British prime minister Winston Churchill loved collecting exotic animals for his menagerie, and decided he wanted six platypuses. Australia did not export platypuses, because they knew they rarely survived any kind of travel. But this was 1943 and they needed Britain's help to repel the encroaching Japanese. So arrangements were made to send Churchill one platypus, which they named Winston Churchill. The animal was to be delivered without fanfare, which was all for the good because Winston the platypus died en route.  

Churchill, the man, had Winston Churchill stuffed, and the whole incident was kept from the press. But leaks occurred, and eventually the story became known that a German U-boat attacked the delivery ship and the platypus was shaken to death. Was there any truth to that story? Last year, a team in Britain and another team in Australia went to work to uncover the truth. Read what they learned, plus the story of three platypuses that made it to Brooklyn a few years after the war at BBC.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Charles J. Sharp) 

Kiki was born paralyzed, due to a mosquito-borne virus. She was rejected by her mother, but was taken in by Don’t Forget Us…Pet Us, a sanctuary for neglected or disabled farm animals in Massachusetts. There she was pampered with plenty of attention, walks in a stroller, toys, music, and even a TV in the barn! Kiki showed how intelligent she is by learning to work the controls on her electronic toys, so they built her an electric cart with a joystick she can control. Kiki has since become an ambassador for the sanctuary and for those with disabilities of any species. Kiki has developed a special bond with the sanctuary owner's mother, Barbara, who suffers from Alzheimers disease. 

Since Kiki learned to drive her own vehicle, other barnyard animals have joined in, like Kashu, a goat who is also learning to steer with a joystick. You can keep up with Kiki and the other animals at Instagram and Facebook. -via Boing Boing 

Astronaut James Arthur Lovell Jr. was the oldest living former astronaut for a couple of years. He died Thursday at the age of 97. 

While Neil Armstrong is the most famous astronaut for being the first person to step onto the moon, he was just doing his job. Lovell, on the other hand, never walked on the moon, despite traveling there twice. But he commanded the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. When an oxygen tank exploded, the mission was scrapped and the world thought the three astronauts aboard were doomed. But Lovell, along with Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, moved into the Apollo Lunar Module and cobbled together the technology they would need to survive and return to earth. The fact that they did makes Lovell a hero of the space program.

Lovell also flew on the Gemini 7, Gemini 12, and the Apollo 8 missions. Lovell's total time in space flight was 715 hours and five minutes, a record that stood until space stations were developed. Along with Haise and Swigert, Lovell traveled further from the earth than any other human beings.   

In 1994, Lovell wrote the book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. A movie came from it, but the book is so much more, and I highly recommend it. Before Apollo 13 was filmed, Lovell thought Kevin Costner should play him. Costner looked more like Lovell, but Tom Hanks did a fine job. Lovell appeared in the movie as the captain of the ship that picked up the returning astronauts. Hanks posted a tribute at Instagram. Rest in peace, space hero.     

-via Metafilter 

We are all familiar with things that our distant ancestors considered true that were later proven to be just myths, mainly because we developed science to explain things. The sun doesn't revolve around the earth, even though it looked that way to ancient people. Illness doesn't happen because the body's humors are out of line- but that was the best explanation they had before germs were discovered. 

But the inverse also happens. Many things that ancient folks didn't believe turned out much later to be true! These are things that people couldn't believe because it was so outlandish, or because they didn't trust the source, or because they thought their own ancestors were less capable, or because they lacked context. Chill Dude Explains tells us about eight such "myths" that were eventually proven to be real. It will make you question the things we believe today. As you should. 

The last one is so wild, you might want to read more about Heinrich Schliemann. 

-via Laughing Squid 

Ashcroft Fire Rescue in British Columbia responded to a brush fire last week and found locals already fighting the blaze. The fire was extinguished with no trouble, leaving a scorched area of about 60x90 meters. But what caused the fire? The answer is in the image above. The site is about three kilometers away from the nearest river. The firefighters determined that an osprey had taken the fish and then dropped it into power lines, causing falling embers that sparked the blaze. Ashcroft Fire Rescue had fun reporting the incident, using every pun they could think of. Here's a sample. 

We do suspect by the size of the fish and the heat of the day probably caused the rather tired bird to drop its catch. Or another suspicion could be that it’s tired of raw fish and wanted to give cooked a try. 

