About 30 years ago, Hello Kitty rose from Japan and took over the world. But she was just one of a long line of pop culture cats from Japan. Japanese legends and folklore are full of cats, such as Maneki Neko, the lucky waving cat. And to our delight, Japanese art going back hundreds of years documents these folklore cats. Bakeneko are cats that change into human form, or they can remain cats but speak like humans. They can even kill and take the identity of their owner! Nekomata are cats who live to be very old, and then split their tails in two and walk around on two legs. 

There are also cat witches and cats who may steal a corpse from a funeral. Don't miss the very charming story of the boy who drew cats. A post at Hanashi by Curious Ordinary also has recommendations for books and movies if you want to explore more on Japanese cats. And it has lots of lovely artworks. -via Everlasting Blort 

I saw this Honest Trailer for Freaky Friday posted today, and couldn't figure out why Screen Junkies would do an Honest Trailer for a YA movie from 2003. It turns out that a sequel called Freakier Friday opens this weekend, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, and Mark Harmon playing the same characters 22 years later. I guess there's an audience for this, since it's become an entire franchise.

Anyway, if you are going to see the new movie, you might want to go back to the original and refresh your memory first. Did I say original? There have actually been four movies with the title Freaky Friday, from 1976, 1995, 2003 and 2018. The Jamie Lee Curtis version was the biggest hit the the four, and the only one to warrant a sequel. The verdict from Screen Junkies: it's kind of dumb, and surprisingly racist for its time. Let's hope the geriatric version does better. 

Communication between pilots and air traffic control for international flights is almost always conducted in English. It makes sense to use the most common second language for communication. But it doesn't always work, especially when no one involved speaks English as their first language. A TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon to Nice crossed into France with a little problem on board- all the toilets were non-functional. Aware of the passengers' potential for distress, the pilots contacted air traffic control in Nice to request expedited landing. They didn't want to circle waiting for earlier planes to land if they could get permission to skip the line. 

However, this divergence from protocol involved several messages among quite a few people. In a radio transmission, the word "toilet" got confused for the word "pilot." The pilot's not working? It must be a medical emergency. What, you have no pilots? Then when the plane's crew tried to clarify, the control tower crew got the idea that the auto-pilot was non-functional. They put Nice Airport in a state of alert for the jet landing. Read an edited transcript or listen to a video to hear what went down in Nice.  We assume that the plane was able to land and let the passengers do their business. 

(Image credit: Siyuan He) 

English has a lot of words that people rarely use in general conversation, but they flourish in text. You may know a word for years and never hear it pronounced. One such word is "biopic," a movie that's the story of one person. Do you pronounce it BY-oh-pic or by-AH-pic? The word is short for biographical picture. Mental Floss argues that it is pronounced BY-oh-pic, and I have heard movie critics pronounce it that way, so I guess they are right. It used to be spelled with a hyphen: bio-pic. Still, the pronunciation by-AH-pic is what I've always heard in my head, and maybe you did, too.  

Then they go into why we mispronounce the word in our heads. It's an example of a misle, or a word with a spelling that doesn't make the pronunciation clear. English is full of them! When we encounter new words in print, we have a tendency to pronounce them like similarly spelled words that may have nothing to do with the word you are seeing. Read some common examples, and the varied reasons we hear them incorrectly in our heads at Mental Floss.

(Image generated with PhotoFunia) 

Millions of years ago, the grassland of North America was a brutal place. There were huge animals like rhinos, camels, horses, and elephants. And there were predators that evolved to take them down. These were canid borophagines, bone-crushing dogs. Borophagine species ranged from the size of a large coyote to larger than the biggest wolves, up to more than 300 pounds! They had short muzzles and massive teeth, and may have resembled hyenas. The borophagines consumed plenty of bone, but evidence from fossil feces show they weren't great at digesting them. Tearing through bones, however, was an efficient way for a pack to get its fill of a mastodon.  

