Servals are wildcats, although they act a lot like a house cat, hunting for birds and rodents. A house cat with long legs and big ears that make their faces look tiny. Yeah, sometime people keep them as pets, but it's not a good idea.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta has recommended that everyone (except infants) wear a cloth face cover when in public settings where there are other people, such as grocery stores. Since medical-grade face masks need to be reserved for medical professionals and the sick, the rest of us should be making our own masks.

The CDC has instructions for making three different kinds of masks, depending on your sewing skills and materials available. Vox has more information and additional links and videos for making homemade cloth masks.

(Image  credit: Flavio Gasperini)

If you want to watch movies, but you don't want to pay for a streaming service, you might look into public domain films. There are more of them than you realize, but finding them could be difficult. That's why you should bookmark the new streaming service called Voleflix. Matt Round found all kinds of public domain films and aggregated them on one site to make it easy to watch classics such as Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (1941), and Abbot and Costello in Jack and the Beanstalk (1952). There are also cartoons, Three Stooges shorts, and even a couple of Voleflix originals. If you don't want to watch old movies, you may know someone who would be tickled pink to learn about Volefix. -via Metafilter

A French royal decree in the year 1306 allowed for trial by combat to determine, in a last-ditch effort, who was telling the truth in a dispute that couldn't be determined by other means. The law was only for the nobility, only applied to serious criminal cases, and was rarely invoked. But in 1386, a scandal rocked the entire country and led to France's last trial by combat, with several lives at stake.

Marguerite de Carrouges, descended from an old and wealthy Norman family, had claimed that in January of that year she had been attacked and raped at her mother-in-law’s château by a squire (the rank below knighthood) named Jacques Le Gris, aided by one of his closest companions, one Adam Louvel. Marguerite’s father, Robert de Thibouville, had once betrayed the king of France, and some may have wondered whether this “traitor’s daughter” was in fact telling the truth.

Marguerite’s husband, Sir Jean de Carrouges, a reputedly jealous and violent man—whose once close friendship with Le Gris had soured in recent years amid court rivalry and a protracted dispute over land—was traveling at the time of the alleged crime. But when he returned a few days later and heard his wife’s story, he angrily brought charges against Le Gris in the court of Count Pierre of Alençon, overlord to both men. Le Gris was the count’s favorite and his administrative right hand. A large and powerful man, Le Gris was well educated and very wealthy, though from an only recently ennobled family. He also had a reputation as a seducer—or worse. But the count, infuriated by the accusation against his favorite, declared at a legal hearing that Marguerite “must have dreamed it” and summarily dismissed the charges, ordering that “no further questions ever be raised about it.”

You can see how politics, alliances, and bad blood can make a mess of a criminal accusation that came down to "he said, she said" anyway. Carrouges appealed to the king, which set in motion a prolonged investigation and eventually led to a duel in Paris in December. Carrouges and Le Gris battled to the death, with Marguerite's life also in the balance. Read the entire story of the trial by combat at Lapham's Quarterly. -via Strange Company

Sarah Butler created this Bingo card for Gothamist. While two of the squares are particular to New York, they can be replaced with your local TV station and governor. The rest of the squares work anywhere, since boredom and drinking are fairly universal. After all, we are all in this together. Bingo! -via Laughing Squid

Lynx Vilden has lived off the grid for most of her life. She now camps out in the woods of Washington state. Vilden has a cabin, but prefers to sleep in a dugout away from any kind of civilization, where she holds camps to teach other people how to survive on only what they can find around them. Writer Katherine Rowland drove out to see what that's like.   

It’s getting late, so Lynx and I abandon the cozy cabin for the lodge in the forest. “I like to sleep touching the earth,” she says, speaking in the drawn-out syllables of the Queen’s English. Through the thin light of my headlamp, I try to chase her sure-footed steps down an invisible trail through conifers and broad-leaved trees. I worry that I’ve lost Lynx to the night. But then I catch sight of an earthen dome rising five or six feet from the needled floor. I cast my light around, and see a tiny wooden door leading into the shelter, and crouch to enter a warm womb carved from the soil. Inside, Lynx coaxes embers to a roar before we settle into our matching hide and pine-bough beds.

