In early October, a charter boat took a group of shark watchers offshore of Lincoln, South Australia. There, tourist Wendy Bower-Leech recorded a Great White Shark swimming on the surface on its back. Why? Global News explains:
Sharks do not typically swim upside down. However, they do flip over on rare occasions to assume a position known as tonic immobility, according to the Shark Trust, a U.K.-based non-profit dedicated to promoting shark conservation.
Tonic immobility puts the shark into a relaxed, trance-like state, according to the Shark Trust. Biologists often use this technique when handling much smaller sharks.
Redditor CaptainWisconsin made this monstrous stuffed bell pepper. When other redditors confronted him/her with the lack of post-baking photos, the Captain responded that eating the delicious thing was a greater priority. That makes sense, especially if there was reason to believe the monster might wake up.
Will trick-or-treaters be delighted or too terrified to walk into Cookie Monster's gaping maw to knock on Lisa Boll's front door?
She transformed the bushes in front of her home in York Township, Pennsylvania into the image of Cookie Monster eating a chocolate chip cookie. Spray painting her bushes gave them the color and texture of Cookie Monster's fur. She then made eyes and the cookie with styrofoam. ABC News reports:
Boll said drivers have pulled over with their kids to take pictures of her oversized open-mouthed character.
"It was surprising how many people get a big kick out of it," Boll told WHTM. "It's fun for Halloween and it's not a horror thing, so it appeals to kids under the age of 3. It’s not scary."
The ceramic animal figurines happily decorated homes for years before they were eventually discarded. One garage sale led to another and, finally, chipped and partially broken, to the thrift store.
That's where mad scientist/artist Debra Broz found them. She promised these discarded figures a home. But there was a price to pay for that new home. Oh, yes, a terrible, terrible price.
For Broz performed...experiments on them. She altered them.
In the 1990s, a unique and dying custom in the village of Grimentz, Switerland caught the attention of anthropologists. Villagers kept special wheels of cheese that would be eaten by friends and neighbors at their funerals. Atlas Obscura explains:
Devotion to dairy has taken different forms throughout the Alps’s secluded valleys. “A popular culture of the cow … traverses all moments, objects, and events of the mountain peasant,” wrote Preiswerk. In Grimentz, it manifested in elaborate funerals. After a death, the bells of the deceased’s cows were removed, so that the animals, too, could mourn. Families added a “picnic of the dead” to the casket, which included a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese (as well as sturdy boots, as ghosts were rumored to wander the glaciers after dark).
The same foods comprised the all-important burial meal, which symbolized the reconstitution of the community after its tragic rift. As one of Preiswerk’s interview subjects recounted, the funeral guests were told, “Come to the meal, because the dead man has left enough.”
In a historically poor area, “leaving enough” required advance planning. “There was the ‘cheese of the dead,’” explains Zufferey. “Everyone had a wheel of cheese so that they had something to serve at their funeral.” When the inevitable time came, the chiseled cheese was washed down with vin des glaciers, the local wine.
The practice has largely died out. But Jean-Jacques Zufferey, who is pictured above, has kept a local library of such death cheeses. The one that he is holding is 149 years old.
It's a clever idea that is gradually spreading this Halloween season. You're trapped inside your car while horrifying monsters lay just beyond the glass. They invite you to come out to play.
To make it only scarier, I'd suggest having the car wash "break down" in the middle, trapping the passengers inside. Then, in total darkness, the clowns try to open the car doors.
Because Neatorama is a serious, hard news endeavor that seeks to educate the public about scientific developments, let us pause from our usual levity to talk to you about your Uranus.
In 2017, researchers Carol Paty and Xin Cao published the results of their examination of Uranus. Because that planet rotates on an axial tilt that is, relative to us, on its side, the magnetic field interacts in an unusual way with the passing solar wind. New Scientist explains:
Uranus is not like most of the planets. It rotates on its side, tilted almost 98 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun. The axis of its magnetic field is tilted too, at a 59-degree angle from the rotational axis. The magnetic field is also off-centre, with the field lines emerging about a third of the way toward the south pole.
All of this makes Uranus’s magnetosphere a total mess. “As it is tumbling around, the magnetosphere’s orientation is changing in all sorts of directions,” says Carol Paty at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. [...]
The magnetosphere acts as a barrier to the solar wind: when the two are moving in the same direction, the solar wind slides off it like water off a duck’s back. But just as when water hits a duck’s feathers from the tail end, the duck gets wet, so when the solar wind blows toward Uranus at the right angle, the planet’s magnetic field lines up with the solar wind’s and lets some particles flow through.
This process, called magnetic reconnection, occurs occasionally near Earth’s poles, where the influx of particles from the solar wind can lead to intensified auroras. On Uranus, Paty and Cao found that it should happen every single day (roughly 17 Earth hours), switching the magnetosphere’s protection on and off. This could lead to an aurora there as well.
If you insist on stopping every few miles to Instagram yourself into a scenic background, this is bound to happen. That's the price of being an influencer. But in this case, blame the scientists who didn't anticipate that the birds to which they had attached GPS tracking devices might fly into areas without network coverage. The BBC reports:
Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges. [...]
The birds left from southern Russia and Kazakhstan.
The journey of one steppe eagle, called Min, was particularly expensive, as it flew to Iran from Kazakhstan.
Min accumulated SMS messages to send during the summer in Kazakhstan, but it was out of range of the mobile network. Unexpectedly the eagle flew straight to Iran, where it sent the huge backlog of messages.
The price per SMS in Kazakhstan was about 15 roubles (18p; 30 US cents), but each SMS from Iran cost 49 roubles. Min used up the entire tracking budget meant for all the eagles.
