Getting lost in a city is no reason for a freakout, since you can ask for directions or help. Getting lost in the woods or some other wilderness area can lead to death, often because of panic that overwhelms not only our sense of direction, but our ability to think of alternate plans.

The fear runs deep in the culture. Children lost in the woods is as common a motif in modern fairy tales as in ancient mythology. Usually in fiction there is some kind of redemption: Romulus and Remus are saved by a she-wolf; Snow White is rescued by dwarfs; and even Hansel and Gretel, facing certain doom in the gingerbread house, find their way home. Reality is often more grim: During the 18th and 19th centuries, getting lost was one of the most common causes of death among the children of European settlers in the North American wilderness. "Scarcely a summer passes over the colonists in Canada without losses of children from the families of settlers occurring in the vast forests of the backwoods," the Canadian writer Susanna Moodie noted in 1852. Moodie’s sister, Catharine Parr Traill, another pioneer and writer, based her own novel Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains on real-life stories of children who walked into the woods and couldn’t find their way home.

It's one thing to know the best course when one is lost; it's another thing to actually remember and do it. Read about the process of getting lost and how you might raise your chance of survival under such conditions at Wired. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Shenandoah National Park)

One of the challenges of parenting is to introduce your children to the more unsavory aspects of the world in an age-appropriate way. Disagreement over how to do that fuels moral panics on a regular basis, and things that were commonplace in children's entertainment in the past are considered taboo today. Disney movies are no exception- you may watch a film designed for children and be surprised at what is presented.

To see how kid-friendly Disney films really are in the eyes of the public, the online marketplace OnBuy.com gathered data from 1371 people. The themes in Dumbo (1941) raised the most eyebrows, with 31 percent of respondents deeming it inappropriate and 26 percent saying they wouldn't show it to their kids. It was followed by Peter Pan (1953), which earned the inappropriate label from nearly 20 percent of people and got an inappropriate-for-kids designation from 24 percent of parents. Both movies feature racist caricatures and substance abuse (tobacco in Peter Pan, and booze-fueled, psychedelic hallucinations in Dumbo).

You can read the results of the survey here. The list isn't all extremely old movies- Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid are there, too. You have to wonder why Song of the South isn't the number one inappropriate film, but then you remember that few people born in the last 50 years have actually seen it. Read more about the survey at Mental Floss. 

Art show producer Svetlana Dvoretsky had planned to make her immersive Van Gogh exhibit a walk-through experience through massive digital projections. Then the pandemic came. Now she and her colleagues making it available to the people of Toronto from the safety of their cars. The project is called "Gogh by Car." The CBC describes it:

Art lovers will drive into the 4,000 square foot downtown industrial space and will stay inside their vehicles. It's quite a change from the original concept, which permitted 700 people to walk inside the space at a time.

The drive-in, the first of its kind in a post-pandemic era, will allow 14 vehicles per time slot. Visitors will park, turn off their engines and watch a 35-minute show while remaining inside their cars.

The exhibit opens on June 18.

-via Marginal Revolution | Image: Gogh by Car

#ICYMI The #Cygnus spacecraft left the @Space_Station today. Within 24 hours, Cygnus will begin its secondary mission--hosting the Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment – IV (Saffire-IV), which provides an environment to safely study fire in microgravity. https://t.co/AjTYO9eqWX pic.twitter.com/2Wvg0YBG6W

— NASAexplores (@NASAexplores) May 11, 2020

In order to further understand how fire behaves on microgravity, and how materials spread the flames in space, NASA will be setting a spacecraft on fire. The event is part of the institution’s Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment (Saffire) project, and the data that will be gathered throughout this experiment will be used to keep future astronauts safe.

Thankfully, nobody will be harmed throughout this experiment, as the spacecraft has no astronauts inside.

More details about this over at Futurism.

(Video Credit: NASAexplores/ Twitter)

Year 1110. The fifth night of May. The moon shone bright in the night sky. Suddenly, its light diminished gradually, until it eventually completely into the night. An unnamed scribe, who documented this event in the Peterborough Chronicle, stated that the Moon “was so completely extinguished withal, that neither light, nor orb, nor anything at all of it was seen. And so it continued nearly until day, and then appeared shining full and bright.”

Clouds weren't the problem; if they were, the scribe would not go on to describe how bright and twinkling the stars appeared while the moon faded from view. Nor was the moon being eclipsed by Earth's shadow — if it was, the skywatcher would have seen the orb become a coppery "blood moon," not an eerie blank spot in the sky.

Scientists of today might have an explanation behind this strange lunar eclipse. And their explanation might be just as weird as the night when it happened, but it all makes sense. The culprit behind the eclipse? Scientists say it might be volcanoes.

Know more about this interesting story over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: rkawkowski/ Pixabay)

Last week Filipino journalist Doris Bigornia tried to conduct a live TV interview from her home. She was distracted when her two kitties began brawling in the background. She appears to say in Tagalog, "Children! There are rules in the studio!" They don't care. They want to become internet famous.

