The image is certainly artful, but is it real? An egret seems to step from one world into a completely different world. But it's neither Photoshopped not is it artificial intelligence, just a nicely-composed photo. Photographer Kenichi Ohno took the picture at a nearby marsh. It went viral after he was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Nature in Japan photo contest from the All-Japan Association of Photographic Societies, because so many people couldn't figure out how it was done. Is the background blue or is it yellow? Why not both?

If you can't see what's happening in the picture, here's a clue. The yellow is a wall. The wall reflects onto the water. There is no sky in the picture. If you still can't see it, there's further explanation and a handy chart at My Modern Met that will make it all clear, plus the story of Ohno's illusion image. -via Fark 

Last Tuesday, police in Boone, North Carolina, had to chase a driver who fled a traffic stop. The suspect led the cops on a chase, then stopped, got out of his vehicle, and fled into the countryside. The police didn't see which way he ran, so they started searching the area. A news release from the Town of Boone Police Department on Facebook details what happened next.

As officers began to search the area they received some unexpected, but welcomed assistance from some local cows. Apparently cows do not want suspected criminals loitering in their pasture and quickly assisted our officers by leading them directly to where the suspect was hiding. The cows communicated with the officers as best they could and finally just had the officers follow them to the suspect’s location.

The Facebook post goes on to thank the cows and speculates on the feasibility of forming a Bovine Tracking Unit for the force. The suspect, 34-year-old Joshua Minton, faces charges of driving on a revoked license and several counts involving fleeing. -via reddit 

(Image credit: Town of Boone Police Department)

Louie Zong asked people to send him a video of them singing one note so that he could construct a song. He got more response than he expected, and then went to work building computer files with the notes so that he could play them like a musical instrument. You might say, hey any MIDI keyboard will do that, but these are still real people singing real notes. It was a lot of work. But the kicker is that when he put them together into this song, he matched all the videos up for the music video. And that was definitely a lot more work. Zong says he has many more songs made with his one-note video musical instrument, but this is the first that has the actual videos of people singing. It will take him a while to construct others, but he says he will do that, featuring more people, in case you want to bookmark his YouTube channel.  -via Boing Boing

Ensio Tiira really didn't want to be part of the French Foreign Legion anymore. In 1953, the 24-year-old Finnish recruit found himself on a ship headed to French Indochina to fight the communists. Tiira and Swedish fellow Legionnaire Fred Ericsson planned to escape before the ship reached its destination. When they calculated they were near the shore of Sumatra, they threw a life raft overboard and leapt after it in the dark of night.

But no matter how much they paddled, they did not find land. And they were surrounded by sharks. They ran out of fresh water and food on their second day adrift. It was two weeks before any rain brought fresh drinking water, but it was too late for Ericsson. Tiira held on for twice that long before he was found. Read about Ensio Tiira's ordeal at sea and how he was rescued at Singular Discoveries. -via Strange Company

The very short new song from Tenacious D (Jack Black and Kyle Gass) is called "Video Games." It's their first new original song in five years. The song is about giving up playing video games, except for... all the video games. Each of the "except fors" has a valid excuse, like it's not a game, it's an experience, it's an adult thing, etc. The lyrics are here. Meanwhile, in the wacky animated video, Black becomes character after character from all kinds of video games you'll recognize as he sings. It's a subject that hits close to home for Black, who has been a dedicated gamer all his life, and recently voiced Bowser in the animated film The Super Mario Bros. Movie. This video contains NSFW language, violence, blood, non-explicit cartoon nudity, and none of it should be taken seriously at all. -via Laughing Squid

Anyone who has ever tried to moderate content on the internet knows how hard it is. When you allow strangers to post or comment on your website, you have to keep an eye on what they say. If it is your responsibility to encourage free and open exchange of ideas, while at the same time protecting your site from becoming a cesspool of threats, harassment, spam, or odious content, you have to make some hard decisions. The biggest sites have a content policy as a guide.

In the game Moderator Mayhem, you are confronted with many decisions on whether to keep or toss content on a fictional social media network. Some comments are easy, but many are edge cases and you may need to consult the content policy to decide. It can still be difficult. But whatever your score is, you'll learn about the process of content moderation and what professional moderators are up against. Read more about the purpose of the game.  -via Metafilter

This video is framed with the joke that tourists go to Austria and want to see kangaroos. There are no kangaroos in Austria. However, as you zoom about Vienna in this video, you might catch a glimpse of one here or there. But pretty soon you forget all about kangaroos because this animated hyperlapse focuses on the beautiful and historic city of Vienna. It's way more impressive than kangaroo chasing.

Kirill Neiezhmakov created this delightful video, and also posted a list and description of the Viennese locations in the video at the YouTube page. You really should watch this in full-screen mode, because it's just lovely. Oh, by the way, you just might find that kangaroo at the Schönbrunn Zoo.  -via Nag on the Lake

Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles was long the main highway to the western United States. Approved in 1926 (and completed in 1938), Route 66 was the path Dust Bowl victims used to escape to California. It was the subject of many a college road trip, or the path to start a new life somewhere on the West Coast. In 1946, Nat King Cole recorded a song that ensured everyone knew Route 66. There was even a TV show called Route 66 in the 1960s. But in the 1980s, the interstate highway system bypassed and replaced Route 66. A lot of it fell into ruin.

But now, ahead of the road's 100th anniversary, some states are working on repairing and preserving their portions of Route 66 to bring it back to its mid-century glory. Many of the famous gas stations, hotels, and tourist stops along the way are also staging a comeback. If you've always wanted to recreate those road trips of yesteryear on a historic highway that takes you through scenery you can see, your opportunity is coming. Read about the state of Route 66's revival and Smithsonian.

