Perhaps seeking revenge on behalf of the entire avian class, this crow spends a whole five minutes ruining a cat's day. But who knows? Maybe there's a history between these two. Maybe they were siblings in a past life. More likely, the crow just thinks this is fun.  -via Boing Boing

Amidst the ongoing global pandemic which is the novel coronavirus, it is not surprising to see supermarkets empty after all the hoarding and the panic-buying that’s happened. 23-year-old actor Tom Holland, for example, went to a supermarket to buy eggs. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to buy any of those, and so he bought chickens instead.

The actor, 23, showed off his new fowl friends, Predator, Ranger and Chestnut, on Instagram and explained he'd decided to raise them in his garden after being unable to buy what he needed from his local shops.

He said: 'With everything that's going on, the supermarkets are all empty. There's no eggs; we have no eggs.

So we thought to solve that problem, we would become the source of eggs. Now, we're the owner of chickens.'

Very smart of him.

(Image Credit: Tom Holland/ Instagram/ DailyMail)

Who says there is no such thing as a free lunch? Those cynical people haven't been paying attention to all the kind acts taking place around the country.

An anonymous neighborhood mom in Maryland has been setting up a table and leaving sack lunches for people,

A sign on the table reads, “For anyone who needs it...I will be leaving some healthy sack lunches on this table for you if you are hungry and need to eat. Made with love by a neighborhood mom in a clean and sanitized kitchen.”

This little act of goodwill is helping local families and neighbors struggle a little less. Thank you anonymous neighborhood mom in Maryland! You rock!

Via - Capital Gazette

Photo: Selene Felice / Capital Gazette

Think you know your comic book superheroes? In a different country, in another language, you might not even recognize your favorites. Over the last few decades, there have been some major changes depending on future, copyright, and various other reasons. For example, in the 1990s, the Argentinian version of the Flash was named Flushman. Really. And it wasn't a matter of being lost in translation.  

Flushman sounds like someone you'd call when your toilet tank is overflowing, not the fastest man alive. And yet, that's how Latin American readers knew the character in the '90s, after a publisher called Perfil scored the license to print DC comics in Argentina and neighboring countries. Among those comics was The Flash, but unfortunately, there was already an Argentinian gossip magazine called Flash. To avoid being sued (or simply having hurtful rumors printed about their persons), Perfil's editors decided to come up with a new name. After considering options like El Rayo ("The Ray") or El Relampago ("The Lightning"), they settled for Flashman, only to decide at the last moment that it was still too close to Flash. Hence: Flushman. The most logical solution.

Note that toilets make the same sound all over the world, so even in Argentina, "Flushman" still sounded like a poo-related superhero. Everyone hated it, including many of the people working on the comic. The translator claims he refused to type that stupid name in the scripts, to the editor's annoyance, which explains why the character was accidentally called "Flash" about once per issue.

Read the rest of that story and four others about how comic book superheroes were changed in other countries at Cracked.

(Image credit: DC Comics)

The most Reagan Era movie of the Reagan Era was, I think, Red Dawn. This Cold War film depicted a sudden invasion of the United States by communist nations led by the Soviet Union. The are ultimately defeated by American courage and pluck as exemplified by a band of freedom fighters led by Patrick Swayze.

Or a character that he played. I forget which. It's been about twenty years since I've watched it.

David Hookstead, a writer for the Daily Caller, has enjoyed the movie for many years. He recalls a time in college when he once persuaded a young lady of his acquaintance that Red Dawn was based on the real, historically true Soviet invasion of the United States in 1980. It was a brutal war that killed 80 million Americans.

You know, that war. The once that was a mere forty years ago. Hookstead reminisces:

That’s when I paused the movie and just took a deep dive into this great war America won in 1980. I explained to her how the Soviet nukes had knocked out key tactical strongholds of America in the Dakotas, and how “crack” paratroopers took the Rocky Mountains.

[...]

I mean, she didn’t just buy it. She was asking genuine questions about why this was never taught in high schools or colleges. I had to explain with a quivering lip that after America lost 80 million men in the great war of 1980 that we couldn’t discuss it in schools because the pain was too great.

[...]

At one point, I explained to her how D.C. took a direct nuclear strike, but we were able to hold off the Soviets at the Mississippi River (again, a direct reference to the plot of the film).

[...]

Then, later at night, she was literally talking to people how she had just learned the USA lost 80 million men in the great war of 1980. Eventually, somebody told her she was being pranked and she was far from pleased.

