BugsyShort is renovating his home. He said he "decided to put this in the wall before its boarded up so I can give the next person who renovates the house a heart attack." The two main reactions were suggestions for what the skeleton's t-shirt should say, and laments about the wasted space. BugsyShort was ready with an explanation.  

And that, my friends, is how you internet.

Whale sharks are fish that can grow as long as 59 feet (18 meters), so there's not much in the ocean that's going to mess with them. However, they are vulnerable in their own ways, and have developed adaptations to protect themselves from the friction of swimming, namely, teeth that grow all over their bodies, including their eyeballs! These modified teeth are called dermal denticles.   

Whale sharks, unlike some other shark species, don’t have eyelids. Also, their tiny eyes are located at the corners of their square heads, exposing their peepers to potential damage. That’s where the protective eye denticles come in.

Sharks have dermal denticles elsewhere on their bodies. These marine animals don’t have scales like other fish, but they do have placoid scales, which are made of dermal denticles. These modified teeth, with their hard enamel, provide sharks with armor-like protection, but they also work to reduce friction in the water, helping sharks swim with speed and stealth.

A study of whale sharks from Japanese aquariums, both living and dead specimens, show the denticles comes in all sorts of shapes. One shark eyeball had nearly 3,000 denticles! Read more about this research at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: istolethetv)

I have never seen The NeverEnding Story, but according to this Honest Trailer, it was full of doom, gloom, misery, and sadness. In other words, it was a German kids' movie. It was a big hit in West Germany, which was still a country in 1984, and managed to make money in the US, although it was not what we'd normally think of as a blockbuster. However, people who were children in 1984 now run the internet, so The NeverEnding Story is a fondly remembered shared experience among them.

Katmai National Park and Preserve's Fat Bear tournament last fall was won by a fabulously rotund female brown bear named Holly. You can see her at her chonkiest here. But soon after winning the competition, Holly went into hibernation, and now she has emerged a changed bear.

After online voters crowned Holly the fattest of the fat bears in October 2019, she went into hibernation during the long winter famine, subsisting on her ample fat reserves. What's more, Holly also gave birth and nursed a cub during hibernation (female bears are the only animals known to give birth and lactate while hibernating, noted Fitz).

"All that fat paid off," Naomi Boak, the media ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve, told Mashable. "She’s one-third the bear she was," Boak, who's currently stationed at the Brooks River in Katmai, added.

Giving birth to a cub is all the more remarkable because Holly is 20 years old, which is the expected lifespan of a brown bear. She probably won't be in the running this fall, because this summer she is fishing for two. Read more about Holly at Mashable. You can follow the bears of Katmai on a webcam through the summer.

(Image credit: National Park Service)

You might look at a map and think about how wonderful a road trip it would be to drive from the top of North America down to the bottom of South America (or vice-versa) on the Pan-American Highway. The problem is that the Pan-American Highway doesn't go all the way- there's a relatively short route that connects the two continents that has never been paved -and might never be. It's called the Darién Gap, and RealLifeLore explains why it's so difficult to build a road through it. -via Digg

As I’ve been trained by fab @guidedogs how to navigate using tactile pavement I thought I would share some key info in a thread! First, blister paving at road crossing points. The tactile round bumpy paving at pelican crossings is usually red & bumps are in horizontal rows. pic.twitter.com/bGdmfW3sZ9

— Dr Amy Kavanagh👩🏼‍🦯 (@BlondeHistorian) June 13, 2018

Amy Kavanagh is visually impaired, and navigates London with a cane. She writes about her experiences and disability issues at her blog Cane Adventures. Kavanagh explains the nuts and bolts of tactile paving, which is a guidance system in city streets for those who cannot see what's ahead. Textured blocks denote road crossings, rail platforms, stairs, ramps, and other hazards. The pattern of raised bumps signal what is ahead, which can be felt by feet or a cane. The shape of these blocks help to orient direction. Kavanagh gives us a short tour of the different ways tactile paving helps her navigate city streets in this Twitter thread.

Kavanagh describes tactile paving as it exists in British cities. The system varies slightly slightly by country, which you can read about at Wikipedia.

-via Bored Panda

German paper designer Peter Dahmen shows us some of the commissioned pop-up cards he has created. You won't find these in your local drug store! If you want to see how it's done, he has a few tutorials for beginners. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Churchill, Manitoba, is a unique town. A thousand miles north of Winnipeg, it sits on the shores of Hudson Bay. It is home to about 900 people, but they are dominated by polar bears, as Churchill is right on their migration route.

Churchill grew from a small remote outpost to a thriving commercial port engaging in fur trade to a strategic US military base all in the span of four hundred years. After World War 2, Churchill became part of the Canadian signals intelligence network, and later the site for rocket research for atmospheric studies. Churchill was nearly annihilated when the British government decided to test nuclear weapons there, but then chose Australia instead.

Today, Churchill is mostly a polar bears’ town, with nearly 800 of them living in the vicinity. That number swells to 10,000 during the hunting season. That’s the best time to watch polar bears. Tour operators take visitors to the town’s fringes on giant buggies from where they can watch the animals in the wild. The vehicle’s height keeps the occupants safe and beyond the reach of even the largest bear.

To live in Churchill, one has exercise caution at all times. There are warning signs posted all around the town reminding people not to leave the town’s borders or venture into bear sites. Many people keep the doors of their houses and vehicles unlocked, should anyone need to make a quick escape.

