It's happened time and time again- humans introduce a non-native species to kill another species and then have to confront unintended consequences. Amami Oshima is a subtropical island off the coast of Japan that is home to unique animal species like the Okinawa rail, the Iriomote leopard cat, and the Amami rabbit. But there are also venomous pit vipers called habu. In 1979, officials brought in 30 mongooses to eat the habu. Mongooses are immune to snake venom and will kill and eat snakes. The problem is that mongooses will eat snakes when there aren't delicious rabbits available.  Besides, the pit vipers come out at night, when mongooses sleep. The mongooses helped themselves to the endangered Amami rabbits and the Ryukyu long-furred rat. By 2000, there were 10,000 or so mongooses on the island.  

That's when Japan announced a mongoose-eradication program involving 30,000 traps and trained dogs, deployed by a group called the Amami Mongoose Busters. It took almost twenty years, but this week Amami Oshima has been declared mongoose-free, since no mongoose has been seen for six years. The rabbit population is recovering. However, there is still a danger of mongooses moving in from Okinawa, where mongooses were also introduced to control snakes. -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Thomas Fuhrmann)

When we talk about the wildlife of Australia trying to kill you, we are usually talking about snakes, spiders, or jellyfish. Occasionally, we warn people away from cassowaries. But kangaroos are everywhere, jumping their way through your golf game or playground, posing for pictures, or getting hit by a car. They aren't predators, and usually mind their own business. However, they can surprise you. On July 13th, Kat Beaton was out running when a kangaroo charged her. She ran behind a tree and to 'roo chased her around it. She flagged down a passer-by who stopped to help. Jason West tried to shoo the animal away with a golf club, and the kangaroo knocked him down. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. The standoff went on for 40 minutes, and was only resolved when police arrived and chased the kangaroo away with their vehicles.

In light of this attack, Australian wildlife experts explain the kangaroo's behavior, and give us tips on what we should do if a kangaroo attacks. While they seem to think this was an isolated incident, there are several "related articles" at the bottom left of the page that will make you think differently. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: PotMart186)

We play video games for to escape the real world. Still, those video game characters use a lot of resources, and someone has to keep up with all that. Enter the accountant. The poor guy is just doing his job, but his job is annoying. Nobody wants to be told how to spend their money! To be honest, that's what you hired him for. Try to look at it from the accountant's side. He's a professional party pooper, trying to reign in expenses for the benefit of the game's long-term viability. What's wrong with that? It's annoying, because we're all just here to have fun. The poor accountant knows he's not liked, and he knows his job is the opposite of exciting. Surrounded by all the luxurious trappings and odd challenges of video games, the accountant starts to break down. Now we feel for him. This skit from Dorkly is only 2:35; the rest is promotional.

You may know the song "Kumbaya" from singing it around the fire at summer camp. The lyrics are simple and repetitive, the music only has three chords, and it's slow enough to wind down a bunch of rowdy kids and get them ready for a good night's sleep. But where did it come from? From what language does the word kumbaya come from? In tracing the song from your summer camp days backwards, there's a string of people who laid claim to the song and had the backstory to prove it, until an earlier version was found with a different story. The song turns out to be way older than we thought.

Then we trace the history of the song forward. First it was a spiritual, then a camp song, then a protest song, and finally a derisive term for naive idealism. "Kumbaya" has gone through a lot of twists and turns, as you'll see in an article at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Benny Mazur)

Tuariki John Edward Delamere of New Zealand threw a big wrench into the sport of the long jump when he launched into a front flip in competition in 1974. This move can add inches to a jump, although it seems like magic of some sort to us non-athletes. A gymnast would understand, and an article from Wired explains the physics. Anyway, the track and field folks call this a somersault jump instead of a flip, so you know they are completely separated from gymnastics. Delamere made quite a splash when he debuted the move at a championship meet. And officials ultimately deemed the somersault jump to be too dangerous, which also tells you they had never even watched gymnastics. Something tells me the real reason that this move was banned is because everyone would do it until the long jump would be completely out of reach for track and field athletes who weren't also gymnasts. Delamere went on to serve in New Zealand's Parliament. -via Kottke

A kitchen is built for work, and the placement of the tools involved is important to the work flow. For safety and efficiency, a microwave should be placed between waist-high and the user's head level. But that's not the only factor to keep in mind. My microwave is bigger than it should be, and sits too low over the stove. I have to use a light to see the oven controls underneath and I have to pull out the stove to use the canner.

Not everyone puts thought into how an appliance will be used before they decide where to put it, meaning landlords. Homeowners may find they have little choice in where to put a microwave. A fairly new subreddit called Microwave Too High is starting to take off. It chronicles awkward microwave placement from on top of the refrigerator to hanging from the ceiling, and sometimes even near the floor. All these places make a microwave difficult to use and even dangerous when hot food comes out. Check them all out, and keep all this in mind when you arrange your own kitchen. -via Boing Boing

If you enjoyed those pictures, you might also like TV Too High and WTFaucet.

