Can you imagine trying to put a headband with a GoPro on a cheetah? Odyssey must be an unusually cooperative cat. He is out on the hunt with his siblings, which gives us a chance to see a chase from the cheetah's point of view. When things get going really fast, the production slides into slow motion to keep us from falling out of our chairs.

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It's a clip from the PBS Nature 3-part series Animals With Cameras. The chase itself reminds me of a study we posted last week about how prey animals benefit when a predator cannot go in a straight line. Cheetahs can run more than 60 miles per hour, but only for about ten seconds, and only then if there are no obstacles to break their stride. In this cas, we feel good for the gnu, but the cheetahs are tired and still hungry.     

This image was posted at reddit with the label When Libraries Troll Their Patrons. We've all been there, trying to find a book when we recall neither the title nor the author. Commenters started telling tales about working in book stores or libraries, or getting embarrassed by being that patron with the wonky memory. Librarians and book store workers want to help, and they consider it a challenge to find that one book you can't identify, if they have the time. Then starstarstar42 told his story.

To all bookstore employees that take the time to help... thank you.

35 y.o. me walked into a bookstore after WEEKS searching on the web for the first book my now deceased mom let me pick out on my own. Thing is, 3 y.o. me was really mad at her for some reason that day and I did not want to pick out a stupid book! I cried all the way home because she made me do so.

That night she tucked me in (me, still very mad) and read me that book. I f-----g hated the story. I f-----g hated the mouse that starred in it. I f-----g hated the colors when she showed me the pictures. I f-----g hated that book, period. At the end, my mom kissed me and smiled as she smoothed back my hair. Looking back so many decades later I understand now that her love for me was dancing in her eyes as if to say, "be mad all you want, little man of mine. I can never stop loving you. You are my world".

30 years later and I was stoically mourning my mom's death when, for no reason I can explain, I remembered that book.

I wanted it. I wanted more than anything else in my life to find it. To see the mouse in it again, to hold the cover, to bring that small part, that tiny memory of her, back into my life.

Weeks on Google. All I could remember were hazy faded images of a mouse. I searched "mouse story" on Google. 2.8 million hits. It wasn't in the first 20 pages of 100 hits-per-page results. I kept trying till one night I furiously slammed my fist on my desk and gave up. I had nothing else to go on. I was unnaturally angry and upset at myself that evening; feeling I'd let her down again, as I'd done more than once when she was still around. I barely got any sleep that night.

A week later and I'm driving past a mom & pop bookstore/vinyl record shop. With little hope, I went in and bashfully asked the question that my mind knew was stupid, but had to be said.

"I'm looking for a book. It's about a mouse. I'm so sorry, that's all I remember. Can you help me?" I didn't even tell her why this meant so much to me.

The owner, a nice lady in her 50's, spent an hour helping me. She suddenly turned into a combination of "Monk" and "Sherlock". How old was I now, how old when I read it? Was the book wider than it was tall? What colors in it did I remember? Any other characters that I could remember? Most of the answers to her questions were "I can't remember".

One hour.

She found it. "Scuttle the Stowaway Mouse" by Jean Soule. It had been out of print for decades, but she found a pristine copy of it online, ordered it for me and it got to me 48 hours later. $32 she made on that sale. Not even enough to pay to keep the lights turned on in their shop for a day I bet.

Got home, opened the book, my hands softly running over the cover as if it was my mom's face. I was unashamedly weeping bittersweet tears by the first page. Each word was like a kiss on a mad little 3 y.o. boy's forehead.

I miss my mother with my whole heart.

Thank you, bookstore lady. Thank you beyond words.

Please pass the tissues. -via reddit

When we think about microbes, we think "germs." We try our best to kill the bacteria, viruses, fungal spores, and tiny creatures that could make us sick. We kill germs constantly, and rarely ever consider all the beneficial microbes that make the world turn.

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Ed Yong and Professor Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago give us an idea of what the world would look like without microbes. It's creepy and downright apocalyptic. Remember that Horton said, "A person's a person, no matter how small." Microbes are not persons with rights, but they do contribute to the world as we know it. -via The Atlantic

Would you be able to bring yourself to drink any of these lattes? After all, they are masterpieces! Yeah, sure, but only after pictures are taken to preserve their beauty. Kangbin Lee is a professor in the Hotel, Restaurant, Cooking, and Confectionary Department at the Seoul Arts Center. He is also a latte artist who puts a rainbow of colors into lattes, in both 2D and 3D versions.  



I can't imagine the drink would still be hot after the painting and the photographs, but a minute in a microwave will fix that.



Watch how Lee creates the Starry Night latte in this video. See more of Lee's lovely cups of coffee at Instagram. -via Boing Boing

Bonus fact: while Sarah and Brian think chicken pox is normal, Debbie and Gary are afraid of shingles. Meanwhile, Shirley and John think that fear of polio is normal. Age and cohorts are constant within themselves yet changing over time. Names are trendy, but once you have a common name, it becomes part of the cohort. This is the latest comic from Randall Monroe at xkcd.

The next Star Wars movie is a stand-alone film covering the life of Han Solo in his younger days, before he met Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa. Disney aired a 45-second teaser during the Super Bowl last night, and promised the full trailer would debut today. And now it's here. It's only a minute and a half, and we don't see much of Han, but this is what we have.