The appeal of the “Stone Age thing,” Lynx explains as we sprawl before the fire, is that all you have are the materials available in the immediate environment. “It liberates something in the mind when you realize you’re not constrained by having to go buy some kind of tool that’s going to make your life easier.” This direct dependence on the elements cultivates “a depth of connection with all the nuances of nature around us,” she says. “You might see a shriveled-up stalk of grass. What I know is that, below the earth, there’s an edible root that tastes nutty. You just keep on learning.” Living wild, she elaborates, is an act of bearing witness, one that frequently requires relearning how to see and hear. Our senses have been numbed by the unrelenting light and noise of urban life. It deadens us, she says. “If we get so tame, so domesticated, we lose something that is very human.”

Read about Lynx Vilden and her philosophy at Outside Online. -via Digg

Every annoying and unfamiliar issue we are dealing with this year has already been confronted by the residents of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Frank Vaccarriello looked up the scenes from M*A*S*H that deal with social distancing, infection, hand washing, and worst of all, lack of toilet paper. -via Laughing Squid

Romans brought elephants to England during their invasions in first century of the common era, but after that, more than a thousand years passed before another elephant was actually seen by people in Britain- or most of Europe. But travelers brought back tales, which artists tried to illustrate. For his masters thesis at the University of Arts in Berlin, Uli Westphal created a taxonomic tree of those illustrations called Elephas Anthropogenus. It was later published in Zoologischer Anzeiger - A Journal of Comparative Zoology.

Since there was no real knowledge of how these animals actually looked, illustrators had to rely on oral, pictorial and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct an elephant, thus, reinventing the image of an actual existing creature. This led, in most cases, to illustrations in which the most characteristic features of elephants – such as trunk and tusks – are still visible, but that otherwise completely deviate from the real appearance and physique of these animals. In this process, zoological knowledge about elephants was overwritten by its cultural significance. Based on a collection of these images I have reconstructed the evolution of the ‘Elephas anthropogenus’, the man made elephant.

Westphal's interactive chart is posted here. Click on an elephant to see the drawing up close. There are also links to the originals, like the hoofed elephant from the year 1444 shown here, although many suffer from link rot. -via Metafilter

Update: You can see quite a bit of those medieval artworks in a gallery at Flashbak.

Erin Krichilsky is a research assistant at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. In 2018 she examined a unique sweat bee that appeared to be male on one side, and female on the other side -divided exactly in half like a side show performer, but without the costume. This was a gynandromorph, which is so rare that this is only the second gynandromorph bee found in 20 years.

In humans, biological sex is determined by two sex chromosomes—one from mom and one from dad. Inheriting two X’s yields a female, while an X paired with a Y creates a male. But bees do things a little differently. All fertilized eggs, which carry genetic material from a mother and a father, hatch female bees. Unfertilized eggs, however, can still yield offspring: fatherless males that carry only one set of chromosomes from their mothers—half of what’s found in females. Sex, in other words, is determined by the quantity of genetic information in a bee’s cells.

That's very weird in itself, but bees might consider the way humans do it to be very weird. Scientists have a couple of different theories as to the genetic mishap that caused the gynandromorph bee. They also did a behavioral study of Krichilsky's bee, still alive when it was discovered, which you can read about at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Chelsey Ritner/Utah State University)

In 1784, just a year after the Revolutionary War ended, the US suffered its first secession. Several counties in what was then North Carolina, now Tennessee, decided they would be their own state, the 14th state, called Franklin after Benjamin Franklin. The residents who had lived and worked there all their lives felt they had no choice. The federal government threatened to seize their land. North Carolina wanted to keep them. Native Americans had a treaty that also carried a claim. And the US hadn't worked out any plan to create new states in addition the the original 13.   

One of the primary political concerns of the Franklinites was that the North Carolina government and the federal government would sell their land from beneath their feet. That fear was grounded in reality, as North Carolina had ceded the territory west of the Appalachians to the United States for the purpose of resale just months before the formation of Franklin.

In 1784, the United States owed massive debts to its allies from the Revolutionary War. Without the power to levy taxes, the Continental Congress, which was the federal governmental body in charge before the U.S. elected its first president and ratified its Constitution, had to get creative in how they compensated their lenders. One way the U.S. did this was by accepting land ceded from the 13 states and selling land titles to settlers. North Carolina’s cession of the territory on the other side of Appalachia threatened to make the Franklinites trespassers on the land on which they lived and worked. When North Carolina changed its mind about giving up the territory in November 1784, it was too late. Washington, Sullivan, and Greene representatives met in Jonesborough, a city in Washington County, and declared their sovereignty in the form of the brand new State of Franklin.

