So we couldn't let the moment for #CreepiestObject #CURATORBATTLE pass us by... From the Dept of Creepy in our Education Collection: a naturally mummified pigeon. Sealed into the wall of a building, this pigeon died, desiccated and then its feathers were eaten clean by insects. pic.twitter.com/qpfE7kA02t

— Bell Museum (@BellMuseum) April 20, 2020

Museums are known to collect various objects that tell us many things about the ancient past and our present lives. But since they collect these kinds of artifacts, it wouldn’t be surprising if some of them are creepy. If there was a place on Earth home to creepy objects, it would be a museum.

Participating at the #CuratorBattle, various museums share the items that they believe are the #CreepiestObject. Colossal compiled what they believed to be the creepiest of the creepiest. Check it out over at the site. But for now, here are some not-so-spooky objects.

(Image Credit: Bell Museum/ Twitter)

Thanks for thinking of us @HottyCouture and wow, will we be having nightmares tonight with all these #CreepiestObject|s ! Here is the one we just can't hide from you, one of our many creepy gems – our Plague Mask (1650/1750)! #curatorbattle pic.twitter.com/JrMjqAJSIM

— Deutsches Historisches Museum (@DHMBerlin) April 17, 2020

(Image Credit: Deutsches Historisches Museum/ Twitter)

What if something happened one day that caused all of the animals on Earth to be gigantic?

Artist Vadim Solovyov imagines what our cities would look like if, one day, gargantuan versions of the animals we are so familiar with suddenly appear in our cities. It wouldn’t be a pleasant day for us, that’s for sure. But hey, there’s a sloth running the convenience store, so I guess that’s comforting.

See the photos over at DesignBoom.

(Image Credit: Vadim Solovyov/ DesignBoom)

If you think you’re cool with the hairstyle you’re currently wearing, wait till you see an alpaca wear the same hairstyle as yours and be ten thousand times cooler.

Check out the coolest alpacas here over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad And Useless)

Mexico — Juan José P. Flores has been leaving food outside his house to make sure that the stray cat he usually sees in the neighborhood does not go hungry. Unbeknownst to him, his dog, a Pit Bull named Hades, picked up on his loving gesture.

The other day, Flores was at home when he heard knocking at the back door, where Hades likes to hang out. Flores thought it was a person, but it was actually his pup. Hades, it turns out, had something important to share.

"He was desperate and making a lot of noise," Flores told The Dodo.

Sensing the urgency, Flores finally went outside to check, and then he saw what Hades was so eager to show him — he “invited a certain someone to stay in his doghouse.”

That someone was the bashful stray cat. As it turns out, she was pregnant and in need of a safe place to deliver her babies. Hades knew just the right spot.

"I was very surprised," Flores said.

Hades then guarded the doghouse while the stray cat gave birth to two kittens.

More details over at The Dodo.

Wholesome!

(Image Credit: Juan José P. Flores/ The Dodo)

#HeadlineChallenge: The world needs reasons to smile - and the solar system is about to give us a helping hand. On May 16, a crescent moon, beneath Venus & Jupiter, will form a smiley face in the sky...@PeteBarronMedia goes with PUT ON A HAPPY SPACE. pic.twitter.com/G6Tmz0Lx34

— BBC Radio Tees (@BBCTees) March 30, 2020

Now this is something to happily look forward to.

On May 16, the moon will be crescent, and the two planets of our Solar System, Jupiter and Venus, will align above the crescent moon, and these celestial bodies will form a smiley face in the sky.

This rare spectacle is called conjunction and is not to be missed, as the last time this happened was 12 years ago in 2008, so not a regular occurrence. In 2007 this also happened in the Philippines when the sky lit up at night.

So mark your calendars, and set your alarm clocks.

(Image Credit: BBC Radio Tees/ Twitter)

Architect and graphic designer Katerina Kamprani has redesigned a number of household items in such a way as to make them dysfunctional - and make the viewer appreciate good design all the more.

RegalPlatypus recently adopted a cat named Tormund. He wanted to show his friends what life with a cat is like, so he set up a camera that recorded while he slept -or tried to. Tormund believes his human has slept long enough and it's time to wake up for kibble, cuddles, and playtime. Bonus points for the excellent choice of music. -via reddit

February 14, 2019 was a beautiful day onboard the USS Momsen, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. As she sailed in the eastern Pacific Ocean, Ensign Kathryn Hunter photographed the 5-inch/54 caliber Mark 45 gun framed by a rainbow.

-via Kurt Schlichter | Photo: US Navy

A group of dolphins is swimming in Newport Beach, California, waters. Those water are stacked with a high concentration of bio luminescent plankton. Shaken, not stirred, it lights up and gives us a wonderful show.

Have you ever wondered why eating a little sugar causes us to eat more? Why does our appetite increase when we eat sugar? In a study published in the journal Nature over a week ago, Charles Zuker, an investigator from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as well as his team, report their findings.

Like other sweet-tasting things, sugar triggers specialized taste buds on the tongue. But it also switches on an entirely separate neurological pathway -- one that begins in the gut…

In the intestines, signals heralding sugar's arrival travel to the brain, where they nurture an appetite for more, the team's experiments with mice showed. This gut-to-brain pathway appears picky, responding only to sugar molecules -- not artificial sweeteners.

