Scarecrows are called that because their function is to scare, well, crows (and other types of birds). But some people just don’t like the idea of scaring just birds — they want to scare people, too!

The above tweet comes from Twitter user @jaguchi, whose parents live in the town of Yokote. When @jaguchi goes back home for a visit, before he can get to the front door and see dear old mom and dad’s faces, he’s greeted by this flying terror.

In a way, though, this spooky denizen of the fields is a proxy hello from the family, since @jaguchi’s dad is the one who created it.

Some people have pointed out the scarecrow’s resemblance to that of the Death Scissors monster in the video game Devil May Cry 5.

Those who have dared to go visit @jaguchi’s parents would probably have had a mini-heart attack when they saw this scarecrow. Though I wonder if his dad was frightened even once by his own creation.

What do you think?

(Image Credit: @jaguchi/ Twitter)

夜間動画
ライトアップ
これはやばい🥺 pic.twitter.com/PA5BM4FNvu

— 蛇口 (@jaguchi) June 22, 2020

Youtuber smoothiethecat writes

Error! Cat.exe has stopped working. Any suggestions how to reboot this broken cat? In this (older) video Smoothie chatters / chirps, because she's seeing snow for the first time. Milkshake comes to the rescue. He's worried about her and starts to calm her down. Not only does he start washing her, he also blocks her view. This way she won't have to deal with the "danger".



Phi Compile and his four-year-old son Ollie made a stop-motion video by moving magnets around on their refrigerator! The final result is pretty cool, we are also impressed that he could keep the child engaged through the "few hundred" still photos.

Too long but it kept Ollie off my Switch

— Phi Compile (@phi6) June 28, 2020

See, you never know when an attempt to distract your children might lead to a viral video! -via Digg

Pianist Jacob Koller, also known as The Mad Arranger, takes on Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell Overture with a jazzy twist. Full of syncopations, scales, and dissonant chords, watch as he plays around the piano from the lowest to the highest of notes. The result is a music that is good and, at the same time, weird.

Via The Awesomer

(Video Credit: Jacob Koller/ The Mad Arranger/ YouTube)

Rok Andic made a little wordless cartoon that is less than two minutes long, yet manages to tickle the funny bone just right. Did I say wordless? It's got a punch line that you can see coming, but is still so satisfying. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Now, this is one weird-looking animal. It's called Thylacosmilus, and it was a South American marsupial that lived around three million years ago. Note the huge saber teeth, as big as those of the saber-toothed cat, or Smilodon, that lived quite a bit after Thylacosmilus. But even weirder is the lower jaw that accommodated those teeth. A comparison between Thylacosmilus and Smilodon reveals that despite the teeth, they were very different animals.  

At a time when South America was still an island, Thylacosmilus did not occupy Smilodon’s apex niche. Large “terror birds,” which could grow taller than a person, with a two-foot long skull that was mostly beak, may have been the dominant carnivores. Thylacosmilus appears to have filled a unique ecological niche, one that even modern scavengers, such as the relatively indiscriminate, bone-chomping hyena, don’t quite fit: a scavenger that was careful with its food, targeting the softest tissues, such as internal organs rather than muscle or bone.

Read about Thylacosmilus and its unique ecological niche at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Jose manuel canete)

The Scythian culture went all out for burials. High-status people were even buried in underground log cabins, surrounded by artifacts that wold be useful in the afterlife. The boot shown above was worn by a Scythian woman buried in the Altai Mountains of Siberia around 2300 years ago. The permafrost helped to preserve it in amazingly fine condition, but even if it weren't so old, the craftwork and decorations would still impress us.  

The red cloth-wrapped leather bootie, now part of the State Hermitage Museum's collection, is a stunner, trimmed in tin, pyrite crystals, gold foil and glass beads secured with sinew. Fanciful shapes—ducklings, maybe?—decorate the seams. But the true mindblower is the remarkable condition of its sole.

Speculation is rampant on Reddit, as to this bottom layer’s pristine condition:

Maybe the boot belonged to a high-ranking woman who wouldn’t have walked much…

Or Scythians spent so much time on horseback, their shoe leather was spared…

Or perhaps it’s a high quality funeral garment, reserved for exclusively post-mortem use…

I would guess number three. I can imagine this woman spending her own free time preparing the garments she would eventually be buried in. Or maybe there was a local industry dedicated to making burial boots. Read more about Scythian burial practices at Open Culture. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image source: Museum Archive)

YouTuber Bebop bakes a pizza made out entirely of LEGO pieces, from the dough, to the tomato sauce, as well as the pizza cheese and the pepperoni, onion, and black olives toppings. Bebop says that this 2-minute stop-motion video is made up of 2,890 pictures! Talk about dedication!

