Cheryl Stephen knew what she had to do when she saw the orphaned fawn lying in the middle of the road: she would take care of the deer at her home. What she wasn’t sure of, however, was how Sarge, her 9-year-old German shepherd, would react when he saw the deer. Much to her surprise, Sarge immediately stepped in to be the deer’s temporary babysitter. And so began the happy days of Sarge and Buckwheat the deer.

In an interview with The Dodo, Cheryl Stephen, Sarge’s mom said;

“Something clicked in Sarge and he took to Buckwheat instantly,” “He wanted to be involved with every aspect of Buckwheat’s care.” “He took on the role of being Buckwheat’s guardian,” she added. “None of the other dogs were allowed near the baby.”

After a time, Buckwheat was released back to the wild, but it wasn’t the end to Sarge’s deer-raising days.

Sarge’s exceptional rehabilitation skills became of the talk of the town on the local area by the time Buckwheat was released back into the wild and Sarge’s mom Cheryl was the go-to-person anytime someone came across an orphaned or injured deer.

After learning about his compassionate side his owners have now started regularly introducing him to animals who have come upon hard times. Most often these are fawns, or baby deer, who have found themselves in need of extra care. This is Sarge’s job and it clearly makes him proud!

Very wholesome.

(Image Credit: Dogs Addict)

Hungary — Réka and Balázs wanted a summer getaway that would get them closer to nature, not something “grounded” or “fixed” like their normal lives in an apartment in Budapest. And so, In October last year, the two approached the architect Tamás Bene and asked him to design a boathouse so that they can explore Lake Tisza, the largest artificial lake in Hungary.

The project pays homage to their love of the region, and their desire to learn more about it and experience it on a more intimate level. 

Lake Tisza is a vast, artificial body of water that owes its natural ecosystem to River Tisza, which passes through it. Tamás Bene found it interesting to conceptualize and design a dwelling that has no tangible groundwork or foundations. The point of vehicles – their primary function – is to transport. However, the movement of this compact living space intends to enable its inhabitants to experience the natural environment as closely as possible. The boat provides an opportunity to spend time, eat, drink, sleep and awaken nearly anywhere.

See the pictures of the tiny boathouse over at DesignBoom.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Balázs Máté/ DesignBoom)

A pastel character rolls on a wavy road with a smile on its face. However, its smile suddenly turns into a frown as it rolls on the road, and then it smiles again. This animation, titled “SMILE”, captures how we felt during this year: happy in one moment, and suddenly sad the next. 

Watch the full clip over at Colossal.

(Image Credit: Lucas Zanatto/ Colossal)

Lizards are known to have the ability to grow their tails back after being cut off. However, it seems that they are not the only reptiles to have the ability to do so. Alligators can do the same, apparently.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists using advanced imaging technology have answered the question of whether alligators share any of the same regenerative capabilities as much smaller reptiles. Many kinds of small reptiles, such as lizards, are known to regrow their tails. However, with a potential body length of 14 feet, little was known about whether alligators could possibly regrow their massive tails.

A team of researchers from Arizona State University and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries have uncovered that young alligators have the ability to regrow their tails up to three-quarters of a foot -- about 18% of their total body length. They speculate that regrowing their tails gives the alligators a functional advantage in their murky aquatic habitats.

[...]

The researchers hope their findings will help lead to discoveries of new therapeutic approaches to repairing injuries and treating diseases such as arthritis.

Learn more about the study over at ScienceDaily.

Man, I wish that we humans can regrow parts of our body, too.

(Image Credit: Norbert Nagel/ Wikimedia Commons)

Located in Miranda, one of the moons of Uranus, is the Verona Rupes. Having a depth of 20 kilometers (which is over ten times the depth of the Grand Canyon, which is about 1.83 kilometers at its deepest point), the Verona Rupes is the tallest known cliff in the Solar System. A person jumping off this cliff would take about 12 minutes before reaching the bottom of the cliff at a speed of approximately 200 kilometers per hour (and still survive, if given the right airbag protection).

