What's fat cat Maru doing these days? Here he is in the bathtub, but there's no water. He's discovered that the tub plug goes round and round, but it doesn't come out. -via HuffPo Green
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Photographer Mark Laita's series "Created Equal" puts seemingly opposite people side-by-side in portraits. When you look closely, the staging shows them to have common elements that make them appear eerily similar. See twenty of the pairs at Flavorwire. Link
Why don't all poison dart frogs look the same?
(Image credit: Flickr user William Wan)
Nothing says "STAY AWAY!" to a predator like a tasty-looking creature that's a little too flashy. Bright colors and crazy patterns are nature's skull and crossbones, a warning to the carnivorous to look elsewhere for meals. Toxic animals usually have uniform markings: Each member of a species looks the same. Monarch butterflies bear the same patterns; puffer fish all puff up in the same way. But there's one animal that ignores this advice completely: the poison dart frog. These deadly amphibians have developed endless combinations of shades and markings, making it a challenge for hungry birds and snakes to keep track of their patterns. If the idea of being visibly toxic is to be as obvious as possible, why would a single species of frog maintain such an extensive wardrobe? That's the question that had Mathieu Chouteau sweating in the Peruvian Amazon as fastened 1,800 clay frogs to rainforest leaves.
(Image credit: Flickr user MoleSon²)
Back in 2009, Chouteau, a biologist from the University of Montreal, became obsessed with this evolutionary puzzle. "For the longest time, I've been fascinated by the phenomenon of local adaptation," he says. But because the varieties of poison dart frog patterns are so many and, more importantly, occur so geographically close to one another, they struck Chouteau as particularly odd. He wondered whether different types of local predators were somehow responsible for the variations.
The reason mad scientists are pictured in film in labs with interconnected beakers and machinery that does incomprehensible things is because that's the way labs looked at one time. io9 has a collection of pictures of the laboratories where huge scientific and engineering breakthroughs occurred, from Edison (top) and Tesla (bottom) to the development of cellophane and computers. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Allie Brosh (previously), popular blogger and creator of the alot, took a year and a half off from Hyperbole and A Half to deal with depression. She also wrote a book, and returns today to explain more about her experience. Brosh gives a clue as to why she stopped posting despite how many people adored her and the things she wrote and drew.
Perhaps it was because I lacked the emotional depth necessary to panic, or maybe my predicament didn't feel dramatic enough to make me suspicious, but I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn't feel obligated to keep existing.
Brosh writes (and draws) eloquently about the darkness of depression, which she still struggles with. But things may be getting better. We hope so. Link
Google made this video tribute to Moms for Mothers Day. You'll find a list of the source clips at the YouTube page. -via Viral Viral Videos
DeviantART member Hyung86 drew a series of 17 Disney characters -princesses, princes, and other characters- as college students. They look just like the movie cartoons, but dressed as modern young folks. They also show some of their movie talents at school. For example, Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid is a surfer, and he hangs with David, the surfer from Lilo and Stitch. Snow White and Peter Pan look like clueless freshmen, Tarzan rides a skateboard (at the University of Kentucky), and Esmerelda is a dance student. Link -via Unreality
(Image credit: Hyung86)
A vehicle at an impound lot in Kansas City had a surprise inside, but no one knew for almost a month. When an inspector went around to mark cars for auction on Monday, the puppy jumped up on the dashboard! Since the car was locked, lot employees called the police, who freed the puppy.
What is known is that the 1990 Chevy Suburban was towed because it was abandoned April 8 on an eastbound ramp to I-70 from Van Brunt Boulevard and was blocking traffic, Rotert said. Police got the call at 10:08 p.m. and it was towed to the city tow lot at 10:45 p.m. Neither police nor the tow truck driver saw a dog, nor did tow lot employees.
The doors on the car were locked. Typically, when a car arrives at the tow lot with locked doors, employees take pictures of the outside of the vehicle and keep the doors locked. Rotert said they do not try to break into locked cars.
