Best-ever snow globe, bought in Castle Dracula (Bran Castle) in Transylvania. pic.twitter.com/c5dvout8Y6

— Christopher Fowler (@Peculiar) September 27, 2019

At Bran Castle in Romania, the gift shop sells a souvenir snow globe that has bats swirling around instead of snow! Unfortunately, the gift shop is not online. A commenter pointed out that you can make your own snow globe with swirling bats, since bat-shaped glitter is now a thing.

Sugar Spice and Glitter has the instructions for making your own bat globe. Just be careful not to mix up your bat glitter with the edible bat sprinkles that are also available this time of year. -via Boing Boing

Jill Hicks of Chattanooga, Tennessee, saw a kitten running across a road and captured it for its own safety, as one does. When she showed the rescued kitten off to a neighbor, she was informed that she had actually picked up a bobcat kitten! Hicks then took the bobkitten to For Fox Sake Wildlife Rescue. The organization posted the story and a picture of the bobkitten, now named Arwen, and some of the responses were rather strange.

On September 26, For Fox Sake mentioned that they had received a lot of requests about people wanting to adopt Arwen. "There is a 0 percent chance that Arwen, or any other bobkitten, will grow up to be a suitable house pet,” they wrote. “Even when raised by humans, bobcats are unpredictable, territorial wild animals with a powerful prey drive and no desire to please human beings.”

In other words: Sorry, but you won’t be able to adopt a bobkitten. And if for some reason Arwen won’t be able to be re-released into the wild, the rescue said she would go to a zoo or a nature center.

For future reference, "Wildlife Rescue" is very different from "Animal Shelter." You can read that story at Mental Floss. You can keep up with Arwen, who is battling anemia, in daily updates at Facebook.

(Image credit: For Fox Sake Wildlife Rescue)

Eric Bastos Gorgens is a forestry engineering professor at Brazil’s Federal University of Jequitinhonha and Mucuri Valleys. As he and colleagues studied data from satellites about the Amazon forest, something strange caught his eye.

At first it was just a set of numbers on a screen that let the researchers know giants were growing in the Parú State Forest conservation area in the state of Pará. It took time and dedication to figure what the height measurements represented.

“It could have been a bird flying by, a tower, a sensor error,” says Gorgens, the lead author of a recent study about the trees published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “So we started to look into what could have given us these numbers that were so far from standard. And as we started looking at the data more carefully, we realized they weren’t errors. They were, in fact, giant trees.”

So Gorgens and his team had to go find those trees, of the species Dinizia excelsa, that grew to 80 meters (260 feet) and beyond. The journey was difficult, but they found the grove of giant trees. The very tallest, at 88.5 meters (290 feet) was inaccessible, but a return trip is planned for next year. Read about the Amazon giants, how they were found, and what it means, at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Gorgens)

Paul Krapivsky and Sidney Redner crunched the numbers and published a paper on the optimum strategy for choosing a parking space in a parking lot. Since the paper is paywalled, the Santa Fe Institute give us an overview in a short video. However, the study makes a lot of assumptions, the first of which is that walking is something you want to minimize. Honestly, I don't care about parking far out, since I'll probably walk twice as far inside the store anyway. And sometimes it's worth walking further to get a space in the shade. -via Metafilter

It's been ten years since we had the story of the 6-year-old boy who floated away in a flying saucer-shaped hot air balloon by himself. The whole USA was on edge until we found out Falcon Heene was in the attic of his home the whole time. Was it a mistake or an elaborate hoax? Officials began to suspect it was a publicity stunt for Richard Heene's reality TV plans.

Today, the Heenes live in a camper trailer parked on the side of a twisting country road. A 160-year-old farmhouse slumps just a few yards away, a spray of mold running up the white siding. The house is a renovation project the Heenes are working on for an investor in Florida, where the family had been living since Richard pleaded guilty to one felony charge of attempting to influence a public servant in relation to what came to be known as the Balloon Boy Hoax. Richard served 30 days in jail and 60 nights of work release, and in August 2010 he moved his family 1,900 miles from Colorado to Florida. Now in the New York countryside for the summer and fall, the Heenes were, in all likelihood, the most famous people in their zip code.

Robert Sanchez visited the family, and also combed through documents from the balloon boy saga to find the truth. Whether he found it or not, the story is a compelling read at 5280 magazine. -via Digg 

(Image credit: Sgt. Benjamin Crane)

North Korea is the most isolated and shunned nation in the world, but it manages to do a little international trade through its Pyongyang Restaurants. You won't find one near you, most likely, because they haven't quite made it to America, or any nation that relies on the English language. Half as Interesting tells us why.

Between 1799 and 1804, reindeer farmer Ossip Shumachov watched a mammoth emerge from the ice during the summer thaws in a remote part of Siberia. By the time he brought tusk trader Roman Boltunov to see it, it had notably deteriorated from the intact specimen the ice had ejected. To be specific, the meat had been removed by animals. But Boltunov took some measurements and drew a picture of the mammoth.   

The drawing is crude, and depicts a strange swine-like creature with tusks pointing in opposite directions. The sketch “is a very good example of a reconstruction hindered by extreme ignorance of basic animal anatomy,” paleoartist Mauricio Anton wrote in an email. “The body and legs are shapeless, and each foot ends in a sort of hoof-like structure unlike anything seen in elephants (or any other animal).” Even so, this somewhat laughable caricature was the first reconstruction of a mammoth known to science that was based on more than bones, McKay writes on his blog Mammoth Tales. Much to the chagrin of stuffy Russian biologists, it played a pivotal role in science’s early understanding of mammoth anatomy.