Still, to this day, I consider it my greatest accomplishment. If you aren’t smart enough to know Washington D.C. didn’t get nuked in 1980, then you deserve to get made fun of.

-via Kurt Schlichter | Image: MGM

Monroe Strause was more than just a pastry chef. He was the Pie King. Strause joined his family's pie business in 1919, and began a journey to fix some of the problems of the pie industry at the time: competition from cake, and the blandness of cornstarch-laden cream pie recipes.  

Strause considered pie to be the “Great American Dessert,” and deemed it superior to just about every other food. A natural perfectionist, his driving motivation was to create better versions of the dish. But unlike housewives and grandmothers, the patron saints of pie, Strause approached pie-making in a way that reflected the growing emphasis on scientific thought that took root in the 1920s. He treated new pies as individual inventions, and methods of preparation as equations to solve. He even referred to his recipes as “formulas.”

In his 1939 book Pie Marches On, Strause’s publishers summed up his approach: “He has reduced pie baking to an exact science and measures each ingredient with the care of a pharmacist.” This style meant no volume measurements (Strause wrote that “the tea cup and teaspoon are the greatest enemies of a good pie”) and endless experimentation. Once, he made 150 different versions of cherry pie. His pie fixation also meant he had the tendency to get a little high-and-mighty. Strause once sniffed that housewives “tend to be too slipshod for scientific pie-making.”

Despite his opinions about home cooks, people flocked to Strause's pies. Read how the Pie King developed pie techniques that are quite familiar today, particularly chiffon pies and graham cracker crusts, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image source: Library of Congress)

It is accepted by popular culture that having a small brain equates to being stupid, and that’s why we say that someone’s a bird brain when they’re really stupid, because birds are known to have tiny brains. And we know for a fact that we have to be smart so that we can survive in this dog-eat-dog world.

But the statement that having small brains equates to being stupid is not true all the time; at least when it comes to pigeons.

Some small-brained birds, like the ubiquitous pigeons, keep their lineage going by breeding more, European researchers have discovered.

The finding, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, solves the mystery of conflicting evidence for the popular theory that birds need big brains to give them greater behavioural flexibility in coping with cities.

“We thought that maybe there was no single way to be an urban dweller,” says lead author Ferran Sayol, from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, “and that’s what we found.”

[...]

Results confirmed that brain size played a role in urban success stories, but it depended on their reproductive strategy.

(Image Credit: Couleur/ Pixabay)

It’s been some days since we’ve been able to go outside our homes and travel places in the world. Thanks to the coronavirus, we’ve been temporarily prohibited to leave our respective homes. And we know that staying at home is the best thing we can do right now, as we don’t want to put ourselves and others in danger of being infected with the disease.

Thankfully, there are many ways to keep ourselves from boredom, such as playing video games. But if you really miss traveling, don’t worry. You can travel virtually using the internet. See how and where to travel virtually over at Forbes.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Many businesses have been greatly affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Because of the lockdown imposed, people are discouraged from going outside to avoid the risk of contracting the dreaded disease. This, however, results in many restaurants closing down, as no customers will come into their establishments.

“The economic impact is huge,” said Johnson-Roberson, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Michigan. “I’m really worried that these restaurants aren’t going to come back.”

This doesn’t have to be the case however. If people can’t go into restaurants to eat, then maybe these restaurants could bring good food to the people through the use of food delivery robots.

Now, in a time of social distancing and Instacart delays, the food delivery robot could finally have a moment.

More about this over at Slate.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Starship)

1990. An army of marbled crayfish clones invaded the land of Germany. Within just a decade, these lobster-like creatures would be found invading other countries like Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, France, Sweden, and Japan. How were these crayfish able to clone themselves? The answer, according to scientists, might dat back to 1995.

Scientists suspect that sometime around 1995, a genetic mutation allowed a pet crayfish to reproduce asexually, giving rise to a new, all-female species that could make clones of itself from its unfertilized eggs. Deliberately or accidentally, some of these mutants were released from aquariums into the wild, where they rapidly multiplied into the millions, threatening native waterways species and ecosystems.

But their success is strange. “All marbled crayfish which exist today derive from a single animal,” said Günter Vogt, a biologist at Heidelberg University. “They are all genetically identical.” Ordinarily, the absence of genetic diversity makes a population exceedingly vulnerable to the vagaries of its environment. Yet the marbled crayfish have managed to thrive around the globe.