-via Althouse

Who knew that an automated rice cooker can be used to cook anything besides rice? Most cooks already use their automated rice cooker to cook sushi rice and porridge. Did you know that you can also use the rice cooker to steam, poach, and bake? Check out The Japan Times’ recipe for chocolate cake here.

image via The Japan Times

The color blue cannot be found in nature very often. There are only a few animals that are naturally blue in color. There are a lot of reasons as to why blue animals are so rare in nature. The colors of some animals depend on what they eat. The pigments on their skin, fur, or feathers depend on what they consume. Check out the full list of reasons on Brightside.

image via Brightside

We all have our own aesthetic. This woman takes her aesthetic to a whole new level. It’s not just her way of dressing, this woman lives like her chosen aesthetic! Laci Fay lives like a woman in 1958. You can say her aesthetic is 1958! Her clothes, appliances, home, and car are influenced by the styles from that year! 

Edvard Munch’s The Scream has been rarely exhibited and instead placed in storage to preserve the famed painting. Over the years, the painting has been slowly degrading, the yellow pigments in the painting turning off-white and some parts of the painting are flaking. Thanks to new research, the painting can be restored and conserved. The study, published in Science Advances discovered that the culprit for the painting’s slow decay is moisture. With the cause known, threat conservationists at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, can do their best to preserve the painting.

image via CNN

This video of a helicopter flying will make you question if that’s possible. Or maybe I’m not knowledgeable about helicopters and their flight patterns. Well, it’s a funny video nonetheless! Who knew helicopters can fly that vertically! 

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😳😳Wow!! Thanks for sharing your video @dprada86

A post shared by COMBAT LEARJET (@combat_learjet) on May 14, 2020 at 11:43am PDT

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In 1892, back when New York City had several daily papers, some that ran two editions a day, a cat could be featured in newspaper stories for being stuck up in a tree. One of those was a black-and-white cat later named Signorita Succi. The cat was far enough up the tree to be level with the third floor of Mrs. King's house. Mrs. King fed the cat with two laundry poles tied together, but Signorita Succi would not approach her. Then on the third day, a new plan was hatched.  

On May 14, a parade of SPCA agents, police officers (including a police van) and three news reporters made their way to the walnut tree on West 11th Street. According to the New York World newspaper, the policeman formed a cordon around the tree to keep spectators away.

Seems to have been a slow news day for both the papers and the authorities. Read how they got the cat out of the tree and the history of the neighborhood at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Usually we avoid consuming content that can depress us, right? However, there’s something about reading or watching apocalyptic fiction. The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert wasn’t upset by reading Lawrence Wright’s The End of October. The novel is set in a global pandemic in which an unfamiliar virus works its way around the world, leaving economic meltdown, conspiracy theories, and mass death in its wake. Sounds familiar? Familiar or not, the premise of the novel wasn’t stressful at all for Gilbert as she writes on her article: 

This particular kind of nightmare fodder would have been stressful pre-pandemic; now you might imagine it to be excruciating. Reading The End of October, though, I felt oddly soothed. When things in real life feel appalling, there’s some comfort in reading about all the terrible events that haven’t happened (yet): mass looting and food shortages in the United States, a power cut that wipes out all the data in the cloud, the unraveling of society. And for everything that Wright seems to have anticipated, he gets one thing strikingly, consolingly wrong. Human nature, in the novel, is inherently savage. “All the virtues—loyalty, patriotism, courage, honesty, faith, compassion, you name it—are just social constructs, patches to cover the naked barbarism that is at our core,” a government employee named Matilda Nichinsky thinks in one scene. Granted, Tildy is a cynic and a nihilist, but as Kongoli devastates the U.S., her take on human frailty is borne out. The scenes that haunted me the most in the book weren’t the ones with lungs frothily disintegrating into pink mush or world leaders bleeding from their eyeballs on camera. They were the moments when people took advantage of the chaos to liberate their most monstrous selves.

image via The Atlantic

Pests have always been a part of human life. For hundreds of years, these plants and animals have caused trouble in our homes, damaged our crops, and harmed our livestock. Pests, however, are not unique to humans; ants, also, deal with their own kind of pests — the thief ants.

“It’s just staggering,” says Andrea Lucky, an ant systematist at the University of Florida, who was not involved with the work, but who now advises the author of the paper. “Thief ants are formidable predators.”

These thief ants tunnel upon the nests of larger ants up to 24 times their size, and prey upon the young of these larger ants.

They spray a powerful venom to keep the adults at bay.

When they are removed from the picture, the species of ants that they prey upon thrive and almost double in numbers.

More details about this study over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: April Nobile/ AntWeb.org/ CC BY-SA 3.0/ Wikimedia Commons)

It is really difficult to commit to something, as commitments cost time, energy, effort, and money. As with many commitments, doing it for the first time might feel forced and unnatural. But through time, this commitment will eventually feel natural.

When it comes to activities that are most difficult to commit to, regular exercise could arguably be the most difficult, even though we know that exercise has a lot of positive effects on the body. So what’s the key to being able to commit oneself to regular exercise? Research suggests that a person should exercise at the same time each day.

It's a schedule your body will thank you for.

More about this study over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)