This is the story of Lily and Bean. And Stan. And Cassidy. A true life soap opera. Is this a case of anthropomorphism, or do cats play complicated mind games the way humans do? Bean is in awe of Lily, who is out of his league. But Lily seems to be on the verge of figuring out what -or who- is good for her. You can see more of Lily and Bean at the Instagram account beautynthebean.

In the movie Finding Nemo, a school of fish snap into a formation that resembles a much larger fish. Photographer James Crombie caught that sort of thing happening in real life, with a flock of starlings over Lough Ennell in County Westmeath, Ireland. Crombie, who was recently named photographer of the year by the Press Photographers Association of Ireland, usually covers sports, but with extra time over the past year, has turned his attention to nature.

“A friend of mine, Colin Hogg, lives near the lake, and he said to me last year that the starlings would make a great picture,” says Crombie, who works for the Inpho photo agency. “They nest in the reeds around the lake, and they move every four or five days, towards sunset, and when they move they make shapes.”

Crombie made, he thinks, about 50 trips to Lough Ennell in the past few months. “I’m usually a sports photographer, so for a while I’ve had a bit of time to think about other things. I had an image in my head,” he explains. “I could see they were making shapes. I kept going back, to get the image I had in my head.”

Tuesday night, Crombie shot hundreds of frames and captured the amazing image he had been seeking: a murmuration of starlings in the shape of a starling. Colin Hogg caught the moment on video.



Read more on how it happened at the Irish Times. -via Kottke

In the 13th century, two chronicles were written that tell the tale of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, a native of Iceland who sailed to Greenland and then the New World, known to Vikings as Vinland. The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red both tell of events that were passed down orally for a couple hundred years already. According to the longer saga Greenlanders, Gudrid also later traveled to Rome! But was she a real person, an amalgamation of characters, or completely fictional? Author Nancy Marie Brown, as well as some archaeologists, believe the story is plausible.

While some of the Gudrid story handed down in the sagas might be apocryphal—like her husband’s ghost coming back for a chat—Brown and other scholars argue that portions of the narrative are based on actual events.

Archaeology can often verify saga events. “When archaeologists pay attention to the sagas and actually go looking for stuff where the sagas say they should look,” Brown says, “they have often found [what they’re looking for].”

In Gudrid’s case, archaeologists have excavated the Glaumbaer turf house described in the sagas as her final home in Iceland. The structure is unlike any other Viking age turf home in Iceland, most resembling one built hundreds of miles away in a North American Viking settlement—the very settlement Gudrid and her husband supposedly built on the tip of a Newfoundland peninsula.

That's not the only evidence of a real Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir. Read her story and the research confirming it so far at Smithsonian.

Banksy has published footage of the creation of the his latest work, which appeared on the outside wall of HM Prison in Reading, Berkshire, UK. The artwork depicts poet and onetime inmate Oscar Wilde escaping not with knotted bed sheets, but on a long page of typewriter paper. The video uses Bob Ross' television show The Joy of Painting as a framework, and Ross himself narrates in exquisitely edited clips from the show. -via Geekologie

A scheduled flight from Sudan to Abu Dhabi was forced to return to its origin after the cockpit… https://t.co/6lAjjM4NE2

— Simple Flying (@simple_flying) March 1, 2021

A plane bound from Khartoum, Sudan, to Qatar was forced to make an emergency landing earlier this week when a stowaway attacked the pilot. The suspected terrorist was a cat.

According to reporting in Al-Sudani, the kitty was not a happy passenger, and proceeded to attack the captain. While the crew made every attempt to capture the aggressive stowaway, it proved impossible to get near the furry hijacker. Unable to continue the journey, the pilots set about returning to Khartoum, to the surprise of the passengers onboard.

While you might assume the naughty cat was an escapee from a passenger’s on-board belongings, it seems he was more likely to be a feral feline who sought a comfortable place to rest. Al-Sudani reported that the plane was stationary in the hangar overnight for cleaning and preparations. It is believed that the cat crept onboard and found a comfortable spot to rest in the cockpit.

There is no word yet on the condition of the pilot. Read more about this incident and other animal shenanigans on planes at Simple Flying. -via reddit

It's been a year since the Skywalker saga closed for good. The latest Star Wars trilogy grossed $4.5 billion worldwide, outstripping what Disney paid for the franchise, and led to plenty of spinoffs. But how does that compare to the damage it left behind? The arc of the three movies left a bitter taste in the mouths of many of the people connected with it. At the top of the list are Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega.  

