The properties of a solid include its consistent volume and shape. A liquid, on the other hand, has a consistent volume, but takes on the shape of its container. A gas takes both the shape and volume of its container. As you can see from the image above, cats take the shape of their container, whether it's a box or a fish bowl, so therefore cats are liquid. It's been proven in an Ig Nobel prize-winning study.

But why are cats this way? What makes them so flexible that they can flow through fenceposts and floor cracks, and curl up in an impossibly small serving dish? It's all in their bones. A cat's skeleton, whether it's a house cat or a cheetah, has several anomalies that make it different from other mammals. Read about a cat's weirdly flexible skeleton at Inverse, and you'll wonder why other animal species haven't developed these keys to flexibility. Cats may be more alien than liquid. -via Damn Interesting

During the space race of the mid-20th century, the US and the Soviet Union were in a hurry to launch rockets into space, and eventually human pilots. The US sent up fruit flies, then mice and monkeys to test whether such a trip would be survivable. The Soviets sent dogs. But it wasn't just a Cold War project. The French wanted to go to space, too. In 1963, a cat named Félicette became the first and only cat in space, launched in a French rocket for a 10-minute suborbital flight, which she survived.

Not that Félicette was thrilled by the experience. She underwent all the unpleasant tasks that astronauts later went through to be chosen for space flight, without understanding the purpose. She was fitted with brain electrodes for the trip. She sustained more than 9Gs at launch. And that wasn't the worst of it. But Félicette was a hero to scientists studying the possibilities of space travel. Stefan Chin tells her story for SciShow.

There was a time when Americans didn't find out about the crazy things going on in our government until many years afterward, because everyone involved wanted to present a veneer of respectability. But we know that government officials are only human, and Hollywood has always been willing to fill in the blanks to entertain us. Political movies have been with us as long as movies themselves, and the comedies are the ones we remember best. If you want to decompress from reality before voting, or after voting, for that matter, you might want to check out a list of the twenty greatest political comedies at Cracked, and then watch one or two.

These movies go back as far as 1933, and include foreign films, musicals, rom-coms, satires, and even a documentary while still tickling your funny bone. Some I had forgotten about, and there are a couple I haven't even seen. I'll always have a soft spot for the 1993 movie Dave, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. And Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator from 1940 was very moving while still making us laugh. Check out the list and let us know which one is your favorite.

When we think about animal camouflage, it's about the animal's appearance looking like its background so that it blends in. But there's a lot more to it than that. Camouflage effects, or nature's illusions, work as a combination of the way an animal looks and the way it is perceived by whatever it's hiding from. We might see a tiger and say, how is that camouflage? But if the cat's prey doesn't perceive colors the way we do, well, that just means we aren't a tiger's natural prey.

The science of perception is uncovering many different methods we use to sort and interpret the signals coming into our eyes and brain by studying the ways we can be fooled by those signals. Perception is an amazingly complex process that we use surprisingly well without understanding it. Animals think about it even less, but use it to survive. That's the way of natural selection- whatever works, in both perception and appearance, will become more common for those creatures who survive long enough to pass on their genes. It's only humans who survived and thrived long enough to study the details. This video is eleven minutes long; the rest is promotional. -via Laughing Squid

There are certain things you can say that can be a blessing or a curse at the same time, like when I would tell my kids, "May you have children just like you!" usually when I was angry. It's the same with the phrase "May you live in interesting times." I hadn't thought much of it, but in the back of my mind I thought that was something Mr. Spock said on Star Trek. In that I may have been a victim of the Mandela effect. It was said in the Star Trek Universe, but by Harry Kim on the show Voyager, in the episode "The Cloud" from 1995. So where did I know it from, and where did the saying originally come from?

Robert F. Kennedy used the phrase in a speech in 1966, and attributed it to an old Chinese curse. From there, it was quoted by many memorable people. But Kennedy was not the first documented use of the phrase, and it may be much older -and it's not an old Chinese curse. Read what we know about the history of "May you live in interesting times" at Mental Floss.

