A tortoise was in that most awful of positions for his kind: flipped over on his back. This is a crisis because he can't move and is vulnerable to predators.
But never mind that. There's a tasty flower to eat. Like his buddies, he focuses on the most important task at hand.
-via Laughing Squid
(Photo: Tom Bowditch)
He's living the dream, I tell you. None of us have come as close to the full goat lifestyle. But there he is, beside his caprine brothers and sisters, eating grass on a steep hillside.
Thomas Thwaites is an artist in London. In the past, he attempted to build a toaster from scratch. That's no small effort, since his starting point was personally mining and smelting the iron.
As you might expect, this project inevitably led him to attempt to live as a goat. He explained to the Daily Mail that this animal-inspired lifestyle could offer people an alternative to a future of cybernetics:
Thwaites, who is interested in transhumanism, believes not everyone will want to become a cyborg in the future.
Biorobotics, he told Motherboad, could be used by people to de-volve instead of evolve.
‘I initially wanted to be an elephant, but it wasn’t going very well,’ said Thwaites. ‘I visited a shaman, and she said “you’re an idiot”. So, I decided to be a goat.’
Thwaites worked with a zoologist to develop the custom prothetic limbs. He's now attempting to cross the Alps with a particular herd of goats.
-via Ace of Spades HQ
(Photo of the mother and daughter by the International Tracing Service)
Margot Bachmann was born on October 24, 1944 in Heidelberg, Germany. Her mother, an Italian woman, was a forced laborer in that city. A German soldier impregnated her. When she was born, Bachmann was taken away. She never saw her mother.
The soldier’s family raised her while the mother vanished into the chaos of the end of World War II. Bachmann asked the International Tracing Service to try to find her mother—if she was even alive. The organization was successful. They found the 91-year old unnamed mother in her hometown of Noverella, Italy. Bachmann sent her a letter, which is excerpted here:
Dear Mum, my name is Margot Bachmann and I am your daughter, born on Oct 25 1944 in Heidelberg. All my life I asked my family about you, without being given any answers. I want to come and find you so that I can hug you once again. I’m immensely happy to be able to finally know you.
The two met in Noverella on August 8. Pictured above is a photo album that Bachmann made for her mother.
-via Marilyn Terrell
(Photo: Basket Streaming)
He’s made a fortune by making his professional dreams come true. Now he’s helping a thousand other people do the same. Basketball star LeBron James announced that his charitable foundation will fund full tuition scholarships for 1,000 students in Akron Public Schools to attend the University of Akron in Ohio. The Cleveland Plain Dealer quotes James:
"It means so much because, as a kid growing up in the inner city and a lot of African-American kids, you don't really think past high school," James later told reporters. "You don't really know your future. You hear high school all the time, and you graduate high school and then you never think past that because either it's not possible or your family's not financially stable to even be able to support a kid going to college."
James likened himself to the children who will be eligible for these scholarships -- a poor child of a single parent who didn't have the money to go to college. But the 6-8, 250-pound superstar had the NBA and millions of dollars waiting for him.
Five years ago, the James foundation switched its focus to mentoring and tutoring poor, at-risk youths who are in danger of failing out of school because of problems learning, with attendance, or in their homes. This partnership with the university could play a key role in helping James reach his goal of raising the city's graduation rate.
-via Hopes & Fears
The television of my youth—from Gilligan’s Island to Scooby-Doo—taught me that quicksand is a routine danger of adult life. This was incorrect. As this video demonstrates, quicksand, though it is as common in real life as it was on television, isn’t dangerous. You can walk on it easily. Watch this man with Bay Search and Rescue in northern England stomp on it like a water bed.
Now try it for yourself on the nearest patch of quicksand. If you’re having trouble locating any, just start running without looking where you’re going.
-via Gifsboom
(Photo: Jalaliep)
(Photo: Imgur)
It’s time to get the kids ready for school. They’ll need essential supplies. The school administrators, having years of experience with this, know exactly what. So they’ve sent a shopping list. If you lose it, then just go shopping and grab whatever is marked “Back to School,” because retailers know pretty well, too. 22 Words has 20 funny photos of back to school sales that were hopefully mislabeled.
(Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Wire/AP)
Sophia was a 6-year old St. Bernard with terminal cancer. She loved to play in the snow. But her final day came in the middle of summer. Her human, Alyson Page, nonetheless found a way to give her a last experience with snow hours before she was put to sleep.
Page took Sophia to the Chill Factore, an indoor snow skiing facility in Manchester, UK. The Manchester Evening News quotes Page:
"She absolutely loves the snow, so I sent an email cheekily on the off-chance, I never expected them to be so kind to let us come and bring her.
