Cosplayer and gamer Ginny Di, who can insult or seduce you with appropriate Dungeons & Dragons lines, is back! Although you're a target within ranged attack, she wants you closer--close enough for an attack of opportunity with a melee weapon. Be prepared for her to grapple your body and heart with this love song.
-via Geek Tyrant
Notorious mobster James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. had been a force in Boston's organized crime scene since the 1940s. When he claimed millions in lottery winnings in 1991, few who knew him were surprised, and many thought he deserved it.
The lottery win had been another one of Bulger’s brilliant schemes to launder his drug, extortion, and loan-sharking money. Back in the summer of 1991, a winning Mass Millions lottery ticket had been purchased at the South Boston Liquor Mart by Michael Linskey, who was the brother of a Bulger underling named Patrick Linskey. The FBI had learned that once Whitey heard about the jackpot, he ordered the real winner to sign the ticket over, with Whitey and two associates paying $2.3 million cash for 50 percent of the winnings. Bulger himself paid Michael Linskey $700,000. Although Linskey lost money in the deal, he really had no choice. It came down to selling the ticket or risking his life.
The winnings set Bulger up with a legitimate annuity, set to last until 2010. But the feds wanted that money, and wanted Bulger even more. Read about Whitey Bulger's lottery winnings at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Federal Bureau of Prisons)
Mother Nature is sometimes a prankster. The caterpillar that will eventually turn into the moth Uraba lugens is called the mad haterpillar because it grows its own hat, out of its own shed exoskeletons! This video is really only a minute long, then host Steve Mould discusses future episodes. -via Geekologie
It takes a special person to teach kindergarten, and Miss Kittenger is the kind of teacher we could all use. Her class was upended when she had to teach via Zoom to her kindergarten students at their homes, so she wanted to do something special to end the year. I would call this virtual class extra-special. -via Digg
At around 11:45 PM on May 22, the Ring camera on Adam Schoenfeld’s backyard captured a Coyote running around their backyard golf course. The coyote then managed to find a golf ball and decided to play with it for a few minutes. Adam decided to upload this on YouTube because he thought the footage was cute.
“Make sure to watch out for your animals during the night!” he said on the video description.
Via ViralHog
(Video Credit: Adam Schoenfeld/ YouTube)
Technology has helped us a lot, but it’s not just us humans who can benefit from technology. We can use it to help animals, too!
One of the most important animals on the face of the earth are bees. They are the world’s most important pollinators of food crops, and one-third of the food that we eat relies mainly on these pollinators. Without them, the food chain would become imbalanced, if not entirely collapsed. And so it would be right to help these tiny creatures, for the benefit of all.
Beehero is employing smart beehives to maximize crop yields through precision pollination services, offering growers quality assurance to their bees. the California-based company, which operates the largest database of bee pollination performance and analysis, measures pollination quality and optimizes hive deployment. Beehero recently announced $4 million in seed funding, which will enable it to implement technology and services for growers that radically de-risk pollination and stimulate maximum output potential during pollination cycles.
Beehero ensures healthy and hyper-efficient pollinator bees by continuously tracking and optimizing pollination through a combination of machine learning algorithms and low-cost sensors, including smart beehives, that monitor hive health in real-time. In this way, it manages to increase crop yields by up to 30 percent on average for 70 percent of major crops. by monitoring hives, the company ensures they lead to healthy, productive colonies, which results in fewer losses and lower operational costs.
More details about this over at DesignBoom.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Beehero/ DesignBoom)
Frustrating and disappointing events are normal in life. We all have sighed a big sigh of disappointment when we realized that the bag of cereal will no longer fit inside its skinny box when opened, or when the tofu cover doesn’t completely peel off.
Japanese artist Ryosuke Otomo draws these infuriating events and calls these illustrations “One Scenes”, which he posts daily on his Twitter account.
They’re all based on his own personal experiences, and are usually slightly disappointing but highly relatable.
He has also made them into a collection of books, which he sells in his shop.
Spoon & Tamago compiles some of his illustrations. Check them out over at the site.
