Inky the Octopus was a popular exhibit at the National Aquarium in Napier, New Zealand, since 2014. But Inky no longer lives there, as the aquarium has revealed that he made his escape earlier this year. One day, staff noticed that there was only one octopus in the tank instead of two. The lid to the enclosure had had been placed loosely, leaving a small gap, and the octopus took the opportunity to climb out. Octopus tracks led to a small floor drain, only 150 millimeters (6 inches) wide.

Rob Yarrall​ from the National Aquarium said Inky was about the size of a rugby ball but octopuses could stretch themselves to extremes, allowing them to squeeze through almost any space.

"As long as it's mouth can fit," Yarrall said.

"Their bodies are squishy but they have a beak, like a parrot."

Since his disappearance aquarium staff have missed Inky, who was popular with staff and visitors, but they were pleased to see him return to the ocean, Yarrall said.   

While we learned that “all drains lead to the ocean” is not universally true, in this case the drain does lead to the ocean. Inky had toys and games and regular meals at the aquarium, but nothing beats freedom.-via Uproxx

(Image credit: National Aquarium of New Zealand)

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Warning: earworm. Toronto musician Aaron Ridge (@Dopeusmaximus) had a little fun on Snapchat by constructing a song around cooking a meal, Disney-style. He assembled all the parts into one video to share with us. Yeah, this sounds just like something you’d find in a Disney animated film. Joeyfingis supplied a plot:

That spin at the end, I picture his cape twirling around him, his riding boots clicking on the tile, and there's a princess who's secretly in love with him spying through the window wishing her father would let her marry the dashing, horseback riding, castle chef. Little does anyone know, his biological mother was the Queen long ago and he's destined to rule! Unfortunately for the star crossed pair, their love will have to wait. They will suffer through years of sexually charged friendly tension, he will always be there on his horse to save her from her adventurous miss steps, keeping her out of trouble with her evil great uncle the illegitimate King.

But one day, a traveling beggar will walk through the kingdom, and upon hearing the melodious voice of the chef singing the royal morning-time Steak and Eggs tune of a long forgotten lineage of gracious rulers, the beggar will reveal herself as none other than the chef's nanny, once top advisor to the Queen! The chef's ascent to the throne will be swift, as the populace helps to overthrow the evil illegitimate King, and the Chef/Prince/King will swoop up his long time princess lover onto his steed and kiss her deeply as they cross the threshold into the castle grand room where a massive wedding has sprung up for them! Steaks and Eggs will rain from the ceiling as the town's people empty the castle pantrys of the new King's favorite dish!!!!!!!

Horaaay horaay, a wondrous day, now we all can eat these tasty Steak and Eggs!!!

Now how long will it take until someone does an animated sequence to go with the song? And how long will it take to get “Steak and Eggs” out of my head? -via reddit

You’ve read our reports on more than one robot restaurant opening in Asia. After a few years and a few more restaurants trying the concept, it looks like the robot apocalypse has been postponed. Who could have figured that robots don’t make good waiters? The city of Ghangzhou in southern China had three robot restaurants, but two of them have now closed. The remaining restaurant is staffed with mostly people, and has only one remaining robot server.  

One of the establishments employed as many as 10 robots at one time. The gimmick reportedly had some short-term benefit of driving customers through the door.

However, those guests reportedly were just as quickly turned away by food that was generally considered "unpalatable" for guests, according to reports.

Likewise, the robots were unable to pour beverages for guests, nor were they able to consistently take accurate food orders.

Instead of being fired, some of the robots were merely demoted to greeters. Robots may take all our manufacturing jobs, but they aren’t smart enough to juggle orders and serve ten tables, so remember to tip your server accordingly. -via How Stuff Works

Guinness World Records has certified that this awesome machine built by Austin Granger (previously at Neatorama) is the world's largest K’NEX ball contraption. 

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Brickmania Toyworks in Minneapolis commissioned this work. It has 126,285 K’NEX pieces and runs 278 meters Granger is a 23-year-old computer science student at the University of Minnesota. He’s been building K’NEX projects since he was five years old. -via Viral Viral Videos 

The description at imgur said, “A family went to movie for 3 hrs come back to this.” Whoever left these prints apparently found a stock of ink and had a grand old time.