What's it like to feel the warm embrace of another human being? Your dakimakura can offer you only so much and, honestly, she's been thinking that the two of you should go on a break.
You should think of this difficult time as an opportunity. You can have an even better relationship. Artist Lucy McRae invented the Compression Carpet, which is a mattress that constricts around you as another person* turns the crank. Hi-Fructose magazine quotes her:
Lucy McRae’s new “Compression Carpet offers a full embrace for those who feel like they need a hug, a meditation on how technology can aid intimacy or support. The “body architect” recently showed the device at Festival of the Impossible in San Francisco. For some, the device may recall the hug machine created by Temple Grandin for stress relief and therapy. With her device, McCrae says, you “relinquish control to the hands of a stranger as your ‘servicer’ decides the firmness of your hug.”
7-year old João Vicente of Brazil wanted to skateboard, but cerebral palsy left him completely unable to do so.
That's when the Skate Anima project was born. CBS News explains how it makes skateboarding accessible for these children with severe physical limitations:
Physiotherapist Stevan Pinto and psychologist Daniel Paniagua started the Skate Anima project, with a mission of creating skateboard adaptations, so children with various types of disabilities can enjoy the sport, Patron said. "It is a very powerful and beautiful work. It is necessary," she said,
The company built a "walker" that fits around João so he can hold on while someone pushes him on a skateboard. This particular tool was designed by Ricardo Oliveira, who is not only a skateboarder, but a father.
Oliveira's daughter also has a disability, and he invented the walker so she could enjoy skateboarding with him. He sold the design to Skate Anima, which then created one for João, his mother said.
The crafty Instagram user Sabine Timm does a lot of little gags like this. Fruits, toys, and other knickknacks come to life with googly eyes and just the right perspective. In this case, I suspect that the pepper is a masked robber who was shocked at what he found to steal in the wrong house.
Lately, your waifu has been pestering you about your long-term future together. She wants a ring, if for no other reason than to show it off to her friends.
You should give her what she wants by doing what this man in Japan did. He collected his fingernail clippings for a year. Then he ground them into a fine powder, baked the powder, then compressed the resulting glob into a black gemstone.
Good luck and may you have many blissful years together!
6-year old Ethan Haus and his dog, Remington, got lost while playing outside their home near Elk River, Minnesota. Law enforcement officers and 600 volunteers began searching for him as night fell.
Among them was Steve Fines, a commercial drone operator. He used one of his drones equipped with a heat sensor to search for the child from the sky. Fines found the boy lying in a cornfield with his dog as the night temperature dropped to 30°F. ABC News reports:
Ethan was seen, with his dog Remington, around 1:50 a.m. Wednesday lying down in a cornfield a little more than a mile east of his home, Sheriff Joel Brott said in a statement.
When first responders reached Ethan, he was cold but otherwise in good health, according to Brott.
If you visit an old-fashioned pub, you may see a metal or wooden rail along at ankle height around the bar. These rails emerged by the late Nineteenth Century. Why did they become popular? Wayne Curtis of the magazine Inbibe explains that they were footrests that encouraged drinkers to relax while standing, and therefore buy more drinks:
Foot rails are both altruistic and mercenary. They’re altruistic because they’re installed for the comfort of the drinker. They’re mercenary because the more comfortable drinkers are, the more they’ll spend. A modest investment in a foot rail can evidently lead to a pleasing return.
Turns out, humans aren’t really designed to stand for long periods with feet flat on the floor. This contributes to stress on the spine, and you can feel it in your lower back. A foot rail allows us to redistribute the load on our feet—first one foot, then the other—and alter the tilt of our spines. “Bartenders were probably the first ergonomics experts on the planet,” write the authors of Deskbound, a 2016 book about the hazards of the sedentary life. “A standing-height drinking table that you can lean on, with a place to rest your foot? Genius.”
But brief lunchtime visits to bars faded away as a common practice, and so did this piece of furniture designed to facilitate standing:
Foot rails faded in importance for a simple reason: The workingman’s saloon, where one knocked back a shot or two and then quickly returned to work, were replaced by bars where people lingered. “Belly up to the bar” was not a facile metaphor, but a reasonably exact description of what one did. Then barkeeps found that if they added stools, people would linger and order more. (See: “mercenary.”) Today, the foot rail persists in a feral fashion, sometimes inconveniently. The legs of bar stools bump into them; the feet of customers can get entangled when dethroning, especially if tipsy.
This is an interesting hypothesis. But I'd like to suggest another. While composing this blog post, I selected the above photo, which describes the brass sheet in front of the foot rail as a "spit trough". Googling around led me to learn that some bars used to have troughs where customers could spit or pee without leaving their chosen spot. Sam Sessa wrote in 2010 for the Baltimore Sunthat:
If the pub was packed full of people and you were lucky enough to have a spot at the bar, you weren't going to want to risk losing it by walking to the bathroom. But when nature calls, sooner or later, you have to pick up the phone.
What to do?
To solve the problem, bars began installing impromptu urinals underneath the bars. They were stainless steal troughs with a faucet at one end and a drain at the other. That way, the beer could go in one end and out the other at the same time.
Since 1990, Andy Gregg has made unique and luxury pieces of furniture out of old motorcycle and bicycle parts. He takes wheels, tires, pipes, and handlebars and turns them into tables, chairs, and couches.
Gregg feels a mission to give new life to old trash. He explained to Eluxe magazine that:
I’m glad that environmentally friendly materials have been growing in popularity, and there are many designers like me who think some trash is just too good for the garbage. I am trying to make playful, modern, sometimes even elegant pieces from bike parts. Sometimes I also use train and automobile windows for tabletops, or surplus automotive seat-belt webbing for seating upholstery.