(Image Credit: Ryosuke Otomo/ Spoon & Tamago)
No matter what the situation, there will be someone who figures out a way to illegally profit from it. Julia Lyons was one of those, a longtime swindler who, when she was arrested, would just slip away and change her name to one of her many aliases and con someone else. During the flu epidemic of 1918, Lyons had an idea that made her shenanigans easier.
As The Washington Post reports, Chicago was in the throes of the 1918 influenza pandemic that fall, and hospitals were enlisting nurses to tend to patients at home. Lyons, correctly assuming that healthcare officials wouldn’t be vetting volunteers very thoroughly, registered as a nurse under several pseudonyms and spent the next two months caring for a string of ailing men and women across the city.
Lyons’s modus operandi was simple: After getting a prescription filled, she’d charge her patient much more than the actual cost. Once, she claimed $63 for a dose of oxygen that had actually cost $5 (which, once adjusted for inflation, is the same as charging $1077 for an $85 item today). Sometimes, “Flu Julia,” as the Chicago Tribune nicknamed her, even summoned a so-called doctor—later identified by the police as a “dope seller and narcotic supplier”—to forge the prescriptions for her. Then she’d flee the property, absconding with cash, jewelry, clothing, and any other valuables she could find lying around the house.
Read the story of "Flu Julia" and the police manhunt launched to stop her at Mental Floss.
(Unrelated image credit: Harris & Ewing)
The caption to the above picture begins: "A snoot that gets Eris into any trouble she wants, and eyes that get her out." Meet Eris, a Borzoi wolfhound. That's a large, long-limbed breed, but Lily and Savannah had no idea Eris' nose would be so far out there when they adopted her as a puppy two years ago. But Eris grew up to be a magnificent dog, and has become an Instagram star.
Read about Eris at Bored Panda, and see more pictures at Instagram.
Steve Benjamin is an aquatic photographer, capturing the lives of underwater creatures such as sharks, dolphins, and whales. But as he had to stay indoors recently, he was not able to do what he usually did. And so, he looked for other animals that he could photograph while indoors, and he found his ideal subjects in the form of the birds that visited his backyard.
Sunbirds is a stunning series of portraits captured using the same techniques as underwater photography. Benjamin tells Colossal he established a miniature studio for his avian visitors by positioning a feeder in a small sunny area with nearby shade, plenty of blooming flowers, and twig perches. “This is a studio setting for wild birds that are free to come and go as they please,” the photographer says.
To ensure the backdrop was dark, he used shutter speeds of 1/2,000 of a second and mounted additional lights to illuminate the vibrant intricacies of the feathers, feet, and bills. “The birds did not like flash photography so I have to figure out how to get constant light onto them with my underwater video lights,” he writes. “I had to get the birds used to being close to bright lights, which took a while.”
Some of his stunning images can be viewed over at Colossal. You can visit his website, too, if you want to view the whole gallery.
(Image Credit: Steve Benjamin/ Colossal)
Every week, planes drop millions of sterilized screwworms over the border of Panama and Colombia, creating a transcontinental "barrier" to the pests far, far away from the U.S.
— Sarah Zhang (@sarahzhang) May 26, 2020
Here's one of the planes getting loaded with chilled boxes of adult screwworms:
3/ pic.twitter.com/VvDxx86fDG
You may have never heard of screwworms, but they are horrible parasites that eat animal flesh. They were once the scourge of livestock, wildlife, and pets alike, and occasionally infected humans. But scientists developed a program 70 years ago to rid North America of screwworms.
The man who came up with the scheme, and believed in it most passionately, was Edward F. Knipling, a USDA entomologist who, in the 1930s, spent long hours watching screwworms mate. As a boy, he had waged constant war against insect pests on his family’s Texas farm. “Every plant that we grew,” he later said, “there was some type of insect that was causing damage.” Screwworms infected the farm’s cows and pigs, and Knipling remembered them as one of the worst pests. He had to climb into the hog pens to smear medicine on the wounds of uncooperative sows. “That was a very unpleasant task,” he recalled some eight decades later, in an interview shortly before he died.
