Animals of the Namib desert in Namibia flock to a waterhole in the Gondwana Namib Park, and you can follow them anytime with a dedicated live stream. At five this morning (11AM in Namibia), I watched some wildebeests, a litter of young warthogs, and an ostrich hanging around. This particular waterhole was built in 2006 and is connected to a reservoir with a solar-powered borehole, equipped with a float to signal a refill when the water level drops. That reliability ensures that animals will show up to get a drink, since the size of the hole matters little when it's always filled. The park is adjacent to the Namib Naukluft Park, and there are no fences, so animals can roam over 21,830 square miles of reserved land.

In the video compilation above, you'll see how the animals take their turns at a drink depending on species. If one species takes too long, they may be chased off so that others can drink. Sometimes a fight breaks out, like when an ostrich challenges an antelope. When the cheetahs gather, all the prey animals move back a respectful distance to watch until the coast is clear. The leopard arrives at night. All of them hope to get a drink before the warthogs take a bath.

If you like the compilation, you'll want to check on the livestream during different parts of the day to see what's going on in Namibia. Since the park relies on ecotourism, you may sometimes catch a human on camera. The live discussion to the right will identify animals as they arrive. -Thanks, gwdMaine!

Every new discovery in science adds to the body of knowledge we've built up about our world. But science as a philosophy must also be open to the possibility that we've been reading the clues wrong, and be ready to change gears when needed. In the field of archaeozoology, ancient horses have been unearthed to tell the story of when and where horses were first domesticated. That act enabled people to travel long distances, which led to exploration, trade, war, and conquest. Our history would have been quite different without the the use of the horse.

The prevailing theory for the last few decades has been that horses were first domesticated in Kazakhstan by the Botai culture in the fourth millennium BC. The bones of horses from that era and area seem to show evidence of using a bit in their teeth, and the horses may have been milked for human consumption. But you can't stop studying a question just because you think you know the answer. More recent research, using DNA, has thrown a bit of cold water on the theory. As of now, it seems more likely that horses were actually domesticated a couple of thousand years later, although still somewhere on the steppes of central Asia. Read what the evidence shows and how scientists have had to reconsider their conclusions at the Conversation.      

(Image credit: Togzhan Ibrayeva)

Why would Screen Junkies go back 36 years to do an Honest Trailer for Beetlejuice? Because the sequel is finally going to hit theaters this weekend. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will bring back Michael Keaton, Catherine O'Hara, and Wynona Ryder, but not Alec Baldwin nor Geena Davis. It premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on August 28th, and so far has garnered "generally favorable" reviews from critics. That could mean anything, since the original received mixed reviews and became a beloved cultural touchstone. Still, it's hard for any sequel to measure up to the original. The 1988 Tim Burton horror-comedy was ultra bizarre and beyond the realm of believability, but that was the point. It was a lot of fun! If the new movie can offer that kind of fun, that's all that matters. This Honest Trailer will remind you of what Beetlejuice is all about and give you an anchor for comparison when you see the sequel this weekend.

In 1920, Chandra Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana was the autocratic ruler of Nepal, having inherited the title in a family that overthrew the government decades before (he had actually deposed his brother). Rana ruled with an iron hand, and decreed that all books had to be approved by a government board before publishing. In this atmosphere, Krishna Lal Adhikari, an official in the Office of Foreign Affairs, wrote a book about growing corn, titled Makaiko Kheti (The Cultivation of Maize). He submitted the book to the Nepali Language Publication Committee, which may have skimmed through it. After all, how exciting can an agricultural manual be? The book was approved, Adhikari had a thousand copies printed, and it became a popular read.

Allies reported the book to Rana, and he was furious. Tucked into the manual for corn farming were some metaphors that could be taken to refer to Rana and his political allies. Or they might have been completely benign. It did not help that Adhikari was a known free speech advocate. He was arrested, and ordered to turn over all copies of the book- his sentence would depend on it. Adhikari rounded up 999, but could never find the last book. He contracted tuberculosis in prison and died before his sentence was up.

What could have possibly been in a book about raising corn that was so politically objectionable? No copies have existed for a hundred years. But there are some examples of what Rana found to be critical of his government that would only be decipherable if you were looking for them. Read those, and the story of how Adhikari became a literary martyr, at Amusing Planet. 