Over the Garden Wall is a beloved animated miniseries that aired on The Cartoon Network in 2014. The ten episodes concern two half-brothers, Wirt and Greg, who negotiate their way through an enchanted forest accompanied by a bluebird named Beatrice and encounter various supernatural adventures. The show captured the imagination of children and their parents with its stunning visuals and playful storytelling, won several awards, and today has a 94% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The miniseries first played November third through the tenth in 2014, making it ten years old today.

For the show's 10th anniversary, the network has released a new stop-motion video by Aardman Animations featuring the original voice actors: Elijah Wood, Collin Dean, and Melanie Lynskey. Welcome back to the Unknown! If you haven't seen Over the Garden Wall, The Cartoon Network is live-streaming it at YouTube. To start from the beginning, hit the >| button.  -via Metafilter

There is a building on Philpot Lane in London that has two mice attached to an outside ledge, both nibbling on, or fighting over, a piece of cheese. The structure was built in 1862, but no one knows when the mice were added. The two rodents have quite a story behind them. It is said that two workers got into a fight during the building's construction, when one accused the other of stealing his lunch. A shoving match led to one of the workers falling to his death, although some versions of the story have both workers dying. During the commotion afterward, someone saw what happened to the lunch in question- it was taken away by two mice.

Is there any truth to the story? Ian Mansfield looked into the tale's history, and found that the first documented account was in 1975, but also found reasons why contemporary accounts might not exist. What he didn't find is any information about who installed the sculpture. Still, the veracity of the story now matters less than the fact that the sculpture and the story have become a part of Philpot Lane's culture. Read up on the two mice and the cheese at Ian Visits. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Loco Steve)

Do you recall the adventures of hitchBOT? The little robot hitchhiked its way through several European countries, but when it came to the US, it only lasted a couple of weeks before vandals destroyed it. Humans have a tendency to take their frustrations out on technological innovations, none more so than robots, from factory robots to hitchBOT to Waymo autonomous cars. Every time Boston Dynamics came out with a new robot, they showed us how they tested them by hitting them, tripping them, or thwarting their tasks, and those are the parts of the videos that people enjoyed the most. Viewers had a lot more sympathy for Spot, the robot dog, than for the Atlas humanoid robot.

It's easy to vent our frustrations on a machine, knowing that they cannot feel pain or die in the conventional sense. They may represent technology taking away human jobs, or the surveillance state, or vanity toys for rich people. There are plenty of reasons to hate robots, but how can we change this behavior? Recent experiments have had some success by triggering feelings of empathy for robots under attack. Read how that's done, and what it tells us about human nature, at Popular Science. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Boston Dynamics)

A creole language is one that arises from a mixture of two or more other languages that becomes a primary language with its own stable grammar and syntax. A pidgin language is one that simplifies a language that is foreign to the speakers to enable communication, for example, when a non-native language is the only one they have in common. A pidgin language can grow into a creole if it is standardized and used long enough. You can see from those definitions that many languages are creoles, but some are looked down upon, because of how recently they were formed, or more pointedly, who speaks these creole languages. That brings us to the question of English. It was formed by a combination of several European languages with plenty of loan words from all over the world. Yet linguists will argue about whether English is a creole. Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) explains the formation of languages and why creoles should be considered just languages.

Earthquakes can happen anywhere, but are much more likely to happen where tectonic plates are rubbing against their neighbors. Seismic Explorer is an interactive map that displays every earthquake of magnitude 5 or above that has occurred since 1980. You can use the slider to show their collective progress over time, or play it like a video. Zoom in or out to identify the activity in your area. Clicking on an earthquake dot will bring up more information about it.  

Change the parameters to show where the boundaries of the tectonic plates are, although they are hard to see during the most recent dates because they are covered with earthquakes. That's okay, because you can change the map to get the tectonic plates labeled, or indicate their direction of movement.   