The evidence leads through the home. Who could have committed such a crime?

The perpetrator didn’t get in the bed, but he obviously thought about it.  

I believe we have found the guilty party. The good news is that the floor was fairly simple to clean, and the ink was non-toxic. The bedspread will be a permanent reminder to put the ink away where unauthorized users cannot get to it. There are 11 pictures of the carnage in the imgur gallery.

-via HuffPo

Ah, the things women go through to be beautiful… sometimes could kill them. Since the ancient Egyptians, we’ve concocted miracle potions to improve one’s complexion with compounds that later proved to be highly toxic, like lead, arsenic, mercury, and radium.

Did you ever put a highlighter on your face and go, “Man, I wish my skin glowed. Also I want some face tumours”? Then go back to the early 1900s and get some Radior! In 1917, the London-based company Radior created a series of cosmetics that contained radium, meaning you could buy an actual face powder called “Flesh” full of radium in the hellish dystopia that London apparently was in the 1900s. Other brands, such as Tho-Radia (a French company started in 1933 that made things such as lipstick, skin creams, and toothpaste containing thorium chloride and radium bromide) and Artes (also started in 1933, creators of a skin cream made with “radium gas”) made claims that their products would help “assist blood circulation” and “stimulate cellular vitality”, along with “brightening” complexions.

Oh, but there’s more. The rundown at The Toast has to make you wonder which beauty product we’re using today that will turn out to be a very bad idea when the next generation of research is in.

The National Museum of Natural History, a part of the Smithsonian Institution, has a huge exhibit space in Washington, DC. However, what’s on display is only about 1% of what they have. The rest is in storage, carefully curated, and sometimes rotated into display. Over a period of twenty years, Smithsonian photographer Chip Clark documented this backstage collection in photographs. The museum’s assistant director Carol Butler tells us about the stunning images.  

There’s one image of the bird collection. And what I remember [Clark] told me was that it took about eight hours to set up that shot. The collections are stored taxonomically according to the tree of life. But to get beautiful colors and good artistic composition, they had to move some drawers to different positions.

It took an artistic eye, a lot of patience, and probably a certain amount of flexibility to shimmy under drawers or to move sideways past pulled-out drawers. It also took an understanding of what science needed to be expressed through the photographs.

But that’s just the story of one picture. Read more about Clark and the museum’s collections, and see a gallery of his images at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution)

Disney is producing a live-action remake of their 1967 animated film The Jungle Book. At least they are calling it live-action, even though almost all the characters are CGI. In honor of the occasion, Screen Junkies is looking back at the first Disney Jungle Book with an Honest Trailer.

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Sure, we know Disney played fast and loose with Rudyard Kipling’s novel book. But since I hadn’t seen this movie in many years, I’d forgotten how repetitive it was. Not a problem for little children, because they are going to watch an animated film over and over again on home video anyway. And how else are they going to learn all the songs? -via Tastefully Offensive 

This appears to be a scuffle between two octopuses over a nice cozy place to sit and blend in with the scenary. You see provocation, chase, and some smacking about, plus some color-changing, which might be communication, a cooling-off, or bragging. Who knows? There’s also an intriguing bit where an octopus wipes itself down.     

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I can’t even tell who won, because how do you tell one shapeshifter from another? Anyway, it’s a pretty cool sequence. This all happened off the coast of Asu Island in Indonesia. -via Metafilter

Some guys are just players, and a lot of guys in movies are players, racking up women by the score (pun intended). Often, that’s what the movie is all about, and the plot concerns how he comes to see someone of the opposite sex as a person instead of just a conquest. But that’s not always the case, or even the main plot. Of course, some characters are better at it than others.   

If you were a single billionaire, would you settle down with one woman? Probably not. Tony Stark doesn’t, and he has the kind of  money to do whatever and whoever he wants. It’s pretty sweet that he’s able to seduce a hostile journalist who wants nothing to do with him, but that’s nothing compared to his feat of sleeping with each and every Maxim cover model for an entire year’s worth of issues…including twins.

Robert Downey, Jr., I mean Tony Stark, can get away with that, while other characters need to be taken down a notch. Read about 15 womanizer movie characters at TVOM.

