A bear wandered into Deedee Mueller's house in the hills of Pasadena, California, Saturday looking thin and hungry, like it had just come out of hibernation. The Muellers weren't home, but their two tiny terriers, Squirt and Mei Mei, were. The family's security cameras tell the story, which has a bit of a surprise ending. -via Digg

An interactive list of the world’s most populated cities may surprise you. Imagine living in the midst of 20 million (or more) people! None of the top 20 cities are in the US. None are in Europe, either, unless you count Istanbul, which lies in two continents. Maps Mania has more information and some tips on how to use the map.

The World's Twenty Largest Cities is actually a bit of a misnomer as the map actually allows you to explore the size of thousands of cities around the world. If you scroll to the end of the map presentation you can explore the map for yourself. Zoom out and you will see that cities around the world have pink circle's representing the relative size of the population. If you click on a city's circle you can view details on the city's actual population size.

-via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Ben Morlok)

Children are born to seek sweet nourishment and reject bitterness -it's a part of human survival. But by the time they are adults, they've learned to enjoy things like salsa, seafood, pickles, and salad. Or most do. Your diet would be pretty bland if you only ate what babies want, and it wouldn't be good for you, either.

Acquired tastes are part of practically every culture’s cuisine and some of the world’s most beloved dishes. Without expanding beyond innate preferences in their diet, humans wouldn’t be able to get the nutrients they need to survive. But there’s a good reason people aren’t born with a taste for bitter vegetables and fermented foods. Without knowing any better, seeking out these flavors could be deadly.

Humans have an innate aversion to decay because that odor and flavor signals that a food has gone bad, and may therefore carry dangerous pathogens. But many fermented foods (which are technically decayed) are totally safe to eat and even contain beneficial bacteria. People have no natural instinct for telling “good” decay and “bad” decay apart, so they rely on the process of acquiring taste to learn what’s good to eat. This also applies to bitter flavors, which are present in toxic plants as well as nutritious vegetables.

It's not a matter of taste buds "maturing," even though that what I told my kids and they bought it. It turns out to be a matter of learning. Science says that there are three components to acquiring a taste for foods we wouldn't naturally eat: influence, familiarity, and conditioning. Mental Floss explains these components, and has some tips for those who want to learn to like a certain food. And considering the quote here, let's have a moment for those adventurous individuals in our distant past who determined, say, which mushrooms are okay to eat and how to safely ferment food.

(Image credit: Rainer Knäpper, Free Art License)

In Riga, the capital of Latvia, there's a house with cat sculptures on top, as if they were guarding the building. While the Art Nouveau house is now a landmark, its history may be surprising. For some reason, the man who owned the house, built in 1909, was refused membership in the local tradesman's guild, called the Great Guild.  

He happened to own the building across the way from the Guild. So, he ordered two sculptures of black cats made and placed on the roof of his building (Kaķu nams in Latvian). Not only that but he ordered that they should be turned away from the Guild, backside up.

Today it may not seem much of a retort, visual or otherwise. Back then, a pair of black cats showing their posteriors to the parish principals was a public gesture of defiance, distaste and damnification. This feline feud was serious. Put the message in to your own contemporary words.  You got it.

The gesture enraged the members of the Great Guild, and a battle ensued. Read how that turned out, and see plenty of images of the Cat House at Kuriositas.

(Image credit: Flickr user Yusuke Kawasaki)

If you've ever had to give a pill to a cat, you know that it can involve lots of time, possible injury (to you, not the cat), and may land you on the cat's enemies list. Now imagine giving medication to a wide variety of wild animals, some of which have the ability to kill you.  

The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute is home to hundreds of animals comprising a wide variety of taxa, from bugs to bison, salamanders to siamangs, prairie dogs to pandas, and everything in between. Regardless, all of our animals receive veterinary care, and often that means an animal needs to take medicine.

Our Department of Wildlife Health Sciences includes veterinarians, technicians, pathologists and nutritionists that ensure every single animal receives the highest level of care. They examine the animals in our care and prescribe the best course of action for any ailment. An animal may have a new problem, like a wound that needs attention, or a chronic problem, like arthritis. Medication can take several forms — pills, capsules, liquid suspensions (medicine mixed into a liquid) or even injections. Ensuring that an animal receives its full dose of medicine, as often as necessary, takes a bit of creativity.

