This tiny owl was spotted lying in a ditch near Saxmundham, England. The passerby who spotted her assumed that she was injured, and when she didn’t fly away, it would seem that the assumption was correct. But apparently, that didn’t seem to be the case; there was something else keeping her on the ground.

The Good Samaritan called the Suffolk Owl Sanctuary for help. During an examination, staffers were shocked when they placed the little owl on a scale and discovered that she was roughly a third heavier than they expected.

The owl weighed a little over half a pound — healthy adult little owls tend to weigh closer to a third of a pound. 

“We found her to simply be extremely obese!” Suffolk Owl Sanctuary wrote on Facebook.

The owl, which was aptly nicknamed Plump by the sanctuary, apparently overindulged herself over the holidays. Thankfully, in just a few weeks, she had successfully trimmed down to a more natural weight, and she was released back to the countryside at the end of January. Her carers only wish, however, that she does not overfeed herself again.

(Image Credit: Suffolk Owl Sanctuary/ The Dodo)

You know what they say: time flies when you're having fun. Forty years ago should be ancient times, but it was only 1980. That was the year Mount St. Helens erupted. The year you could buy Apple stock for $22 (or if you had way more money, an Apple computer). The year that angelic child star McCaulay Culkin was born. Some of the things that arose in 1980 seem like they happened just yesterday, while others really do seem like ancient history. Take a nostalgic look back at 1980 and the things that will turn 40 years old in 2020 at Considerable.

Who knew rubber bands could be this elegant and stylish?

A graduating art student from Japan’s Tama Art University, Rie Sakamoto decided to use this lowly stationery item to create a line of garments, which were displayed last week at an exhibition in Tokyo. The results are fantastic!

In her studies of the rubber band, Sakamoto, who is part of the department of Integrated Design, says she realized that the rubber band does in fact have more functionality than immediately meets the eye. In addition to its texture, flexibility and opacity, the rubber band is actually an aesthetically beautiful object. Sakamoto became acutely aware of this when she knitted several together and allowed the sunlight to shine through them.

Check out the photos over at Spoon & Tamago. You can also follow Rie Sakamoto’s Twitter if you want.

(Image Credit: Spoon & Tamago)

This is the rope chair. As its name implies, some parts of this chair are made of rope. These parts are the arms and the back rail of the chair. But why sit on this one? It is because this chair welcomes creativity in your posture, and it adapts to whoever is using it.

This chair, which was unveiled alongside a tupla (“double” in Finnish) wall hook, was announced by Finnish brand Artek. Both products were designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec.

Intriguing.

(Image Credit: DesignBoom)

Whenever a montage of a person working out is shown in a film, I usually hear rock music or upbeat music in the background. Why is this the case? It seems that science holds the enlightening, but unsurprising answer. In a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, it was shown that listening to high-tempo or upbeat music “reduces the perceived effort involved in exercise and increases its benefits.”

These effects were greater for endurance exercises, such as walking, than for high-intensity exercises, such as weightlifting. The researchers hope that the findings could help people to increase and improve their exercise habits.

Find out how upbeat music affects our bodies during exercise, over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Most likely once a member of a binary star system, Zeta Ophiuchi had a companion star. Unfortunately, its companion star was more massive, which meant that it was shorter lived. The companion star exploded as a supernova, and Zeta Ophiuchi, which was blown away by the explosion, became a runaway star.

Zeta Ophiuchi is a star about 20 times the mass of our Sun. Found 460 light-years away, it moves toward the left at a speed of 24 kilometers per second.

Zeta Oph is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if it weren't surrounded by obscuring dust.

This image was captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which retired recently after 16 years of aiding us in the exploration of the cosmos.

(Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Spitzer Space Telescope)

Cephalopods sometimes are called the chameleons of the sea. They have the ability to camouflage themselves quickly when threatened or disturbed. They have surprisingly complex brains, with some of them having over 500 million neurons, which is significantly greater compared to the 200 million for a rat, and 20,000 for an average mollusk.

Some examples of complex cephalopod behaviour include the ability to camouflage themselves despite being colourblind, count, recognise patterns, problem solve and communicate using a variety of signals.

One example of a cephalopod is the squid.

In order to understand better how it can camouflage itself instantaneously, researchers Dr. Wen-Sung Chung and Professor Justin Marshall, from UQ's Queensland Brain Institute, mapped the squid brain using MRI technology.

"This the first time modern technology has been used to explore the brain of this amazing animal, and we proposed 145 new connections and pathways, more than 60 per cent of which are linked to the vision and motor systems," Dr Chung said.

More details regarding this study over at ScienceDaily.

(Image Credit: Nick Hobgood/ Wikimedia Commons)

(Image credit: ryan4637)

The way a cat stretches is so impressive that it inspired Pilates and a long-lived internet meme. In fact, the world is full of longcats!

(Image credit: Stuckurface)

How do they do that? My theory is that a feline spine is constructed like a Slinky. Made of rubber.

