After forest wildfires in the Maule Region of central Chile had stripped much of the land of vegetation, the task of re-seeding the land fell on a brave trio of border collies.
The dogs were outfitted with special backpacks filled with seeds. When they run around, the backpacks released native seed.
Photo: Martin Bernetti
Despite dying just before his 51st birthday, Michael Jackson had a long career in music. After headlining The Jackson Five as a child, he became an even bigger superstar ten years later -without ever having left the stage. The transformation was due to a confluence of music trends, Quincy Jones' work, and Jackson's depth of talent. Nerdwriter1 illustrates that transformation by taking a deep dive into the song that signaled what was to come: "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." It was the first single for which Jackson had creative control. -via Digg
Australian software engineer Sarah Spencer hacked an old knitting machine to knit a giant star map out of wool:
Spencer unveiled the fruits of her labors — "Stargazing: a knitted tapestry." The piece features all 88 constellations as seen from Earth, as well as the equatorial line with the zodiac constellations running along it, stars scaled according to their real-life brightness, the Milky Way galaxy, the sun, Earth's moon and all of the planets within our solar system. Spencer made sure to put the planets, sun and moon in specific, strategic positions so that the heavenly bodies indicate a specific date in time.
Jehv Maravilla and Christian Toledo saw a blank wall at their local McDonald's and decided to make a fake poster of themselves and hung it up. Nobody from the restaurant noticed for almost two months!
When we aren't feeling well, one of the first things we do is grab a thermometer to see if we have a fever. But does that really tell us? We've been told all our lives that normal body temperature is 98.6, but that was determined from a flawed study done 150 years ago. Now we have new research. Your body temperature could be different in the morning and afternoon and still be quite normal.
The study, published online this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, refutes the age-old benchmark of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, [rheumatologist Jonathan] Hausmann and his colleagues found an average normal temperature in adults of 97.7 degrees, as measured with an oral thermometer. (The published study uses results from 329 healthy adults.) As for fever, Hausmann found that it begins at 99.5 degrees, on average.
But that doesn’t mean you should shift to a lower benchmark for normal. Hausmann wants body temperature to be a flexible concept, viewed in context with age, gender, time of day, and other factors—much in the way weight is evaluated based on height, and how the thresholds for normal blood pressure differ based on age.
So you could have a fever even if your temperature is under 100 degrees. The important part his knowing what to do about it. Read about body temperature and fever at Wired. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user Robert Couse-Baker)
There are nine basic things that a cat needs to live a happy life. Each one of them is illustrated by a Simon's Cat vignette of him being his usual self. Personally, I would have lumped "hunting" and "entertainment" together. Strangely, sex is not one of the nine, but if a cat is fixed before puberty, he or she will never know what he/she is missing.
More than 100 Pink Cadillacs lined up outside of Greater Grace Temple in Detroit #ArethaHomegoing #ArethaFranklinFuneral #ArethaQueenForever pic.twitter.com/a4aK1KasoX
— #LaquanMcDonald (@ifuaskmee) August 31, 2018
You may have spent all day Friday watching Aretha Franklin's star-studded funeral service on TV, but even so, you didn't get to see the procession outside. More than 100 pink Cadillacs were there to escort the hearse from the funeral home to Greater Grace Temple in Detroit on Friday morning.
The cars are a reference to her song, "Freeway of Love," in which she sings: "We goin' ridin' on the freeway of love in my pink Cadillac."
The turnout is all thanks to Mary Kay national sales director Crisette Ellis asked that any employee who owns a pink Cadillac show up for Franklin's funeral service, according to the Detroit Free Press. (Sales representatives for the cosmetics company famously drive pink cars.)
Per the paper, many of the Cadillacs that turned up to the service were driven by Mary Kay employees, though other pink Cadillac owners also turned up to pay homage to the Queen of Soul.
You can see many more pictures of the Cadillacs and some video, too, at Mashable.
There are many species of parasitic wasps, many of which we've posted. But even parasites can become the victim of parasites, in this case a plant that feeds on wasps that feed on plants. The oak leaf gall wasp invades oak trees and induces them to develop galls, or abnormal growths, that the wasps use to draw nutrition from and lay their eggs in. A research team led by Scott Egan of Rice University noticed a vine among collected galls that seem to have attached suction cups to the galls.
So, Dr. Egan went back to the Florida sand live oak forest where his collaborator, Glen Hood, first found the gall. Dr. Egan walked through the trees and kept his eyes open. Soon, he realized that in one patch, the oaks and their galls were threaded with a plant called the parasitic love vine. There the researchers found numerous instances of the vine entering the galls.
The connection did not seem harmless. When the researchers dissected 51 love-vine-infested galls from one wasp species, they found that 45 percent contained a mummified adult wasp, compared with only 2 percent of uninfested galls.
That suggests that the love vine interferes with the wasp’s nutrition such that it develops fully but is not able to leave. And the host tissue within dissected galls was twisted toward the vine's entry points, hinting that it was co-opting the gall's nutrients.