The state of Franklin was never officially recognized by North Carolina nor the US government, but locals fought for it for four years, including one deadly gun battle. Read the story of Franklin at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Iamvered)

This riddle starts off with a rollicking story of monsters and magic, and then gets into math. There's some logic, too, but it's really about math. While the answer is pretty darn cool, it wouldn't work if the numbers were the least bit different. Sure, sea monsters and floating cities are fantastical, but what really defies logic in this story is that they could keep chests full of pearls around for a thousand years without someone stealing any. That part is truly preposterous.   

If you want to eat like a survivalist, you might want to brush up on the food taken on Antarctic expeditions a hundred years ago. There were no freeze-dried processed MREs, unless you count staples like the hardtack stocked on long voyages (consisting of flour and salt) and the Native American pemmican (dried meat, rendered fat, and sometimes fruit). While that may not sound appetizing, hunger is the best sauce.

“Pemmican was the only food source which could make [expeditions] happen, and was thus a prime mover of polar travel,” [author Jason C.] Anthony said. “The calorie requirement for the hardest polar sledging could be up to 10,000 [calories per day], though usually the hard days required about 6,500 — still more than the Tour de France, I think.”

Sounds great! Well, not so much “great” as “necessary.” Still fun. And, per Anthony, these aren’t necessarily hard and fast numbers.

“Generally the British expeditions provided each man 4,000 to 4,500 [calories per day]. Even modern adventurers have had trouble calculating the caloric needs,” he said. “I think it was Fiennes and Stroud ... who determined that the caloric deficit between what [explorers] burned and what they ate was the equivalent of what a normal person eats at home each day. In other words, they were starving.”

And if you were starving, there was nothing better than hooch, which was made from hardtack, pemmican, and snow. Get the recipes for homemade hardtack, pemmican, and hooch at The Takeout.

(Image credit: Karl Gustafson)

One of the problems with archiving things digitally is that formats change so often that data may become inaccessible, if not irretrievable. That can spell disaster for early internet classics, such as the website YTMND (You're The Man Now, Dog). Launched in 2004, it was a repository for early memes in repeating loops that became classic memories for the internet generation. But it was based on Flash, which fewer and fewer browsers now support. Therefore, viewership lagged over time. Then last year, a catastrophic server failure convinced founder Max Goldberg to go offline completely. But it has now been resurrected.

Goldberg has been working to restore the site since it went offline last May. The site’s database was being stored on eight-year-old hardware and was somehow deleted. After going down, Goldberg said he received an “outpouring of support from people all over.” He launched a Patreon, and “people clearly wanted to support the site sticking around,” so he started work on fixing it up.

The new YTMND looks mostly like the old YTMND that went down last year. But it’s had some major under-the-hood upgrades: the whole site is served over HTTPS, encrypting your connection, and audio is now played in HTML5 instead of Flash, so the site works properly on modern browsers (which no longer support Flash) and on mobile. Goldberg has also removed ads from the site since Patreon supporters are covering his server costs.

Now you can access the YTMND main site and relive classics like the original Picard Song, Paris Hilton, Cuppycake Gumdrops, and also check out new user-generated silliness. -via Metafilter

Finally, we learn what the fox says! Finnegan lives at Save a Fox Rescue in Faribault, Minnesota. He looks in the window, because he wants attention from his caretaker, and he gets it. So what does the fox say? He giggles! -via Digg

The eight planets of our solar system range from hot, rocky Mercury to the huge gas giants further out, but Earth is unique in that it is the densest of all the planets. The reasons behind that have to do with the way the planets formed in the first place. They coalesced from material spinning around the sun as it formed, all at different distances from the star that affected what they are made of.

If everything were based purely on the elements making them up, Mercury would be the densest planet. Mercury has a higher proportion of elements that are higher on the periodic table compared to any other known world in the Solar System. Even the asteroids that have had their volatile ices boiled off aren't as dense as Mercury is based on elements alone. Venus is #2, Earth is #3, followed by Mars, some asteroids, and then Jupiter's innermost moon: Io.

But it isn't just the raw material composition of a world that determines its density. There's also the issue of gravitational compression, which has a greater effect for worlds the larger their masses are. This is something we've learned a lot about by studying planets beyond our own Solar System, as they've taught us what the different categories of exoplanet are. That's allowed us to infer what physical processes are at play that lead to the worlds we observe.

The process of planet formation made Earth unique, and may go a long way toward explaining why it is habitable. The story is told in fascinating detail at Forbes. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: NASA)