The last of the borophagine species died out 1.8 million years ago, and were replaced by true canines that didn't crush bones, like coyotes. Wolves came even later. Saber-toothed cats hung around until about 10,000 years ago. So what happened to the borophagines? Read what we know about these ancient dogs at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Ghedoghedo) 

When Batman debuted in comics in 1939, his alter-ego Bruce Wayne was made a billionaire to explain how he had the remote location Batcave, the Batmobile, all kinds of technological wonders at his disposal, and the free time to fight crime in Gotham City. Readers had no real concept of a billionaire back then, except that they were rich. Now we have plenty of real billionaires in the news, sucking up resources and exerting power over our everyday lives. They give rich people a bad name, which just gets worse when we learn how they came to have more money than many national economies. That knowledge kind of puts a different light on Batman, don't you think? In this short video from Dorkly, Batman's usual nemeses -the Joker, the Riddler, Two-Face, and Mister Freeze- realize who the real villain is. The story is only 2:40; the rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Jim Ashworth-Beaumont is an orthotist at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital in London. He builds and fits prosthetic limbs and cares for patients using the devices, as he has since the 1990s. In a cruel twist of fate, he was riding his bicycle and was struck by a truck in 2020. The truck wheels sliced through his body and ripped his right arm off. Ashworth-Beaumont spent six weeks in a medically-induced coma as doctors saved his life by repairing his lungs and liver. The loss of an arm was a lower priority at the time. However, in another twist of fate, Ashworth-Beaumont's surgeon, Edmund Fitzgerald O’Connor, is a plastic surgeon who had been on the lookout for a patient to try a new type of prosthetic limb. 

Osseointegration is the process of implanting a titanium rod into an amputee's stump that can be attached to a prosthetic. The process is commonly used to implant teeth, and we have seen it used in animals. It has been used in people, but now bionics has progressed to allow osseointegration to be combined with electronic sensors to control a limb's movements with the patient's brain. Ashworth-Beaumont received his implant last October. Read his story at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting 

Children love to play with their food. Tula-Tu is no exception. The Asian elephant calf at the Oregon Zoo celebrated her 6-month birthday on Friday- or would you call that a half birthday? Either way, Tula-Tu would rather play than eat, so she kicked a birthday watermelon around as if she were training for the World Cup. It's all fun and games until Mom steps in to show her what a watermelon is really for. Tula-Tu is still nursing, but trying out regular foods one at a time. Watermelon may have to wait, at least until she is hungry enough to stop playing. She's already tripled her birth weight and is now 650 pounds. For a six-month-old, she's more accomplished than most of us, having appeared on national television more than once and serving as the Grand Marshall of the Rose Festival’s Grand Floral Parade. See more videos of Tula-Tu at Laughing Squid. 

A Chinese surgeon named Hua Tuo was born around 140 CE and became famous for his talents in compounding natural herbs into medicine. The most amazing of his creations was called mafeisan, a plant-based anesthetic. Administered as a drink, mafeisan would render a patient unconscious and numb enough to undergo serious surgery, such as resecting damaged intestines. The patient would awaken after 24 hours or so, and recover from the anesthetic in a few days. We don't know how accurate that is, since all accounts of Hua Tuo's work are from later, secondhand writing. Unfortunately, Hua Tuo fell out of favor with a warlord he had previously saved. The doctor's mafeisan recipe was lost when he was executed, and surgery in general fell out of favor in China. 

Much later in Japan, surgeon Hanaoka Seishū was inspired by Hua Tuo and spent decades developing an anesthetic called tsūsensan. In 1804, he performed a mastectomy on a cancer patient which is credited as the first documented surgery using general anesthesia. He went on to perform hundreds of surgical operations using tsūsensan, and taught his methods to medical students. Read about the development of surgical anesthesia before ether and chloroform at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Nat Krause) 

Tell us what you hate most about television shows these days, and Ryan George has that covered, plus a whole list of other annoyances that infest our screens. TV shows can exist on network TV, premium cable, streaming services, or just plain YouTube, and there's no way you can keep up with them all. And if someone convinces you their favorite show is worth a watch, you discover it's on a service you're not yet paying for. If it's a show that's been going awhile, you have to catch up. How long can you stay with it hoping it gets better? Or if you jump into a popular show in season three or four, you may notice that the writers have run out of ideas and the cast is getting bored -or getting hired away. Let's take a look at Plinker Donkle, the TV series that stands in for all of them.

This past Monday, Cécile Dionne (left) died at the age of 91. That leaves her sister Annette Dionne (right) as the sole surviving member of the Dionne quintuplets. While Annette has family members, her identical sisters were the only constant in her life. 