(Image credit: dead_marine)

See a collection of the 80 finest longcats found on the internet in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

David Ambarzumjan, an artist in Germany, will paint a detailed landscape, then brush across the middle of it. On that brushstroke, he paints a glimpse of that same scene from the past or the future. A city thus becomes a wilderness, or vice versa.

Adam Koford, also known as apelad, is well-known at Neatorama for his t-shirts and his erstwhile comic Laugh Out Loud Cats. In November, he Tweeted, "Still no word on whether or not they will let me take over Peanuts." The Tweet was accompanied by several comic strips that saw children discussing modern problems with the same cadence and attitude as Charles Schultz's classic comic strip. Now, the strip has been picked up for syndication. You can read Koford's comic Haircut Practice (apparently named for a throwaway line in the first strip) at Go Comics beginning here. See more of them at Instagram.   -via Metafilter

Do you save your place in a book by setting it face down, or by inserting a bookmark? The difference between the two says something about how you regard and use books. Anne Fadiman labels those two approaches as "courtly love," as in those who respect the physical aspects of a book as well as the contents and would never cause their literature any harm, and "carnal love," meaning those who value the contents way more than the paper its printed on. People who feel carnal love toward books will fold a page down, allow the spine to crack, jot notes down in the margins, or even split a book in half in order to make the act of reading more efficient and enjoyable. Fadiman's brother explains why he leaves open books face down.   

“They are ready in an instant to let me pick them up,” he explains. “To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you’ve only pressed Pause.” I confess to marking my place promiscuously, sometimes splaying, sometimes committing the even more grievous sin of dog-earing the page. (Here I manage to be simultaneously abusive and compulsive: I turn down the upper corner for page-marking and the lower corner to identify passages I want to xerox for my commonplace book.)

All courtly lovers press Stop. My Aunt Carol—who will probably claim she’s no relation once she finds out how I treat my books—places reproductions of Audubon paintings horizontally to mark the exact paragraph where she left off. If the colored side is up, she was reading the left­hand page; if it’s down, the right-hand page. A college classmate of mine, a lawyer, uses his business cards, spurning his wife’s silver Tiffany bookmarks because they are a few microns too thick and might leave vestigial stigmata. Another classmate, an art historian, favors Paris Métro tickets or “those inkjet-printed credit card receipts—but only in books of art criticism whose pretentiousness I wish to desecrate with something really crass and financial. I would never use those in fiction or poetry, which really are sacred.”

Both types of readers love books, but differ in that one regards books as sacred objects to be cherished as well as read, while the other regards the paper manifestation as something to be used, even used up, to get all the good out of it. Read more about this dichotomy at Slate, and then tell us what you think in the following poll. Calling John Farrier! -via Digg

When a famous person dies, there's a lot to consider for the funeral. For instance: should his wife or his girlfriend attend, or maybe both? Charles Dickens was fabulously famous when he died suddenly of a stroke in 1870. However, he had left explicit instructions for his funeral and burial, which was to be in one of the small, local cemeteries.

Buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity.

But since those rites are carried out by the living, it was not to be. Dickens was interred at Westminster Abbey, in Poet's Corner, where Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, and other literary figures were buried. His grave was left open for three days afterward for the public to pay respects. These changes to Dickens' plans were ascribed to public demand, but that's not all there is to the story. You can read what happened to Dickens after his death at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: User:Jack1956)

The older something is, the more rare it is, and therefore the more people will pay for it. Very old whiskey, particularly Scotch whisky, can fetch thousands of dollars a bottle from collectors and connoisseurs. But when there is money to be had, someone will try to cheat the system. Some of those very old bottles are not as old as they say they are, as science reveals.  

Nuclear bombs that were detonated decades ago spewed the radioactive isotope carbon-14 into the atmosphere; from there, the isotope was absorbed by plants and other living organisms, and began to decay after the organisms died. Traces of this excess carbon-14 can therefore be found in barley that was harvested and distilled to make whisky.

Carbon-14 decays at a known rate; by calculating the amount of the isotope in a given whisky batch, scientists can then determine if a bottle's contents were produced after the start of the nuclear age — and if that age matches the date written on the bottle's label.

Scientists tested bottles of whiskey dated from 1847 to 1978, and found about half of them were counterfeit. Read how they did that at LiveScience. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: ctj71081)

Get your future Starfleet Academy cadet ready to take the helm with this rocker by Etsy seller GandGRockers. I agree that the old Constitution-class cruisers may be obsolete, but they're a more comfortable ride than a Defiant-class escort.

This rocker design also comes in a pretty painted version in the original light grey of the pre-refit NCC-1701.

This really messed with my head for a few minutes before I realised pic.twitter.com/HiFaDG6DCy

— Lesley (@dancingfool75) February 3, 2020

Is this a tiny pig? or maybe a goat? Or maybe some kind of birth defect. Or a picture created by artificial intelligence -they can be pretty crazy, after all.  

If you are still confused, continue reading for a clue.