Scientists have found fossil remains of quite a few human species, with the caveat that "species" is still not quite defined. How different from modern humans does a hominid have to be to get a different species designation? A type of human fossil found in Israel 100 years ago is called Homo sapiens, but these people were different from modern humans in several ways. They used tools, wore jewelry, and buried their dead in graveyards. They may have traded with other communities. But anatomically, they seemed to be a transitional species or a missing link between modern humans and earlier species. Were they an ancestor of Homo sapiens in the evolutionary tree? No, because they arose and died out long after Homo sapiens was already flourishing elsewhere. They were more like a cousin to modern humans. Some now call them an archaic version of humans.

Later, these archaic Homo sapiens were found in far-flung parts of Africa, but the remains still dated to after the debut of modern humans. Research on these archaic humans highlights how many holes there are in the fossil record when it comes to the human family tree. Read about the skulls of archaic Homo sapiens at Aeon.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Wapondaponda)

Ryan George titled this video "If Red Carpet Interviews Were Honest," but I feel it's a distillation of the different facets of the business of celebrities. One pseudo-celebrity is interviewing other celebs as they march into an awards show in a carefully choreographed way designed to fill the airwaves with hours of chitchat. Just slot in the details of whoever is hot right now for the generic patter, and you've got a set of Mad Libs going. Why are you here? To promote my new project or else to remind everyone I exist. Who are you wearing? That's both a required question and a required answer because it's an ad for whoever is providing the clothing. Next time you are tempted to actually watch a live red carpet event (if that ever happens), you'll have to laugh at how generic they really are, and how much acting goes into them.

On May 18th, 1927, a series of bombings took place in Bath Township, Michigan. Before the day was over, 45 people were dead, including several school administrators, two teachers, and 38 children in grades two through six. A bombing blew up several buildings on a farm, where Nellie Kehoe was found dead. At almost exactly the same time, an explosion in the basement at Bath Consolidated School brought down the school's north wing. Soon after, a truck exploded, killing five more people, including a second grader and the man who planted the explosives, Andrew Kehoe.

Kehoe had spent months planning the massacre, buying explosives a little at a time until he had enough. During the investigation, another 500 pounds of explosives were found in the south wing of the school. If they had exploded, the death toll could have doubled. Read what led up to Kehoe's murderous plan and how he carried out the Bath School Massacre at Danny Dutch. -via Strange Company

"Jargon" refers to language that only means something to a specific group of people, such as a workplace. When it has something to do with that work, it functions perfectly well and rarely escapes into family or social life. Still, some phrases that turn out to be particularly useful get adopted into the greater world. Then there's corporate jargon, which has evolved into a whole dictionary of phrases that mean pretty much nothing, but it does pad the conversation out. We are inundated with corporate jargon that is designed to be vague and noncommittal, often as a way to give plausible deniability or else cover the fact that your supervisor just doesn't know what he's talking about. Master a good amount of corporate jargon, and you can talk for hours and still not say anything useful.

Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) explains how this language evolved from regular workplace talk, and why it is so frustrating whether you understand it or not.  -via Geeks are Sexy

Johan Helberg of Trondheim, Norway, was awakened when he heard someone knocking at his door at 5 AM Thursday, but he didn't want to get up to open it. Only when the neighbor outside called his phone did he learn that the bow of a huge container ship was just feet from his front door! The 135-meter (446 feet) NCL Salten had run aground as if it were aiming for Helberg's house.

"It's a very bulky new neighbor but it will soon go away," Helberg said.

No one was injured in the incident and no cargo was spilled, but the ship damaged a heating pipe in Helberg's cabin. Removing the ship has been delayed while an investigation is carried out. The shipping company said that the same ship had run aground twice before, in 2023 and 2024. There is no word yet on what caused the ship to run aground this time, but one might think it's become a habit.  -via Fark

Long ago, people said that cats should never be allowed near babies because they would snatch the baby's breath away. Later on, I heard that cats who appear to be doing that are just investigating a baby's mouth because it smells like milk. That makes sense. Now, after a lot of experience with cats and babies, I realize that cats know what human babies are, and find them attractive the same way people find infants of all species adorable.

