The movie Cocaine Bear is fiction, because we know that the real bear the story is based on died pretty quickly from consuming cocaine. But could a bear who drank 69 cans of soda pop go on a caffeine and sugar-fueled rampage? People near Earls Cove, British Columbia, might want to be on the lookout. That's where a bear broke into Sharon Rosel's car and helped himself to a ton of soda while Rosel could do nothing but watch. The bear spent an hour and a half biting off the tops of pop cans and drinking the contents. He started with the Orange Crush and went through them until he came to the diet sodas, then quit. Even wild bears have their standards.

The beast left Rosel's car a mess, tearing up the leather upholstery, breaking off the door handle, and of course, spilling soda all over everything. -via Damn Interesting

Dr. Christina Hartmann, Ph.D. and Dr. Michael Siegrist, Ph.D. of the Technical University of Zurich developed the Food Disgust Scale to study what makes people shy away from certain foods. They've also launched the IDRlabs Food Disgust Sensitivity Test so that you can identify your own triggers for deciding what not to eat. In 32 questions, the test will measure your disgust on the eight parameters seen in the graphic above. These are my test results, which show my food disgust is in the average range at 45.38%. No surprises here. However, I don't really find seafood disgusting as long as it's someone else who eats it. I just don't like fish or seafood. You can see I'll eat fruit no matter how disgusting it is, but that may come from having to wait until it's overripe because of dental problems. (TMI?)

So the short test doesn't control for some foods that you just don't like, or just don't eat because you're vegetarian or follow religious restrictions. And I would agree that there should be some component of texture, since that's a trigger for food disgust among a lot of people. Many of the questions could be answered with "It depends..." and while the desktop version has a slider for the degree of agreement, the mobile version requires a yes or no. But the test may give you an overall look at your own food disgust profile as compared to others. -via Metafilter

Here's something you would probably never notice on your own- soda cans in Hawaii are different from all other soda cans. That may be the case even if you've been to Hawaii a few times and had soda. To find out why, you are going to learn more about soda cans than you ever thought you would, from Half as Interesting. The reasons have to do with the confluence of product design, raw materials, shipping, and most of all economies of scale. Everything in the manufacturing industry has to do with economies of scale, where tiny little tradeoffs are made and the value of long-term investments must be compared to the value of short-term investments. The difference is also because Hawaii is unique, and that's what we love about it, even if you've never noticed the difference in their soda cans.

This video is a minute shorter than its length would indicate. -via Laughing Squid

When Ruth Handler introduced her fashion doll Barbie, she was an instant hit. Barbie was a glamorous young fashion model, and every little girl wanted to be like her. in 1963, she got a best friend named Midge. But Midge wasn't glamorous at all. She seemed to be designed as second best, in order to not steal Barbie's thunder. And she had weird eyes. What little girl would want a Midge doll for a friend when you could just as easily get two Barbies? Midge was discontinued in 1967. But she was brought back again and again, with no better results. Once Midge came back pregnant, with a husband and a son, but her popularity didn't take off no matter what Mattel did to her.

This is all coming back because Midge is a character in the new live-action movie Barbie ready to land in July. She and her husband Allan are the only characters in the film that aren't some iteration of Barbie or Ken. Will Midge finally find her spot in the sun? It's doubtful. Read the tragic history of Midge and her unceasing unpopularity at Buzzfeed News.  -via Digg 

In 1861, 25-year-old Samuel Clemens answered the call of Missouri's governor to step up and defend his home state. This was governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, a Confederate sympathizer who was forced out of office in July of that year. Missouri never officially seceded from the Union, and its men joined both the Union and Confederate armies. The young man who would later become Mark Twain joined a Confederate unit. However, his "unit" was made up of men who didn't really know anything about the military.

In all, the famed author’s two-week stint as a soldier in the Civil War largely amounted to him larping as a Confederate.

Twain didn't see much action before he gave up and went to stay with his sister in St. Louis, and then headed off to Nevada. But the experience gave him something to write about later as a comedy of errors. His unit tried to retreat once and realized they didn't even know how to do that. Read about Twain's short but comical military service at Historynet.  -via Damn Interesting

Once upon a time, the Cook pine tree (Araucaria columnaris) was only found on New Caledonia in the Pacific. But over the last couple of hundred years, they were imported and cultivated in far-flung parts of the globe. As they grew tall, a peculiar behavior was noticed among these trees. They have a tendency to lean. It's not just because they are tall, as other, much taller pines manage to grow completely upright. Cook pine trees have their own agenda.

