The latest experiments conducted at Tel Aviv University have uncovered an interesting fact about plants. Plants can hear and respond to animals in their natural environments. The way these beautiful creations interact and behave is fascinating. Isn’t it?

But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team’s answer is surprising, yet tidy: It’s the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose’s petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee’s wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!) “The results are amazing,” says Karban. “They’re the most convincing data on this subject to date. They’re important in forcing the scientific community to confront its skepticism.”

Plants can hear, and they use their flowers to do so. Read more to learn about how flowers communicate with animals.

Image: Unsplash

A donkey and an emu have given a new spin to the phrase "love is love."

Rescued from an abandoned farm in South Carolina, the male donkey named "Jack" and the female emu named "Diane" are "in love," according to Carolina Waterfowl Rescue.

"They like to cuddle and even sleep together," Jennifer Gordon of the rescue told The Charlotte Observer.

Rescuers are also finding it hard to house the donkey and emu in separate pens, as both animals become extremely agitated at such attempts.

The donkey is jealous to the extent of attacking other donkeys who have gotten "too close" to the Emu in the pen.

Learn what fate awaits this love struck duo over at Live Science.

(Image: Carolina Waterfowl Rescue)

There's been a lot of news reports over fake news and Russian interference of the elections on social media. And surely you've heard that there's a lot of fake accounts on Facebook. But exactly how many is a lot?

Engadget summarizes Facebook's latest transparency report, covering the first half of 2018:

... at a high level Facebook says it removed over 1.5 billion fake accounts from April through September, up from the 1.3 billion accounts it removed in the previous six months. If you were wondering just how widespread false content and accounts are on the platform, wonder no more.

While Facebook is able to pull down more than 90 percent of instances of adult nudity and sexual activity, child nudity / sexual exploitation of children, fake accounts, spam, terrorist propaganda and violence and graphic content, there are two categories where its content moderation falls down. Facebook only found and removed 14.9 percent of bullying and harassment before users reported them; it also only found 51.6 percent of hate speech violations before users reported them (timeframe was July through September of this year).

Read the rest over at Engadget

(Image: own photo)

Alain Robert pulled the stunt of climbing the 662 ft Heron Tower in London without any safety gear and was arrested once he reached the top. Due to alerting emergency services, he was sentenced and charged for his adventure:

The 56-year-old grandfather ... reached the top in around 45 minutes, to cheers from the crowd which had formed below, and immediately handed waiting police officers his passport and the number of his lawyer.

Before the stunt, Robert told Sky News his targets when climbing a building are "going to the top" and "to stay alive".

"When you are climbing, as I'm not using any safety devices, when life is at stake, I guarantee that you are focused," he said.

Read the rest of the story and view the nerve-wrecking video clip over at Sky News

For the inaugural Tokyo Hotaru Festival, 100,000 LED lights were placed in the Sumida River to resemble the fireflies that once inhabited it. Powered by 100% solar power, the beautiful display kicked off the summer festival.

Babies suck their thumbs, but what's a baby elephant to do? Why, it certainly has something that it can do for comfort ...

Image via u/Orangth

This small, worn out toy monkey looks like an ordinary albeit well-loved toy, but it's nothing short of extraordinary. It escaped Nazi Germany, and 80 years later, helped a war-torn family come together.

The toy monkey belongs to Gert Berliner, who lived in Berlin in 1930s as a young boy. When the Nazis took control of the city and started rounding up Jewish men, Gert's parents managed to help him escape from Germany through an underground railroad operation:

In 1939, at the age of 14, he had to say goodbye to his parents, Paul and Sophie Berliner. He boarded the train in Berlin, bound for the city of Kalmar, on the Baltic Coast. He had a small bag and there wasn't much he could bring. But stashed away in his suitcase was the toy monkey, his talisman ...

Orphaned when his parents were murdered in Auschwitz, Gert thought that he had no family left. From that point on, wherever Gert went, the toy went with him. Eventually, it ended up in a museum in Berlin as a war memento.

And that's when the toy monkey changed Gert's life one more time ...

Read what happened next over in the story by Uri Berliner, Gert's son, over at NPR.

(Image: Jacobia Dahm/NPR)

Michael Jackson, the king of Pop, took the meaning of Marvel fandom to a whole new level in the late 90s. This comic book fan wanted to play Spider-Man so badly that the only way he could think of making this happen was to attempt to buy Marvel.

Another source reveals that he was also vying for Professor X’s role in the X-Men series and even went to the auditions.

Meanwhile, Marvel legend, the late Stan Lee, who knew Michael Jackson at a personal level, confirmed that Michael Jackson did discuss with him the strong desire to play Spider-Man.

Maybe there was more to his song “She is going Hollywood” than we could realize. Hmmm ...

Learn why Jacko’s dream didn't materialize and what Stan Lee thought about his potential as a super hero over at this post by Stewart Perrie over at LADbible

In the U.K., over half a million amphibians get trapped in drains every year. A small group of British conservationists are saving the day!

“The amphibians are coming to breed and then hitting the road, getting across the roads, hitting the curb, along the curb and into the drains. And then that’s it - end of story for them, game over,” said Tim Jenkins, a ladder fitter at WART.