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The film stars Alden Ehrenreich as the title character, Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, plus Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, and Thandie Newton as characters we haven't met. Solo: A Star Wars Story will be in theaters May 25.

The 1992 crime film Juice starred Tupac Shakur and Omar Epps in a tug-of-war over their descent into a life of crime along with their other two friends. Bishop (Tupac) goes full-tilt while Q (Epps) wants to pull back. The violent film received favorable reviews that stand up over time. Juice was Tupac's first acting job- he auditioned for it on a last-minute whim. Epps was only 17 when he was cast. Let's learn some more about Juice.  

10. Tupac Shakur would often walk off the set between filming.

Fellow cast member Jermaine Hopkins decided to pull a prank on him by telling Shakur that he’d been fired. When the prank was discovered Tupac got into a fight with Hopkins.

9. Shakur wanted people to call him Bishop even when off screen.

He was that intense that he wanted to stay in character as much as possible, which meant that he was also kind of edgy.

There's more trivia to read about Juice at TVOM.

Once upon a time, the Super Bowl was all about football. Then it became all about the party ...and the food. Then as ad rates soared, the game became a showcase for advertisers to put their best foot forward, with new and clever ad campaigns that cost millions. Well, that's still true, but those of us who don't want to watch hours of football know that those premiere ads would be easier seen on the internet. And so it is. You can watch the best of them all in one place this morning. See Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman channel Busta Rhymes and Missy Elloit, watch Wendy's diss McDonalds, get a fleeting glimpse of the new Star Wars movie, and see what the Bud Knight does.

Kaplamino gives us look at the project he's been working for three months. It's a chain reaction marble run on a tilt table. There are magnets, levers, fidget spinners, catapults, and all kinds of clever segments all working together to get one blue marble to the end.

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Kaplamino (previously at Neatorama) says it took about 500 failures to get this video, but he refined the design along the way. After the design was perfected, it only took about 30 tries to get everything to work in one perfect run. -via reddit

Calling names, now huh? I've got enough problems without appliances getting an attitude. There's a perfectly logical explanation. "Slut" mean "finished" in Danish and Swedish. In Norwegian, it would say "slutt." I don't know how you would say finished in Finnish. -via reddit

The following article is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John' Bathroom Reader.

(Image credit: Bruce Turner)

It's fascinating (at least to us) to find out how classic children's books were created. There aren't necessarily magical stories behind them; some were conceived in bars or business meetings, some were inspired by hated relatives, and some just evolved out of other books. Still, it's interesting trivia. Here are some examples.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

In November 1955, Maurice Sendak, a young storybook artist, drew up a draft of a children's story he called Where the Wild Horses Are. The only problem: "I couldn't really draw horses," Sendak said, "and I didn't, for the longest time, know what to use for a substitute. I tried lots of animals in the title, but they just didn't sound right." In 1963, Sendak finally settled on Things, dumping the horses in favor of monsters that were based on the Brooklyn relatives he detested as a child. "I remember how inept they were at making small talk with children. There you'd be, totally helpless, while they cooed over you and pinched your cheeks. Or they'd lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses, and say something threatening like, 'You're so cute, I could eat you up.' And I knew if my mother didn't hurry up with the cooking, they probably would."

CHARLOTTE'S WEB

If, for some reason, you will be in the midst of a group of football fans this evening, you might feel a little out of place. You really don't know much about the game, but you don't want to look stupid, either. Help is here! Kayden Hines posted this handy chart to help you get through the evening. She says,

The trick with all of these is to leave the room immediately after you say something and don’t answer any questions

Good luck with that. See more of Hines' comics at Instagram. -via reddit

Xena is a Siberian husky, and her buddy Lana is a Malamute. They live together, and most of the time the dogs are best friends, but here they are having an argument. You can see them both trying to get a word in, raising their voices, reaching out, rebuffing, pressing their points, turning their backs to pout, cooling off, and all the behaviors you'd expect in a family dispute.

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The two eventually made up, but you have to wonder who won, and what they were arguing about in the first place. You can see more of Xena, Lana, and their other housemate Kiko at Instagram. -via Tastefully Offensive

(Image credit: Flickr user IQRemix)

The sports of the Winter Olympics have us watching mainly to see who slips and falls on the snow and ice. Could we possibly make it more dangerous? Think of this: downhill ice skating. Then give it a winding course with jumps and have a bunch of skaters go all at once. That's Ice Cross Downhill, a sport invented by Red Bull, of course. The video here is a compilation of crashes.

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-via Metafilter, where you'll find a lot of links to the action.

This guy is getting the works: medical check, pressure suit, air supply, mission control team, escort vehicle. He's not an astronaut going into space, but he comes pretty close. This pilot flies a U2S spy plane, cruising at 70,000 feet, so high he can see the limits of our atmosphere.

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The U2 is considered the most difficult plane to fly, as it it was designed for minimum weight. At altitude, the pilot must maintain a constant speed, since the difference between the stall speed and the "never exceed" speed is only 12mph. Outside that narrow window, the plane could fall apart. Landing requires contact with a chase car because the pilot cannot see the ground near him, and the slightest angle could drag those wide wings. -via Digg