Read about the National Zoo's animals and see videos on giving medication to a gecko, a red panda, an orangutan, sea lions, monkeys, onagers, and avocets at Smithsonian. Bonus: find out what onagers and avocets are.

If you've ever wondered how a courtroom stenographer keeps up with everything that is said in a trial, Isabelle Lumsden is happy to explain. It takes special equipment that require a particular technique. After watching the video, I am impressed, but I still don't know how she does it. -via Digg

In 1936, actress Mary Astor and her ex-husband Dr. Franklyn Thorpe went to court to fight over custody of their daughter Marylyn. It had been a particularly acrimonious divorce, and the custody battle became a sensation, mainly because of Astor’s diaries.  

Her estranged husband stole her private diaries, called the Purple or Lavender Diary, to use in a bitter custody battle. It was reported that Astor wrote breathless accounts of her many love affairs in its pages. As the press salivated for details, Astor appeared in court to face a hostile lawyer hellbent on proving she was an unfit mother. People flooded the courthouse and vendors sold hot dogs and ice cream to the crowds.

Astor's diary was the first major Hollywood sex scandal, "a sensation the likes of which had never been seen before," writes Joseph Egan in The Purple Diaries. Astor faced losing her career, daughter, and reputation, but she wouldn't be shamed. When faced with these challenges, Astor fought back.

Astor’s affairs became public knowledge during the trial, but so did Thorpe’s. The press couldn’t get hold of the actual diaries, so they published false excerpts. And the diaries weren’t even purple: they were written in brown ink in blue notebooks. In any case, the details of the case were both salacious and gripping, but the fallout what not what you would have expected from the early days of Hollywood. Read the story of the purple diaries at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: CINELANDIA magazine)

It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen has announced the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. pic.twitter.com/XOIDQqlFPn

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 9, 2021

The British royal family has announced that Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, passed away this morning. Philip was 99, only two months from achieving his 100th birthday. His wife of 73 years, Queen Elizabeth II, has a habit of congratulating her subjects with a personal letter on their 100th birthday. In discussing the prince's death, reddit poet Poem_for_your_sprog said:

She looked at the message
she'd crafted and penned -
A letter to Philip
that she'd never send.

-via reddit

Neuralink, a tech startup owned by Elon Musk, is working on a wireless brain-machine interface to give paralyzed people some control over their environment. They've reached an important milestone in the quest.

Today we are pleased to reveal the Link’s capability to enable a macaque monkey, named Pager, to move a cursor on a computer screen with neural activity using a 1,024 electrode fully-implanted neural recording and data transmission device, termed the N1 Link. We have implanted the Link in the hand and arm areas of the motor cortex, a part of the brain that is involved in planning and executing movements. We placed Links bilaterally: one in the left motor cortex (which controls movements of the right side of the body) and another in the right motor cortex (which controls the left side of the body).

Pager was already pretty good at Pong, but now he can play without a joystick! Read more about the research at the company's website. -via Geekologie

There are few frontiers left in the world these days, but the vast oceans are enticing when you want to get away from it all. Some would like to get away from it all forever. These are the proponents of "seasteading," or living on the ocean, close to nature and away from laws, taxes, and mortgages.  

The first attempts at open-ocean habitation were obvious larks. In 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s brother, Leicester, declared that a bamboo raft, little bigger than an oversized parking space, was a sovereign nation, New Atlantis. One record shows that the “country,” which floated off the coast of Jamaica, had six founding citizens: Hemingway’s family plus a public relations specialist and his assistant. When the raft sank in a storm a few years later, no one seemed to be on board. In 1967, an engineer built a platform the size of a basketball court off the coast of Italy, added a restaurant and souvenir shack, and called it the Republic of Rose Island. The Italian government deemed it a tourist trap designed to evade the local tax laws and destroyed the structure the next year. (This story was the inspiration for Rose Island, a recent Netflix comedy.)

A retired British army major named Roy Bates proved more successful. In late 1966, he climbed aboard an old antiaircraft platform 11 kilometers off the coast of England, declaring it the Principality of Sealand and his family its royalty. Despite efforts by the British government to reclaim its property—and a few attempted coups by rivals—the Bates family still claims the platform, which supports a 10-room compound. As of 2019, its sole occupant was a full-time hired guard. Bates’s son, Michael, now the reigning monarch, lives in the more convenient country of England, where he runs a fishing fleet.

