Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is a documentary series on Netflix that took the world by storm when so many people suddenly were furloughed and told to stay at home. The subject is fascinating: people who keep big cats and other exotic animals. They include controversial Texas zookeeper Joe Exotic, who checks off enough boxes to be rejected in a pitch for a fictional series, and his rival Carole Baskin, founder and CEO of Big Cat Rescue in Florida. You've heard enough gossip about the series; should you sign up for Netflix and watch Tiger King? This Honest Trailer may help you decide.

Natalie Morrell brings to my attention photos of Catholic shrines crafted by French soldiers during World War I. These contain images of the saints for veneration during traumatic and terrifying times. Many remain, floating around antiques dealers. They're shaped from dispensed brass casings from rifles or field artillery shells. Many of these sculptures display remarkably professional skill and precision, as detailed in Nicholas J. Saunder's book Trench Art, A Brief History and Guide, 1914-1939.

-via Aelfred the Great

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a quiet place now. The engineers and scientists who normally work there are telecommuting a very, very long distance.

All the way to Mars.

The Curiosity Rover team has adapted to control the robot from home. NASA reports that it took a lot of ingenuity during early March:

The team began to anticipate the need to go fully remote a couple weeks before, leading them to rethink how they would operate. Headsets, monitors and other equipment were distributed (picked up curbside, with all employees following proper social-distancing measures).

Not everything they're used to working with at JPL could be sent home, however: Planners rely on 3D images from Mars and usually study them through special goggles that rapidly shift between left- and right-eye views to better reveal the contours of the landscape. That helps them figure out where to drive Curiosity and how far they can extend its robotic arm.

But those goggles require the advanced graphics cards in high-performance computers at JPL (they're actually gaming computers repurposed for driving on Mars). In order for rover operators to view 3D images on ordinary laptops, they've switched to simple red-blue 3D glasses. Although not as immersive or comfortable as the goggles, they work just as well for planning drives and arm movements.

-via Marilyn Terrell | Image: NASA

At $203 per pound, these dumbbells are the most luxuriously expensive fitness gear that you can ask for. They're ideal for people with more money than sense and upper body strength, as they weigh only 6.7 pounds each. They are engraved and wrapped in the Louis Vuitton monogram, so you know that they're the right look for any season at the gym. Please rack them when you're done with your sets.

These dumbbells are one of four sets of ridiculously overpriced fashionable fitness gear rounded up by Rain Noe, the wittily scathing critic of bad design at Core 77.

Like Captain Picard and Chief O'Brien say, building ships in bottles in fun. It's a centuries-old hobby.

In Japan, it continues to this day with gunpla--the hobby of building Gundam mecha models. For the past few years, Twitter user @rishima343 has been building Gundam models inside empty whiskey bottles. You can see a gallery of them at Kotaku.

The world is changing fast. As technology is advancing at breakneck speed, very soon we might be surrounded by new gizmos and thingamajigs. And with new gadgets comes new signs and labels, too.

We don't like being caught off-guard, so we asked Sonoftime to use his mad photo manipulation skills, along with his crystal ball, to show us the signs of what's to come. So to speak.

Check out the various signs that we might see in the near future over at Cracked.

(Image Credit: Cracked)

Edinburgh, Scotland — When Laura Howarth was walking with her 15-year-old son at Corstorphine Hill, they spotted a pelican wandering the area.

"We didn't know who you're supposed to call when you find a pelican," she told the Edinburgh Evening News.

And so she just decided to call the police to inform them about the exotic bird.

Howarth said the bird seemed friendly and calm.

Apparently, the bird was from the Edinburgh Zoo, and it managed to escape last Saturday through the help of a gust of wind, says Darren McGarry, head of living collections at the zoo.

"One of our pelicans managed to fly over a fence and wall on Saturday evening," he said. "She was returned safely from our car park by one of our keepers within thirty minutes, having also made her way to the hospital car park next door."

"It is rare for this to happen and would have been an unusual sight for anyone who saw her," McGarry said. "Pelicans are calm birds so she would not have been a danger to the public."

What a very lucky bird.

(Image Credit: Augustus Binu/ WIkimedia Commons)

A curious tombstone stands in the Hebrew Cemetery in Corsicana, Texas. Or it once stood; now it reclines instead. The name on the stone reads Rope Walker, although that isn’t a real name, but rather an occupation. The story goes that when an elderly one-legged tightrope artist died during a stunt in Corsicana, no one knew his name, so they did the best they could with the tombstone. Find-a-grave has the short version of the story.

"In the late 1890s a one-legged tight-wire walker was performing his act in downtown Corsicana as a promotion to bring people to town. He would walk a rope stretched across Beaton street from the tops of two buildings. The rope walker carried a cast iron stove on his back to add to the trick. On July 28, 1898, the 69 year old man, who claimed to have been born in Princeton, New Jersey on February 6, 1829, was performing his tight rope performance when the rope sagged excessively and he fell while halfway across Beaton Street. Mortally injured, the man called for a rabbi. There were none to be found but a Jewish merchant prayed with him in Hebrew. The dying man stated his date and place of birth but no cone could remember if he have his name and he was never identified. He was buried in the Hebrew Cemetery in Corsicana. His headstone simply reads "ROPE WALKER"

Find-a-grave also has a longer version of the tale, which seems like a standard Texas tall tale, because it is. The true identity of Rope Walker was known at the time of his death, although it may have been forgotten by the time the stone was ordered. The legend was untangled a few years ago, and you can read about it at the Corsicana Daily Sun.  -Thanks, WTM!