Throughout this experiment, researchers were also able to identify the brain region that responds exclusively to sugar.

"Uncovering this circuit helps explain how sugar directly impacts our brain to drive consumption," he says. "It also exposes new potential targets and opportunities for strategies to help curtail our insatiable appetite for sugar."

More details about this study over at ScienceDaily.

(Image Credit: Myriams-Fotos/ Pixabay)

All of us have choices to be sad or happy each day. We can either choose activities that make us feel good and settled, or activities that make us feel bad and uneasy. But because we cannot go outside, and we are encouraged to distance ourselves from each other, our choices have become very limited these days. With this in mind, our natural mood regulation is impaired, which, according to scientists, might result in depression.

New research, published [two days ago] in JAMA Psychiatry, from the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford suggests a new target for treating and reducing depression is supporting natural mood regulation.

This new study looked at 58,328 participants from low, middle and high income countries, comparing people with low mood or a history of depression with those of high mood. In a series of analyses, the study investigated how people regulate their mood through their choice of everyday activities. In the general population, there is a strong link between how people currently feel and what activities they choose to engage in next. This mechanism – mood homeostasis, the ability to stabilise mood via activities – is impaired in people with low mood and may even be absent in people who have ever been diagnosed with depression.

More details about this over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

How did those lights get up there in the sky? You can thank the animals. A Finnish folk tale explains the stars and even the aurora borealis. This animated sequence was Keilidh Bradley's final project at Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Scotland. -via Laughing Squid

When it comes to flirting with women, men prepare themselves to look good and smell good. They comb their hair, wear nice clothes and perfume in order to attract the girl they really like.

For lemurs, it’s almost the same, minus the “comb your hair and wear nice clothes'' part. Like a human being who wants to attract a potential mate, these male lemurs wear perfume to attract their female counterparts.

Males produce this smelly secret ingredient in their wrist glands, which they then rub on their tails and waft as a scent cloud toward a likely mate. Secretions from these and other glands are commonly used by male lemurs to communicate with other males — to mark territory, demonstrate their social rank or broadcast their readiness for breeding — but scientists recently discovered that lemurs produce additional chemicals that are used to "stink flirt" with females during their yearly mating season.

[...]

… For most of the year, this liquid smelled "bitter," "leathery" and "green" to the human nose, the researchers wrote in the study. But during the breeding season, it smelled "more fruity, floral and sweet."

Check out more details about this fragrant story over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: Mathias Appel/ Wikimedia Commons)

French socialite Madame Juliette Récamier was a renowned beauty in turn-of-the-19th-century Paris. Her salon drew many admirers, intellectuals, and artists. Woman wanted to know the secret of her flawless complexion, and many artists painted, sculpted, and drew her likeness.

“She was a compound of ingenuous gracefulness, talent and goodness, harmonized by that delicacy which alone forms the charm of loveliness. I have often discovered a resemblance between her and the Madonnas of the pious Italian painters; but this resemblance was purely intellectual. It proceeded not from regularity of features, but from that soul which animated her eyes and beamed forth from under her long eye-lashes, and from the high and intellectual forehead, blushing under its fillet of leno, the only head-dress with which, for many years, she set off the charms of her countenance. In the smile which so often separates her lips of rose, you might perceive the innocent joy of a young and ravishing creature, happy to please and be loved – who saw nothing but bliss in nature, and answered the salutation of love which met her on all sides, by an expression of silent benevolence.”[10]

Madame Récamier's influence outlived her, not only in the many artworks depicting her, but also the beauty product formulations she purportedly used, and in the women who mimicked her casual poses for their own portraits. Read about Madame Juliette Récamier at Geri Walton's blog.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: François Gérard)

James McNeill Whistler is most widely known for his Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, which most folks call Whistler's Mother. But how he decorated the Peacock Room is a much better story. British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland was redoing his new home in 1876, and engaged architect Thomas Jeckyll to design the dining room to highlight his collection of Chinese porcelain and his Whistler original painting. Whistler himself was working on decorating another part of the home. When Leyland went out of town and Jeckyll fell ill, Whistler took over the dining room.

Alone and unsupervised, Whistler began to take a few liberties with the dining room. He covered the entire room, from the ceiling to the walls, with Dutch metal, or imitation gold leaf, over which he painted a lush pattern of peacock feathers. He then gilded Jeckyll’s walnut shelving and embellished the wooden shutters with four magnificently plumed peacocks.

When Leyland returned unexpectedly in October that year, he was stunned to find his dinning room entirely transformed, but it was more than he had asked for. The floral-patterned leather on the walls were completely painted over, and every surface shone with luminous shades of green, gold, and blue. To add fuel to fire, Whistler had been inviting other artists and members of the press into the house to watch him work in the room, without the permission of Leyland. The straw which broke the camel's back was the bill that Whistler presented to Leyland—£2000, a huge sum at that time. Leyland refused to pay.

The fight over the dining room led to bad feelings and -believe it or not- more artwork. Read the story of the Peacock Room, which is now in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries)