The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Cat-centric research
compiled by Dirk Manley, Improbable Research staff

Cats Recognize (But Don’t Always Respond to) Owners’ Voices
“Vocal Recognition of Owners by Domestic Cats (Felis catus),” Atsuko Saito and Kazutaka Shinozuka, Animal Cognition, vol. 16, no. 4, July 2013, pp. 685-690. The authors, at the University of Tokyo, report:

We studied 20 domestic cats to investigate whether they could recognize their owners by using voices that called out the subjects’ names, with a habituation–dishabituation method. While the owner was out of the cat’s sight, we played three different strangers’ voices serially, followed by the owner’s voice. We recorded the cat’s reactions to the voices and categorized them into six behavioral categories. In addition, ten naive raters rated the cats’ response magnitudes. The cats responded to human voices not by communicative behavior (vocalization and tail movement), but by orienting behavior (ear movement and head movement). This tendency did not change even when they were called by their owners. Of the 20 cats, 15 demonstrated a lower response magnitude to the third voice than to the first voice. These habituated cats showed a significant rebound in response to the subsequent presentation of their owners’ voices. This result indicates that cats are able to use vocal cues alone to distinguish between humans.

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

A review of ear research
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research Staff

Old Folks Have Big Ears
Old men have big ears, is the consensus of several medical studies on the question. The most celebrated work focused exclusively on men, in accordance with British male doctordom’s smug tradition of showing interest mainly in themselves. But in Japan and in Germany, wide-ranging investigations broke through the patriarchal hegemony. The newer studies made plain, for anyone who cared to know, the long-untold half of the story: that old women have big ears.

The British action played out in a characteristic location: the pages of the British Medical Journal, where all body parts are always of interest.

In 1993, Dr. James A Heathcote, a general practitioner in Bromley, set out to answer the question: “As you get older do your ears get bigger?” Dr. Heathcote and three colleagues examined the ears of 206 men of various ages, then presented his findings in a monograph called “Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?”

What’s it like to go see a movie at a theater in Korea? It can be an experience you’ll never forget. While American theaters focus on simplicity in order to serve as many people as possible, a trip to the movies on the other side of the world can be as individual as you like.

(YouTube link)

Get yourself some butter squid and beer, or maybe some cheesecake, and relax in a soft reclining couch… or even a bed! There is no end to the upgrades you can get at a movie theater for just an extra dollar or two in Korea. It can be as comfortable as watching a movie at home, except on a screen the size of an iMax theater. -via Digg

When you think of playgrounds, you probably remember the good times you had at your local school or park, playing on metal swings, testing your bravery on high slides, climbing the monkey bars, and getting dizzy on the merry-go-round. You don’t see those pieces much these days, because in the mid-‘70s they started to be replaced by safer plastic and fiberglass structures nestled in shredded wood or rubber surfaces. Kids can’t catch a good thrill anymore. Brenda Biondo finds and takes pictures of vintage playground equipment to document those pieces before they all disappear. Her book Once Upon a Playground: A Celebration of Classic American Playgrounds, 1920-1975 contains both her photographs and vintage ads for playground equipment. She tells us about playgrounds evolution.

Collectors Weekly: What was the impact of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which launched in 1973?

Biondo: Things started to change after that, which is why I limited to book to apparatuses made before 1975. New playgrounds were starting to be build out of plastic and fiberglass. I looked up the statistics, and according to the little research I’ve done—contrary to what you’d expect—there’s not much difference in the number of injuries on older equipment versus injuries on equipment today. A “New York Times” article from 2011 called “Can a Playground Be Too Safe?” explains that studies show when playground equipment was really high and just had asphalt underneath it and not seven layers of mulch, thekids knew they had to be careful because they didn’t want to fall. Nowadays, when everything is lower and there’s so much mulch, kids are just used to jumping down and falling and catching themselves. So kids learned to assess risk by playing on the older equipment. They also learned to challenge themselves because it is a little scary to go up to the top of the thing.

Read about Biondo’s research and see plenty of pictures that will bring back memories at Collectors Weekly. Don’t miss the extra gallery of images at the bottom the article. You may find the Madonna song “This Used to be My Playground” running through your mind. Now get off my lawn!

The Eye of the Sahara is a 25-mile wide geologic feature in the desert of Mauritania. Officially known as the Richat structure, it appears from the air as a series of concentric circles on the earth. No one ever saw it until it was photographed by the Gemini IV mission in 1965, but now it is a landmark for astronauts orbiting the earth. The Gemini mission was looking for impact craters, and the Eye of the Sahara was thought to be one for quite some time, but scientists now think there’s a more complex origin for the circles.

They think that the Eye's formation began more than 100 million years ago, as the supercontinent Pangaea was ripped apart by plate tectonics and what are now Africa and South America were being torn away from each other.

Molten rock pushed up toward the surface but didn't make it all the way, creating a dome of rock layers, like a very large pimple. This also created fault lines circling and crossing the Eye. The molten rock also dissolved limestone near the center of the Eye, which collapsed to form a special type of rock called breccia.

A little after 100 million years ago, the Eye erupted violently. That collapsed the bubble partway, and erosion did the rest of the work to create the Eye of the Sahara that we know today. The rings are made of different types of rock that erode at different speeds. The paler circle near the center of the Eye is volcanic rock created during that explosion.

So the colored circles are the result of the wind and sand shaving off and leveling the dome that was created millions of years before. Read more about the Eye of the Sahara at Business Insider. -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: SRTM Team NASA/JPL/NIMA)

Liquid oxygen presents us with a conundrum. When you expose a fire to oxygen, it burns brighter. When you expose fire to a liquid, it should put the fire out. And when you introduce something hot into something cold, the temperatures should cancel each other out, depending on how much substance there is of each. So what happens when you expose burning iron wool to liquid oxygen? The reaction is pretty spectacular.

