Steffen Kraft, also known as ICONEO, produces lovely artworks that are often fantastical, but always relatable. Some are just clever images, while many illustrate what's wrong with our modern world in simple and often wordless fashion.  



You can see all of ICONEO's works at Instagram, and check out a ranked list of his social commentary images at Bored Panda.

ICONEO prints can be bought through Etsy.

In March of 1898, British surgeon Dr. William Brown attended a livestock auction. He was summoned to an emergency on the grounds, as a 14-year-old boy just had his ear bitten off by a horse! A slice of his scalp was gone, too.  

Although the case looked so hopeless (as regards disfigurement) I determined to make an attempt to save the ear, as the patient could be no worse off than he was then if the attempt failed. I asked for the ear and after about ten minutes’ search it was brought to me, having been found near the horse in the stable yard.

It was of a dirty drab colour and the posterior flap was curled up in a roll. I had no instruments or dressing with me, and it would have taken half an hour or more to procure them, which delay would have rendered the attempt to preserve the ear useless. I therefore procured some common needles and thread and after washing the ear in warm water I proceeded to sew it on by inserting a suture above and another below, followed by three behind and three before.

Although R.J. eventually lost a small portion of the ear, the surgery was successful. It may have been due the boy's natural healing powers, as he was accident-prone and had undergone skin grafts earlier in his life. More likely, his recovery was due to the careful battle against infection taken by Dr. Brown, as he related in his account at Thomas Morris's blog.  -via Strange Company

A young black bear climbed into the window of the ladies' room at Buck's T-4 Lodge in Big Sky, Montana. He couldn't get back out the window he came in, and didn't know how to open the door. Hotel staff knew what to do, though- call for help and pull out the phones to take video, which they uploaded to Facebook.

The sheriff arrived at the lodge quickly after the hotel staff called, but guests and the bear had to hang out for a few hours while waiting for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks to show up due to distance. The little guy was "pretty spooked" by the people gathered outside the bathroom door. He dealt with his fear by doing what we've all done when faced with trouble: nap.

"He made himself at home in the bathroom counter where the sinks are and went to sleep," O'Connor said.

The game warden and his team tranquilized the bear and set a phone in the restroom and monitored the bear through FaceTime. He was eventually removed and taken to a remote location for release. The bear left behind some damage, though- a shredded towel dispenser and a sink full of poop. No word on whether the bear scat was full of berry seeds and squirrel fur. Read the full story of the bear in the bathroom at Mashable.

This is only appropriate use of "scientists are baffled" I've ever seen.

Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace, Baffling Scientists https://t.co/RGJMjiyzMY pic.twitter.com/z72MJnDVuH

— Andrew Thaler (@DrAndrewThaler) September 6, 2019

The Boknis Eck Observatory is an automated monitoring station gathering scientific data on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Or it was. Launched in 2016, the 800-pound device transmits data to ocean researchers, or it did until August 21st, when the signals stopped. A team of divers went down to see what was wrong, and found the entire station gone. The data transmission cable was shredded.

The observatory was in a restricted area off the northern coast of Germany. Boats, including fishing vessels, are not allowed into the area, the BBC reported. That somebody, or a group of individuals, removed the observatory remains the most plausible explanation. Other factors, such as a massive storm, heavy currents, or even marine animals, were ruled out as potential causes owing to the weight of the instrument. Who or what removed the science station, and why, is a complete mystery. German police were alerted to the incident and are now investigating, according to GEOMAR.

Well, it was obviously the kraken. Or possibly a supervillain, the type with unlimited funds and an incomprehensible but nefarious plan, like you'd find in a James Bond novel. Then again, it could have been aliens from outer space. Scientists involved with the project are asking anyone with information to come forward. Read more about the Boknis Eck Observatory at Gizmodo.

The lesser ape known as the siamang is the largest of all gibbons, and is native to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Unkie and Ellie are a siamang couple at the San Diego Zoo who have been together since 1987. In that time, they've produced five healthy female baby siamangs, and Ellie was on contraception for her retirement. But last November, the zoo staff were shocked to find Elllie with a tiny new baby! The hairless offspring was premature, weak, and underweight, and showed signs of a possible spinal anomaly.

While Ellie carried and cuddled her infant 24 hours a day, veterinary staff stood by. They were concerned enough to check the infant again about two weeks later, but intervention wasn’t necessary. To everyone’s relief, any potential problems resolved as the infant developed. Everyone was thrilled to celebrate her two-month milestone, and then see her continue to grow into a strong, healthy youngster. They give all the credit to Ellie’s maternal skills. “It was all Ellie,” says Julie. Keepers named the infant Selamat, and affectionately call her Sela. The name is an especially appropriate Malay word: its most common meaning is “congratulations,” but a lesser-used definition is “survivor.”