“By installing the amphibian ladders, it enables them to get back out of the drains and back to their breeding pools and doing what they should do and making more amphibians.”

Read the rest of the story over at Reuters

The Satanic Temple was offended by The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina presenting their Baphomet statue as “the devil.” Now Netflix and Warner Brothers have a lawsuit on their hands:

Satan “is a literary figure symbolic of the eternal rebel in opposition, rather than the personalization of evil,” per the Temple. A key tenet of members and supporters of the Temple is that Satanists deserve as much protection and respect as followers of any religion.

The Temple “commissioned ... Baphomet ... to be a central part of its efforts to promote First Amendment values of separation of church and state and equal protection,” the complaint stated. “Defendants’ prominent use of this symbol ... associated with evil, cannibalism and murder blurs and tarnishes” the Temple’s Baphomet.

Read the rest over at HuffPost

Image: @LucienGreaves

There's sand everywhere - heck, there are whole deserts filled with sand - but in reality, the world is actually running out of construction grade sand.

As sand becomes a scarce resource, there's a rise in criminal enterprises that traffic in sand. Call them, the Sand Mafias:

“Sand mafias” are groups of criminals that illegally dredge sand from areas where extraction is prohibited. Since they’re not following laws, all environmental protocols are ignored. Often rivers are illegally mined, destroying the habitat for fish and fishermen. Sometimes land from private villages is even taken over by these mafias.

And like their Sicilian namesakes, Sand Mafias regularly resort to violence, and even murder:

This problem is particularly rampant in India. A number of murders have allegedly been committed by these sand mafias to keep journalists and agitators quiet. In a recent murder, journalist Sandeep Sharma was run over by a truck after he secretly filmed a police official agreeing to a bribe in exchange for allowing sand mining in a crocodile sanctuary. According to the editor of the local television channel where Sharma worked, he was denied police protection after receiving threats. The editor also told the Guardian that police confiscated Sharma’s camera with footage of the bribe agreement and never gave it back.

Read the rest over at this intriguing article by Erik Brown over at Medium

Appreciate people for their work or you may get a viral whooping. This musician’s

response to a Craig’s List ad looking for free musicians totally won the Internet over.

via boredpanda

When one of NASA's highly advanced equipment in space broke down not long ago which had been later repaired after a few weeks, sources reported that they succeeded by doing the "have you turned it on or off" approach.

But of course in real life, things aren't that simple. Turns out, NASA did not fix the Hubble Space Telescope by turning it on and off (if only it was that easy).

No, they actually had to jiggle it a bit:

On Oct. 18, the Hubble operations team commanded a series of spacecraft maneuvers, or turns, in opposite directions to attempt to clear any blockage that may have caused the float to be off-center and produce the exceedingly high rates. During each maneuver, the gyro was switched from high mode to low mode to dislodge any blockage that may have accumulated around the float.

Hubble Operations Project Manager Patrick Crouse told The Washington Post:

“At a high level, if people want to call it jiggling around, I suppose they can,” he said. “But we were trying to do very particular activities we thought would clear the problem. It certainly wasn’t as simple as turning it off and turning it back on.”

(Image: NASA)

For having given birth to the modern English language, you would think that Old English - the now defunct language spoken in medieval Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers - would have a lot of surviving written records.

But in case of original manuscripts of poetry in Old English, there are only four surviving books. Four. That's it.

Josephine Livingstone wrote this interesting article over at The New Republic about them:

They are: the Vercelli Book, which contains six poems, including the hallucinatory “Dream of the Rood”; the Junius Manuscript, which comprises four long religious poems; the Exeter Book, crammed with riddles and elegies; and the Beowulf Manuscript, whose name says it all. There is no way of knowing how many more poetic codices (the special term for these books) might have existed once upon a time, but have since been destroyed.

... the main attraction lay in a quiet little vitrine: all four Old English poetic codices, side by side. They don’t look that impressive to the casual eye. The exhibition room is dark and cold, to keep the books safe from damage. The manuscripts are brown, small, almost self-effacing. There’s no outward sign of how important they are, how unprecedented their meeting.

What makes these four books so special? Read the full article to find out.


Image: British Library Board

Some of the most touching love stories are those that blossom through deep struggles and extreme situations like war.

Harley Rustad of The Walrus learned of one such love stories when his mother handed him a worn box, torn at the edges, containing dozens of envelopes, tied with yellowed string in small bundles.

The letters were love letters, sent by Rustad's grandfather, who wrote to the love of his life from the battlefields of the Second World War:

The Canadian soldier, Harry Mac­donald, my grandfather, had sent Jacquelyn Robinson dozens of letters, spanning several years—letters written in spidery cursive by candlelight as rain ­pounded down on corrugated rooftops or amid the blasts of nearby shelling. His letters were often rushed or cut short, with some started and finished with hours or even days in between. He ­frequently apologized for his messy handwriting, hoping his words would be legible. One letter, sent five days before, written in haste, contained a question for which he anxiously awaited a reply. The letter had begun with a familiar two words, “Dear Jacquie,” and ended with a ­question: “Will you marry me?”

He signed the bottom of the page, folded the sheet, and slipped it into an envelope and carefully wrote a Vancouver address. Now he waited, not knowing what would come first: death or a reply.

Read the rest of the fascinating story over at The Walrus.