Lots of great movies had tortuous paths to the big screen, but they tend to be more of the “director and star didn’t get along” variety. The treatment that Tran endured was something uglier and more modern — and she wasn’t alone in the Star Wars universe. Likewise, Boyega had to deal with racist fans on social media, although he was outspoken about his frustrations with how Disney sidelined his character along the way: “They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley,” he said last summer. “Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.” Both he and Tran have reason to complain: By The Rise of Skywalker, they felt like supporting characters that the filmmakers didn’t know what to do with. So much for diversity.

Others were affected, too: Driver and Ridley, Oscar Isaac, Rian Johnson, Mark Hamill, George Lucas, and millions of lifelong Star Wars fans. Read how they feel about the last Star Wars trilogy at Mel magazine.

PS: If you're interested, there's more in a new interview with Kelly Marie Tran at The Hollywood Reporter.

(Image credit: Gage Skidmore)

Botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov had a lifelong mission to prevent starvation by improving food production. His native Russia suffered numerous famines under both the tsar and the Soviets. The scientist would walk hundreds of miles in remote locations all over the world to collect seeds that might be bred to grow grain in the cold Russian climate. He initiated experimental growing programs that harnessed Mendel's gene theory for crop improvements.      

At the end of 1920, Vavilov was promoted to director of the Institute of Applied Botany in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). The previous director, the plant biologist Robert Regel, had died of typhus the previous year. Shortly before his death, he had written to the Commissariat of Agriculture, recommending Vavilov as his successor. Vavilov was not only ‘the future pride of Russian science’ but an especially agreeable person, belonging ‘to a category of people of whom you won’t hear a bad word from anybody at all’. The Institute, under its new leadership, was envisaged as a scientific centre for testing and improving crop varieties to prevent future famines. It was also to be the home of Vavilov’s grand new project: A vast seed collection, acting as a genetic library, a repository of useful genes which he could use to breed new, superior plants. Arriving at the Institute, Vavilov quickly realised that he was at the helm of an institution devastated by poverty. The rooms were in a state of complete disrepair, a chaotic mess of dust and broken furniture. The pipes had burst, and the existing stock of seeds devoured by the starving masses.

The Institute was not alone in its state of neglect; the whole city was in ruins. Hospitals had been abandoned, public transport was at a standstill, and there was an atmosphere of hopelessness among the dwindling population. Leading academics didn’t escape the clutches of poverty and hunger. In Petrograd, seven out of the Academy of Science’s 44 members died of starvation. Even Ivan Pavlov, a national treasure famous for being the country’s only living Nobel laureate, had to scavenge for firewood and food. Laboratory animals disappeared from their cages and appeared on dinner plates. Lab equipment was repurposed to make moonshine in exchange for food on the black market. Hunger wasn’t the only obstacle academics faced. Scientists returning from a conference or a field trip often found their laboratories looted and houses occupied by refugees from the countryside.

Vavilov managed to turn that situation around, collect more seeds from around the world, and continue the Institute's work. Vavilov's adventures in the field continued, and his reputation grew as the USSR went from the era of Lenin to the era of Stalin. But Vavilov then had to deal with Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist with lesser experience and education, but with a philosophy that meshed better with that of Stalin and the Communist ideologists. When it came time to lay blame on someone for the Soviet Union's agricultural failures, Vavilov had a target on his back. Read about the life and legacy of Nikolai Vavilov at Damn Interesting. You can also listen to it in podcast form.  

Don't you just love it when you watch a video for the comedy you expect, and end up learning something neat? Ze Frank is happy to introduce us to some weird creatures of the rainforest and the things they do to survive. He covers techniques like camouflage, toxicity, and mimicry that rainforest creatures use to avoid predators, which are all forms of deception. Plants do some of these things, too. You can't trust what you see in the rainforest, but you will enjoy the fabulous photography of bizarre animals by David Weiller and Thomas Marent in this video.

Taking a tip from the gritters of Scotland, the Minnesota Department of Transportation ran an online poll to name eight of their snowplows. The winning names are shown above, and all the names in the running can be seen at the competition site. There were more than 122,000 votes cast, and many of those who voted will now have some intangible connection with their local snowplow. I'm just surprised that Tator Tot Hotdish didn't rank among the winners. -via Laughing Squid

The "Best in Show" award in the Ocean Art 2020 Underwater Photo Competition has been announced. Photographer Gaetano Dario Gargiulo won a trip to the Solomon Islands for the above image of an octopus in a tide pool. According to the story of the shot, the octopus itself snapped the photo!

On the day of the photo, I remained in the tide pool as the tide was too low to venture outside of its boundaries. In one of the shallowest parts of the pool I noticed an octopus. I placed my camera near its den and the octopus started interacting with it. It came completely out of the den and to our amazement it started shooting pictures! My son (3 y.o. in the background) was very curious about the octopus.