(Image credit: jamesross801)

We all love seeing a dog (or a cat) ride a skateboard, and some have become very good at it. You'll see that a dog climbs on a skateboard, and then pushes off with one back leg. Simone Giertz (previously at Neatorama) has a dog that cannot do that, because Scraps only has one rear leg. How can she rig up a skateboard so that Scraps can use it? Giertz wanted to make it so that Scraps could steer the contraption by balancing on her front legs, and Giertz could control the forward motion. She enlisted the help of a children's robotics club that she met while making a LEGO ad, for which she was apparently paid in LEGO blocks.

So what we have here is a video that contains a dog, kids, robotics, LEGO, skateboarding, and Simone Giertz. There's even a cat cameo. What else could you ask for? No, there's no flamethrower, sorry. -via Nag on the Lake

The trouble with fantastical legends from antiquity is that they change over time. Storytellers embellish the accounts to make them more exciting or more meaningful. The oldest versions of these stories may have been lost forever, but the best yarns begin with a grain of truth. Evidence of those grains of truth emerge when archaeologists discover the remains of the places where those stories were supposed to have occurred.

The King Arthur legends may have been based on a real person, although not in the form he takes in the stories. The places associated with Arthur are real, and more discoveries are made in those places all the time. The city of Troy figures heavily in Greek mythology, and has been unearthed gradually over 150 years of excavations in Turkey. The lost city of El Dorado could be hiding right under our noses. The Pool of Siloam was lost in Jerusalem for thousands of years before it was discovered in 2004.  Read about these and other ancient places that were relegated to mythology until they were found, at Smithsonian.

"Equal protection under the law" is part of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, but it's not always practiced. There is a city ordinance in Cleveland, Ohio, that states a woman cannot wear patent leather shoes. The reason behind that is the fear that men will use the reflective surface to see up a woman's skirt! Another Cleveland regulation stipulates that a woman cannot show her cleavage. Not that anyone is enforcing these rules today, but why are they still on the books?

Some states once had laws that prohibited women from working night shift jobs, because they were so weak and frail. Up until 1923, many states had laws against women wearing pants. Women in Washington State were prohibited from sitting at a bar until a lawsuit in 1969. They could be served if they were sitting at a table, though. These are all part of a roundup of strange, sexist laws in the United States. Most have been overturned, but you may be surprised at how recently that happened. A few of these laws are still valid, although not enforced, because who has time for such nonsense?

Europeans who colonized Africa had trouble sending their horses to sub-Saharan countries, because they would be bitten by flies and died of the diseases those flies carried. The obvious answer was to domesticate zebras to ride and carry cargo instead. Not a good idea. While zebras had some immunity from the diseases that killed horses, they did not want to be domesticated. Zebras aren't just striped horses; they are wild animals that are distantly related to horses. And the reason they could survive among all those disease-carrying flies were the distinctive stripes they developed. Nature knew that fly bites were more dangerous to these creatures than the lions that ate them, so zebras invented their own kind of dazzle camouflage. This TED-Ed lesson from Cella Wright covers the research done to find out why zebras abandoned the kind of brown camouflage most animals use for flamboyant stripes. -via Laughing Squid

A scientific study our of Spain does not refer to prehistoric cave people, but a community of Christians weho lived in manmade caves carved out of the cliffside at Las Gobas for hundreds of years. Data from burials in their cemetery are dated from the 7th to the 11th centuries, so the community was founded after the Roman Empire receded from Spain, while the Visigoths ruled. The community stayed in the caves during the Muslim conquest, and then built a small village outside the caves in the 10th century, although they kept using the cave church for another hundred years.

DNA from human remains tells a story of a small group founded by related men, in which marriages were kept within the community, leaving evidence of inbreeding. Genetic material from the bacteria and viruses they carried tell us more about where the people came from and who they encountered over time. Injuries indicate the group was no stranger to violence. Still, each discovery raises more questions. Read what science can and cannot tell us of the cave-dwellers of Las Gobas despite their lack of documentation at Ars Technica.  

(Image credit: Iapmetoj)

     

It's always a good idea to keep control over the rights to a song you wrote. A famous case is Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You." Elvis Presley wanted to record the song in 1974, but Colonel Tom Parker demanded that Elvis get half the publishing rights, and Dolly said no. Eighteen years later, Whitney Houston sang the song and made Dolly "enough money to buy Graceland." But it doesn't always turn out so well.

The song "Without You" went to number #1 when Harry Nilsson released it from his album Nilsson Schmilsson in 1971. Mariah Carey's version in 1994 became a global hit. What you might not know is that the song was written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans for their band Badfinger. They recorded for the 1970 album No Dice, but it was never released as a single. The songwriters were thrilled when Nilsson's cover became a hit. Surely they would enjoy royalties from the song, but it was not to be. Ham committed suicide by hanging in 1975, after their business manager ran off with the band's money. Evans did the same in 1983, after an argument over the royalties to "Without You."

You can hear Badfinger's original recording of "Without You," along with five other songs that became big hits in cover versions, but not for their obscure original rock recordings, at Cracked.

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.