All the Cook pines that grow in the Northern Hemisphere lean to the south, and all that grow in the Southern Hemisphere lean to the north. Those that grow near the equator manage to stand up straight. What's more, the angle of the tilt also depends on location- trees that are further from the equator lean more. The reason for the tilt has not been scientifically proven, but common sense would tell us that the tree is looking for optimized sunlight. However, other pine trees prioritize standing straight for longevity. Something about Cook pine trees makes leaning toward the sun more important than balancing its weight. -via Nag on the Lake

When Abraham Lincoln was a presidential candidate in 1860, it had been more than ten years since he served in the House of Representatives, so he had to be introduced to the national electorate. His campaign staffers were afraid that voters would find him just too ugly to vote for. His opponents had indeed spread talk of Lincoln's looks, calling him grotesque and worse. Photography was fairly new at the time, and Lincoln's advisors raced to get ahead of the game before the other side did.

Lincoln turned to the most famous photographer of the era, Matthew Brady, for a portrait that could be disseminated. Brady took the image above, but there were some tweaks made. While it didn't make Lincoln look like a movie star (it couldn't, because there were no movies then), it did improve upon his actual appearance, and staved off the rumors of his hideousness. It wasn't the last time photo manipulation was used on Abraham Lincoln.  

Read the entire story of Lincoln's portrait and the stories behind a dozen other iconic historical photographs at History Collection. -via Nag on the Lake 

The University of Konstanz in Germany has created a virtual world- for insects! They study locusts' movements and brains at the same time by attaching scanners to their heads while they walk about on a movable sphere, following the virtual locusts projected on the walls. They also study these insects in crowds, using little tags they've glued onto thousands of bugs. It does seem like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, but don't feel too bad for these locusts. They were bred to be eaten, so working in a virtual lab is probably the best life they could hope for. Who knows? Maybe these bugs think they're playing the coolest video game ever. They still give Tom Scott the heebie-jeebies. But maybe you could think about these locusts the next time you put on your virtual reality headset and step into another world.  

Read more about these experiments at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour.

Redditor ikedness found a kitten yesterday that was a complete mess. A woman told him that some kids had glued the kitten to an object a couple of days earlier! He turned to reddit for advice on removing the glue. Redditor Com_Trad_IsTime recommended using coconut oil, which worked, so the kitten, a female, was named Coco.



The glue was only one of her problems. Coco weighs less than a pound, although she appears to be about two months old. And soon she started showing symptoms of respiratory distress. She was taken to the veterinarian, where she tested positive for feline calicivirus (FCV), a common but dangerous infection.



She was prescribed a slew of medicines, but Coco again showed signs of difficulty breathing, and was taken to the vet again. This time, she got a nebulizer treatment and snot removal. Since then, Coco seems to be doing better, and even purring.  



Several redditors have reached out to help with the vet bills. Coco still has a long way to go to gain weight and be considered healthy, but she is on her way. The crucial part was finding a loving home.

(All images credit to ikedness)

Update: The latest on Coco. You can follow her progress here.

In the 1930s, the German government, controlled by the Nazi party, began confiscating all the gold they could, especially from Jews. In 1935, it became illegal for any German to accept or retain a Nobel Prize. At the time, a Nobel Prize medal was made of 23-karat gold and weighed 200 grams. They were embossed with the winner's name, and were therefore hard to hide. Max von Laue received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1914. James Franck received the physics prize in 1925. Both scientists sent their medals to fellow physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr in Denmark for safekeeping.

But in 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark. They approached Bohr's Institute of Physics in Copenhagen. If they found the medals, it would be evidence that would send von Laue and Franck to their deaths. Bohr turned to Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy to make sure the invaders didn't find the medals... with science! Read the story of how the medals were hidden, or more accurately, destroyed, and how they were eventually returned to their rightful owners many years later, at Today I Found Out.

