One thing that can really boost the enjoyment of a new toy is having a cat -or better yet, a kitten- who assumes it's really a cat toy. Athena, a kitten who lives in Brazil, was fascinated by her owner's new slot car and track, much too fascinated to be scared. And that's a joy. -via Mashable

We've known for some time that human being originated in Africa, but it's a big continent. Scientists have been trying to pinpoint exactly where Homo sapiens first appeared, and the more we learn, the muddier the search becomes. The theory of "mitochondrial Eve," in which one woman is the ancestor to all humans, indicates it was in East Africa, while the corresponding "genetic Adam" points to West Africa. The earliest evidence of art and symbolic thought come from South Africa. These discoveries have led some scientists to a fairly new pan-African theory: that modern humans evolved over a very large area.

Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, London, explains. “The immediate predecessors of modern humans probably arose in Africa about 500,000 years ago and evolved into separate populations,” he says.

“When times were bad – for example, when the Sahara was arid, as it is now – you would get little isolated pockets of humans clinging on to existence. Some of these people would have gone extinct. Others managed to hang on.”

Later, when conditions improved – for instance, when the Sahara became green again and lakes and rivers formed – surviving populations expanded and came into contact with each other. When they did, they would have exchanged ideas – and genes. Then the climate would have turned grim again and they would have separated.

“This happened over and over again in different places for different reasons for the next 400,000 years,” adds Stringer. “The end product was Homo sapiens, the species that is more or less the version of modern humanity that now inhabits every continent on Earth.”

This idea hints that our very existence comes from our distant ancestors' willingness to travel and to connect with others. Read about the discoveries that led to this concept at the Guardian.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Wapondaponda)

There are certain skills that aren't taught in schools, that parents just handed down to children as they performed those tasks, like reading a map or changing a tire. But now kids don't see their parents do those things, for one reason or another, so they don't learn them, and they don't have to. But is that a good thing? I give my younger daughter a hard time about relying on GPS for navigation, but she manages to find her way around even where there's no wifi, since she didn't listen to me when I told her not to talk to strangers, either. We lament that the younger generation doesn't know how to write a check, but do they really need to?

Considerable has a list of 12 skills that young people no longer learn. I can do all these things, but a couple I just don't do anymore, because it's easier to hand off those tasks to professionals. Whether they actually matter is the real question. Sure, you can get through life without knowing how to sew or read cursive, but if you had those skills, you could have the custom curtains you otherwise couldn't afford, or read your father's old love letters.

(Image credit: Zirguezi)

Who is Hammurabi, and what's in his code? And why is it considered so important? Mainly, it was written down in stone, and is therefore the oldest set of laws we have in their original form. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out takes us back to ancient Babylon for a look at the Code of Hammurabi.

Sir Ian McKellen kept an online diary between 1999 and 2003 that chronicled his time filming The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He calls the first part of it The Grey Book, followed by The White Book, and it's delightful.

So the journey has begun without me. On Monday 11th October, Elijah Wood et al gathered in Hobbiton — and I hear they are behaving themselves! I have been in Toronto, masquerading as Magneto, the master of magnetism, on the set of Bryan Singer’s “X-Men.” I have just sent Peter Jackson an e-mail of good luck. I don’t expect an immediate reply — directing a film is totally time-consuming.

Meanwhile, Tolkien aficionados are mailing to the “Grey Book.” From teenagers and readers old as wizards come the advice, the demands, the warnings — united by the hope that the film’s Gandalf will match their own individual interpretations of the Lord of the Rings. I take comfort from the general assurance that they approve of the casting (not just of me but of all the other actors so far announced - thrilling news that Cate Blanchett is joining us.) Yet how can I satisfy everyone’s imagined Gandalf? Simply, I can’t.

I recognise the responsibility of course. It's not as if LOTR were a play that could be revived over and over, each new cast adding to the discoveries that their predecessors have made. The Jackson trilogy will be unique. It is, after all, unlikely that there will be a re-make any time soon - although there have already been the cartoon "Hobbit" (which I have yet to see) and the BBC's radio LOTR (with Ian Holm as Frodo). But some of my correspondents seem to think that actors are essayists or critics who analyse a character's complexities and then parade them, like sticking on a false beard. It's just not like that.

It bears repeating that, as with Richard III or James Whale or Magneto, I must discover Gandalf somewhere inside myself - and that process depends on absorbing the words of the script and its story, listening to the reactions of the director and responding to the performances of the rest of the cast. So now, still 3 months away from shooting (for me), my Gandalf doesn't exist, not even in my mind. He will only come to life as the camera turns and discoveries are made in the very moment. Even when I am in the thick of it, in costume and make-up and speaking Tolkien's words, I'm not sure I will be able to describe the character to you. Actors don't describe - they inhabit.