The featured image of Verona Rupes was captured by the passing Voyager 2 robotic spacecraft in 1986. How the giant cliff was created remains unknown, but is possibly related to a large impact or tectonic surface motion.

It’s a good place to skydive in space, I guess.

(Image Credit: Voyager 2, NASA)

Back in 2015, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spotted three of these weird sea creatures in the underwater canyons of Puerto Rico, near the seabed of roughly 13,000 feet (over 3,960 meters).

Their bodies are small — about the size of a golf tee (just over 2 inches, or 6 centimeters, long) — but they're vibrant; when the creatures move and pulse, rows of tiny hair-like cilia refract light into a prism of shining colors.

Recently, the researchers identified these blobs as a new species of carnivorous comb jellies, with the scientific name Duobrachium sparksae.

While their wee bodies and shimmering cilia are traits commonly shared among the 100-plus known ctenophore species, the Puerto Rican party blobs still represent an exciting first in marine biology. According to the researchers, this is the first underwater species NOAA researchers have ever described from pictures alone; the team had no access to physical samples for their new study.

Learn more about them over at Live Science.

Nature sure is weird.

(Image Credit: NOAA/ Live Science)

Young children face two problems when learning a language. One, they need to know which sounds group together to form words, and what these words mean. Two, they need to know how these words go together in sentences.

These problems are interwoven, because to be able to acquire the meaning of words the child also needs to know what role they play in the sentence: is the word “teddy” about a thing, or what the thing is doing, or something else? And to figure out what a word’s role is, the child needs to already know what it means.

Professor Patrick Rebuschat likens these two problems to the chicken-and-egg problem. In this case, “which comes first, the word or the sentence?”

To find out, the researchers tested how people learned new words and [sentences] by giving adults an artificial language to learn. They invented a language spoken by aliens and showed people sentences in alien language alongside scenes showing aliens carrying out different actions.

Over time, learners were able to acquire the words’ meanings and their roles in the scenes — the names of the aliens, their colours, and the actions they were doing.

Learners do this by keeping track of all the associations between words and different aspects of the scenes across many learning trials before narrowing down to focus on those associations that are reliable.

In other words, we learn sentences and words at the same time.

Learn more about this study over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: athree23/ Pixabay)

Astronauts are human, too. And because they’re human, they are not immune to enjoying a good drink, and that is why some of them smuggle alcohol aboard the International Space Station. Astronauts are good at smuggling that kind of stuff, too.

According to a new book, a lot of astronauts have done the same thing. Routinely! According to a phenomenal rundown of the history of booze in space on Supercluster, astronauts are saucing in orbit all the time. For example:

“NASA will tell you there is no alcohol aboard the ISS,” NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson told [2019’s “Alcohol in Space” author Chris Carberry]. “As a person who lived there for five months, I’ll tell you that’s bogus.”

But it’s not just for fun that they smuggle alcohol in space.

For one thing, learning about the way booze behaves, at a chemical level, in a zero-g environment informs the scientific development of it down here (and there have been several cargo payloads containing alcohol used for experiments that’ve already made it into orbit).

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Openpics/ Pixabay)

You might have heard of the morning person (also called the morning lark or early bird) and the night owl, but have you heard of the highly active type, daytime sleepy type, daytime active type, and the moderately active type? This is my first time hearing of other chronotypes, too. That’s right. This recent research suggests that there are six human chronotypes, not just two.

In terms of alertness and energy levels, morning types have high alertness in the morning, which proceeds to dip to medium levels in the middle of the day, then drops to low levels in the evening.

By contrast, evening types exhibit low alertness in the morning, which rises to medium levels in the middle of the day, then rises to high levels at night.