The most mundane Wikipedia articles can end up being the most fascinating. The couple whose pictures illustrated the "high five" captured the public's imagination and they became a meme. Likewise for the guy you see if you were to look up "shrug." His is the only picture in that entry, and has been since 2007. He is illustrating a shrug, alright, but he's also wearing a paisley tie and holding a cocktail. And why is he wearing a tiara that says SCAMPER in on it?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sixteen years later, he is known as the Shrug Guy. His picture has illustrated innumerable reaction memes as well as "shrug" in many various language versions of Wikipedia. But he is not unknown. Comedian Annie Rauwerda reached out and connected with him, and got the story behind the original photo and the tiara, which is quite funny. His life has changed considerably since then, but he's still recognizable, and he's still okay with being the Shrug Guy. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dazzledog)

The three Australian guys behind the YouTube channel How Ridiculous came into the possession of a two-ton axe.  Anything positioned under it is toast when it falls, so, uh, don't try this at home. Their goal here is to break into safes, from the cheapest to the more sturdy safes. However, they cannot resist the temptation to chop up all manner of other things just to see what it looks like. Or to experience major destruction in its purest form, which is the more likely motivation. Watch them destroy a piano, a brick chimney, bulletproof glass, a boulder, and a succession of ever-tougher safes. You couldn't pay me to set those things in place. The only way I'd even get near it is after it has fallen.  -via Born in Space

Every once in a while, we need to remind ourselves that our ancestors, even ancient ancestors, weren't stupid. They were just as smart as people today, but they lacked the number of advancements we inherited to build on. We have writing and books and instant communication. Pre-literate cultures had their own way of passing along crucial knowledge in the form of oral history. The stories of things that happened, people, places, and events that are important, were related over and over again by storytelling, until the next generation knew these things intimately.

Author and geography professor Patrick Nunn tells us about oral histories passed along by indigenous cultures that reveal important geological events that happened many thousands of years ago, when volcanoes changed the landscape and islands formed where there was once continuous dry land. These stories come from all over the world, and have been confirmed by geological studies. The ability to memorize and pass on such knowledge indicates how monumental those events were to the people who witnessed them. Of course, people remember only what they need to remember. You don't memorize a movie when you can see it again on demand, but in 1977, it was important to see Star Wars as many times as you could because it would eventually be gone from theaters. In pre-literate societies, memorizing everything about the land, the people, and their history was just what was done to preserve that knowledge.

Some of those stories became infused with mythology over time. Nunn explains that with the need to embellish stories with explanations that kept the audience's attention and helped them to understand difficult concepts. We can look beyond the supernatural embellishments to find the core nuggets of why these stories were crucial to pass along. Read about the oral history knowledge that is still being passed on today in a thought-provoking essay at Aeon. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Zainubrazvi)

Paul Klusman and TJ Wingard are engineers who are particularly interested in cats. You might recall them from An Engineer's Guide to Cats which established them as authorities in 2008, or from their subsequent videos. In this video, they examine how cats have always inspired humans to develop technology to make our lives easier. They also extrapolate about which tech developments may be in our future as inspired by cats. Then at the five-minute mark, they run out of inspiration and stage a Sweded Star Wars video starring cats and the tech they've already talked about.  

There are many clever inspirations in this video, but I was drawn to the idea of using a lint roller on a cat. It's been my habit to use a brush on a cat's fur, and a lint roller on the rug. I should just combine those two activities! But what really drew my attention was the YouTube description.

This video was ten years in the making. Getting it done was a big part of my incentive for beating cancer (stage IV Lymphoma, November 2020). Thank you TJ, Monica, Larry, Mark, Ben, Tom, Calyssa, David, Nick, Paulette, Eldon, Richard, and Mitch. Thank you sweet kitties. Thank you patrons and supporters. Thank you all our lovely fans watching all this these years!

We wish Paul all the best. As he says, imagination and cats are the most powerful force in the universe.  -via Laughing Squid

You know those signs in a bakery that say "Oops, we baked too much!"? This is story like that on steroids. Crystal Regehr Westergard started a business back in 2018 to bring back lost candy bars. She started with her mother's favorite, called Cuban Lunch. She bought the discontinued trademark and contracted with a manufacturer, and the candy was a hit among those who remembered it. That led to the formation of Regehr Westergard's company Canadian Candy Nostalgia. 

The next project was her husband's favorite candy from his childhood, called Rum & Butter. But by then the pandemic was causing delays in everything from raw ingredients to wrappers, and Regehr Westergard had trouble stocking Rum & Butter. Until now. When all the ingredients came together, she was inundated with way more back orders of Rum & Butter bars than she can sell. And they all have sell-by dates on them. The candy will be good after those dates, but grocery stores won't stock them. Regehr Westergard is willing to take a loss on the candy itself, but she doesn't want to waste them, and doesn't want to pay to dispose of them. She's already contacted food banks, but they could only handle 22,000 bars. Do you have any suggestions? Read about the candy bars and the dilemma of overstock at CBC.

My first thought was that she should sell them by mail order at a discount and charge for shipping, especially now that she's been in the news. The sell-by dates on the big shipment are still a couple of months away. -via Metafilter