The dog was taken to a veterinarian, who estimated the emaciated pup was 12 weeks old, although the female, now named Kia, was the size of an 8-week-old. She had apparently survived on fast food scraps and cigars, but no one knows if she had anything to drink. The owner of the car came by the lot on May 1st, but did not have a car key and never mentioned a puppy. Kia is expected to recover and will be sent to a foster home before adoption. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: The KC Pet Project)
To publicize the premiere of the fourth season of the TV series Arrested Development on May 26th, Netflix is opening frozen banana stands in London, Los Angeles, and New York City. They will be up for a limited time, so get your frozen bananas while you can! Cast members will make appearances at each, but they aren't yet saying when. Link -via Daily of the Day
(Image credit: Arrested Development)
PBS Digital Studios brings us a video that speculates on the evolutionary value of music and why the emotions it evokes are so universal.
New evolutionary science says that we may read emotion in music because it relates to how we sense emotion in people's movements. We'll take a trip from Austin to Dartmouth to Cambodia to hear why music makes us feel so many feels. The connections between movement and music go far beyond dance moves!
I would guess that language fits in there somewhere, because we can discern emotions in language even when we don't understand the words. You can find links to the referenced research at the YouTube page. -via Boing Boing
Like many people, I watched Star Trek: TNG for years and never noticed how Riker sits down. And stands up. Jonathan Frakes is a tall guy with long legs, and was compelled to wear a jumpsuit uniform, so this might have been the easiest way he found to deal with chairs. Or it could be totally for style. But why did it take so long for anyone to notice? -via Metafilter
To celebrate Star Wars Weekends at Disney's Hollywood Studios this year, Etckt made a periodic table featuring the characters from Star Wars! Of course, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are the most elemental characters, with Grand Moff Tarkin up there, too, for some reason. You can recognize some characters by their initials and standing, or see the full-size version at the link to read them.
The allegiances of the characters are categorized, and their order of appearance and movies are numbered in each cell, although in the Arabesh language. Read more about how the chart is put together at Etckt. Link -Thanks, Matthew!
John Green gives a quick roundup of grammar mistakes. Honestly, I know the rules, but the mistakes come from either my atrocious typing, my failing eyesight, or the fact that I edit text so much that the tenses don't match up in the finished product. Alex has a much better excuse: English is not his first language. But if we never made any errors, we'd get much fewer comments! -via mental_floss
PS: I never heard "menopause" for "mental floss," but unfortunately, I will now.
It's time for the latest edition of our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what this thing is? This week, You'll have to be pretty specific to win. Or if you don't know what it is, make up something funny!
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. Pease do not post URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
See more pictures of this mystery object at the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!
Update: the pictured object is a rock, but despite many guesses, the What Is It? blog was never able to ascertain anything else about it, which means there is no correct answer this week. So… we decided to pick two of the funniest answers! StilesJM declared it to be C-3PO's kidney stone, which is certainly good for a t-shirt! And Anthony Zaragoza told a great story that's a winner:
A deadline was fast approaching for Clark Kent. But during his speed-typing, the IBM Selectric typewriter ball had a meltdown from the friction. The story that would have exposed the insidious 4-H organization was never published.
See the answers to the rest of the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
Paraceratherium was a rhinoceros that lived around 20 million years ago. Standing tall with a longer neck, it doesn't much resemble a modern rhinoceros. The 15-20 ton giant is the subject of a new book by paleontologist Donald Prothero called Rhinoceros Giants. But it's not just about Paraceratherium. It's also a book about paleontologists finding evidence of Paraceratherium.
For more than the first half of the book, in fact, Paraceratherium only appears as scattered fragments that puzzled and inspired successive generations of paleontologists. Prothero recounts the lives of fossil mammal researchers such as Walter Granger, Henry Guy Ellcock Pilgrim, Clive Forster Cooper, and Zhou Ming-Zhen, among others, in detail before diving into the geological particulars of where Paraceratherium bones are found and where the giant fit in the wider rhino family tree. While a giant rhino without a horn might look odd compared to living species, Prothero points out that Paraceratherium belonged to a major and totally-extinct group of rhinos, and that most fossil rhinos don’t show any evidence of horns at all. Modern rhinos might look prehistoric, but they’re actually quite different from their varied predecessors.
Read more about this rhino and the book at Laelaps. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
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