A closer look reveals that the crayfishes’ uniformity is only genome-deep. According to studies conducted by Vogt and others in the mid-2000s, these aquatic clones actually vary quite a bit in their color, size, behavior and longevity. Which means that something other than their genes is inspiring that diversity.

So what contributes to the diversity of these crayfish clones? If it is not nature, then the usual response would be nurture. At least that’s what our common sense would deduce. But new research on crayfish and other organisms reveal something else other than nature and nurture, and that is “random, intrinsic noise”.

More details about this over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Zfaulkes/ Wikimedia Commons)

Dreams can come in a lot of variations. They can be pleasing, sad, or just outright weird. Some say that dreaming is just our brain trying to process things, but what do they really mean? Sometimes we’d like to decipher the message or meaning behind these dreams, but even scientists can’t say what our dreams mean. It’s up to the dreamer to determine what their sleep-induced movies mean, as MSN detailed: 

Dr. Kryger says that dreams are "mostly speculation in terms of specific meanings." Among the scientific community, he continues, there are two main trains of thought: One is that every part of a dream has a specific meaning, and the other is that dreams are entirely spontaneous and mean nothing. 

The first train of thought can be attributed to Sigmund Freud, who is recognized as the first person to assign definitive meanings to dreams -- like that dreaming about a king and a queen actually means you're dreaming about your mother and father, Dr. Kryger says. 

Although dream psychoanalysis may have only begun in the last century or two, people have studied dreams for far longer: Aristotle wrote about dreams as early as 325 B.C., according to Dr. Kryger.  

Lauri Quinn Loewenberg, a professional dream analyst, says the problem with arriving at proof across the board "is that dreams and their meanings are so very personal because they are based on the person's individual life experiences." 

Additionally, neuroscience tends to focus on the function of dreaming (like memory retention) rather than the "comparative analysis between the imagery in dreams and the content of the previous day, which is how I approach dream analysis," Loewenberg says. 

image via wikimedia commons

A video of the Etobicoke Creek in Ontario, Canada, turning completely red has creeped out the Internet. The video was shared online by Twitter user adamcarson0205. The creek turning red was like a scene from a horror film! Some people are believing that the end is near, with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the creek turning red.

(via Daily Star)

King Henry VIII is best known for his cruelty towards his wives. He executed two of his wives as King of England. There’s even a mnemonic to remember the fate of all six of King Henry VIII’s wives! The Infographics Show looks into the reason behind the fate of all the king’s wives. Watch and find out the reason why King Henry VIII beheaded two of his wives!

Jose Manuel Ballester recreates classic paintings such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The Spanish artist recreates these paintings with a twist: he removes all human figures from his recreations. His reimagined paintings seem to ask the question, ‘What would happen if humans left the scene of these paintings?’ His work give a new look and life to the classic paintings, as The Colossal detailed:  

In an interview with Bored Panda, Ballester said that while his Concealed Spaces series often is regarded as humorous, it has multiple meanings. “After a deeper look it’s not difficult to find transcendence and the multiple possible interpretations, both as new images and as related to their original counterparts,” he said.

One of the clearest aspects in this series is the way we can understand art from the point of view of each period, which has a unique way of looking and understanding reality shared by artists, who develop their creativity inside those period’s values and connect with ideas and universal precepts extended in time.

image via The Colossal

Antonio Muñoz wanted a bag of Cheetos to eat. There’s a problem, however — he doesn’t have one at home, and he can’t go outside to the department store across the street to buy one due to the quarantine. He would be exposing himself to greater risk of contracting the disease if he did go. But he really wanted Cheetos. He didn’t just let his cravings go. And so he thought of a way he could have his Cheetos without having to step a foot outside his house. If he can’t go, then maybe someone can go for him. Maybe his chihuahua can go for him. And so he set his chihuahua on a mission.

“Day three of quarantine. I really wanted my ‘Cheetos’,” he said.

Muñoz sent his dog out to the department store across the street with a note that said, “Hello Mr. Shopkeeper. Please sell my dog some Cheetos, the orange kind, not the red ones, they’re too hot. She has $20 attached to her collar. WARNING: She will bite if not treated right. Your front neighbor.”

Surprisingly, the chihuahua returned to him holding a bag of Cheetos in his mouth.

More details about this story over at Bored Panda.

Humans are indeed creative beings. 

(Image Credit: Antonio Muñoz/ Facebook)