bird by outfitting it with a custom set of colorful bands around its legs. The bird—known as 4BBRW for the colors of the bands on its legs: two blue, one red, and one white—was also equipped with a tiny satellite tag that tracked its every move. The data revealed that the bird reached a max speed of 55 miles per hour and flew nonstop for 11 days, likely without sleeping, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.

The previous record was set by a female bar-tailed godwit in 2007 who flew 7,250 miles during her migration, reports Chris Baynes for the Independent. Scientists say that for this year’s record-breaker, strong easterly winds likely lengthened his journey, helping him break the record.

Now that’s awesome!

(Image Credit: Paul van de Velde/ Wikimedia Commons)

This is Maki, an elderly ring-tailed lemur who lives at the San Francisco Zoo. He was stolen from his enclosure last week. Fortunately, a sharp-eyed 5-year old boy named James Trinh spotted him as he left his preschool, which is about 5 miles from the zoo. The AP reports how the school director, Cynthia Huang, responded when James cried out "There's a lemur! There's a lemur!":

Huang was skeptical at first. “I thought, Are you sure it’s not a raccoon?” she said.

Maki scurried from the parking lot into the school’s playground and took refuge in a miniature play house, as the school called police who quickly alerted animal control and zoo officials. The children, parents and teachers watched as caretakers arrived and coaxed the lemur into a transport cage, Huang said.

Police have arrested a suspect in the case. Zoo officials have rewarded James with a lifetime membership at their facility.

-via Instapundit | Photo: San Francisco Zoo

Composting is good for the environment for many reasons. Just to name one, composting enriches the soil, and this could lead to healthy plant growth.

There are two problems when making compost, however. One, it takes a long time. Two, it produces an undesirable smell that could attract pests. But a German team has developed a device that addresses both problems.

Created by a German team of "material scientists, engineers, and hobby gardeners," Kalea is about the size of a kitchen garbage can and it sits (appropriately enough) in the kitchen. As users generate food waste – including meat, fish or dairy products – they deposit those items in a lidded bin on top of the device.

Once activated via the press of a button, Kalea starts by dropping the waste from the bin into a chamber where it's shredded and dried. Once that process is complete, the organic material is dropped into a second chamber where it's tumbled.

It is said that the device can produce compost in just two days. It has also been said that there is not much odor involved in the composting process.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Kalea/ New Atlas)

Back in 2018, there was a viral video of a female orca in the Pacific Northwest. The orca, named Tahlequah, had just lost her calf, but she did not abandon the corpse. Instead, she kept on pushing it around for over 17 days. It was almost as if the orca was grieving for the loss of her calf. But is the orca really grieving?

Scientists are tempted to draw those conclusions, too. But even if researchers feel that an animal’s behaviors mean it is mourning, that’s not how their job works. “We need documented evidence that this is indeed an analogue to grief,” says Elizabeth Lonsdorf, a primatologist at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, that proof is hard to get. “In terms of emotion, animal cognition is tricky,” she says. “It would be a lot nicer if you could ask them what they’re feeling.”

Since that option is off the table, scientists resort to observations, analysis and testing hypotheses to figure out why animals interact with their dead, and whether those interactions count as grief. And it’s going to take a lot more than just observations in the wild to get an answer. “The short answer is this is one of these great scientific problems that will take people working from all areas to sort out,” Lonsdorf says.

More details about this over at Discover Magazine.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Foto-Rabe/ Pixabay)

Water usually flows faster than honey. But when liquids are put in narrow tubes coated with liquid-repelling compounds, liquids with higher viscosity, flow faster.

And that’s more than just a physics fun fact. The speed at which fluids flow through pipes is important for a large range of applications, from industrial processes to biological systems.

Scientists were surprised to find this out when they experimented with superhydrophobic coatings. Their findings are reported in the journal Science Advances.

“A superhydrophobic surface consists of tiny bumps that trap air within the coating, so that a liquid droplet that rests on the surface sits as if on a cushion of air,” says research leader Robin Ras.

The coatings themselves don’t speed up the flow of the more viscous liquids, Ras explains. If you place a drop of honey and a drop of water on a coated surface then tilt it to let gravity do its work, the low-viscosity water will flow more quickly.