Amanda got a tuxedo kitten and named him Sushi. Sushi likes Amanda, but absolutely loves baby Xiomora. Double squee! Sushi learned quickly how to climb into the crib and despite his young age, he became her guardian angel. They spend so much time together that Sushi knew immediately when Xiomora became ill. And even afterward, Amanda knows when Xiomora's diaper needs to be changed, because that's the only time Sushi leaves her side.

When I was a young adult, my dad would always ask if I'd checked my oil lately. I'd been reading a dipstick since I was too young to drive, along with other car maintenance tasks he taught me. But all these years later, I realize I have never looked for a dipstick in my current car. Not only do I get regular oil changes, but the car itself will nag me to get one when odometer reaches the recommended interval. Does it even have a dipstick?

Fewer and fewer new car models come with a dipstick at all. Instead, they have a warning on the screen if your oil level gets low. It's all run by the car's internal computer. Sure, it's a modern convenience, but internal auto computers can have their own problems, and can even stop performing some tasks. Drivers with no dipsticks have encountered problems with ever more complicated systems. Read about the death of the dipstick and what could possibly go wrong at Jalopnik.

(Image credit: Environmental Protection Agency)

We are all familiar with Medusa, the mythological Gorgon with snakes for hair and the ability to turn men to stone just by making eye contact. But how much do you know about her backstory? In ancient Greek mythology, she was a straightforward monster that needed to be killed for the safety of humankind. But in a later retelling by the Roman poet Ovid, Medusa started out as a perfectly normal young woman who was raped and then blamed for it. Her punishment turned her into a monster in more ways than one, first by making her a Gorgon, then by hate, shunning, and the quest to murder her. Ovid's story is tragic, and some might say cautionary, but much richer with the themes of trauma and injustice. In this TED-Ed lesson from historian and archaeologist Laura Aitken-Burt, we get an animated version of Ovid's Medusa story. -via Geeks Are Sexy

It was a great day when tracking animals went from finding them embedded with arrows to putting bands on their legs. Now an even less burdensome method is being tested to track an endangered species.

The Welsh water vole was once found across Wales, but now is limited to a few small populations, making them almost extinct. Studying these creatures is a problem, because they are small, shy, and can be mistaken for rats. Scientists want to track water voles to find their preferred habitats so that efforts can be made to accommodate them. But how to find them? Maybe the answer is glitter.

An experiment was conducted on some Welsh water voles raised in captivity. They were fed edible purple glitter smeared on apples in the hopes that they would produce sparkly poop. Finding glittery poop in the wild would help conservationists determine where the voles have been even when they don't want to be seen. The test was deemed successful when sparkly purple poop appeared. The next step is feeding glitter to wild voles. The real challenge will be to feed voles without feeding other wild species as well. -via Metafiler

(Image credit: Peter Trimming)

Actor George Wendt passed away yesterday at age 76. Wendt appeared in several TV shows and quite a few movies, but he was best known for his role as Norm Peterson on the sitcom Cheers, which ran from 1982 to 1993. Norm was the bar's most loyal customer, and Wendt earned six consecutive Emmy nominations for the role. He appeared in all 275 episodes. Norm's nightly entrance into the bar was a reliable running gag on the show. He enters on the left and is greeted by all. Someone asks how he's doing as he makes his way to the far end of the bar, and is rewarded with a one-liner. This video is a compilation of every one of those scenes in chronological order. It's 18 minutes long, since it covers eleven years, but you can come back to it later if you want to see them all. The plot remains the same throughout. -via Laughing Squid

Slovak engineer Stefan Klein scooted ahead of companies working on prototype helicopter hybrids and electric flying machines to bring his AirCar through testing and certification in Slovakia. It is scheduled to go into mass production this summer, the world's first flying car to do so. The AirCar will be manufactured by Klein Vision and is expected to be available in early 2026. This vehicle looks like a large expensive sports car, with wings that unfold at the touch of a button. It uses an old-fashioned gasoline engine, and requires a runway of about 300 meters (984 feet).