You can read McKellen's musings of his Gandalf experience in chronological order at his site, or in its original form through the Internet Archive.  -via Kottke

Algol designed a visualization of the four billion year history of the earth. The overall effect is to drive home how relatively recently everything we know came about. The video is three quarters of the way through before plants made it to land, and the percentage of oxygen finally got above 1%. Then things go pretty fast. But it's not as if nothing happened earlier. There was that time the ocean turned red, and meteor impacts to stir things up, and the time the ocean turned purple. If you have trouble catching the notes along the way, they are easier to read here. -via Digg

To the average American, Italian food means something flavored with garlic. To some, the more garlic, the more "authentic" a dish is. But that isn't the story in Italy, and the flavor of garlic was not always welcomed in America the way it is today. See, in most of Italy's long culinary history, garlic was seen as something only poor people ate.

While garlic is as central to Genovese pesto and Piedmontese bagna càuda as it is to any spicy Calabrian tomato sauce, there is a sense that strong flavors like garlic were initially introduced to mask the absence of better ingredients in times, and especially regions, of scarcity. Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi famously wouldn’t allow anyone in his cabinet to eat garlic when they were around him—a taste that suited his “successful businessman” persona. And when Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan called the overuse of garlic “the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking,” she was not denigrating any region or class of Italian food per se, but rather attempting to distinguish her recipes for dishes like delicate risotto alla parmigiana or luxurious vitello tonnato from the cucina povera that had dominated Italian-American cooking up to the mid-20th century.

And who immigrated from Italy to America? Poor people, looking for better opportunities. Read how garlic came to be accepted and even lauded in America, while the rift remains in Italy, at Taste.  -via Damn Interesting

If you're in the US, you might not have realized that there is a Canadian version of Family Feud. A recent episode featured the question "What is Popeye's favorite food?" The answer highlights generational differences in pop culture knowledge, but the best part is how proud she is of herself. But there's more, as these two people had a hard time getting any answer right.

There's more to the #FamilyFeudCanada chicken story - What happens when contestants guess wrong on a sudden death round? Take a look at these behind-the-scenes bloopers and see what you'd never get to see on TV. #bloopers #chicken pic.twitter.com/K7x6V0hpSv

— Family Feud Canada (@FamilyFeudCa) January 10, 2020

-via Boing Boing

You might think that a home is "cursed" if two famous musicians died there, at the same young age, only four years apart. But then if you consider how many famous musicians spent time partying hard at Harry Nilsson's fashionable London flat, it may seem inevitable that the odds would eventually catch up with you.

He had bought it two years previously in 1972 while he was particularly good friends with Ringo Starr; it was a two-bedroomed top-floor flat in a large eighteenth-century house at 9 Curzon Place, on the south-east edge of Mayfair. Nilsson and Ringo had become good friends during 1972: Ringo, although credited as ‘Richie Snare’, was the drummer on much of Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson released in July of that year. ‘Ringo and I spent a thousand hours laughing,’ Nilsson once said. They were part of a social set that included Marc Bolan, Keith Moon and Graham Chapman of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. As rock stars can do, they met in the afternoon and when each arrival dropped by they would say, ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything?’ Nilsson recalled: ‘We would drink until 9 p.m. That’s six hours of brandy. Then between 9 and 10, we would usually end up at Tramp, the most uproarious exclusive disco-restaurant in the world. Royals, movies stars, world champions, all frequented there. It was really a ride, meeting these luminaries and having total blow-outs almost every night.’

In 1974, Cass Elliot was staying at Nilsson's flat when she was found dead of a heart attack. Four years later, Keith Moon died there as well. Read the accounts of both deaths and of Nilsson's unique apartment at Flashbak. -via Strange Company

Karl Patterson Schmidt was a renowned American herpetologist who had years of experience with snakes and other reptiles. But he was mistaken about one very important fact- how venomous a boomslang snake is. He was bitten on the thumb by a juvenile boomslang in 1957.

Karl Schmidt, like many herpetologists at the time, didn't believe that boomslang venom had the fatal dose necessary to kill humans, although peer-reviewed studies showed otherwise. Instead of treating his bite wound, Schmidt took the train home from work, and began to record the effect of the venom in his journal. Schmidt believed that accepting treatment would upset the symptoms he was documenting.