However, when a droplet is confined to one of the very narrow tubes used in microfluidics, things change drastically. The superhydrophobic coating creates a small air gap between the inside wall of the tube and the outside of the droplet.

More about this over at Cosmos Magazine.

(Image Credit: Aalto University)

Bryant Hoban of O'Fallon, Missouri refers to his business model as "investment sandwiches." He buys fast food menu items right before they are dropped from a menu, freezes them, then sells them at huge markups in online auctions.

Pictured above are Hoban's three Potato Soft Tacos from Taco Bell, a culinary delight that lives on only in our memories since Taco Bell discontinued them in July. Hoban sold two of these tacos at $70 each when he couldn't find a buyer for the entire set. The River Front Times talked to the taco baron about his business:

"These babies are rare!" the ad reads. "Never been eaten!"

We reached out to the seller, Bryant Hoban of O'Fallon, Missouri, and learned that the entrepreneurial scheme is part of a larger frozen-fast-food business idea for which the Potato Soft Tacos are simply a trial run.

"I've had this idea of 'investment sandwiches' where, like, you'd buy a limited-offer sandwich in bulk, freeze it, and then sell it later for a profit," Hoban explains. "You know, like the McRib — McDonald's only offers it once a year, but the demand doesn't go away. So then when I heard Taco Bell was discontinuing the Potato Soft, I decided it'd be a good opportunity to test this idea out before McRib season."

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Facebook

Today, if you smell like human excrement, people would tell you that you stink. But if you are in 18th century France, people in that era would remark that you are fashionable. The French art historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc would even tell you that your scent reminds him of good times. I know. Pretty weird, right?

It was an era of less scrupulous sanitation. The malodor of privies and cesspools was no doubt part of the distinctive bouquet that jogged the lady’s memory. But it wasn’t just the chamber pots that reeked. In the era of Louis XV, it was fashionable to drench oneself in “animal scents:” musk from the scent glands of fanged Himalayan deer; civet from the perineal glands of civet cats; and ambergris from the intestines of sperm whales. Noblemen perfumed themselves with the same reeks that wild beasts used to mark their territory.

In their natural state, each of these substances smell about as bad as you would expect. The noxiousness of civet, for instance, can be indicated by the fact that early settlers of Virginia thought the skunks they smelled around the woods were a local variety of civet cat, and proposed bottling and selling their secretions for “good profit.” In the same vein, human excrement was occasionally referred to as “occidental Civet,” as the historian Karl H. Dannenfeldt notes in the Journal of the History of Biology.

But why did this happen? Why did such scents become popular that time?

Learn more about this over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: John William Godward/ Wikimedia Commons)

An awful lot of people are far from blind, but have trouble reading text in certain circumstances, like the ubiquitous "small print." Others have low vision, meaning they aren't totally blind, but could use some help in navigating text. While typographers design fonts for readability as well as beauty, a new font developed by Applied Design Works and the Braille Institute is designed specifically to help those with low vision. Atkinson Hyperlegible was named in honor of J. Robert Atkinson, the founder of the Braille Institute.

“Typefaces that have more character are generally easier to read,” says Craig Dobie, founding creative director at Applied Design Works. Traditional serif faces like Times New Roman have some of that character, but the Braille Institute needed a more contemporary typeface like Helvetica, Dobie says, because the organization is modernizing for the 21st century.

The challenge for modern, sans serif faces is that they accept a certain level of ambiguity. For example: When “Illness” is capitalized in Helvetica, the first three letters look identical. Atkinson Hyperlegible’s small, serif-like flourishes remove these ambiguities.

“It does some things a modernist font doesn't usually do, so it's breaking the rules a little bit,” Dobie says. “But it's breaking the rules for the right reason — to increase legibility.”

Read more about the font at All About Vision. You can download the free font here. -via Kottke

(Image credit: The Braille Institute)

If you want to prepare yourself for Halloween with plenty of creepy stories, there's no fiction that's scarier than the news. These stories happened in different years in different places all over, but together they will make your skin crawl.

As they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Cracked has a list of pictofacts that will set up the facts (and the goosebumps) with a link for each in case you want to read more.