"We got a reply yesterday and it was just before we were due to have her put to sleep, so it was just amazing.
"She has not really shown any interest in anything for a couple of weeks now, so just to see her with a waggy tail and diving around in the snow has just been amazing. It's been a wonderful end for her."
In this video, you can see Sophia playing in the snow one last time.
Markie and Sarah have been together for over 6 years. Markie figured it was finally time to tie the knot, so she decided to propose marriage. In order to offer Sarah, a marine biologist, a special proposal experience, she secretly took scuba diving lessons. After she was certified, she swam toward the already submerged Sarah and held up placards which read:
I told you I’d go to the bottom of the ocean for your love, but right now I’m only certified to 60 feet. Would you marry me?
And Sarah said yes!
-via Huffington Post
Moving through the forests of Endor at high speed requires incredible dexterity. Get your little Scout Trooper’s reflexes primed for it. That’s what Instructables member Tez Gilmer is doing. He built a rocking horse that looks like a 74-Z speeder from Return of the Jedi. It consists of PVC tubes, plywood, and decorative pieces that he made with a 3d printer.
Tez Gilmer does a lot of amazingly precise fabrication for his kids. In the past we’ve also featured his LEGO creation station.
-via Nerd Approved
(Photo: Philipp Stössel)
Researchers at ETH University in Switzerland developed a useful, weavable fiber from the waste products of slaughterhouses. Philipp Stössel, a doctoral candidate and the lead reseacher, says that collagen recovered from animals can be turned into a gelatin which can be spun into fiber. Design Indaba reports:
The gelatine rendered from the skin, bones and tendons is heated to create protein precipitation. The precipitants are coated with ethanol to harden them, spun into yarn, treated with a resin to bond them fibres together and impregnanted with a natural wool lanonlin to keep them supple.
Stössel knitted a glove from the yarn he made from the gelatine, and notices that the gelatine fibres were smoother than natural wool fibres, giving the gelatine fibres an attractive sheen. They fibres were also full of tiny hollows, which lend them the ability to insulate well. The only advantage the natural sheep’s wool fibre has is its water-resistance, but Stössel is working on ways of improving this.
-via Unconsumption
(Photo: Mike Burley/Telegaph Herald/AP)
Courtney Holmes, a barber in Dubuque, Iowa, wants to encourage kids to read. So if a child sits in his chair and reads a book to him, Holmes will cut the kid's hair--for free! He's offering this opportunity as part of a local back-to-school program. The Globe Gazette reports:
Tayshawn Kirby, 9, of Dubuque, read from "Fats, Oils and Sweets," by Carol Parenzan Smalley, informing Holmes that the average person eats 150 pounds of sugar each year. Before Tayshawn's 10-year-old brother, Titan Feeney, took his turn in the barber chair, he told his brother the new look was great.
"I just want to support kids reading," Holmes said.
Caitlin Daniels, grade-level reading coordinator with the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque, also helped struggling readers in the barber chair.
"It's great. All the kids, they want to have a good haircut to go back to school," she said. "They're paying through reading."
-via Daily of the Day
Bro, do you even nap? You'd better. You've got to look healthy. And that means sleep. And if you're not doing it to be well, then you need to sleep because the ladies love a well-rested man. If you know what I mean.
The comedy troupe Collective Noun imagines life if we took sleep as seriously as exercise. It reminds me to get around to reading Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness. I should stay up to make sure that I get that done.
-via Daily of the Day
A staff member of the TM'z Veterinary Clinic in Saskatchewan recently had the best possible flight safety demonstration on a WestJet plane. The flight attendant doesn't say a word. He doesn't have to. He's a master of physical comedy. Watch him induce laughter among the travelers with, at times, just his eyebrows!
-via Huffington Post
(Image: Lucasfilm)
Yes, that’s an image from the climactic trench run scene at the end of Star Wars. It’s not an error. That scene was inspired by the 1955 British war film The Dam Busters. That movie was a retelling of a real-life and truly extraordinary raid conducted by the Royal Air Force during World War II.
(Photo: Alan Gibson/New Zealand Herald/Associated Press)
Flight Lieutenant John Leslie Munro, the last of the heroes who participated in that daring strike at Germany’s industrial heartland, died on Monday at the age of 96.
This is so adorable!
In the 1942 Disney movie Bambi, the young deer is best friends with a little rabbit named Thumper. Now that sotry has come true. Volunteers at the Lula W. Dorsey Museum in Estes Park, Colorado recently recorded a fawn and rabbit playing together on the front lawn of the museum.