You can also add in volcanic activity, which follows the same boundaries more or less. It's very clear where the Pacific Ring of Fire is, and that line of quakes in the middle of the Atlantic show where the continents are pulling apart. There's a key in the upper right to help you make sense of the colors and sizes of the visual data (the blue earthquakes are the deepest). Pulling the timeline slide back and forth is pretty trippy, and it shows how the earth is a clearly amazing and dynamic planet. -via Kottke

People are constantly floating the idea of making Election Day a national holiday in the US as a way to making voting easier and get more people to the polls. Holidays need meaningful treats, and there are already a few recipes that have political or even electoral overtones that would be good candidates for inclusion. For example, in Australia, it's already traditional to serve up grilled "democracy sausage" on a bun as an election day fundraiser. This reminds us that if you love sausage and you love the law, you don't want to see either being made.

Or how about bean soup? It has been the Soup of the Day in the United States Senate dining room for more than a century. Or maybe we could resurrect Watergate Salad, which is neither salad nor does it have anything to do with the Watergate scandal. Check out the bona fides of these and other foods that have some tenuous link to political campaigns at Atlas Obscura. However, most of us would like to celebrate the end of this year's election with a good stiff drink.

A couple of weeks ago, we learned how lobotomies became so popular. It was a desperate measure to treat mental illnesses that we couldn't treat, but of course many people endured the surgery who shouldn't have. Even for those with serious mental disorders, lobotomies proved to be a hit-or-miss treatment, and the doctors who performed them really didn't know why. Altogether, it was a shameful period in medical history. Yes, it's true that some people's lives actually improved after a lobotomy, but those were the minority. The real tragedy is how eager doctors were to provide lobotomies for people suffering from such varied illnesses as seizures, schizophrenia, depression, dyslexia, and teenage rebellion, often just relying on a relative's reporting to make a diagnosis. Weird History hones in on seven actual victims of lobotomy, what precipitated the treatment, and how it turned out for them. You can read about even more cases in a list at Ranker.

During the 18th century, the supply of cadavers for medical students to study was fulfilled by grave robbers, or "resurrectionists." No one wanted their bodies to undergo such a fate, but Henry Trigg of the village of Stevenage, Hertfordshire, England, came up with a plan to protect his earthly remains from plunder. He arranged with his brother that his coffin should be buried not underground, but up in the rafters of his barn. The barn was to be locked, and the key placed in the coffin, so that only Trigg himself could unlock it when he returned from the dead, supposedly in thirty years. As you might have guessed already, the key business could not physically be accomplished, but in 1724 when Trigg died, his coffin was indeed installed in the roof area of the barn.

But while this may have protected Trigg's body from immediate theft, his resting place became a curiosity, then eventually when the barn became an inn, the coffin above the rafters became a tourist draw. Fifty years after his death, Trigg's niece requested a burial, but was denied. Over time, parts of Trigg's remains began to disappear. Read about the restless corpse of Henry Trigg, despite his complicated burial plans, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: AnemoneProjectors)

Insects can do horrible things to each other in the name of survival and reproduction. If you've been a Neatorama reader for some time, you've probably read some of our zombie parasite posts, many of which feature parasitic wasps who lay their eggs inside other insects, which then hatch and eat their way out. Or they may control the host insect's behavior in bizarre ways that benefit the parasite's species. It's pretty gross to even think about, but now you can see it happen. Ze Frank's True Facts series looks at parasitic wasps and their sick lifestyles that revolve around taking advantage of other insects. There's a 7-second skippable ad at 3:38.

There are some places that just always burn. One is the eternal flame installed at the grave of John F. Kennedy. That one's fed by a gas pipe. Then there's Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a cold seam caught on fire in 1962 and is still burning all these years later. The Darvasa Gas Crater in Turkmenistan is a methane vent that has been burning for more than 40 years after it was deliberately ignited.  

Turkey has its own eternal flame in Yanartaş, which used to be called Mount Chimaera, in Olympos Beydagları National Park. There are quite a few totally natural torches burning in holes, and will keep burning long after Centralia or Darvasa exhaust their fuel. These eternal flames in Turkey are fed by methane rising from the deep underground, which is ignited when reaching the oxygen at the surface, with the help of the catalyst called ruthenium in the igneous rocks that make up the mountain. Read about the perpetual flames of Yanartaş and how you can visit them at CNN Travel. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: William Neuheisel)