Adult screwworms are actually flies, with big red eyes and metallic blue-green bodies. After mating, the females lay their eggs in open wounds, and the resulting larvae eat through a ring of surrounding flesh. Once sufficiently engorged, the larvae drop off the wounds to pupate, emerging as a new generation of flies. As Knipling watched screwworms churn through their life cycle in his government laboratory, he made an observation whose importance he could intuit but not yet put to use: Female screwworms mate only once in their entire life. If a female screwworm mates with a sterile male, she will never have any offspring. So if the environment could somehow be saturated with sterile males, Knipling surmised, screwworms would very quickly mate themselves out of existence.
Raising, feeding, sterilizing, and distributing screwworms by the millions was not easy, but once they figured out how to do it, it was effective. Read about the screwworm eradication program, which continues today, at the Atlantic. The very abbreviated version is at Twitter. -via Metafilter
It's 2020, and we were supposed to have flying cars, or at least flying hover boards by now. Crazy inventor Colin Furze (previously) took matters into his own hands to make a Back to the Future 2 experience happen. He took one of the hover boards made to commemorate the film and made it really hover by using a jetpack and two small jetpacks on his arms! He shows us how he did it, but if you want, you can skip to 6:00 to see him fly. That's a lot of equipment to carry around, but he's flying and we're not. -via Geekologie
There were 33 children aboard the Mayflower when it sailed to America in 1620. Among those were John Billlington Jr. and his brother Francis. They were not good little Pilgrims, and archives of their rambunctiousness survives 400 years later. The ship hadn't even arrived in Massachusetts when the scandalous behavior started. From a journal written by William Bradford and Edward Winslow:
“The fifth day [of December, 1620] we through God’s mercy escaped a great danger by the foolishness of a boy, one Francis of Billington’s sonnes, who in his father’s absence had got gun powder and shot off a piece [musket] or two and made squibs [small fireworks], and there being a fowling piece charged in his father’s cabbin, shot her off in the cabbin. There being a little barrell of [gun] powder halfe full scattered in and about the cabbin, the fire [discharge] being within foure foote of the bed [bunk] betweene decks and many flints and iron things about and so many people about the fire. And yet by God’s mercy no harme was done.”
But that was minor compared to his brother John, who later went missing in the woods. He was eventually rescued by Native Americans, which caused a diplomatic problem. And their parents? Also troublemakers. Read about the Billington family at Genealogy Bank. -via Strange Company
Colin Furze found his own way to hover around, but back in 1959, you could zip along in Curtiss-Wright Model 2500 Air-Car. Or maybe not, as there were only two built. Curtiss-Wright is an aircraft company, but delved into experimental vehicles for the military, including this hover car.
Each engine was used to drive, via reduction gears, a single four-bladed lift fan placed within a plenum chamber. The two chambers created a cushion of air 10-15 inches thick. Forward propulsion was supplied by air bled off the chambers and expelled at low velocity through two sets of louvers on each side of the vehicle.
It was fairly maneuverable and could reach speeds up to 38 mph. It was not really capable of all-terrain operation and never caught on commercially.
It was big and heavy and pretty cool, but that seemed to be about ll it had going for it. Both prototype models are still in existence. Read more at Vintage Everyday. -via Nag on the Lake
Scientists have understood before that the mucus found in the gut is the body’s first line of defense against bacteria that attempt to attack the said part of the body. Now, scientists have discovered yet another feature of the gut mucus — it might also be the key towards therapeutic options for neurological disorders.
Bacterial imbalance in the gut is linked with Alzheimer's disease, autism and other brain disorders, yet the exact causes are unclear.
Senior author Associate Professor Elisa Hill-Yardin said these changes could be contributing to bacterial imbalance and exacerbating the core symptoms of neurological diseases.
"Mucus is a critical protective layer that helps balance good and bad bacteria in your gut but you need just the right amount -- not too little and not too much," Hill-Yardin said.
"Researchers have previously shown that changes to intestinal mucus affect the balance of bacteria in the gut but until now, no-one has made the connection between gut mucus and the brain.
"It's a new gut-brain connection that opens up fresh avenues for scientists to explore, as we search for ways to better treat disorders of the brain by targeting our 'second brain' -- the gut."
More details about this over at Science Daily.
(Image Credit: Pixel_perfect/ Pixabay)