The image, titled "Day of the Tentacle," also won in the wide angle category. You can see all the winners in this gallery. -via Boing Boing

The stories that are handed down from ancient times can seem infinitely weird to us, because we are familiar with the scientific method and modern technology that allows us to explore the nature of things. That doesn't mean there weren't smart people around way back then, but even those who figured there was a logical explanation somewhere had to find a way to explain the world to the uneducated masses. Imagine you were a person of some education and experience in the Dark Ages, and so were considered a medicine man or a wizard. You had to find a way to explain why this place wasn't good for castle construction to an illiterate king, so fire-breathing dragons it was.

Well, it's hypothesized that, back in the Iron Age, people would seal up treasure in the tombs of kings and rich people. The thing is, they would seal these tombs with a ton of things that decomposed: people, animals, vegetables, etc. The buried flesh would emit gasses as they decomposed, and with nowhere to go, they would create pressurized gas pockets. Try to open the tombs with a torch so you could see, or cause a spark with an iron spade, and BOOM!: big, firey oblivion in a world where Michael Bay wouldn't be around for thousands of years.

In Wales, there was a king who was trying to make his walls impenetrable. The only thing is, the walls kept falling down. A young real-life Merlin told the king that it was dragons fighting underground, possibly because he believed it, possibly because when a king asks you a question, you give him an answer even if it's nonsense. Instead of underground lizards, it was more likely gas pockets buried in the vast Welsh coal deposits underground.  

Read more about fire-breathing dragons, plus the likely real-life explanations for witches, vampires, and more at Cracked.

We learned about the historical practice of letterlocking some years ago. Then we learned about a trove of 17th-century undelivered mail discovered in the estate of postmasters Simon de Brienne and Marie Germain. Some of the mail was eventually opened and read, and some remained letterlocked to preserve its historical significance. Now a team of scientists and engineers from MIT have figured out how to read those letters without unfolding them!

“We’re X-raying history,” says team member David Mills, X-ray microtomography facilities manager at Queen Mary University of London. Mills, together with Graham Davis, professor of 3D X-ray imaging at Queen Mary, used machines specially designed for use in dentistry to scan unopened “locked” letters from the 17th century. This resulted in high-resolution volumetric scans, produced by high-contrast time delay integration X-ray microtomography.

“Who would have thought that a scanner designed to look at teeth would take us so far?” says Davis.

The technology had to be adapted to the project in order to separate the different layers of handwriting on paper. On the one hand, this could be a real breakthrough for deciphering writing on fragile ancient materials such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. On the other hand, it could enable nefarious organizations to read our contemporary correspondence. Read about the project at MIT News.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: MIT Libraries)

Have you ever heard of a bongo? According to Wikipedia, the bongo is the third-largest antelope in the world, and comes in two species: the western bongo is a near-threatened species, and the eastern bongo has a native habitat that consists of only a few mountains in Kenya. It is critically endangered, and there are more in zoos than in the wild. The Naples Zoo welcomed the birth of a new eastern bongo in January. The female calf's name is Amali, which means "hope" in Swahili. Read about bongos and the breeding program trying to save them from extinction at ZooBorns.

Karagöz, or shadow puppetry, is a Turkish art form going back hundreds of years. The plays performed this way center around two main characters, Karagöz and Hacivat, who worked together to build a mosque, despite coming from different social classes. They were both charming and witty, and their shenanigans led to their execution, yet they live on in shadow plays. These characters lend themselves to both drama and comedy.

The concept of shadow theater came to Turkey during the 16th century, when the Ottomans conquered the sultanate of Egypt. Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluk dynasty and attached Egypt to his empire, capturing Tuman bay II, the vanquished sultan, and hanging him in 1517. To win the victor’s favor, a Mamluk puppeteer portrayed the hanging during a shadow theater performance. Selim the Grim, as he was also known, was so pleased by the grisly show that he brought the puppeteer to his court. Soon after, shadow theater became popular throughout the Ottoman Empire, with performances based on social events, daily life, politics, and romance.

But the practice of Karagöz is waning. Master puppeteer Cengiz Özek is one of the few artists working full time to keep the tradition alive. Learn about his work at Atlas Obscura.

Now that we are looking forward to seeing Coming 2 America (the sequel), it's a good time to look back at the original 1988 movie Coming To America. Screen Junkies finds plenty of fun to poke at the Eddie Murphy hit, but none of it makes the movie less enjoyable. While the comparisons between this movie and Black Panther are expected, they could have said more about The Lion King. Not only did James Earl Jones voice Mufasa a few years later, but Madge Sinclair, who played Queen Aoleon, did the voice of the lioness Sarabi. The sequel, Coming 2 America, will be released March 5.