The question that came into Randall Munroe's What If? series (previously at Neatorama) specifically asked if a human could survive a nanosecond on the sun if he were teleported there and back instantly. That glosses over the danger of approaching and leaving the sun, because a human couldn't survive long enough to get near the surface if traveling in a conventional manner. But a nanosecond is a billionth of a second, and a millisecond is a thousandth of a second, so this question deserved to be explored. You'd want to know what to expect before you embark on such a mission, if it were at all possible. The surface of the sun is a few thousand degrees, which is pretty darn hot. The interior of the sun is much hotter, so your teleportation machine would have to calibrated just so. Just to be safe, if you want to teleport somewhere to warm yourself up, make it the Seychelles, and stay longer than a nanosecond.

We know that color perception is an individual matter. We will never be able to look through someone else's eyes, but we can test how people label colors compared to each other. The language we use for colors affects these tests greatly, as color names vary over time and by culture. The site Is My Blue Your Blue? offers a test to see how you label shades of blue. Your screen will show a color, and you click on your opinion at the bottom. The shades will get closer and closer until your perception can be plotted on a graph along with the results of others taking the test. This test only distinguishes blue from green; now I want to try this with other colors. My results ranged from 174 to 177, depending on the time of day. Others say it also depends on your screen, the lighting in the room, and whether you have undergone cataract surgery.

By the way, if it tells you that turquoise is green to you, remember that is just a color sample, and has nothing to do with the rock. I have both green and blue turquoise jewelry. -via Metafilter

It will be hard to pick a winner in this dance off, but who cares as long as you enjoy it? You know Australian dancer Smac McCreanor as the viral dancer who interprets the dance moves of animals and inanimate objects alike. That's the very essence of "interpretive dance." This time she's emulating an actual dancer! Darwin the parrot is a superstar on TikTok for his smooth dance moves to all kinds of music. Could a human do better? Smac wanted to find out if she can dance as well as the parrot, and I believe she does. But you'll have to watch twice to see, because I couldn't take my eyes off Darwin the first time I watched this video. Smac has been following Darwin's videos for some time, working out all the moves for the TikTok audience. This video is a compilation of those efforts so far, but there will most likely be more in the future.

I've sometimes used the sad but common adage "there is no problem that can't be solved by throwing enough money at it." I'm sure you have seen that played out in real life, but Howard Hughes had enough money to make his everyday annoyances disappear, and he did not hesitate to do it. When he moved into the Desert Inn in Las Vegas in 1966, the innkeeper was annoyed that he stayed through the holidays. Hughes solved that problem by buying the hotel for $13.25 million.

Hughes rarely left his room, because by the 1960s, he was a chronic pain patient, suffering from addiction, OCD, and paranoia. He didn't sleep at night, and he was frustrated that his favorite TV station, CBS affiliate KLAS, signed off at 11 PM. So did the other TV stations. What was a billionaire to do? He bought KLAS. Not only did the station begin broadcasting overnight, but Hughes treated it as his personal movie projector. The problem was that the CBS station also had plenty of regular folks in Las Vegas watching, and what Hughes demanded from the station was chaos for everyone else. Read about Howard Hughes' personally programmed TV station at Mental Floss.

We love to laugh at medieval bestiaries, with their odd images drawn by clueless artists from secondhand descriptions and the accompanying text that appears to be based on assumptions swallowed whole or just made up on the spot. You can have a never-ending supply of these with the generator called An Abundance of Beasts. The images and text are drawn from Medieval Bestiary: Animals In The Middle Ages website and from the 13th-century book Bodleian Library Bestiary.  

But be aware that the image and text are not linked. Sometimes you get an animal with a description that could plausibly be about the animal pictured, even though we all know the description is very wrong. They all are. But sometimes they are so different you cannot help but laugh. Once you've seen a fair amount of these, you'll want to go check out the sources, too. -via Nag on the Lake  

Mila is a Maine coon cat that was rescued from a breeder who was also an animal hoarder. She looked like a worn out cat, but she was only four years old. That's what happens when a cat has too many litters of kittens at a young age. Mila was underweight and had rotten teeth, and was scared of all the changes that happened when Katie Cats Sims took her in. It took a lot of time and love, but that skinny, frightened, worn out cat turned into a lovely queen with luxuriant fur and a Maine coon stare that charms everyone.