Tobe Hooper's 1974 slasher film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a classic of the genre. And it's a good thing, considering what the cast and crew went through to get it filmed. Shot in the summer of 1973 in remote Texas locations, they put up with 120 degree heat, the smell of rotting flesh (cheaper than having props made), and performing stunts they were not used to. Marilyn Burns, who played Sally, was particularly affected.

    “She (Burns) had a few accidents on the set. After running through the thicket, she had to go to a plastic surgeon to have thorns removed from her breasts.”
 
So, as it pertains to Burns’ famous screaming in TCM, in this particular instance (and others in the thicket), Burns’ screams are all too real, and the blood on her shirt is largely her own. Talk about taking one for the team.

But that was just the beginning. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, had never used a chainsaw before, What could possibly go wrong? Read about the filming of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at Dangerous Minds.

(Image credit: The NeatoShop)

It's 2020 and we don't have flying cars. But if you have a leaf blower and a mop bucket, then you have all you need for the shimmering utopia that futurists have promised us for generations. And it's all thanks to Brian Edward Kahrs, a custodian in Clearwater, Florida. The New York Post reports:

Kahrs, a Brooklyn native, called the mop-bucket mobile his “blue-collar limousine.”

“Nothing like taking a cruise along Clearwater Beach after a long night of mopping floors and scrubbing toilets,” the grandfather wrote this week on Facebook.

And, yes, he really is as ripped as he appears in the video.

-via Dave Barry

When you plan your time travel trip, make sure you've set the coordinates correctly. This video is short and to-the-point and ends the only way it could. -via Digg

In 1726, an illiterate working-class British woman named Mary Toft became famous overnight by giving birth to rabbits. They were dead and often dismembered rabbits, and she also produced parts of other animals. The bizarre events were enshrined in pamphlets, science reports, satirical writing, and tons of gossip.  

A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. Howard wrote excitedly about the case to England’s highest-ranking doctors and scientists, and King George I sent two men to investigate: Nathanael St André, Swiss surgeon-anatomist to the royal family, and Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales. They arrived in Guildford at an opportune moment, just as Toft was about to give birth to a 15th rabbit. Howard had helpfully pickled the others and put them on display in his study. Whether he was entirely persuaded that Toft was gestating rabbits or whether he colluded with her in a deception is unclear. One London doctor thought they were in it together, but since that doctor was himself accused of collaborating with Toft he may simply have been trying to clear his own name. It’s possible that fewer people were genuinely taken in by Toft than were determined to see how far the ruse could be taken, and in particular how many of their opponents or competitors might be gulled.

Educated people were not fooled, and the hoax was revealed fairly soon, but the legend lived on. Toft was required to submit to examination bordering on sexual assault, and treated as if she were too stupid to have participated in her own hoax. The real question was "why," since neither she nor the physicians involved made money from the incident. Read an account of Mary Toft and her monstrous offspring and a look into the motivations behind them at the London Review of Books. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

Nell Cropsey and Jim Wilcox became sweethearts soon after they met in 1898, when her family moved to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. By 1901, they were not yet married and began to tire of each other. Nell began to flirt with other men, and Jim wanted to break off the relationship. He did so on the night of November 20, which was also the last time anyone saw Nell alive. Jim swore he didn't know what happened to her, as he left her at her home after the breakup. More than a month later, her body was found. The murder investigation turned up some weird anomalies, but Jim Wilcox was tried for murder.

While the jury deliberated, there were numerous reports that if Wilcox was found not guilty, he would be kidnapped from jail and lynched.  It was even suggested that the jurors themselves would be in grave danger if they did not return the approved verdict.  To no one’s real surprise, the jury voted for a conviction, and Wilcox was sentenced to death.  However, his lawyers, citing the extreme prejudice against their client in Elizabeth City, were able to win him a new trial in another county.  Wilcox was again found guilty, but this time merely for second-degree murder.  His life was spared, but he faced a long prison term.  As he was heading to the penitentiary, Wilcox told a policeman, “There is a little fire smoldering in Elizabeth City which might break out in three months, or it may be three years, but it will break out sooner or later, when the truth will be known which would then relieve me of the burden of somebody else’s sin.”

Jim Wilcox maintained his innocence for the rest of his life, and quite a few facts about the case raised questions about who really killed Nell Cropsey. Read about the case and the devastation it left behind at Strange Company.