The local newspaper went all in on the alliteration potential for this story.  -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Ashcroft Fire Rescue) 

Eighty years ago today, the first nuclear bomb was deployed over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb was dropped by the B-29 named Enola Gay, piloted by 30-year-old Col. Paul W. Tibbets. Six other planes participated for reconaissance, escort, scientific analysis, and photography. The mission commander was William Sterling Parsons, who worked with the Manhattan Project under Robert Oppenheimer. Parsons decided to join the mission on the Enola Gay to arm the nuclear bomb after takeoff to protect the US base on Tinian Island in the event of a crash during takeoff. 

The crew members of the various planes later described what the mission was like and their impressions of the nuclear explosion. Despite being miles away by the time the bomb detonated, they were rendered speechless. One crew member thought they had missed their target, because he couldn't see any city remaining. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, leading to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II.   

Although none of the Americans who participated in the mission are alive today, Garrett M. Graff compiled quotes from military archives, memoirs, speeches, and other sources for his new book The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. Read an excerpt published today in the Washington Post.    -via Damn Interesting 

The small hamlet of Torrington, Alberta, (population 239) is proud of their history. You can learn about it at the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, which boasts 82 dioramas illustrating events in Torrington history, populated by taxidermied gophers. The museum is operated by volunteers and is open daily in the summer and on weekends the rest of the year. Admission is by donation, because "We will never let finances get in your way of the joy of seeing dead gophers!"

The origin of the museum is quite a story. In the 1990s, Torrington received a small grant from the province to create a tourist attraction. At a brainstorming meeting, one woman suggested a museum of stuffed gophers. It was a joke, but it became real. Five people volunteered to learn taxidermy, and the whole town got involved in making the displays. PETA heard about it, so by the time the museum opened in 1996 it had become world famous. You can see a short video about the museum here, and see more pictures here. -via Fark 

Remote control LEGO vehicles can do some amazing stuff. Can they climb walls? You have to design them specifically for the task. In this video, the guys at Brick Technology start small, but then attempt to climb ever taller walls. For each LEGO wall, they begin with failure. But we see how they quickly identify the problem, and redesign the vehicle to fix it. Bigger wheels. Lower axles. Greater length. Adjustable weigh distribution. Success comes only when the vehicle climbs to the top and manages to land on the other side without toppling over, and be able to drive away. For each extra layer in the wall, the vehicle gets bigger and more elaborate, until the later models look more like robots than vehicles. The last version, challenged to climb a wall 40 bricks tall, might remind you of a medieval war machine. They had to pull out all the stops for that one! -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Pics or it didn't happen! It's always been that people tend not to believe something until they see it for themselves. In the 19th century, thousands of New York residents lived in overcrowded tenement slums with crumbling walls, dangerous staircases, and no plumbing. They did piece work in their homes, took in boarders for extra money, and raised so many children some had to sleep outside. Jacob Riis arrived in New York from Denmark in 1870 and had to deal with crushing poverty until he got a job as a journalist with for The New York Tribune. He covered the police beat, and described the conditions in the tenements as best he could, but reading about it wasn't nearly as effective as seeing it. That's why Riis incorporated photography into his reporting. He was a pioneer in flash photography because the tenement apartments were so dark inside. In 1890 he published his book How The Other Half Lives, full of pictures of the poor people of New York. 

The book made an impression on the public, but more importantly, on the city's Police Commissioner, a man named Theodore Roosevelt. That's when housing standards began to rise. Read about Jacob Riis and the photographs that brought poverty to light at Danny Dutch.  

Ekstremsportveko (Extreme Sports Week) 2025 was held in June in Voss, Norway. It is the world's largest extreme sports festival, taking advantage of the region's snowy mountains, wild rivers, lakes, and the high cliffs that loom over the fjords. Those cliffs are perfect for extreme BASE jumping. These adrenaline junkies had looked forward to Ekstremsportveko all year for the chance to soar through this beautiful natural world. Lifted by helicopter, they eagerly jumped off a cliff that you and I would be afraid to approach the edge of. I think there was a rule that they all had to have cameras attached. Some used parachutes, others used wing suits, and one guy did his jump suspended under another guy using a wing suit! I kept thinking "Don't let go! Don't let go!" And then he let go. But no one was hurt, and a good time was had by all. -via Kuriositas 

About 30 years ago, Hello Kitty rose from Japan and took over the world. But she was just one of a long line of pop culture cats from Japan. Japanese legends and folklore are full of cats, such as Maneki Neko, the lucky waving cat. And to our delight, Japanese art going back hundreds of years documents these folklore cats. Bakeneko are cats that change into human form, or they can remain cats but speak like humans. They can even kill and take the identity of their owner! Nekomata are cats who live to be very old, and then split their tails in two and walk around on two legs. 