Still, she lost her teeth. Now, a cat with no teeth is much better off than a cat with rotten teeth. Cats rarely chew their food, and will adapt to being toothless just fine in most cases. I have two elderly cats with very few teeth left, and they eat well. Katie Cats Sims fosters rescued kittens, and Mila has turned out to be an excellent foster mom. She gets to love on the kittens without the stress of giving birth to them, so it all works out. You can see more of Mila and her roommates at Instagram.

Mattel's Hot Wheels toy line has long offered 1/64 scale models of existing cars. Sure, they're toys, but adults collect them, and even people who aren't collectors like to have a Hot Wheels version of their real car. It's pretty hard to find a realistic Hot Wheels replica if your car is a beater with some obvious damage, or if it is up on concrete blocks in your back yard. A new limited edition fills that gap. Behold the Hot Wheels x MSCHF Not Wheels.

Mattel launched a project called Mattel Creations, for which the toy company partners with other companies to create toys for adult collectors. This one is a collaboration with art collective MSCHF (previously at Neatorama). The Not Wheels car has two mismatched regular tires, one mini-spare, and one missing tire. The rest of the car sports bangs and dents, mismatched replacement parts, and in-progress repairs. You might also recognize some once-cool accessories left over from your younger years. See all the details of the Not Wheels car at the Autopian. Unfortunately, the Hot Wheels x MSCHF Not Wheels sold out within minutes of its release, and will probably be seen for premium prices on eBay soon.

Ken Shirriff saw an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art titled Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction and saw the the Navajo woven tapestry shown above by Marilou Schultz. The pattern looked strangely familiar to him, and he realized it was the image of Intel's Pentium chip. The incongruity of the traditional art of Navajo weaving and a Pentium chip spurred Shirriff to look up the artist. Schultz tells us a bit about the intricate process of Navajo weaving, which can take all day to progress one inch in a masterpiece. Schultz is both a Navajo weaver and a math teacher, so she completely understood the assignment when Intel commissioned the work as a gift to the American Indian Science & Engineering Society.

However, the relationship between the art and the industry led Shirriff to learn about the rise of integrated circuit and semiconductor processing in New Mexico in the 20th century. Tech manufacturers recognized the value of the fine motor skills honed by Navajo weavers, mostly women, and the Navajo recognized the value of job creation in New Mexico. The relationship between the various companies and their workers did not always work to the benefit of both, as you will learn in Shirriff's research that began with Shultz's artwork. It's a fascinating read, even if you have to skim over the most technical parts. -via Metafilter

We are familiar with the term "gaslighting," where a nefarious character tries to convince a victim that they are going insane. In this story, the poor fellow who can't pass a Captcha test starts to think he's losing his mind. Those things can be quite maddening at times to the point you suspect they were designed by robots who have no idea what they're doing. But his co-workers seize the opportunity to convince him that he's not insane; he's actually a robot and never realized it before! Their methods are horrifyingly clever. Surely, you recall the moment you were born, don't you?

You can almost see this guy seeing his therapist afterward, with a story so weird that he might be referred for psychiatric tests. The more likely result is that his therapist would get a good laugh out if it. Yeah, as if someone working at Tech Town could afford to see a therapist. This nonsense comes to you from Viva La Dirt League.

It's September, and that means comic artist Sarah Andersen will be swinging into high gear for spooky season. "Spooky season" was once just Halloween, but became so popular it spread through the month of October. After all, there are a lot of horror films to watch! But that's not enough, so September has been reined in as part of spooky season, too. Anyway, Andersen has brought out the monsters.



I know the cephalopod at the top at an Eldritch meeting would be Cthulhu, but I'm not all that familiar with an antlered skull wearing glasses. But in Andersen's latest comic, he's back to learn what monster love is all about.   



I, for one, am looking forward to this terrifying yet lovable creature being a recurring character. You can follow Andersen's work at her webpage Sarah's Scribbles, or at Instagram.

The megalodon makes a great monster for Shark Week and scary movies, even though they died out millions of years ago. These sharks could get as big as a tennis court -over 60 feet long! And since we marvel at how vast and how deep the oceans are, and how we've never been able to explore most of it because it's just that big, we can tell ourselves that there may be a megalodon or two lurking where we cannot see, just like colossal squid. But yes, they really really are extinct. Besides that, a megalodon wouldn't even bother with eating humans, because they needed something substantial to eat, like whales.

Shark scientist Jaida Elcock of MIT addresses the question of how and why megalodon became the largest shark ever. How they can tell so much about an extinct fish just from the teeth they left behind is fascinating. There's a one-minute skippable ad at 4:37