As Sela grew, she became friends with a 6-year-old orangutan named Aisha. Although Aisha is many times Sela's size, they play together with joy. Ellie still keeps a close eye on her baby.

Read Sela's story at the San Diego Zoo's website.  -via Metafilter

There are a lot of place names in the world that are considered rude, explicit, and even downright obscene, especially in a different language. These place names are collected in the Really Rude Map.  You can scan the entire world, or zoom in to bring up more place names. Be warned that your co-workers will consider this NSFW. It was difficult enough for me to find a section tame enough for a screenshot to post here. -via Boing Boing

Collaborations and innovations are made over drinks. Or at least, that's what we hear. Mike Andrew heard it, too, and began to look into the geography of collaboration, to find out exactly where great minds get together to bounce around ideas. To test whether saloons had an effect on innovation, he looked into data on Prohibition in the US.

Across the United States, these new laws promptly shuttered the imbibing regions’ bars and taverns. A century or so later, Andrews realized this was the holy grail of social-science research: a natural experiment. He downloaded patent data, compared the number granted to inventors in the wet and dry counties before and after statewide prohibition began, and came up with a measurement of the importance of slightly drunken discussion to invention.

The result? A 15 percent decrease in the number of patents. The areas whose saloons shuttered had become less inventive.

This is a meaningful change, comparable to the effect the Great Depression had on invention across the United States. In other work, Andrews has calculated that the establishment of a new university results (eventually) in a roughly 45 percent increase in local patents. This suggests that the bars’ closure had an effect one-third as strong as a county gaining a university—albeit in the opposite direction. Which is pretty remarkable! After all, universities are centers of knowledge, and bars are businesses that exchange beer for money.

Andrews tested the data in other ways to check his hypothesis, such as measuring the effect of Prohibition on patents by women and patents by corporations, and the effects of the Great Depression and World War II on patents. Read what he found at Atlas Obscura.

The word "dinosaur" wasn't coined until 1842, but fossilized bones of extinct creatures have been encountered for as long as humans have been digging in the ground. Those who found them would ascribe their origin to whatever they could relate to, such as dragons or giants. Which leads us to a chicken-or-egg question: did the legends come from the fossils, or were the fossils just further evidence of the legends? However, the science of paleontology inched forward over time, with some wonderful stories along the way, like that of the first Megalosaurus bones that were seriously studied.  

But before it was called the Megalosaurus, it had a rather more humorous name. You see, in 1763 a physician called Richard Brookes studying Plot’s drawings dubbed it “Scrotum Humanum” because he thought it looked like a set of petrified testicles. (To be clear, Brookes knew it wasn’t a fossil of a giant scrotum, but nevertheless decided to name it thus because apparently men of all eras of human history can’t help but make genital jokes at every opportunity.)

While hilarious, in the 20th century, this posed a problem for the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature when it eventually came time to formally classify the Megalosaurus as such. The problem was, of course, that Brookes had named it first.

Eventually the ICZN decided that since nobody after Brookes had called it Scrotum Humanum, even though he was the first to name it, that name could safely be deemed invalid. Thus Megalosaurus won out, which is unfortunate because discussion of the rather large Scrotum Humanum would have provided great companion jokes to ones about Uranus in science classes the world over.

Read about how the science of dinosaurs developed at Today I Found Out.

El helicóptero de #LaVuelta19 descubre una plantación de marihuana en una azotea. pic.twitter.com/Zhry3x1rng

— AUGC Guardia Civil (@AUGC_Comunica) September 3, 2019

It seemed like a good idea: grow your weed on the rooftop, where the sun shines but no one can see. No one except the cameraman covering a bike race from a moving helicopter, broadcasting the results live!

Catalan cops seized over 40 cannabis plants from a rooftop near Barcelona yesterday thanks to information from an unexpected source: a TV helicopter broadcasting this month’s Vuelta a España. Stage 8 of the race finished in the town of Igualada on Saturday, and as the race made its way through the city streets at the end of the stage, helicopter footage showed a whole bunch of (presumably) dank weed on someone’s rooftop.

Apparently, the cannibis was only noticed when the video hit social media, where rewinding is easier. The owner of the plants has not been found. -via Boing Boing

No matter what time it is, there are people all over the world joining, contributing, and editing Wikipedia. At 4AM local time, there were 49 edits per minute. Listen to Wikipedia monitors that activity and renders it as a data visualization with sound.