The Dionne Quintuplets were born on May 28, 1934, in a farmhouse near Callander, Ontario. They were the first quintuplets to survived infancy. The five sisters were born prematurely, so after first being warmed in a basket by the stove, antique baby incubators were shipped in because the house had no electricity to power modern versions. Their parents, Oliva and Elzire, already had five children and were desperately poor. To prevent the five girls from being exploited, the Canadian government took custody of them, and promptly exploited them. A nursery was built to house the quints, and soon was expanded to accommodate the thousands of people who flocked to see them. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were Canada's biggest tourist draw, eclipsing Niagara Falls for some time. 

Their parents fought to regain custody, only achieving that when the quints were nine years old. But they never felt integrated into the family, which by then included another three children. Émilie died in 1954, Marie in 1970, and Yvonne in 2001.  

 -via Fark 

These guys are the epitome of a certain engineering stereotype- young, bright, tech-savvy, and disconnected from normal life. They don't want to extend the effort of putting their garbage directly into the waste baskets, nor do they want to take out the trash. But instead of getting a larger trash can, they design and engineer waste baskets with cameras, motion sensors, servo motors, and wheels that will move to the spot where the trash is being flung. Yes, that's the equivalent of driving a hundred miles out of your way to avoid making a left turn. But while they are impressing you with their clever technology, they are also quite funny, and that makes the whole project worthwhile. 

Once their labor achieved a waste basket that will follow you around and position itself under the garbage you are dropping, they went ahead and outfitted all the waste baskets with different kinds of high tech silliness. Being a mother who wanted to shake these young men for their sanitation habits, my favorite is the can that wants to destroy you for not throwing away your own trash. -via Born in Space 

A woman with a 20-year psychiatric history began taking an immunosuppressant. Suddenly, her seeming schizophrenia vanished. https://t.co/AHKtnfI9U8

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) July 28, 2025

Schizophrenia is the condition that divided psychiatry and neurology. Neurologists can find brain cancer and other physical conditions and psychiatric drugs and therapy can help many mental illnesses, but schizophrenia was considered an incurable lifelong condition that can at best be controlled by drugs, but only in some patients. Worst of all, no one knew what caused it. However, there is a growing awareness that some patients labeled as schizophrenic may be suffering from an autoimmune disorder. Occasionally, a person with schizophrenia is treated for another illness, and drugs meant to suppress the immune system actually cure the delusions. Mary was one of them. After more than 20 years of delusions, she emerged from treatment for leukemia with no psychiatric symptoms at all. 

The good news is that there are pilot programs designed to identify schizophrenia patients who could benefit from immunotherapy. But there's still the question of how someone with many years of delusions in their past can reintegrate with family, friends, and the world once they have been cured. Mary's daughters didn't feel they knew their mother at all after the delusions were gone. Mary herself doesn't know how to confront her years of insanity and her behavior as her children were growing up. Read her story and the potential of immunotherapy for schizophrenia in an article from The New Yorker. -via Strange Company 

You haven't thought about cream soda in a long time, even if you drink a variety of sodas. You don't see cream sodas in stores much at all. If you were to think about them, it would be to wonder why they are called cream sodas, since there is no cream or even milk in them. The name itself seems to work against the drink's popularity. If you've had one, you might think that the reason it's not popular is because it's too darn sweet. Like that ever stopped any other soft drink. 

But vanilla-flavored cream soda was once very popular, especially at soda fountains where it was mixed up on the spot. With the rise of bottled and canned sodas, every regional bottler had their own version of cream soda. It declined in the latter half of the 20th century for various reasons explained by Tom Blank of Weird History Food. Cream soda is still around, although its main draw these days is the nostalgia factor. But watch out- the nostalgia factor is gaining ground because people in troubled times go for comfort foods from their childhoods, and drinks, too.  

Artist Kate Bingaman-Burt is always delighted when she sees one of these charming hand-painted signs screwed to a telephone pole around town. Whenever she shared an image of one of them on Instagram, people responded with similar delight. She finally decided to text the business number and ask who painted the signs. She got a response from Landon, who cleans roofs, home exteriors, gutters, and patios, who said he paints all his own signs. That led to a long back-and-forth about the signs, and the two got to know each other.

Bingaman-Burt organized their texts into an interview. We find out more about Landon and the joy he gets from painting his signs (they get stolen a lot). The story is not just about one man who not only cleans but also gives color to Portland, but about how two friendly people who are complete strangers can reach out over something that may seem small, but ends up bringing joy to the rest of us. -via Metafilter