Thammapa Supamas lives in Thailand and has a white cat named Ka-Pwong. Or, to be more precise, she used to be white. The poor cat suffered from ringworm.

Supamas was worried about her cat’s infection so she asked her mother for advice. She suggested applying turmeric—an Indian spice and medicinal herb used to treat infections. “My cat Ka-Pwong had ringworm, we did everything to cure it, but nothing worked. That was when my mother had the idea of using turmeric. At first, she painted it on the ringworm but as there was a lot left, she decided to paint the whole body to prevent future mycoses,” said Supamas to Bored Panda.

As anyone who cooks with turmeric knows, it can stain your skin yellow. The spice turned the entire cat bright yellow, which did not wash out. The good news is that the ringworm has cleared up! And Ka-Pwong now has her own Facebook page, in case you want to follow along and find out how quickly the cat replaces her dyed yellow hair with new white fur. Read the whole story with lots of pictures, including some with Photoshopped Pickachu features, at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: ตุ้มเม้งแมวแพนด้า&คาพ้วงแมวเชื้อรา)

Tina Fey read the nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabees, about the toxic culture of teen girls, and wrote a fictional treatment which became a big hit in 2004. Mean Girls was a fetch comedy that struck close to home for a generation and then some. This Honest Trailer is pretty straightforward, because Mean Girls was everything it aimed to be.

Only a few animals can survive the subzero temperatures of Antarctica. One of those animals is penguins, who have an ingenious way of keeping themselves warm while ensuring that no one dies as they travel across the frozen terrain and bombarded with gusty winds. What do they do? They huddle. This phenomenon is already amazing enough on its own, but once we look deeper into this, it becomes even more amazing.

“A penguin huddle looks like organized chaos,” said François Blanchette, a mathematician at the University of California, Merced. “Every penguin acts individually, but the end result is an equitable heat distribution for the whole community.”

It turns out that penguins execute their huddles with a high degree of mathematical efficiency, as Blanchette and his team discovered. More recently, Daniel Zitterbart, a physicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, helped develop and install high-resolution cameras to observe undisturbed huddling behavior. Zitterbart’s team recently discovered which conditions cause penguins to huddle, and they are investigating the possibility that the penguins’ mathematical behavior may reveal secrets about colony health over time.

Learn more about this interesting mathematical phenomenon over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Nature on PBS/ YouTube)

Growing up, I have encountered people who are okay with artificial developments such as vaccines and GMOs. I also have encountered people who are not okay with “unnatural” methods, as they believe that 100% natural should be the way to go. But natural is not always good all the time.

… Given a choice, most people gravitate toward the natural over the artificial. After all, natural environments are preferable to garbage dumps, natural foods are nearly always healthier than stuff concocted in a chemistry lab. Yet it needs to be said loud and clear: Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good. “Smallpox is natural,” Ogden Nash noted. “Vaccine ain’t.” …

Reading 19th-century critic and essayist John Ruskin, who wrote “There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather,” one cannot help conclude that Mr. Ruskin didn’t get out much. By the same token, “doing what comes naturally” can be very bad advice indeed.

Read more of David Barash’s article about this over at Nautilus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)

The temperature hit 130°F (54.4C) in Death Valley last week. Just knowing that can make you sweat, but there are people actually living and working in Death Valley. How do they cope with such heat not only this year, but year after year as the desert warms up? Park ranger Brandi Stewart of the Death Valley National Park taels us about her life in the heat.

“Overall, we spend a lot of time indoors,” she says. “On our days off, many rangers go hiking or camping in the mountains to spend some time outdoors without the heat. For those who have a water heater with a tank, many rangers will turn off the water heater, so that water becomes the ‘cold’ water, and the water running through the pipes becomes the ‘hot’ water. Unfortunately, my house has a tankless water heater, so while it saves energy, my home only has hot and hotter water in the summer.”

Lastly, Stewart mentions that she and many other park rangers have misters lining their porches to help them stay cool. “But really, anything above 120 is too hot, even with the misters,” she says.