There are also cat witches and cats who may steal a corpse from a funeral. Don't miss the very charming story of the boy who drew cats. A post at Hanashi by Curious Ordinary also has recommendations for books and movies if you want to explore more on Japanese cats. And it has lots of lovely artworks. -via Everlasting Blort 

I saw this Honest Trailer for Freaky Friday posted today, and couldn't figure out why Screen Junkies would do an Honest Trailer for a YA movie from 2003. It turns out that a sequel called Freakier Friday opens this weekend, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, and Mark Harmon playing the same characters 22 years later. I guess there's an audience for this, since it's become an entire franchise.

Anyway, if you are going to see the new movie, you might want to go back to the original and refresh your memory first. Did I say original? There have actually been four movies with the title Freaky Friday, from 1976, 1995, 2003 and 2018. The Jamie Lee Curtis version was the biggest hit the the four, and the only one to warrant a sequel. The verdict from Screen Junkies: it's kind of dumb, and surprisingly racist for its time. Let's hope the geriatric version does better. 

Communication between pilots and air traffic control for international flights is almost always conducted in English. It makes sense to use the most common second language for communication. But it doesn't always work, especially when no one involved speaks English as their first language. A TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon to Nice crossed into France with a little problem on board- all the toilets were non-functional. Aware of the passengers' potential for distress, the pilots contacted air traffic control in Nice to request expedited landing. They didn't want to circle waiting for earlier planes to land if they could get permission to skip the line. 

However, this divergence from protocol involved several messages among quite a few people. In a radio transmission, the word "toilet" got confused for the word "pilot." The pilot's not working? It must be a medical emergency. What, you have no pilots? Then when the plane's crew tried to clarify, the control tower crew got the idea that the auto-pilot was non-functional. They put Nice Airport in a state of alert for the jet landing. Read an edited transcript or listen to a video to hear what went down in Nice.  We assume that the plane was able to land and let the passengers do their business. 

(Image credit: Siyuan He) 

English has a lot of words that people rarely use in general conversation, but they flourish in text. You may know a word for years and never hear it pronounced. One such word is "biopic," a movie that's the story of one person. Do you pronounce it BY-oh-pic or by-AH-pic? The word is short for biographical picture. Mental Floss argues that it is pronounced BY-oh-pic, and I have heard movie critics pronounce it that way, so I guess they are right. It used to be spelled with a hyphen: bio-pic. Still, the pronunciation by-AH-pic is what I've always heard in my head, and maybe you did, too.  

Then they go into why we mispronounce the word in our heads. It's an example of a misle, or a word with a spelling that doesn't make the pronunciation clear. English is full of them! When we encounter new words in print, we have a tendency to pronounce them like similarly spelled words that may have nothing to do with the word you are seeing. Read some common examples, and the varied reasons we hear them incorrectly in our heads at Mental Floss.

(Image generated with PhotoFunia) 

Millions of years ago, the grassland of North America was a brutal place. There were huge animals like rhinos, camels, horses, and elephants. And there were predators that evolved to take them down. These were canid borophagines, bone-crushing dogs. Borophagine species ranged from the size of a large coyote to larger than the biggest wolves, up to more than 300 pounds! They had short muzzles and massive teeth, and may have resembled hyenas. The borophagines consumed plenty of bone, but evidence from fossil feces show they weren't great at digesting them. Tearing through bones, however, was an efficient way for a pack to get its fill of a mastodon.  

The last of the borophagine species died out 1.8 million years ago, and were replaced by true canines that didn't crush bones, like coyotes. Wolves came even later. Saber-toothed cats hung around until about 10,000 years ago. So what happened to the borophagines? Read what we know about these ancient dogs at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Ghedoghedo)