The guy from the Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) has a Venus flytrap plant, and is willing to use it as a guinea pig. Would it eat a jellybean? That may be a dumb question, but he has reason to think that it might. -via Boing Boing

Lumberjacks in the forest may fell giant trees whole, but in an urban area, you have to be careful not to take out the whole neighborhood. When a tree gets too tall, the best thing is to take it down a section at a time. This palm tree in San Bernardino, California, got so tall that it was bending over, so it was better to take it down than to wait for it to fall. But the job wasn't without danger, as you can see. -via Laughing Squid 

Parkour is a sport that grew out of military obstacle course training- the word parkour actually derives from the phrase parcours du combattant, or obstacle course. It was invented by David Belle in the 1980s, but its origins go much further back, to George Hébert, who developed a physical training regimen he called his "Natural Method" in the early 1900s.

More than a century later, the training discipline Hébert developed has become the standard system of physical education in modern militaries around the world and it’s even been suggested that we can trace modern adventure playground equipment back to his original obstacle designs in the early 1900s.

Hébert himself was influenced by the observations he made untrained native tribes in Africa while travelling the world pre-WWI: “Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skilful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in gymnastics but their lives in nature”, he wrote.

Learn how Hébert's philosophy led directly to the development of parkour, and later the artistic variation called freerunning, at Messy Nessy Chic. The story contains plenty of impressive videos.

What if your favorite couch had a life on its own, like a Transformer? Visual artist Max Siedentopf’s studio took that concept and created a goofy series called Mundane Machines. The series illustrates what happens when the most mundane objects in our home turn into machines, from hamburgers, to sneakers, to cigarette boxes, Siedentoph displays what would happen if these objects became life-sized machines. It’s lowkey scary, so hopefully this doesn’t happen in the future.  

Image via Plain magazine 

Warsaw-based artist Nespoon created an artwork that covered a side of the Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode. It features delicate mesh and floral elements, as if the artwork is a huge lace blanket covering the museum. Nespoon chose the lace motif from the institution’s archive, which dates back to 1894. The artist then spray-painted the intricate details onto the building.

Image via The Colossal 

The annual Fat Bear Week of Katmai National Park and Preserve will finally begin this Wednesday, and it is as exciting as the other Fat Bear Weeks that have been held over the years.

This year, people will vote on 12 of the heftiest and hunkiest bears that have traveled to the park’s Brooks River to feast on salmon this summer, including last year’s winner “Number 435,” also known as Holly.

The Fat Bear Week has been an annual event of the park ever since 2014. Ever since then,...

“[The event] has grown beyond my wildest expectations when I first conceived the idea while working as a ranger at Katmai National Park,” Mike Fitz, a former ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve, said in an email. “I think there are several reasons why people seem to love Fat Bear Week. It’s positive and provides a brief reprieve from the negativity that often dominates our social media feed. It highlights known, identifiable bears at Brooks River, which people can watch every day on the Explore.org bearcams.”

Know more about the event, as well as the bears that reside in the river, over at Gizmodo.

(Image Credit: National Park Service/Explore.org)

The worst thing that you could do when playing an online game is use cheats. Sure, it helps you win the game, but it is unfair for the other players who just want a fair game that they can enjoy. This is why game developers, such as Activision, do their best to keep cheaters away from their game.

Just as millions of players of Call of Duty: Warzone were gearing up for a new season of the popular online multiplayer game, thousands of them were banned because they were allegedly using an app to help them cheat.

On Monday, Activision de-activated the accounts of around 20,000 Warzone players after the company detected a popular cheat, according to people familiar with the matter. 

More details about this news over at Vice.

Thanks, Activision.

(Image Credit: Activision/ Wikimedia Commons)

Do you have a romance that reminds you of Harley Quinn and the Joker? Then Etsy seller Nenad Cicmil has the perfect wedding ring for you. If you have a different sort of relationship, like that of Spawn and Wanda Simmons or the Punisher and Maria Castle, then this jeweler has more options for you.

For me, I'll take this black gold Batman ring for a gritty reboot marriage. I'd propose in a forced gravely voice, like Christian Bale struggled to use in The Dark Knight film trilogy.

-via Technabob

It has been posited that the extra nutrition that led to the amazing evolution of the human brain came from cooked food, and therefore we owe it all to our ancient ancestors who learned to harness fire. But recent discoveries from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania lead us to wonder about that theory.  

...Olduvai Gorge wasn’t always so dry and dusty—and in fact, it once had something in common with the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. Recently, a surprise discovery by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, geologists, and geochemists suggested that this cradle of our species was filled with soupy, steamy geothermal pools. According to the team, the hot springs might even have been ripe for old-fashioned culinary experimentation by our distant hominin ancestors.

“The major finding is that we contemplate a new resource for humans to process food,” says Ainara Sistiaga, a geoarchaeologist and geochemist at the University of Copenhagen, and the lead author of a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The paper opens a window to stop focusing on there being fire or there not being fire, to say there are other ways to cook and we should be looking for them.”