The residents of Churchill used to shoot polar bears that wandered into town, but now they put them in jail instead. It's not a pleasant experience for the bears, but they aren't there to be punished, rather to discourage them from ever wanting anything to do with humans. Read about the polar bear jail at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Emma)

When motion pictures started using chroma-key effects, they were believable because we weren't used to them. In the decades since, we've gotten much pickier about special effects- we expect all movies, TV shows, and even videos to be as good as the best we've seen. You can catch an old movie you loved as kid and be shocked now at how awful the special effects were. And now that everyone is making their own video content, the quality of green screen shots varies widely. Tom Scott explains exactly why. The video is only 4:30 long; the rest is promotion.

In 1892, a murder case lit up newspapers in Louisville, Kentucky, as it happened in a rather well-known brothel run by Emma Austin. On the morning of September 9, Mrs. Austin made a hearty pancake breakfast. Despite several other people being on the premises, the only ones to eat were Austin and her star prostitute, Eugenia Sherrill. Both women soon felt deathly ill.  

At first, the physician, Dr. Brennan, presumed the women were suffering from nothing worse than a case of severe food poisoning--an ailment sadly common in pre-refrigeration summers--and gave them the medicine appropriate for such cases. However, Austin and Sherrill continued to deteriorate. Their eyes dilated, they were covered in a cold sweat, and, most alarming of all, they had begun vomiting blood. The doctor soon realized the women had been poisoned, probably deliberately.

This shocking development opened up an embarrassing can of worms for everyone involved. As I said above, Mrs. Jackson was left trying to explain why she, a seemingly respectable lady, had spent the last two weeks living in a brothel. Eugenia Sherrill’s position was even more mortifying: prostitution was merely her secret side career. Up until now, she was known to society only as a member of one of Kentucky’s most prominent and respectable families. Even worse, for the past year she had been married to Edward Sherrill, a prosperous traveling salesman. In her agony, poor Mrs. Sherrill was frantic to be brought to her home so she could die without her double life being discovered. Unfortunately, she was far too ill to be moved. Dr. Brennan was helpless to save them. Eugenia died at 12: 45 p.m. Mrs. Austin’s sufferings ended two hours later.

The two women were found to have been poisoned, but it wasn't clear whether either or both were the intended targets. And there was no dearth of suspects. Was it one of Sherrill's clients who had stayed the night? Was it the grocer downstairs? Was it a family member? Or possibly a jealous rival from another brothel, or someone's wife? Was it a suicide? The investigation dragged on, and the local papers printed every scandalous detail, including the names of men who visited Austin's house of ill repute. Read the tale of the Louisville brothel murders at Strange Company.

Phi Compile and his four-year-old son Ollie made a stop-motion video by moving magnets around on their refrigerator! The final result is pretty cool, we are also impressed that he could keep the child engaged through the "few hundred" still photos.

Too long but it kept Ollie off my Switch

— Phi Compile (@phi6) June 28, 2020

See, you never know when an attempt to distract your children might lead to a viral video! -via Digg

Now, this is one weird-looking animal. It's called Thylacosmilus, and it was a South American marsupial that lived around three million years ago. Note the huge saber teeth, as big as those of the saber-toothed cat, or Smilodon, that lived quite a bit after Thylacosmilus. But even weirder is the lower jaw that accommodated those teeth. A comparison between Thylacosmilus and Smilodon reveals that despite the teeth, they were very different animals.  

At a time when South America was still an island, Thylacosmilus did not occupy Smilodon’s apex niche. Large “terror birds,” which could grow taller than a person, with a two-foot long skull that was mostly beak, may have been the dominant carnivores. Thylacosmilus appears to have filled a unique ecological niche, one that even modern scavengers, such as the relatively indiscriminate, bone-chomping hyena, don’t quite fit: a scavenger that was careful with its food, targeting the softest tissues, such as internal organs rather than muscle or bone.

Read about Thylacosmilus and its unique ecological niche at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Jose manuel canete)

Rok Andic made a little wordless cartoon that is less than two minutes long, yet manages to tickle the funny bone just right. Did I say wordless? It's got a punch line that you can see coming, but is still so satisfying. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Scythian culture went all out for burials. High-status people were even buried in underground log cabins, surrounded by artifacts that wold be useful in the afterlife. The boot shown above was worn by a Scythian woman buried in the Altai Mountains of Siberia around 2300 years ago. The permafrost helped to preserve it in amazingly fine condition, but even if it weren't so old, the craftwork and decorations would still impress us.  

The red cloth-wrapped leather bootie, now part of the State Hermitage Museum's collection, is a stunner, trimmed in tin, pyrite crystals, gold foil and glass beads secured with sinew. Fanciful shapes—ducklings, maybe?—decorate the seams. But the true mindblower is the remarkable condition of its sole.

Speculation is rampant on Reddit, as to this bottom layer’s pristine condition:

Maybe the boot belonged to a high-ranking woman who wouldn’t have walked much…

Or Scythians spent so much time on horseback, their shoe leather was spared…

Or perhaps it’s a high quality funeral garment, reserved for exclusively post-mortem use…

I would guess number three. I can imagine this woman spending her own free time preparing the garments she would eventually be buried in. Or maybe there was a local industry dedicated to making burial boots. Read more about Scythian burial practices at Open Culture. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image source: Museum Archive)

Police procedurals, whodunnits, and courtroom dramas are a big part of our entertainment, but that doesn't mean they are all that accurate. Crime fiction uses all sorts of shortcuts and tropes that just aren't so in real life, but they will keep using them as long as they create conflict and move the plot along -and ensure that the "good guys" win.  

See 14 of these myths busted in a pictofacts list at Cracked.