Listen to the sound of Wikipedia's recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell. You can welcome him or her by clicking the blue banner and adding a note on their talk page.

Click on the circles as they appear to go to the page that being edited and see what changes are being made. You can also scroll down on the page to filter the data by type or by language. Even if you aren't sucked into exploring the world of Wikipedia edits, the plucks and chimes are quite soothing to listen to as you do something else. -via Metafilter

Car Talk was a live radio show featuring MIT graduates, auto mechanics, and brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi. It ran for 25 years on National Public Radio, after ten years on WBUR-FM. Since the Magliozzis retired from broadcasting in 2012, the show now consists of previously-aired clips edited together, called The Best of Car Talk. Car Talk combined humor with automotive advice, and relied on the entertaining banter between the Magliozzi brothers. They never took themselves, or the show, too seriously.

“They’re just machines,” Ray told The New York Times in 1988, after recently purchasing 1987 Dodge pickup. “This is not brain surgery. It falls apart, you get another one.”

All this time, Car Talk built a huge audience. Ray and Tom had a vague sense of this, but tried their best to stay oblivious.

“When we were sitting here, just us and [producer David Greene] and [producer Doug Berman] and the engineer it never came into my mind like, ‘Oh, I better do my best possible job because there are four or five million people listening,’ Ray says. “We tried to do our best anyway in whatever that was. We never went out of our way to try to be funny. We never went out of our way to try to give the right answer necessarily although we did try, but we didn’t go to extreme measures.”

Fans of Car Talk will want to read an interview with Ray Magliozzi about his automotive philosophy, his brother (Tom died in 2014), and their radio show at Jalopnik.

Megatherium is the genus of an extinct 20-foot-long South American ground sloth. It was also the name of a very exclusive club. The Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846 in Washington, DC, a town not known for science at that time. That meant it offered wide open opportunities for young, adventurous scientists to get in on the ground floor of a project that could afford to fund their expeditions, experiments, and writing. They could also hobnob with like-minded fellows in a shared boardinghouse.  

Like their English counterparts, the members of the Megatherium Club were united by youth, ambition, intelligence and a deep and abiding love of the natural world. Their days were spent in the bowels of the Smithsonian, hunched over jars of marine worms in alcohol or endless trays of fossils. Thanks to Baird, who was known as a “collector of collectors,” specimens arrived at the Smithsonian from all over the world. Stimpson and the other taxonomic zoologists sorted, described and classified this avalanche of specimens. Their work provided a solid foundation for future biologists by updating and standardizing the classification of flora and fauna.

At night they were ready to cut loose—drinking until dawn. Then they’d recover from their revelries with long walks on Sunday mornings, "the true Church for sedentary men," Stimpson said, when a friend wondered if perhaps they should attend church instead. Courting young ladies, especially with picnics along scenic Rock Creek, was another favorite leisure activity. “Spring is coming fast, glorious season which gives us new life while nature lures us to her arms," Stimpson wrote, in a letter to the geologist Ferdinand Hayden. “I shall now have more time and take more out-door recreation especially in the form of picnics with the girls, the dear angels some of whom I should certainly try to marry were it not for the pain of leaving the others.”

The young men may have partied hard, but they needed mutual support as they helped establish the Smithsonian as a respectable science organization. Read about the Megatherium Club at Smithsonian.

Neo Bye was driving through Kruger National Park in South Africa when he happened on a curious scene. This young leopard would like to eat a slow-moving porcupine, but can't figure out how. He almost gives up when he gets a few spines in his mouth, but curiosity draws him back in. -Thanks, Bruce!

Christina Meador was to be the maid of honor at her sister's wedding. The bride, Deanna Adams, told her she could wear anything she wanted to. So she showed up to the nuptials in a T-rex costume!

“When you’re maid of honor and told you can wear anything you choose … I regret nothing,” wrote Christina Meador alongside a Facebook photo of her wearing a T-Rex costume last month.

The photo — which shows her towering over the bridal party in the costume — has since gone viral with more than 35,000 shares on social media.

Adams didn't mind, and said she meant it when she said Meador could wear anything she wanted. A good time was had by all. -via Fark

(Image source: Christina A. Meador)

Before Stephen King's 1986 novel It was a film in 2017, it was a TV miniseries in 1990. Those who were born later and saw It on home video probably never realized it was full of big name TV stars of the day. Anyway, the theatrical film released a couple of years ago had the advantage of an R rating and digital special effects, so even though the 1990 version was a hit that became a classic, it suffers by comparison, as you'll see in this Honest Trailer.