It appears that even if we know what option would be the best to take, we still won’t take that option, and we have our “gut feelings” and habits to thank for that. This is what this new study recently published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests.

People may choose based on a "gut feeling", a habit, or what worked for them last time, rather than on what they have learned will work most often, said Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology and economics at The Ohio State University.

The results run counter to the belief that people make the less optimal choice because they just don't know any better.

"In our study, people knew what worked most often. They just didn't use that knowledge," Krajbich said.

This phenomenon can be very well seen in real-life choices, such as what route to take when driving a car.

More details about this study over Medical Xpress.

(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)

One of the leading causes of vision loss in people 60 years old and above is macular degeneration. In America alone, around 11 million people have some sort of this age-related disease. In the world, advanced cases of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of irreversible blindness and visual impairment.

… it’s downright characterized as nothing more than the process of aging.

In fact, the study of MD has proven itself to be so fruitful for understanding aging as a whole, MD has become one of the first places that scientists have looked to in order to attempt to repair the damage of aging and restoring youthful, or normal function.

One of the ways to prevent blindness caused by AMD is stem cells. However, stem cells are expensive, and has some legal restrictions on funding and use.

Now in a new paper published in Nature, researchers demonstrate an alternative to stem cells by creating replacement photoreceptors from skin fibroblast cells via pharmacological-conversion—a process that promises to be cheaper, faster, and unburdened by ethical and legal restrictions.

[...]

The loss of photoreceptors can result in MD and other retinal diseases that lead to irreversible blindness. In this new study, however, cells called fibroblasts can be chemically reprogrammed to produce photoreceptor-like cells that are now shown to restore vision in mice.

More details about this over at Good News Network.

Promising!

(Image Credit: George Shulkin/ Wikimedia Commons)

When it comes to dogs playing, mimicking each other’s signals would mean that they are ready to play with each other. This kind of behavior has been observed in species-specific play like cats playing with cats. But is the same behavior demonstrated when it comes to different species playing with each other, like dogs playing with horses? Apparently it is, according to a study published in the journal Behavioural Process. Horses were shown to be mimicking dogs when playing with them.

Playing between humans and dogs has been the main interspecies play focus up until now, but researchers at the University of Pisa decided to examine how play occurred between horses and dogs. Looking at 20 videos of dog-horse social play, the team identified play behaviors that were exhibited by both species and those that were species-specific. They found that the playful tactics between the two species, such as mixing up movements and self-handicapping, were quite well balanced between the two animals.

More details about this over at IFL Science.

(Video Credit: Robert Bostick/ YouTube)

It would seem that there will be a new contender in the field of live game streaming. Facebook is said to be launching their own gaming mobile app on Monday. This new app will be competing with Amazon’s Twitch, Google’s YouTube, and Microsoft’s Mixer.

“Investing in gaming in general has become a priority for us because we see gaming as a form of entertainment that really connects people,” the newspaper quoted Fidji Simo, head of the gaming app, as saying.

“It’s entertainment that’s not just a form of passive consumption but entertainment that is interactive and brings people together,” Simo said.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: ElisaRiva/ Pixabay)

Minecraft is known for its blocky graphics and simplistic textures. But what does it look like with Nvidia’s RTX graphics card? Nvidia showcases the power of the RTX, which is capable of ray tracing (which enables realistic lighting, reflections and shadows), which gives the game an entirely new and modern look.

Check out the video and see it for yourself.

Via Engadget

(Video Credit: NVIDIA GeForce/ YouTube)

The next time you’ll go out fishing, you might want to keep in mind this trick about how to make worms, which will be your bait to the fish, to come out from hiding and go towards where you are.

(Video Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

Most of us do not have trouble sleeping, as we only have nightmares once in a while. But the same cannot be said for people who have nightmares often or even nightly. For those who belong to the 2-5 percent of the population, this is their reality; sleeping is a pain in the butt.

There is good news for people who suffer from frequent nightmares, however.

… there are things you can do to decrease nightmares and regain a good relationship with sleep.

QDT provides 5 steps that would surely help one in overcoming his nightmares. Here are the following steps:

• Get ample sleep and keep a regular sleep-wake schedule. 
• Decrease alcohol intake, and review your medications with your doctor. 
• When you have a nightmare, wake all the way up and do a quick reality check. 
• Rewrite the ending to recurrent nightmares, and rehearse the new script in your mind every day. 
• Get evidence-based treatment for PTSD and other mental health needs.

View them in more detail over at the site.

(Image Credit: DarkWorkX/ Pixabay)