Good advice for humans, but other species survive and even thrive at higher temperatures. Learn how they do it at Mel magazine.

The Great Emu War happened in 1932, but there's a new one raging on the internet over how you pronounce the bird's name. Americans tend to pronounce it ee-moo, and National Public Radio declared it an acceptable pronunciation. However, Australians did not take kindly to the action, as they pronounce it ee-mew. It's the difference in the pronunciation of the words moot and mute. The Guardian stepped into the middle to declare both wrong.

The Portuguese word “ema” was originally used to refer to a cassowary, and may be based on an Arabic word meaning “big bird”. The word was likely brought to Australasia by early colonial explorers.

“This is pretty typical of English which is just absolutely chock-full of words that are borrowed from languages from all over the world,” Enfield said.

“We mangle it to a more comfortable pronunciation for our own language and, you know, then just takes off.”

So it seems both the Aussies and Yanks are guilty of brutalising the bird’s name to suit their lazy anglo accents.

Well, I guess that settles it. Or maybe not. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Calistemon)

August 24, 1995. Midnight. People were already lining up at CompUSA and BestBuy, as they were looking forward to getting a copy of the most anticipated software at that time. That software was Windows 95. Twenty-five years later, 95’s legacy, through its features, still lives on to this day, from the Start button, to other ambitious features of the said software.

… PC geeks were choosing between Pentium or 486 processors, IDE or SCSI hard drives, double-speed CD-ROMs, and Sound Blaster audio cards to experience the best of Windows 95. Microsoft added a lot of features to Windows 95, but the biggest was a new Start button, menu, and task bar that made it a lot easier to discover applications and navigate the operating system. Multitasking improvements and the graphical interface were a big leap from Windows 3.1 and the days of MS-DOS, but the interface was rather similar for Macintosh and OS/2 users at the time.

More about this story over at The Verge.

(Image Credit: Microsoft/ Wikimedia Commons)

He was asking for it! He thought he was tough until he was taken down by the fearless and remorseless police dog.

Click Here for the short video.

These filters aren’t there for aesthetics. Meet the Breeze, a mask that would work in any scenario, be it an area with bad air quality, a smoke-filled war zone, or the daily travels during the pandemic. The mask has a naturally cooling outer fabric, and an inner layer made from silver and 24-karat gold. The inner layer instantly destroys any germs that come in contact with it, as Yanko Design details: 

Designed by a videographer who often had to wear masks for hours while working, the Breeze was first and foremost crafted to fit comfortably around your face, letting you wear it for a long time. Its wraparound style allows you to wear it around your head (instead of around your ears), and a velcro fastening system gives you the freedom of wearing it around caps, ponytails, hair-buns, and even turbans. The comfortable fit allows the Breeze to sit on your face almost like a second skin, giving you hours of use without any “mask fatigue”. The mask uses an 80-20 blend of polyester and polyamide to help it regulate temperature. A simple spritz of water on the outside of the mask helps bring its temperature down as you breathe, giving it a cooling effect. The mask comes in variants with and without air-valves. The air-valves direct the flow of air as you breathe, filtering in the air from one side, and out the other, thanks to replaceable N99 filter inserts. This double filtration system makes the mask safe for you as well as the people around you. Both valve and valve-less versions of the mask come with the unique silver+gold mesh layer along with a standard N95 filter lining to trap microparticles and kill microorganisms.

Image via Yanko Design

All squirrels are created cute. Some squirrels are just cuter than others. Such is the case for these Japanese dwarf flying squirrels, which can only be found in Honshu and Kyushu, both remote Japanese islands.

These incredible creatures can only be found on Honshu and Kyushu islands, remote locations in Japan. While there are around 50 different species of flying squirrels all around the world, these ones – known officially as Pteromys momonga – are one of only two ‘Old World’ species.

They’re rather small, measuring out at between 14 and 20 centimetres and weighing between 150-220g. Also, while other many other flying squirrels have one mating cycle per year, the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel has two.

Learn more about these cute animals over at UNILAD.

(Image Credit: @kristinecake/ Twitter)

We love checking our appearance in the mirror. Isn’t it a brilliant invention, a tool that can let you see what you actually look like? Surprisingly, the mirror has been around for a longer time than one would think. Humans have been interested in seeing their own image since prehistoric times. Some parts of our history suggest that the creation of these objects was a dangerous trade, as Hunker details: 

Yet, the Venetians on the island of Murano gained quite the dangerous reputation for producing quality, highly expensive glass mirrors during the 13th century and beyond.

"The glassmakers at Murano jealously guarded the tricks of their trade, as did the Venetian government; spilling trade secrets was punishable by death, and if a glassmaker dared to leave Murano, their family was sometimes held hostage in attempts to hasten their return," writes Katy Kelleher in her "The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors" article for Longreads. Later on, in 1547, two Venetian glassmakers were actually assassinated when they tried to move to Germany.

The Venetian glass-making trade was somehow made even more dangerous by the fact that the workers were using toxic materials like mercury. "Workers who inhaled mercury fumes might develop behavioral and personality changes," writes Kelleher, citing that they may suffer from failing kidneys, shaking hands, a loss of memory, depression, and more. Who knew that glass-making could be such a violent, unnerving career?

Image via Hunker 

Some design failures lead to accidents, but on a lighter note, some can just give us a good laugh. In a compilation of photographs originally shared on a Reddit thread, people share designs that range from inappropriate to amusing. From a fence randomly secure in the middle of a field to a sign that tells customers to ‘eat kids free’, which one is your favorite?

Image via The Daily Mail

Humans are always looking for a way to answer questions. It frustrates us when we have no answer to a question that’s been bugging us. One of the mysteries we can’t solve is the existence of the very universe we live in. The universe is so vast that there’s not a single theory that can help us understand everything. A small group of physicists are working on a theory that can describe the universe itself. The constructor theory might solve questions such as why biological evolution is possible and how abstract things like ideas and information seem to possess properties that are independent of any physical system, as Gizmodo details:

“When I first learned of constructor theory, it seemed too bold to be true,” said Abel Jansma, a graduate student in physics and genetics at the University of Edinburgh. “The early papers covered life, thermodynamics, and information, which seemed to be too much groundwork for such a young theory. But maybe it’s natural to work through the theory in this way. As an outsider, it’s exciting to watch.”

As a young physics researcher in the 2010s, Chiara Marletto had been interested in problems regarding biological processes. The laws of physics do not say anything about the possibility of life—yet even a slight tweak of any of the constants of physics would render life as we know it impossible. So why is evolution by natural selection possible in the first place? No matter how long you stared at the equations of physics, it would never dawn on you that they allow for biological evolution—and yet, apparently, they do.

Marletto was dissatisfied by this paradox. She wanted to explain why the emergence and evolution of life is possible when the laws of physics contain no hints that it should be. She came across a 2013 paper written by Oxford physicist and quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch, in which he laid the foundation for constructor theory, the fundamental principle of which is: “All other laws of physics are expressible entirely in terms of statements about which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible, and why.”

Image via Gizmodo

What do you do if you don’t have the prop needed for the scene? As the popular meme says, you improvise, adapt, and then overcome. But hey, it really does resemble a real defibrillator, at least from a distance.

Image via 9GAG on Facebook

Before there was Amazon, there was ACME, the company where you could order anything and everything, from hot air balloons to unicycles to anvils to toothpicks to vitamins to bombs. Those diverse products would be delivered at the speed of light, even if you lived out in the middle of the desert. Where else could you select a Strait-Jacket Ejecting Bazooka and receive it within a moment or two? Check out the Complete Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products and marvel at what they once offered.

For the first time ever, information and pictures of all ACME products, specialty divisions, and services (from 1935 to 1964) are gathered here, in one convenient catalog. For more information about any ACME product, simply click on the thumbnail picture. Thanks to Warner Bros. studios and their fine animation department for advertising ACME products in their cartoons!!

However, it may be argued that the line of products may have been much larger than this archive suggests. All that are listed here are the products we have actually seen in Looney Tunes stories. Who know what else they had? -via Metafilter