(Image credit: US Department of Transportation)

A guy finds a purse with some change in it, and it leads him into an adventure in consumerism that resembles a snowball rolling downhill, until he is literally in over his head. It's a cute and clever animation, and if you look beneath the surface, it brings up many familiar aphorisms about money. Don't buy something just because someone wants to sell it to you. A great deal may end up costing you dearly. Possessions only weigh you down. Spending can become a habit you eventually can't afford. I'm sure there are more.

Animator Aaron Hughes made this with thousands of hand-drawn images on financial pages. The finished animation Five Cents won the South by Southwest Animated Short Audience Award last year. -via Everlasting Blort

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has released their annual list of endangered historic places in the US. Over the past 36 years, they've listed 350 places, which usually galvanizes local or government entities to put forth efforts to preserve these places. The reasons these historic places are in danger of destruction vary. Any house with no one living there will deteriorate, and eventually become more expensive to preserve than it's worth, unless people think its history makes the difference. Some historic neighborhoods suffer from the very value of the land, as corporations move in and knock everything down to build new buildings. A historic business on Route 66 has been unused since the interstate routed people in a different direction. Historically ethnic neighborhoods lose their flavor when longtime residents can no longer afford to live there.

Whether a place is "historic" enough to preserve is a matter of opinion. Some spaces might be better used for something else. Maybe preservation is worth the effort and money, or maybe not. And sometimes market forces are just too much to fight back against. Read the stories of these places and ponder those questions those questions for yourself.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: Joe Mabel)

Have you ever come across an internet list and realized that most of the listings don't have much to do with the title? That's the case with the article entitled 5 of the Objectively Stinkiest Humans to Ever Walk the Earth. What we have is one historical celebrity who smelled so badly that people wrote about it (shown above), two people who went a year or more without showering or bathing so their smell was assumed, one doctor with a disgusting experimental technique, and an entertainer who probably didn't smell bad at all yet would make you assume such if you went to his show. Yeah, it's plausible to assume that anyone who goes a year without a shower might smell, but at least one of them was eager to fix that when the opportunity came. Still, each of the stories is interesting in their own way, and well worth a read. They might even squick you out a bit, but at least you don't have to smell them.

A team of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have built an edible battery. Yum! The battery is made from nothing but non-toxic food-grade materials. These include beeswax, seaweed, cellulose, and activated charcoal, among other things. Once again, yum! It can deliver 48 microamperes of current for more than ten minutes. Yeah, it's tiny, and not all that powerful. But it's edible! Still, it wasn't developed in order to grace a meal. In fact, they are rechargeable, which would be useless if you made them just to be eaten.

These batteries could be very useful for children's and pets' toys, since small batteries are often ingested by those who don't know any better. Conventional batteries accidentally ingested can be quite dangerous. Another use would be in cutting-edge medical therapies, like tiny robots that are swallowed to monitor conditions in the digestive system, or even tinier drug-delivery robots. Another benefit of edible electronic components would be the non-toxic disposal of old batteries in our environment. Along those lines, the team is also working on developing edible transistors. Read about these batteries at ars technica, and marvel at the way we've learned how to harness organic matter for hi-tech solutions. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia)

The sitcom Arrested Development and the drama Succession are both about dysfunctional family businesses. Well, the businesses are what you'd expect, but the families are dysfunctional. The difference is that one is a comedy and the other is a drama. Still, the subject matter is close enough to lend itself to a twisted mashup. The video is from Succession, but it is presented in the kooky style of Arrested Development: the editing, the music, and the narrator. The narrator is an artificial intelligence version of Ron Howard, as would be appropriate. This video contains NSFW language, despite the bleeps.  -via Nag on the Lake

Fashion has always been influenced by status, and status has always been the reason for fashion. A suntan carried a status of sorts that remained fixed for thousands of years. Pale skin meant status. A suntan indicated that the person was a laborer and spent a lot of time outdoors, usually tending to crops or livestock or building structures for the wealthy, who had the leisure to stay pale indoors or under shade. In ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt, this unspoken rule was slightly modified for men, because warriors were exposed to the sun. But eventually came the Industrial Revolution, in which poor laborers moved inside factories to work, away from the sun.

But what made a suntan into a status symbol was the concept of a beach vacation. Only wealthy people could afford to spend time frolicking on beaches far from home. When Coco Chanel was photographed after getting a tan on the French Riviera in 1923, a new status symbol was born. That turnaround might remind you of the Dr. Seuss story "The Sneetches." And yes, there were hiccups along the way, like the lead and arsenic cosmetics women used to make their skin pale, and the gadgets that were invented to battle vitamin D deficiency when time in the sun would have done the same job. Read about the historical ups and downs of the suntan at Messy Nessy Chic.

Cancer is not caused by bacterial infections or a virus, like so many other diseases. Cancer happens when our own cells start to grow and divide abnormally (although some infections can create conditions in which our cells are encouraged to turn cancerous). By the time a cancer is large enough for modern medical science to detect it, your body has already thrown many defensive weapons against it. In fact, finding and destroying cancerous cells is part of the body's everyday routine. Cancer as we know it happens when the body's defensive weapons are losing the battle against that abnormal growth. That's when we have pull out the big guns: surgery, radiation, and/or powerfully destructive chemicals.

That our immune systems go to work constantly to fight the body's own cells when they become destructive is astonishing in itself. Some of our cells have tiny testing labs looking for odd proteins, along with a library of those proteins, plus we have an army of killer cells detecting abnormalities in different ways. So not only does our immune system look for cells that shouldn't be there (like bacteria and viruses), they also inspect all our cells to make sure they stay in line. Kurzgesagt explains how that works at the cellular level, and even further down in our DNA.