Eventually, Shumachov's mammoth was removed from the tundra in pieces: bones, skin, and hair. It was the world's first mammoth to be reconstructed and put on display. Boltunov's original drawing has been lost; the image above is a copy. Read the story of what came to be known as Adam's mammoth, and the drawing that accompanied it, at Atlas Obscura.

It took a lot of guts to undergo surgery in the days before anesthetics and antibiotics, when the pain was intense and the survival rate was abysmal. The decision pretty much had to be a matter of life and death. It's difficult to imagine how horrific surgery was for the patient, but we can get some idea from a professional writer who lived through a mastectomy. English novelist Fanny Burney put off surgery for breast cancer as long as she could, but in September of 1811 allowed herself to be put under the knife- while wide awake in her living room. She later wrote about the experience.

“I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision—and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, and the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp and forked poniards, that were tearing the edges of the wound—but when again I felt the instrument—describing a curve—cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left—then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.”

There's more. Read the story of Burney's operation at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

The aim was to unload a ton (probably several tons) of steel beams from a railroad car. Maybe it was too expensive for these guys to get a proper crane, but they did have four forklifts. Just coordinate them all at once and lift that load out! Hmm, what could possibly go wrong? A better question might be: Have you ever seen a train derailment at zero miles per hour? -via Digg

While Star Wars fans built a holiday around a pun (May the fourth be with you), Disney launched their own Star Wars holiday three years ago, called Force Friday. That's the day that the new Star Wars toys and merchandise are unveiled, giving you enough time to decide what you want to ask Santa Claus to bring you. Or your kids, we won't judge. This year, Force Friday is October 4th, but we already can see the new toys that will go on sale in October, because io9 has a rundown of them. Pick your favorites, or perhaps your price range, and you won't be taken by surprise when they're all sold out in November.  

(Image credit: Hasbro, Funko, Mattel)

(Image credit: Mister Global)

Thursday night was the annual Mister Global competition in Thailand. The 2019 winner of the male beauty pageant was Kim Jong-woo of South Korea. If you have an hour, you can see the entire competition, including the swimsuit stroll, on video.

Or you can see all the contestants in portraits of their national costumes in a gallery at imgur. Although some appear a bit over-the-top, they do not approach the levels of the Miss Universe national costumes, and each contestant paid a lot of attention to representing their nation's culture. Well, except for the guy from the USA. -via Metafilter

Amazon announced that celebrity voices are coming to their Alexa home assistant system. The first to sign up is Samuel L. Jackson, whose voice is famously unique. But how much of it is really Jackson, and how much is computer generated?     

While Alexa has featured celebrity voices like Gordon Ramsay in the past, those Skills have only included a handful of pre-recorded phrases. The Guardian reports that this time, Amazon is using neural text-to-speech technology that can actually mimic Jackson’s voice, so you can really feel like you’re getting the current weather forecast from Hollywood’s highest-grossing actor himself.

Along with updating you on the weather, Jackson will be able to play music, set your alarm, sing you a “Happy Birthday” song, and more. But the Oscar nominee does have his limits: According to Amazon, Sam won’t be able to help with shopping, reminders, lists, or other Alexa Skills.

Jackson, of course, is almost as famous for his profanity as he is for roles in movies like 1994’s Pulp Fiction and 2000’s Shaft, not to mention various film appearances as Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And that proclivity for foul language will also be incorporated into his Alexa alter-ego: You can set your device to allow him to swear in his responses.

Jackson's voice will roll out at 99 cents as an introductory offer, then go to $4.99 later. Will hearing Jackson swear at you from your own Alexa device make up for the feeling that everyone at Amazon knows your business? Only time will tell. Read more about the plan at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Kevin Tostado)

You can study a language in school for years, but if you don't practice it in the real world, how fluent are you, really? In this scenario from Foil Arms and Hog, a detective needs someone who knows Gaelic, fast. The skit is only two minutes long, despite the video length. -via Laughing Squid

The Disney parks around the world have a lot in common, but there have been other Disney projects that went nowhere. One of them was Disney’s America, a theme park announced in 1993 that would be built near Haymarket, Virginia.

The park would be arranged into nine sections, loosely focusing on significant periods of U.S. history. One land would focus on the founding fathers while others would feature a 20th century farm, world war battlefields, factories of the industrial revolution. The park would also cover some potentially controversial topics too, like turn-of-the-century immigration, Native Americans, and slavery.

Disney’s new park would be state-of-the-art amusement while mixing in education and sensitivity towards the “painful, disturbing, and agonizing” aspects of American history. Attendees could expect VR technology, innovative motion-simulators, next generation animatronics, and a nightly ironclad ship battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia.

For various reasons, the project was canceled less than a year after it was announced. But what they had planned is quite intriguing, including the development of technologies that were later used elsewhere in the Disney universe. Read a description of the attractions planned for Disney's America at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg

(Image credit: Mliu92)

ZeFrank tells us all about a spider named Margaret, who is an ogre-faced spider. You might guess from the name that the imagery in this True Facts video might be hard to take for people suffering from arachnophobia. Also, there's a bit of rude language. That said, the ogre-faced spider has a unique type of web and a unique method of hunting prey. -via Geeks Are Sexy