The four new chronotypes display different patterns: highly active types show high alertness throughout the day; daytime sleepy types start off high in the morning, dip low in the middle of the day, then rise to a medium finish; daytime active types start low, peak at high in middle, then finish the day on middle level alertness; while moderately active types experience low energy levels all day long.

Learn more about the research over at ScienceAlert.

Which type of person are you?

(Image Credit: RUDN University/ ScienceAlert)

If you’re the type who drinks coffee during work, then it’s likely that you prefer to have a warm cup of coffee by your side as you work. Novelty gift maker Just Mustard might just have the thing for you: a mug warmer that looks like a giant Oreo cookie.

But while the device looks like the iconic cookie made by Nabisco, the embossing says “Mustard.”

This mug warmer, which is USB-powered, is available over at Amazon for only $18.

Yum!

(Image Credit: Just Mustard/ Technabob)

If you’re someone who always has to explain something to someone, then this class might be helpful to you. If I were to take a guess, this class is like debate class or course, but way friendlier.

Well, what do you think?

Image via Engrish.com

Astronomers might have witnessed, for the first time ever, the birth of a magnetar when two neutron stars collided and merged into one massive object. However, this is only a possibility, and scientists say that other explanations for the phenomenon are possible.

Astrophysicist Wen-fai Fong of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and colleagues first spotted the site of the neutron star crash as a burst of gamma-ray light detected with NASA’s orbiting Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory on May 22. Follow-up observations in X-ray, visible and infrared wavelengths of light showed that the gamma rays were accompanied by a characteristic glow called a kilonova.

Kilonovas are thought to form after two neutron stars, the ultradense cores of dead stars, collide and merge. The merger sprays neutron-rich material “not seen anywhere else in the universe” around the collision site, Fong says. That material quickly produces unstable heavy elements, and those elements soon decay, heating the neutron cloud and making it glow in optical and infrared light…

[...]

Observing how the object’s light behaves over the next four months to six years, Fong and her colleagues have calculated, will prove whether or not a magnetar was born.

More about this story over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: NASA, ESA, D. PLAYER/STSCI / ScienceNews)

Engineers from Stanford University have developed a method for imaging underwater objects. By combining light and sound, this method, called the Photoacoustic Airborne Sonar System (PASS), could be an alternative method to sonar systems.

The researchers envision their hybrid optical-acoustic system one day being used to conduct drone-based biological marine surveys from the air, carry out large-scale aerial searches of sunken ships and planes, and map the ocean depths with a similar speed and level of detail as Earth's landscapes. Their "Photoacoustic Airborne Sonar System" is detailed in a recent study published in the journal IEEE Access.

Learn more about this system over at EurekAlert.

Cool!

(Image Credit: Arbabian Lab/ Kindea Labs/ EurekAlert)

Meet Muff. According to a woman who runs a wildlife rehab with her mother, Muff was found “orphaned, cold, and floating down a rushing river by some friendly kayakers who decided to bring him to [them].” For the past two months, the woman and her mom brought Muff back to full health, and since beavers need at least two years of rehab, Muff will be staying with them for a little longer.

This video is of the beaver making little noises that sound similar to a human baby. He is not in danger or scared, just simply making little noises, as they do.

Cute!

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

In the world of lizards, males who have flashier colors are more likely to attract mates. Having flashy colors, however, is a double-edged sword; aside from being able to attract females, flashier male lizards are also more likely to attract predators. A study, which was published in the journal Evolutionary Ecology, proved this phenomenon.

To attract females' notice, male anoles have dewlaps: colorful extendable flaps of skin under their chins. In most species of anole, dewlaps evolved to be as noticeable as possible within the environment, given an environment's predominant colors and lighting conditions.

[...]

While some water anoles have dramatic red-orange flaps, others have more muted colors, more of a dull brownish-red.

[...]

To prove that flashier males face greater risks of being attacked, the researchers created clay models with colored dewlaps—some bright, some more muted…

Learn more about this study over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: J. Montemarano/ PHYS.org)