There are recurring problems in building an ocean utopia: international laws mean that a truly free community will have to be fairly far away from land, building a platform to live on is very expensive, and getting supplies will be difficult. Chad Elwartowski has been chasing the dream of living on the ocean with a community of like-minded individuals for years, which has involved spinning off corporations, becoming a fugitive from Thailand, and settling in Panama for now. Read his story, and more on the seasteading movement, at Hakai magazine. -via Damn Interesting

After their longest shutdown ever, Disneyland in California will open to the public (California residents only) on April 30. That will pave the way for the grand opening of their new theme park within the park, Avengers Campus, on June 4.

At Avengers Campus, guests of all ages can find their powers as they take an active role alongside some of their favorite Super Heroes, with a chance to live out their own heroic story. Whether that be slinging webs with Spider-Man, trying out inventive new foods, experiencing heroic encounters, and even teaming up with the Avengers and their allies, all recruits are invited to join in on the action.

“Avengers Campus will be a place where fans and guests can finally step into the universe they love, and stand alongside some of their favorite heroes,” said Dave Bushore, vice president of Franchise Creative & Marketing for Marvel Studios. “The optimism inherent in Avengers Campus captures the diversity, power and teamwork these extraordinary characters possess, and now they come together to unite people from all over the world under one guiding principle: We are stronger together.”

Get a rundown on what Avengers Campus will offer at Marvel. Reservations will be necessary, as the number of guests will be limited this summer. -via Mashable

Due to popular demand, many food manufacturers would like to offer their products with natural food coloring instead of synthetic colors. However, the pallete has so far been incomplete as there are no purely blue foods in nature. But a new ways to color foods blue has been found, strangely, in red cabbage.  

“Blue colors are really quite rare in nature – a lot of them are really reds and purples,” said Pamela Denish, a graduate student working with Professor Justin Siegel at the UC Davis Department of Chemistry and Innovation Institute for Food and Health.

Having the right blue color is also important for mixing other colors, such as green. If the blue isn’t right, it will produce muddy, brown colors when mixed, Siegel said.

Red cabbage extracts are widely used as a source of natural food colorings, especially reds and purples. These dyes are called anthocyanins. For about a decade, a team led by scientists at the Mars Advanced Research Institute and Mars Wrigley Science and Technology, in collaboration with the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health; The Ohio State University; Nagoya University, Japan; the University of Avignon, France; and SISSA University, Italy, have been working on isolating a blue anthocyanin from red cabbage. But the natural blue coloring is present only in tiny amounts.

The breakthrough came when researchers found an enzyme -among the billions available- that would turn the small amount of anthocyanin blue in red cabbage into a relatively large amount, making mass production possible. Read about the research at UC Davis. Just think, soon we'll be able to eat Superman ice cream and know that it's all natural! -via Real Clear Science

(Image credit: Amada44)

When you have kids and can't go places, you need to get creative about having fun at home. Steve Wilkins and his sons Tyler and Dylan harnessed the family treadmill for some auto racing. They tilted the back end of the treadmill and loaded it up with 100 Hot Wheels cars! Switch on the treadmill, and watch what happens. Wilkins provides the exciting play-by-play narration as we find out which car will survive the longest. They've recorded a whole series of these races. -via Laughing Squid

Kalimullah Khan was inspired by a crossbred rose bush. https://t.co/p13MXaX5Pb

— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) April 7, 2021

Kalimullah Khan grew up on his family's mango farm in Malihabad, in northern India. When he was 15, a rose bush inspired him to learn the art of grafting, and of course that would involve mango trees. His first grafted tree was destroyed by floods, but he never gave up. Now 80 years old, Khan is proud to show off his magnum opus.   

Over the years, Khan fine-tuned the art of cutting off a branch from one tree, slicing notched angles into it, and then attaching the orphaned cutting to a new, hybrid tree. In 1987, he started grafting cuttings of different varieties onto a 100-year-old mango tree. He collected samples from across the country to add, seeking out rare varieties. Khan says the tree now grows more than 300 types of mangoes. He calls it Al Muquaraar, or The Resolute.

The tree has become a tourist attraction, and Khan will let visitors sample the fruit. He also cultivates new varieties of mangos. Read his story at Atlas Obscura.

You've read about Miniatur Wunderland, the place in Hamburg with the world's largest model railway. Recently, they set up a train to cruise by 2,840 water glasses, playing classical tunes as it passes by. The trip lasted six minutes, and set a world record! The rest of the video is a look at how they did it. -via Digg