(YouTube link)

Professor Martyn Poliakoff brings us another episode of The Periodic Table of Videos involving the scientific process. After the initial light show, he and his team of mad scientists tried to design experiments to find out exactly what was happening during the reaction. While they didn’t get the answers they were looking for, they learned quite a bit about the limits of lab equipment and the difficulty of observing unpredicted effects. Luckily, they keep a fire extinguisher handy. However, Poliakoff assures us that you can learn something even in failed experiments. And the footage was so cool that they couldn’t resist sharing it with us. -via Laughing Squid   

See also: More videos with Professor Poliakoff.

Cosplayer Ryan Wells outdid himself this time, with a super-realistic costume of the Garthim.

The Garthim were huge, tentacled, black-carapaced flea-like creatures, armed with powerful claws and moved with a loud ticking sound. When not in battle, they stood like sentries in the corridors and pits of The Castle of the Crystal, standing immobile until given a command.

The picture is awesome, but watch how it looks when he moves!



Looks for Wells in this getup at San Diego Comic Con. -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: Jeff Hinds)

Grant Snider of Incidental Comics shares with us a comic he drew for the Summer/Fall 2016 issue of The Southampton Review. Next time I come down with a case of writer’s block (which is at least twice a week), I’ll use the letters themselves as an excuse. You can get a poster of this comic through Snider's website.

To drum up excitement for the new movie Star Wars: Rogue One, Disney has released a video of some behind-the-scenes footage and quips from the cast and crew. This was first shown at Star Wars Celebration in London.

(YouTube link)

It’s not enough to let is know what’s happening, but enough to let us know that it looks awesome. It does focus on violence a lot, which is not indicative of the finished movie, but works for previews. The beach scene was filmed in the Maldives. -via The A.V. Club

Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955. To celebrate the 61st anniversary of the theme park, Disney has a series of recent park images, overlaid with pictures of the same spot in 1955. The idea is to show how the park has changed, but the main differences are that most of the old pictures are black-and-white, and Walt Disney is in some of them. See them all at Oh My Disney.

Here are two sad updates on people who have been featured at Neatorama. 

On the island of Bermuda, where everyone is friendly, Johnny Barnes stood out for his friendliness, optimism, and joy. Barnes, also known as Mr. Happy Man, was featured in a video we posted in 2012. He greeted commuters at a roundabout in Hamilton every weekday morning since 1986, and became a celebrity. Pregnant women wanted their picture taken with him for good luck. Patients in hospitals requested visits from Barnes. A statue of him was erected in Hamilton in 1998.  

The bench where Barnes sat on his morning round of greetings is now empty. Barnes developed leg problems in December, and stopped going to the roundabout. He died this past Monday at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. His wife Belvina and members of his church were with him. Johnny Barnes was 93.

-via reddit, where commenters are sharing their personal remembrances of Barnes.

Indian moneylender Datta Phuge was profiled in 2013 because he had a shirt made out of gold to impress women. Phuge was attacked by a group of about 12 people Thursday night in Pune. He did not survive the attack. Four people were detained for questioning in the murder, which is believed to have revolved around money. Datta Phuge was 48. 

-via reddit

At the grand finale of a Robo League meet, 18 battle bots go at each other at the same time. The fight starts about 2:30 into the video. Keep your eye on the one called Wedgie; he doesn’t win, but he’s entertaining.  

(YouTube link)

You’ll be able to pick the winner before the battle is half over, but the destruction is delicious. -via reddit

Poor Wally the Whale... Hope this guy doesn't bring some friends in grey suits to Newport. https://t.co/P0eU6yavzF

— Kaleigh Gilchrist (@KGilchrist15) July 12, 2016

A dead whale washed ashore at Dockweiler Beach near the Los Angeles airport in California on the Fourth of July weekend. Authorities used boats to tow the rotting carcass out to sea. But it came back ashore at San Pedro. After another tow, the whale came back to shore at Newport Beach -twice. Both times, Newport workers dragged it back to sea. Then on Wednesday, the whale named Wally washed ashore at Orange County, and the county sheriff’s department towed it away from the beach. But Wally came back, landing on San Clemente State Beach. Park service lifeguards towed the decomposing whale out to sea for the sixth time on Thursday.

Mark Allen, lifeguard chief for Orange Coast District/South Sector said Wally was spotted about two miles from Cotton’s Point when lifeguards decided to pull it back out. They hoped to take it out about 10 miles from shore. A 15-foot shark checked them out at about the eight-mile mark, Allen said, but didn’t try to eat the whale.

“I think it’s way too decomposed,” he said.

They are hoping this time Wally won’t come back.  

We don’t know who decorated this cake, but the occasion was the Radioactive Waste Manager’s birthday. Redditor centinel4, who lives in Austria, posted the picture. He must have been at the party, because he knew that the barrels are made of marzipan, and not marshmallows or earplugs as others thought. You’d think the appropriate flavor would be yellowcake, but the brown cake was important to resemble soil in the edible diorama.

I couldn’t decide for a while whether to use the actual name of this video (which I ultimately did) or use the YouTube comment “Wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube man!” Andreas Jörgensen, David Norberg, and Karl Flodin of Landfall Games came up with this game concept during Castle Game Jam. They are still working the bugs out.

(YouTube link)

It starts out slow, with a slapfest, but ramps up quickly to pitchforks, arrows, and armies of fairly incompetent swordsmen.This could be as popular as Goat Simulator as long as they keep the out-of-shape warriors, the pitchforks, and the googly eyes that turn to Xs to indicate death. -via Digg