Via Laughing Squid

(Image Credit: Bebop/ YouTube)

In a violin or a piano duet, have you ever wondered which person is making the melody and which one is playing the harmony? In order to answer this question, one needs not only his ears but also his eyes.

When the ear fails to tell two instruments apart, the eye often pitches in by matching each musician's movements to the beat of each part.

Taking inspiration from this concept,...

A new artificial intelligence tool developed by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab leverages the virtual eyes and ears of a computer to separate similar sounds that are tricky even for humans to differentiate. The tool improves on earlier iterations by matching the movements of individual musicians, via their skeletal keypoints, to the tempo of individual parts, allowing listeners to isolate a single flute or violin among multiple flutes or violins.

This AI tool could be potentially used in sound mixing and reducing confusion in video conference calls.

More details about this over at TechXplore.

(Image Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology/ TechXplore)

It's enough of a shock to find you are pregnant with twins. It's an even greater shock to find you are carrying twins in two different uteruses! That happened recently to a British woman.

Kelly Fairhurst, 28, only learned she had uterus didelphys, a condition where a woman has two wombs, when she went for her 12-week scan. She was also told she was carrying twins, one in each womb.

“The twins could be identical. The condition itself is quite rare but they went on to tell me that it was a one in a 50m chance for me to conceive twins in each womb,” she told the Sun.

Fairhurst, who was also surprised to be told she had two cervixes, already has two daughters, aged three and four. “With my second baby they said that I might have a bicornuate uterus, which means it’s not fully formed. So when I went for this scan, I was really surprised to learn that I have two of them.

To forestall the possibility that Fairhurst might have two different labor and deliveries, the twins will be born by cesarian section. Read more at the Guardian.  -via Damn Interesting

(Unrelated image credit: David Roseborough)

Police procedurals, whodunnits, and courtroom dramas are a big part of our entertainment, but that doesn't mean they are all that accurate. Crime fiction uses all sorts of shortcuts and tropes that just aren't so in real life, but they will keep using them as long as they create conflict and move the plot along -and ensure that the "good guys" win.  

See 14 of these myths busted in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

Don’t do this, please. If you want to cure your constipation, don’t insert a live eel into your anus. A man in China did, and the 15-inch long eel had to be removed from his innards after it tore a hole through the man’s bowels. The man is safe now thanks to the doctors at Dongguan Huangjiang Hospital in Guangdong in China, but the eel didn’t survive. 

image via wikimedia commons

Makokou, a male western lowland gorilla from Johannesburg Zoo in South Africa, underwent a CT scan because of the unusual growths in its nose. Who knew that the medical procedure for humans can be given to animals as well? The gorilla was airlifted to a hospital to get a  CT scan, as Sky News detailed: 

The facility's CT (computed-tomography) scanner is strong enough to cope with the huge ape's 210kg (33 stone) bulk.

It took more than five people to lift the sedated Makokou, who turns 35 next month, off the stretcher after the scan and he was closely monitored.

Zoo staff, who first became concerned for his health in May, decided he needed a scan after extensive tests revealed the primate had polyps in his nasal passages.

image via Sky News

Don’t go on a beer drinking binge for hours. If you choose to do so, make sure you’ll be able to pee, or else you’ll end up like this man! The man unknowingly held his pee in for eighteen hours after binging on booze. The 40-year-old man passed out after drinking ten bottles of beer, as Fox News detailed: 

After experiencing searing abdominal pains, the lager-logged soul reported to the to Zhuji People’s Hospital in Zhejiang, eastern China, where a CT scan revealed that his bladder was torn in three places. The pee-induced pain was so intense that Hu was unable to lie flat, and he failed to relieve himself of his massive urine reservoir despite several attempts.

Even worse, one of the holes had ruptured toward the patient’s abdominal cavity and forced part of his intestines to spill into the bladder — a complication doctors deemed potentially fatal if not fixed immediately.

Fortunately, they were able to save Hu’s life via emergency surgery, and he has since been released from the hospital after making a complete recovery, according to local media outlets.

image via Fox News

A subreddit is dedicated to photos and stories about people who made very expensive mistakes. From getting their cars wrecked and to toppling an expensive satellite, the subreddit holds some gems! See some astonishing examples and Bored Panda's in-depth interview with  researcher and Assistant Professor of Marketing Noelle Nelson from the University of Oregon about how people deal with their mistakes.

image via Bored Panda