The Australian bushfires had been a catastrophic event not just for us humans, but also for the animals. It is said that a billion animals died in the fires, and Iâm sure that there are animals like this koala who lost her mother in the bushfires.
Death of a loved one is surely a devastating experience in life, whether in humans or animals. And so we do our best to comfort those who were left behind, hoping that they might smile again after a time.
Thereâs a small curry restaurant in Tokyo that offers rice for free, no matter the size. A college student named Kenta saw the restaurantâs offer and ordered a large amount of rice. Unfortunately, he couldnât finish it. Upset at Kenta, the owner asked him why he ordered the large if he was not going to finish it. âI donât want customers like you to come here,â said the owner, and he banned Kenta from the restaurant.
Can Kentaâs ban something that could be legally upheld? A Japanese lawyer offers an answer to the question.
Simon de Brienne and Marie Germain were longtime postmasters of The Hague, Netherlands, in the late 17th century. When they died with no heirs, they left their estate to an orphanage. Among those treasures was a sealed trunk containing around 2600 letters that were never delivered for one reason or another, which was acquired by the Dutch postal museum in 1926. Those letters give us a rare glimpse into the world of everyday communications from 300 years ago. Some of the letters are heartbreaking, like Leendert van Muers' 1694 letter to his wife, informing her that he'd been captured by the French army.
   âI wished with Godâs help that I were with you again, because my heart is aching to be separated from you, in a country and under a people whose language I nor my fathers ever knew.â
He was eventually forced to enlist in the French army for two years, and is hoping it will soon be peace again, allowing him to return home. He closes the letter by wishing his wife, kids and family âa hundred thousand good nights, and a happy new year.â
But alas, the letter never arrived.
Other letters are businesslike, prurient, mundane, or sweet. They were mailed in many languages, on bespoke paper or pages torn from books, some letterlocked or coded, written with a variety of inks. Researchers began opening, analyzing, and translating those letters in 2015, and now have launched a fascinating online exhibit to reveal what they've learned. Begin the exhibition tour here. -via Metafilter
(Image and text credit: Rebekah Ahrendt, Nadine Akkerman, Jana Dambrogio, Daniel Starza Smith, David van der Linden, Sound and Vision The Hague, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T). CC BY-NC 4.0)
Lundy is a puppy who canât use his back legs due to potential hydrocephalus. He was taken in mid-January to The Mia Foundation, an animal rescue located in Rochester, New York, which specializes in pets born with birth defects. Here, Lundy met an unlikely friend in the form of the foundationâs bird ambassador â Herman the pigeon, who has been in the foundation since November 2018.
There is a legend in Ohio that a hidden cave a few miles from Middletown contains many skeletons of people who died there, 21 of them enslaved people traveling the Underground Railroad. The cave produced poison gas, and was eventually sealed up so that no one else would enter. The origin of the legend was a series of newspaper articles that appeared in 1892, written by a man simply named John. No one today know who he really was.
According to Johnâs account, one summer night in 1849, a group of escapees took shelter in the home of a Hamilton, Ohio, abolitionist and physician, about 10 miles south of Middletown. As the night wore on, the physician grew nervous that bounty hunters were approaching. He loaded his guests into two wagons and headed north, following an empty road that wound along Elk Creek. John claimed that the doctor ushered the group into a little-known cave, where theyâd be cramped and cold but safe and unseen. The cave was on the property of an abolitionist sympathizerâJohnâs father.
In the newspaper story, the doctor runs to the farmhouse and knocks. It is well after midnight. âI told him what I knew of the cave, that it was a deathtrap and that I was sure not one of the twenty-one would emerge alive,â Johnâs father says. He tells the doctor that geologists from the âDepartment of Washington City, DCâ had also visited the cave, several years before, and had never returned.
People have been searching for the cave ever since the story resurfaced in the 1980s, yet it has not been found. After all, those who found it died, and if it was sealed up, it is no longer a visible cave, right? But on the other hand, the entire story could be fiction. Read about the enduring mystery of the deadly hidden cave at Atlas Obscura.
Four of America's first five presidents wrote autobiographies, but only John Adams included details of his private life. Some those details are fascinating, particularly the story of how he sailed across the Atlantic, which gives modern audiences a taste of how hazardous such journeys were. In 1778, he became America's ambassador to France, and set out on the trip with his 10-year-old son (and another future president) John Quincy on the ship Boston. First, everyone got sick. Then they were spotted by three ships.
The ships turned out to be British. The Boston outran two of them, but the third one stayed close. The chase stretched on for days. At dawn, Adams would climb on the deck and scan the horizonâat first it would look like they had escaped, until he spotted a stubborn sail. âSometimes she gained upon us,â he wrote, âand sometimes we gained in our distance from her.â Tucker and Barron ordered their crew to keep the Bostonâs cannons rolled out and ready, their barrels jutting from the sides of the ship, their powder and shot piled beside them.
The Boston escaped its pursuer on the 21st, but it soon ran into a new problem. The wind was picking up; dark clouds were filling the sky. That night, a terrible storm hit. The Boston, with its guns still rolled out, was not prepared, and everyone rushed to store the weaponry. A dazzling bolt of lightning struck the main mast. Somehow it missed the casks of gunpowder still strewn across the ship. But it hit a sailor, leaving a scorched divot in his shoulder, a nasty wound that would eventually kill him.