The hot springs were there along with hominims 1.7 million years ago. What if the first cooked food was boiled instead of roasted over a fire? That could completely divorce the use of fire from the initial growth spurt of human brains- like throwing hot water on the spark of humanity. Read what we've found so far at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Noel Feans)

Would you trust your life to a cat? I mean, cats are expendable, and can probably get to you faster than any human. I’d trust a cat with my life. It seems that there’s a possibility of cats becoming trained firefighters! YouTuber and mechanical engineer William Osman has turned his furry companion into a firefighter. The cat may not jump to a burning building, but it can push a button to save people, as Nerdist details: 

Osman decided to train the cat to put out fires as part of a laser-baby build inspired by The Boys. But while the baby build is entertaining, what’s really fascinating here is the cat training. Because, yes, cat training is just as unreliable—and semi-futile—as one would expect.

Despite the difficulties of training Jimmy Neutron the cat, Osman eventually trained him to press a button And all it took is a contraption with numerous moving pieces powered by servo motors; including a treat dispenser, a clickable button, and, to use Osman’s term, a “flame system.”

Toward the end of the video (around minute 13), Osman placed the cat near a tiny wooden house. Osman then lit the house on fire and waited for his cat to press the button—and thusly douse the flaming house with a spit of water from a tiny fire truck. And while it took the feline a while to screw its courage to the scratching post, it eventually put out the fire.

Image via Nerdist

Plants and animals try their best to adapt to the rapidly changing climate by moving to other territories and shifting breeding seasons. Apparently these aren’t the only ways they cope with climate change! Researchers have discovered that for the past 75 years flowers tend to adapt to temperature and declining ozone by altering their color. To be specific, flowers are altering ultraviolet (UV) pigments in their petals, as Science Magazine details: 

To find out, Koski and colleagues examined plant collections from North America, Europe, and Australia dating back to 1941. In all, they examined 1238 flowers from 42 different species. They photographed flower petals from the same species collected at different times throughout their natural range using a UV-sensitive camera, which captured changes in UV pigment. They then matched these changes to data on the local ozone level and temperature.

On average, pigment in flowers at all locations increased over time—an average of 2% per year from 1941 to 2017, they reported this month in Current Biology. But changes varied depending on flower structure. In saucer-shaped flowers with exposed pollen, like buttercups, UV-absorbing pigment increased when ozone levels went down and decreased in locations where ozone went up. But flowers with pollen concealed within their petals, such as the common bladderwort, decreased their UV pigment as temperatures went up—regardless of whether ozone levels changed.

Though surprising, the finding “makes total sense,” says Charles Davis, a plant biologist at Harvard University who was not involved with the work. Pollen hidden within petals is naturally shielded from UV exposure, but this extra shielding can also act like a greenhouse, trapping heat. When these flowers are exposed to higher temperatures, their pollen is in danger of being cooked, he says. Reducing UV pigments in the petals causes them to absorb less solar radiation, bringing down temperatures.Although such pigment changes may be indistinguishable to the human eye, they stand out like a beacon to pollinators like hummingbirds and bees. 

Image via Science Magazine

Some of us dreamed of becoming an astronaut and going to space when we were young. But when we saw the math and science it took for you to become one, most of us just moved on. Have you ever wondered how people get along in space? Mashable’s Jules Suzdaltsev shares an animated clip of how the 1969 Apollo 10 crew reacted after discovering... certain objects floating around the capsule. 

Image screenshot via Mashable 

Mezerg is a French musician and instrument designer who builds unique instruments, including a watermelon, a theremin ring, and an electric drill.

His latest creation is the Piano Cocktail. Selected keys open the stops on liquor bottles, allowing the musician to play a cocktail into existence. You can also mix a specific recipe. It just might sound weird.

-via Born in Space

Because students always have to write a lot of papers, oftentimes they forget to double-check whether what they have written is good enough to be submitted. What happens next, you ask? Regret, that's what.

Not only do students misspell a word here and there, but they leave in entire phrases they typed to themselves in a moment of despair or they forget that the name of the text file is so dirty, it sounds like something Eric Cartman would say.

Bored Panda compiles 32 of these moments. See them all over at the site.

(Image Credit: lindsey_bell18/ Bored Panda)

The Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in Friskney, UK, often takes in parrots that need a home, and they now have around 1500 of them. Recently, they acquired five new African grey parrots from various homes. Park CEO Steve Nichols explains what happened.   

“Every now and then you’ll get one that swears and it’s always funny. We always find it very comical when they do swear at you.

“But, just by coincidence, we took in five in the same week and because they were all quarantined together it meant that one room was just full of swearing birds.

“The more they swear the more you usually laugh which then triggers them to swear again.

“But when you get four or five together that have learnt the swearing and naturally learnt the laughing so when one swears, one laughs and before you know it just got to be like an old working men’s’ club scenario where they are all just swearing and laughing.”

Eventually the birds were put out for display, and they showed off their language skills by abusing visitors. Concerned that children were coming for the weekend, the staff decided to remove the parrots from public view. The parrots were separated from each other and lodged with other parrots in the hopes that they will learn new vocalizations. Or will they teach the other parrots to swear? Read more about the foul language fowls at Lincolnshire Live.