Revenge of the plant kingdom, indeed. Read more about the parasitic vine at the New York Times. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Egan, Zhang, Comerford, and Hood)
Animator Joshua Slice is also a musician. That means Lucas the Spider can play tiny little musical instruments -five of them! And he does it cutely, as always. -via Geeks Are Sexy
At first glance, running a lemonade stand appears to be a wholesome activity. We imagine children getting their first taste of entrepreneurship, while passers-by get a refreshing drink on a hot day. But it wasn't always that way. Lemonade sold on the street was always iffy. If you were lucky, it contained alcohol, and if you were unlucky, it could be vinegar and swill. And even when kids took over, sometimes it could be dangerous.
One hot afternoon in July of 1941, a young woman—name and age unreported—opened up a lemonade stand in Western Springs, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The “little girl,” as newspaper accounts later described her, plied her friends and passing strangers with refreshing glasses of lemonade in a makeshift stand just outside of her home. She sometimes sampled her own supply.
Within weeks, the county’s health department was knocking on her door. They asked questions about the chain of lemonade custody and her sanitary practices. It turned out that the budding entrepreneur had failed to rinse the glasses she gave to her customers after they had been used. As a result, she had contracted polio, and so had four of her young friends. According to the Associated Press, the outbreak of the disease was no less than the “hottest trail of the deadly disease virus in the history of epidemiology.”
Read the history of lemonade stands at Mental Floss.
We knew cheetahs were born to run, but who knew that liked to play fetch? The Oregon Zoo throws balls for their cheetahs to chase for exercise and enrichment, and in order to fling them fast and far enough, they built a huge slingshot they call the Cheetahpult. Imagine getting to shoot that contraption and play ball with large cats ...and getting paid for it. -via Laughing Squid
August seems like an odd time to post a "best of the year" list, but here we are. There have been so many people trying to get away with something that Mashable has plenty of material to work with. Four months from now, they may have an update, but what we've got so far is pretty egregious, and it doesn't even include politicians.
14. Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival fame
You might remember McFarland from his other failed scam: Fyre Festival. Unfortunately, he does not appear to have learned a single lesson from that debacle. McFarland was arrested in June and charged with wire fraud and money laundering for a fake ticket sales scheme completely separate from Fyre Fest. Billy, dude, what's up?
3. The royal wedding expert
Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills, Esq. sounds exactly like the name of someone who would fake their way into becoming an expert in all things royal wedding. With his best fake British accent, Tommy Muscatello scammed his way into history just in time for the nuptials of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
He perfected his British accent twenty years ago during a school play and put it to good use by appearing on news programs regularly as a royal wedding expert and founding member of the British Monarchist Foundation — only to eventually be called out by The Wall Street Journal. Turns out, Mace-Archer-Mills was just a combination of his friends’ last names. In an interesting twist, the British accent has stuck with Muscatello even after all this controversy. Pretty impressive.
Read the rest of the list at Mashable. A couple of them aren't even human.
(Image source: YouTube)
Being atop a skyscraper when it sways is disconcerting, but not as terrifying as that sway would be if it weren't for mass dampers. This simple but thorough explanation of how they work from Minute Physics uses a LEGO Saturn 5 rocket, or two of them, to show how it works. The video is really only 3:40 long; after that, it's an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson spent much of his time exploring the Arctic. Instead of taking vast stores of food, he ate what the Inuit ate: fish, caribou, walrus, and other meat, with few fruits and vegetables of any kind. This was in the early 20th century, when nutrition experts pushed raw vegetables for health, and encouraged minimal meat eating. Stefansson wrote about the Inuit diet, and encountered skepticism from those who couldn't believe it. To show them, Stefansson and an explorer friend went on a meat-only diet in 1928 -for an entire year. They began the experiment in a hospital where doctors could monitor their health, but that didn't last long.
While doctors condemned the diet as dangerous, Stefansson was defiant, attributing his increased vigor and “ambition” to his all-meat diet. Newspapers and magazines across the country ran stories on his experiment, contrasting it with the vegetable-heavy diets most doctors recommended. Soon, Stefansson left the hospital, having lost a few pounds, and continued his meat-eating endeavor from his New York apartment. Doctors examining the two men during the year-long trial reported that neither had heightened blood pressure or kidney trouble, the expected result of a carnivorous diet. The one thing lacking in their diet, Stefansson noted, was enough calcium.
Another conclusion Stefansson came to was that the protein he was eating wasn’t as important as the fat. He briefly flirted with “rabbit starvation,” a condition named for the fact that eating solely meat without sufficient fat can prove deadly. The human liver can only process so much protein sans fat without kickstarting the symptoms of protein poisoning: nausea, wasting, and death. Fat, and lots of it, is essential to the all-meat diet. Aquatic mammals are especially rich with fat, though. Recent studies point to genetics also playing a role in the Inuit aptitude for fatty, meat-filled diets, but as in Stefansson’s time as well as today, there remain questions about the relative healthiness of fats.
Read about Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his all-meat diet at Atlas Obscura.
Last year, we posted about a plan to train crows to pick up litter, specifically, cigarette butts. Here's a way that can happen. The Crowbox is a vending machine for crows. It's set up in stages, to train birds how to use it, and crows are pretty smart and learn quickly. This demonstration video uses quarters, but there's no reason you can't use cigarette butts or something else that crows can easily find. If you'd like to make your own Crowbox, the plans and instructions are here. -via Metafilter