That was only the beginning of the death and destruction and encounters with enemy ships on that voyage. You can read the whole story at outside Online. -via Digg
A giant extinct turtle was discovered in the tropical regions of South America in the 1970s. It was given the painfully generic name of Stupendemys geographicus. The turtle lived five to ten million years ago, but only recently have fossils been found that are intact enough to give us a real vision of its size. The S. geographicus fossil shown above is accompanied by a paleontologist for scale. Â
Researchers of the University of Zurich (UZH) and fellow researchers from Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil have now reported exceptional specimens of the extinct turtle recently found in new locations across Venezuela and Colombia. âThe carapace of some Stupendemys individuals reached almost three meters, making it one of the largest, if not the largest turtle that ever existed,â says Marcelo SĂĄnchez, director of the Paleontological Institute and Museum of UZH and head of the study. The turtle had an estimated body mass of 1,145 kg (~2,500 pounds) â almost one hundred times that of its closest living relative, the big-headed Amazon river turtle.
Believe it or not, this turtle had to worry about predators. Read about the largest turtle ever at SciTechDaily.
You might remember this from your high school life: you listen to a lecture about cell structure. A few days later, you go to school with your assignment â a cell model made of papier mâchĂŠ and dry macaroni. But those are now things of the past. Science is now taught in a very different way.
A teacher might start the lesson by posing a question: How does a wound heal? Well, that involves cell reproduction. So to understand how a wound heals, the teacher might say, we must first learn how a cell works. The instructor might ask: What elements do you think a cell must have to help heal the wound? How about making a model and discussing your hypotheses with each other?
This type of teaching method, which is embedded in the âNext Generation Science Standardsâ, which was adopted by California in 2013, aims to lead students to the right answer, with the teacher serving as a guide to the students. Unfortunately, it isnât that effective.
Across the state, 29.9% of students met or exceeded the new science standards on this first test, with fluctuations according to grade level.
The question is, why?
Find out the factors which contribute to this issue over at Los Angeles Times.
A very heartwarming moment indeed. Astronaut Christina Koch spent 328 days in space, away from her dog. When Koch finally returned, her dog, Sadie Lou lost its mind and welcomed her enthusiastically back home. To quote one of the comments on her Instagram post, the dog does love her to the moon and back.
Ominous music. Low red lighting. A man is shown slowly coming to focus. In his chest is the iconic black bat. The man behind the mask is Robert Pattinson.
Pattinson opened up about trying the Batsuit on for the first time in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last fall.
"I remember saying to Matt, 'It does feel quite transformative!' He was like, 'I would hope it does! You're literally in the Batsuit,'" he recalled. "You do feel very powerful immediately. And it's pretty astonishing, something that is incredibly difficult to get into, so the ritual of getting into it is pretty humiliating. You've got five people trying to shove you into something. Once you've got it on, it's like, 'Yeah, I feel strong, I feel tough, even though I had to have someone squeezing my butt cheeks into the legs.'"
While some people canât wait for the film, Iâm kind of excited to see if Robert Pattinson will still be called âShovel Faceâ on Honest Trailers.
But Iâm still kind of interested in how Pattinson will portray the Dark Knight.
The "show with hot questions and even hotter wings" is back even hotter than before, and now itâs time for Margot Robbie to sit in the hot seat. Despite struggling with each sauce, she was able to survive the gauntlet.
You know what Barenaked Ladies really needs? A mass choir explaining how to pronounce "sorry." The band collaborated with 500 singers from Choir! Choir! Choir! for a fundraiser for Covenant House Toronto, and the result is a real hoot. -via Metafilter
The new playstation console is expected to launch later this year, much to the anticipation of the gaming community. It seems that we have to save up almost $500 to get our hands on one, as the cost of producing the console is $450 per unit. The challenge is getting key components for the PS5 at a reasonable price, as Gizmodo details:
DRAM and NAND flash memory appear to be the components Sony is having trouble getting cheap. Both are crucial if Sony wants to maintain the incredible load times its been bragging about for the PS5. Both are widely used in high-end phones and laptops. Given that it has reportedly been trying to beat Sony on raw power when it launches its next-gen console, the Xbox Series X, Microsoft may also be contributing to the shortage as it would likely be using similar materials.
The $450 number being thrown around in the Bloomberg piece isnât the cost of the PS5 when it will be sold in storesâbut the amount required to manufacture it. Typically this is a good indicator of what the actual device will cost too. The PS4 cost $381 to manufacture, according to IHS Markit, and retailed for $400. By that math, the PS5 would need to cost around $470 to maintain the same kind of profit.
Ricky Davis spent fifteen years after being wrongfully convicted in the slaying of his housemate. Thanks to data from publicly available genealogical websites, the authorities were able to use the data to arrest a new suspect in the murder of Davisâ housemate. The technological development improves the terrible justice system, as The Guardian details:
The El Dorado county district attorney, Vern Pierson, would not go into detail on the newly implicated suspect, who was a juvenile at the time of the slaying and by law must make at least his first appearances in juvenile court even though he is now in his 50s, but said he was one of three young men who had been with the victimâs teenage daughter on the night of the slaying.
Pierson said the developments are âtwo of the most dramatic extremes that you can experienceâ.
âOn the one hand, we have the system working in the worst possible way. On the other hand, we have the evolution of technology in terms of genetic genealogyâ that led to Davis being freed and a new suspect arrested this week, he said. âIt is a surreal thing in a sense.â
Worried that her dog might have swallowed her missing engagement ring, a woman brought her German short-haired pointer puppy to an animal hospital in Pretoria. There, her fears were confirmed: Pepper, her dog really does have it in its stomach.
Veterinarians took X-ray photos and quickly spotted the missing item in the dog's stomach.
The veterinarians, according to the animal hospital, gave the dog medicine to induce vomiting. The medicine then took effect and did its stuff, and up came the engagement ring.
â⌠As good as new. Or I'd say even better as she'll always have our story to tell," the post said.
People reacted positively towards the Facebook post.
(Image Credit: Valley Farm Animal Hospital/ Facebook)