That doesn't mean the skies will be full of flying cars anytime soon. To use the AirCar, operators must be both licensed drivers and licensed pilots. And the cost of an AirCar will be between $800,000 and a million dollars. That means you and I will be safely relegated to the ground while millionaires fly overhead. However, you might want to keep an eye out for when these bigwigs crash into each other directly above you. Read about the AirCar and see a video clip at ZME Science. -via Real Clear Science

(Image credit: Klein Vision)

When we first heard about the live-action remake of the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was suddenly a lot of hype, and a lot of criticism for all kinds of reasons: the casting, the CGI dwarfs, the opposing political opinions of its stars, and of course, the usual rants about the wisdom of producing live-action remakes when we already have perfectly good animated classics. When the movie finally opened a couple of months ago, after a year's delay, you didn't hear much. Oh, it made money, but not enough to cover its costs, and Snow White became the biggest box office bomb so far this year. The reviews were mixed, but the bad ones were scathing. Critics liked Rachel Zegler's performance and hated everything else. Since you might not have seen it, Screen Junkies is here to explain what went wrong with Snow White in this Honest Trailer.   

Argentinian developer Max Comperatore built a website that tracks how many people are engaged in common activities round the world. What The Hell Are People Doing uses estimated statistics from a number of sources to calculate global activities. At the top you'll see how many people are being born, how many are dying, and how many people are watching the stats. Underneath is a list of the things they are doing right now. Sleeping is at the top, which makes sense because we all do it for multiple hours every day. Family care and paid work follow, with half the world's population doing one of these three things. Nice to know that 1.34% of the world is in the bathroom right now. While the activities may change up and down the list, at the bottom I see that more people are making love than are making war. There isn't a category for being online, but you can imagine a large part of entertainment, shopping, paid work, and socializing is done online. Watching these numbers change can be mesmerizing. -via Metafilter

Capuchin monkeys have been caught abducting baby howler monkeys — and no one knows exactly why. Scientists are baffled. See the first-time footage: https://t.co/DsmdRbMhOT

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) May 19, 2025

Scientists studying capuchin monkeys in Panama have discovered that they use stone tools to perform certain tasks. That's pretty amazing, but they also discovered a disturbing habit among young male capuchins -stealing babies from another species! Checking years of video, they found that this kidnapping goes back to January of 2022, when a capuchin named Joker took an infant howler monkey and walked around with it for days. Over time, other young males started taking howler monkey infants. These capuchins didn't interact with the babies much, and couldn't feed them, so some of the infants died, while others were abandoned after a few days and retrieved by their mothers.

It's not the first time social "trends" have been found spreading among juvenile male capuchin monkeys. There was a time when these monkeys found it cool to stick their fingers up another monkey's nose, and for a time they played a game of hiding things from each other in their mouths. Maybe the fad of kidnapping howler monkey infants will die out in time. Read about the discovery and the possible motivations behind it at Smithsonian.

Dante Brown's Saab broke down on Interstate 610 in Houston. Instead of calling a tow truck, he called his girlfriend to come and tow the car. She brought her Ford Expedition, but had no towing equipment outside of a single chain. They attached the chain to the rear axle of the Saab, which is the last thing you should do, and set off down the highway. The axle soon broke, and as Brown overcompensated in his steering, the car fishtailed wildly across several lanes! Brown was obviously not in communication with his girlfriend in the SUV, and she appeared to be oblivious to the mayhem going on behind her. Or was she? Some witnesses even reported she was laughing. 

Police eventually caught up with the pair. No tickets were issued for the traffic incident, but Brown was arrested on an outstanding warrant. Next time, call a tow truck.  -via Born in Space