This 4-month old puppy, Emy, found a butterfly in her yard in Brazil. Her humans report that the two played together for over an hour. Such is bliss.

-via Nag on the Lake

Sadly, this product is not widely available yet. It's a one-off created by a friend of Twitter user Danimal Cannon after he joked about pickling cucumbers in Monster Energy drink. Let us hope that the Monster Beverage Corporation seizes upon this brilliant idea and puts these pickles on grocery store shelves all over the world.

-via Super Punch

I don't want my cat to see the bedroom of Michael's Cat lest I get tasked with building a private room for him. The room has all of the essentials: a bed, a rug, art hanging on the wall, and a TV monitor. I don't see a door to ensure privacy, but we can assume that's a work in progress.

-via Super Punch

David Butler would rather not appear in his fiancée's Zoom meetings. Or, perhaps, his fiancée would prefer that he not show up. Either way, he donned a morph suit that Zoom will use to digitally remove him from the background as he passes by.

-via Geekologie

It's like that scene in Starman: red light means stop. Green light means go. Yellow light means go very fast.

Florida Man, the alien living among us, decided that he didn't have time to wait until the drawbridge in Daytona Beach closed again. As it rose, he gunned the engine and was briefly airborne as the two halves of the bridge separated.

-via Dave Barry

At approximately 8.2 feet on an edge, this massive Rubik's Cube is the largest in the world. And it's not a sculpture on display, but playable. This enormous puzzle is located in a mall in Hong Kong, where enterprising players begin solving it at the 1:45 mark. You can watch some of the construction process at the 3:47 mark.

-via Technabob

A gravity clock slowly rolls down an inclined plane. The turning motion powers the clock. To reset it, move it back to the top of the platform. Physics Fun explains:

As the clock rolls down the incline (here 12 hours are captured in time-lapse of 24 seconds), gravitational potential energy is translated into the kinetic energy of the moving clock gear train and oscillating balance wheel. The clock face and mechanism hang suspended with a counterweight that keeps them upright- although you might notice the mechanism of this vintage clock sticks a little at 7 o’clock. The clock unit is also quite heavy, weighing in at 2.7kg (6lbs). After some research I believe this clock was produced in China about 50 years ago. 

-via reddit

With slight, precise, carefully-timed taps of his hammer, Simon Berger cracks glass so that the fracture lines depict vibrant faces. Five years into his exploration of this medium, Berger has already astonished exhibition visitors with the beauty of shattered glass. He described to My Modern Met how his first experiments lead to joy through a new type of art:

I was immediately enthusiastic about this possibility because I was always striving to find a new form of representation. I like creating beautiful things through destruction.

In this video from last year, you can see Berger at work creating one of his enormous glass portraits.

Once upon a time, wax seals were an important form of identification. Messy Nessy Chic introduces us to some of the more elaborate and elegant seal making tools from past centuries, such as this Victorian wheel that allows a user to choose from a variety of symbols to press into wax. Each intaglio--the carved gem--conveys a different sentiment to the reader.

Perhaps, like letter writing, sentiment could move us moderns to experiment with this ancient, deeply personal practice.

Photo: Antique Boutique

Peter Waldraff's N gauge scale model railroad diorama is a masterpiece of precision craftsmanship, electrical engineering, furniture making, and creative problem solving. The result of his inventing and labors is a tabletop that converts into a three-season display of a train moving through the mountains.

And Waldraff isn't done yet! He plans to make the device WiFi-enabled so that he can control it from a phone. That will make demonstrations even more amazing.

-via Gizmodo

Fionnán O'Connor is a respected historian of Irish whiskey. He has not only consumed a lot of it, but has carefully studied its production over the centuries. For this doctoral program at Technological University Dublin, he has revived many old whiskeys from "mashbills", which are lists of ingredients that distillers used. Irish Central quotes him about the project:

"We’re talking to ghosts by distilling these mashbills again," O'Connor said. 

"The mashbills chosen are creating a map, a language about how all these things might have worked," he said. 

"The bulk of these mashbills haven’t been tasted in over 70 years and the earliest ones I’ve found come from the early 1800s.

"It would be a shame if all that history and those flavors were lost. This project has been about making up for lost time." 

-via Atlas Obscura | Image: Boann Distillery

Oh, so two actors on The Bold and the Beautiful are getting close, moving in for a kiss. How do they do that and maintain COVID-19 protocols?

No, wait, that's not an actress. That's a mannequin. What the heck is going on here?

Russian inventor Eduard Luzyanin took a 150cc scooter engine and tracks from a snowmobile to invent the Hamster. Three pairs of shock absorbers help ease the ride, although steering it is hard: all the rider can do is lean into turns to shift directions. But it can move as quickly as 27 MPH.

Luzyanin has equipped his ultimate commuter vehicle for hard conditions. There's a gas can mounted on the back, as well as survival tools and 49 feet of rope. I can't wait for this to hit the American market!

-via Core 77

Webcams can be so impersonal. Why not make them more realistic? That's what Marc Teyssier, a researcher at Saarland University has done. His Eyecam is a "design fiction prototype" for a new type of webcam and watches you constantly, moving and blinking in realistic fashion. It even even changes expression as it passes judgment upon you. Thus Eyecam is a warning about the future:

Sensing devices are everywhere, up to the point where we become aware of their presence.

-via The Awesomer

It's hard enough to keep up with an ever-growing list of passwords with increasingly complex requirements. How would a medieval peasant manage? Alasdair Beckett-King, a comedian and screenwriter, suggests an answer: poorly.

-via Laughing Squid