Construction workers in Penang, Malaysia, spotted a python curled up around a tree near their work site. They called the local civil defense department, who sent men out to capture the reticulated python. It took them about a half-hour to capture the snake, which turned out to be 26 feet long and weighed 550 pounds!

Herme Herisyam, an official with Malaysian department that caught the snake, told the Guardian that workers from the construction site called the emergency services on Thursday and authorities took 30 minutes to trap the snake.

“It is eight metres in length and weighs about 250kg,” he said by phone.

It emerged later on Monday that the python died on Sunday after giving birth. Herisyam told the Guardian that the snake, which was caught on Thursday, had died after laying an egg. It is not clear why the serpent perished.

The Malaysian snake could well be the longest snake ever captured. The Guinness Book lists the current record-holder, a living reticulated python named Medusa, as the biggest, at 25 feet 2 inches. The folks from Guinness may want to check out the Penang snake.  -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Herme Herisyam/Malaysia Civil Defense Force)

Phyllis Traver got married in 1953 and wore a beautiful lace gown. In 1983, her daughter Susan wore the same dress when she got married. And in 2016, Julia Cain wore the same dress for her wedding! Each bride restyled and altered it a bit, but you can tell it’s the same dress. What’s even more remarkable is that one man walked with all three women at their weddings: Harold Traver married Phyllis, then escorted his daughter Susan down the aisle, and recently gave away his granddaughter Julia at her wedding. Read the story of the dress and see pictures of all three weddings at Buzzfeed.

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

by Tenzing Terwilliger, Improbable Research staff

These scientists are members of the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS).

More and more, more and more scientists are ganging up to write research studies. It’s no longer unusual to see a paper that lists more than 500 co-authors.

The journal Science Watch tracks statistics about which scientists publish where, when, and how often. Every few years Science Watch makes a brave plunge into the sea of so-called “multi-author papers.”^1,2 Their most recent look shows increasing numbers of papers that have more than 50, 100, 200, and 500 authors.

The most gaudy, of course, are the papers credited to more than 500 co-authors. During the year 2003, only (only!) 40 of these giganti-group efforts were published. Then came a growth spurt. The year 2005 saw the publication of 131 of them, and subsequent years have seen production hold about steady.

An experiment from a team at Imperial College London studied the effects of LSD on the brain by giving the drug to 20 experienced volunteers and then scanning their brains. You might wonder why this hasn’t been done before. Imperial College neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt, the lead researcher, explained how difficult it is to get approval for LSD research. Even in the UK where such research is legal, it can only be done as long as the aim is not therapeutic. The money for this particular study was raised by crowdfunding. So what did they find?

In one study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences we looked at blood flow in different parts of the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, and electrical activity using magnetoencephalography. We found that under LSD, compared to placebo, disparate regions in the brain communicate with each other when they don’t normally do so. In particular, the visual cortex increases its communication with other areas of the brain, which helps explain the vivid and complex hallucinations experienced under LSD, and the emotional flavour they can take.

On the other hand, within some important brain networks, such as the neuronal networks that normally fire together when the brain is at rest, sometimes called the ‘default mode network’, we saw reduced blood flow — something we’ve also seen with psilocybin — and that neurons that normally fire together lost synchronization. That correlated with our volunteers reporting a disintegration of their sense of self, or ego. This known effect is called ‘ego dissolution': the sense that you are less a singular entity, and more melded with people and things around you. We showed that this could be experienced independently of the hallucinatory effects — the two don’t necessarily go together.

There were other results you can read about at Nature. Scientists hope to someday run clinical trials to see if LSD can be use therapeutically for conditions such as PTSD, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression. -via reddit

(Image credit: Imperial College London)

This is a simple, yet often entertaining game. You are presented with an image from WikiHow. All you need to do is guess what article the image is from, from four options presented when you click the answer bar. Sure, the options are funny, but the right answer is likely to be just as funny as the wrong ones. And some are funny even without answers!

As far as I know, it can go as long as you want, with your running score kept at the top. I was at about 70% last I saw, but I don’t read WikiHow all that much. They apparently have an illustrated article about everything! -via Digg