By treating the snake bite as an experiment to observe instead of an emergency, Schmidt didn't seek treatment until it was too late. However, it may have always been too late, since no antivenom was available in 1957. Read Schmidt's story at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: safaritravelplus)

When the flight attendant asks the passengers, "Is there a doctor on board?" you may be in for an adventure. Do you respond if you're a veterinarian or a psychiatrist? It might depend on the emergency. For a 1995 case, two doctors, Angus Wallace and Tom Wong, were flying British Airways from Hong Kong to London and realized that a woman who had fallen before takeoff was in worse shape than they initially knew. A fractured rib had punctured her lung, causing a pneumothorax. The air leaking into her chest cavity could kill her during descent, so an emergency landing was not an option. An account of the in-flight surgery is at Dr. Wallace's Wikipedia page.

With the limited medical equipment on board, Wallace and Wong had to improvise heavily. The medical kit had lidocaine – a local anaesthetic – but the catheter in the kit was designed only for urinary catheterisation and was too soft for use as a chest tube. The doctors fashioned a trocar from a metal clothes hanger to stiffen the catheter, and a check valve from a bottle of water with holes poked in the cap.[9] They sterilised their equipment in Courvoisier cognac, and began surgery by making an incision in the patient's chest, but with no surgical clamps available, Wong had to hold the incision open with a knife and fork while Wallace inserted the catheter.[7] The whole surgery lasted about ten minutes; the doctors successfully released the trapped air from the patient's chest, and she spent the rest of the flight uneventfully eating and watching in-flight movies.[9]

Wallace's more detailed account of the emergency was published in the British Medical Journal. Since the incident, medical kits in both British and US commercial planes have been expanded to include more equipment and medicine. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Alan Wilson)

Movies that are fiction have a disclaimer that tells the audience that it is fiction -even for such fantastical tales as comic book superhero movies. Like every common disclaimer, this one has an interesting story behind its use. The precedent involved, believe it or not, Rasputin. His story was such a good one, it had to made into a movie, even while the principles were still alive. That was a mistake, especially that one part that was fictionalized. Cheddar tells the story.

Swiss animal behaviorist Désirée Brucks and German animal behaviorist Auguste von Bayern have been teaching African grey parrots to use money, and have found some surprising things about the birds. Quite a few different animals have been taught to earn an exchange medium and to trade those tokens for treats, and animals have long been observed to share food with each other. But the parrots have put those two things together, and are willing to share tokens so that their friends can buy treats.

After training eight African grey parrots and six blue-headed macaws to barter metal rings for walnuts, the researchers paired the birds up with same-species partners. They then put the parrots in clear chambers joined by a transfer hole, and gave one bird—the donor—ten rings, while the other was left with none.

Even without the promise of a reward for themselves, seven out of eight of the African grey parrot donors passed some of their available tokens through the transfer hole to their broke partners, usually shuttling them beak to beak. On average, about half the metal rings made it through, allowing the recipients to trade the trinkets for walnuts through another window.

“It was amazing to see,” Brucks says. “I thought that when they saw they weren’t gaining anything, they’d stop. But they just kept doing it … some transferred [all] ten of their tokens.”

To see how the birds understood their actions, the experiment was repeated without the walnuts being offered for sale. The transfer of tokens didn't stop, but it abated, showing that birds weren't just sharing the metal washers, but the opportunity to buy walnuts. The story was different with the trained macaws. Read more of what was learned from the experiment at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Anastasia Krasheninnikova)

Lee Loechler took his girlfriend Sthuthi David to see Sleeping Beauty at their local theater. What she didn't know was that Loechler had been working with illustrator Kayla Coombs for six months to make a customized version of the movie. She also didn't know that those other people in the darkened theater were their friends and family, waiting for the big moment. This is adorable. Don't miss the alternate ending! -via reddit

The things we do for science. See, cuttlefish have eyes that move independently of each other so that they can see all around them. The question was: can they use stereopsis? That is, do they judge depth and distance by merging the different views of their two eyes when focusing on prey? The method was to get them to watch 3D movies, which meant getting them to wear the glasses.

Not that every step went smoothly. Attempts to glue the glasses directly on to the molluscs left some at jaunty angles and risked skin damage when the cuttlefish reached up with their arms – of which they have eight – to pull them off. That was solved with a superglued velcro strip that the glasses then attached to.

The glasses posed another hurdle, however. “The first ones that wrapped around caught too much water, so if the cuttlefish swam backwards, the glasses would fly off,” Wardill said.

But with tenacity, the scientists overcame the problems. The cuttlefish – whose names included Supersandy, Long Arms, Inky and Sylvester Stallone – were ready to be trained and tested.

They were tested by watching movies of tasty shrimp in an underwater theater. Read about the research and the results at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting