Once upon a time, the Cook pine tree (Araucaria columnaris) was only found on New Caledonia in the Pacific. But over the last couple of hundred years, they were imported and cultivated in far-flung parts of the globe. As they grew tall, a peculiar behavior was noticed among these trees. They have a tendency to lean. It's not just because they are tall, as other, much taller pines manage to grow completely upright. Cook pine trees have their own agenda.

All the Cook pines that grow in the Northern Hemisphere lean to the south, and all that grow in the Southern Hemisphere lean to the north. Those that grow near the equator manage to stand up straight. What's more, the angle of the tilt also depends on location- trees that are further from the equator lean more. The reason for the tilt has not been scientifically proven, but common sense would tell us that the tree is looking for optimized sunlight. However, other pine trees prioritize standing straight for longevity. Something about Cook pine trees makes leaning toward the sun more important than balancing its weight. -via Nag on the Lake

When Abraham Lincoln was a presidential candidate in 1860, it had been more than ten years since he served in the House of Representatives, so he had to be introduced to the national electorate. His campaign staffers were afraid that voters would find him just too ugly to vote for. His opponents had indeed spread talk of Lincoln's looks, calling him grotesque and worse. Photography was fairly new at the time, and Lincoln's advisors raced to get ahead of the game before the other side did.

Lincoln turned to the most famous photographer of the era, Matthew Brady, for a portrait that could be disseminated. Brady took the image above, but there were some tweaks made. While it didn't make Lincoln look like a movie star (it couldn't, because there were no movies then), it did improve upon his actual appearance, and staved off the rumors of his hideousness. It wasn't the last time photo manipulation was used on Abraham Lincoln.  

Read the entire story of Lincoln's portrait and the stories behind a dozen other iconic historical photographs at History Collection. -via Nag on the Lake 

The University of Konstanz in Germany has created a virtual world- for insects! They study locusts' movements and brains at the same time by attaching scanners to their heads while they walk about on a movable sphere, following the virtual locusts projected on the walls. They also study these insects in crowds, using little tags they've glued onto thousands of bugs. It does seem like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, but don't feel too bad for these locusts. They were bred to be eaten, so working in a virtual lab is probably the best life they could hope for. Who knows? Maybe these bugs think they're playing the coolest video game ever. They still give Tom Scott the heebie-jeebies. But maybe you could think about these locusts the next time you put on your virtual reality headset and step into another world.  

Read more about these experiments at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour.

Redditor ikedness found a kitten yesterday that was a complete mess. A woman told him that some kids had glued the kitten to an object a couple of days earlier! He turned to reddit for advice on removing the glue. Redditor Com_Trad_IsTime recommended using coconut oil, which worked, so the kitten, a female, was named Coco.



The glue was only one of her problems. Coco weighs less than a pound, although she appears to be about two months old. And soon she started showing symptoms of respiratory distress. She was taken to the veterinarian, where she tested positive for feline calicivirus (FCV), a common but dangerous infection.



She was prescribed a slew of medicines, but Coco again showed signs of difficulty breathing, and was taken to the vet again. This time, she got a nebulizer treatment and snot removal. Since then, Coco seems to be doing better, and even purring.  



Several redditors have reached out to help with the vet bills. Coco still has a long way to go to gain weight and be considered healthy, but she is on her way. The crucial part was finding a loving home.

(All images credit to ikedness)

Update: The latest on Coco. You can follow her progress here.

In the 1930s, the German government, controlled by the Nazi party, began confiscating all the gold they could, especially from Jews. In 1935, it became illegal for any German to accept or retain a Nobel Prize. At the time, a Nobel Prize medal was made of 23-karat gold and weighed 200 grams. They were embossed with the winner's name, and were therefore hard to hide. Max von Laue received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1914. James Franck received the physics prize in 1925. Both scientists sent their medals to fellow physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr in Denmark for safekeeping.

But in 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark. They approached Bohr's Institute of Physics in Copenhagen. If they found the medals, it would be evidence that would send von Laue and Franck to their deaths. Bohr turned to Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy to make sure the invaders didn't find the medals... with science! Read the story of how the medals were hidden, or more accurately, destroyed, and how they were eventually returned to their rightful owners many years later, at Today I Found Out.

The most mundane Wikipedia articles can end up being the most fascinating. The couple whose pictures illustrated the "high five" captured the public's imagination and they became a meme. Likewise for the guy you see if you were to look up "shrug." His is the only picture in that entry, and has been since 2007. He is illustrating a shrug, alright, but he's also wearing a paisley tie and holding a cocktail. And why is he wearing a tiara that says SCAMPER in on it?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sixteen years later, he is known as the Shrug Guy. His picture has illustrated innumerable reaction memes as well as "shrug" in many various language versions of Wikipedia. But he is not unknown. Comedian Annie Rauwerda reached out and connected with him, and got the story behind the original photo and the tiara, which is quite funny. His life has changed considerably since then, but he's still recognizable, and he's still okay with being the Shrug Guy. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dazzledog)

The three Australian guys behind the YouTube channel How Ridiculous came into the possession of a two-ton axe.  Anything positioned under it is toast when it falls, so, uh, don't try this at home. Their goal here is to break into safes, from the cheapest to the more sturdy safes. However, they cannot resist the temptation to chop up all manner of other things just to see what it looks like. Or to experience major destruction in its purest form, which is the more likely motivation. Watch them destroy a piano, a brick chimney, bulletproof glass, a boulder, and a succession of ever-tougher safes. You couldn't pay me to set those things in place. The only way I'd even get near it is after it has fallen.  -via Born in Space

Every once in a while, we need to remind ourselves that our ancestors, even ancient ancestors, weren't stupid. They were just as smart as people today, but they lacked the number of advancements we inherited to build on. We have writing and books and instant communication. Pre-literate cultures had their own way of passing along crucial knowledge in the form of oral history. The stories of things that happened, people, places, and events that are important, were related over and over again by storytelling, until the next generation knew these things intimately.

Author and geography professor Patrick Nunn tells us about oral histories passed along by indigenous cultures that reveal important geological events that happened many thousands of years ago, when volcanoes changed the landscape and islands formed where there was once continuous dry land. These stories come from all over the world, and have been confirmed by geological studies. The ability to memorize and pass on such knowledge indicates how monumental those events were to the people who witnessed them. Of course, people remember only what they need to remember. You don't memorize a movie when you can see it again on demand, but in 1977, it was important to see Star Wars as many times as you could because it would eventually be gone from theaters. In pre-literate societies, memorizing everything about the land, the people, and their history was just what was done to preserve that knowledge.

Some of those stories became infused with mythology over time. Nunn explains that with the need to embellish stories with explanations that kept the audience's attention and helped them to understand difficult concepts. We can look beyond the supernatural embellishments to find the core nuggets of why these stories were crucial to pass along. Read about the oral history knowledge that is still being passed on today in a thought-provoking essay at Aeon. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Zainubrazvi)

Paul Klusman and TJ Wingard are engineers who are particularly interested in cats. You might recall them from An Engineer's Guide to Cats which established them as authorities in 2008, or from their subsequent videos. In this video, they examine how cats have always inspired humans to develop technology to make our lives easier. They also extrapolate about which tech developments may be in our future as inspired by cats. Then at the five-minute mark, they run out of inspiration and stage a Sweded Star Wars video starring cats and the tech they've already talked about.  

There are many clever inspirations in this video, but I was drawn to the idea of using a lint roller on a cat. It's been my habit to use a brush on a cat's fur, and a lint roller on the rug. I should just combine those two activities! But what really drew my attention was the YouTube description.

This video was ten years in the making. Getting it done was a big part of my incentive for beating cancer (stage IV Lymphoma, November 2020). Thank you TJ, Monica, Larry, Mark, Ben, Tom, Calyssa, David, Nick, Paulette, Eldon, Richard, and Mitch. Thank you sweet kitties. Thank you patrons and supporters. Thank you all our lovely fans watching all this these years!

We wish Paul all the best. As he says, imagination and cats are the most powerful force in the universe.  -via Laughing Squid

You know those signs in a bakery that say "Oops, we baked too much!"? This is story like that on steroids. Crystal Regehr Westergard started a business back in 2018 to bring back lost candy bars. She started with her mother's favorite, called Cuban Lunch. She bought the discontinued trademark and contracted with a manufacturer, and the candy was a hit among those who remembered it. That led to the formation of Regehr Westergard's company Canadian Candy Nostalgia. 

The next project was her husband's favorite candy from his childhood, called Rum & Butter. But by then the pandemic was causing delays in everything from raw ingredients to wrappers, and Regehr Westergard had trouble stocking Rum & Butter. Until now. When all the ingredients came together, she was inundated with way more back orders of Rum & Butter bars than she can sell. And they all have sell-by dates on them. The candy will be good after those dates, but grocery stores won't stock them. Regehr Westergard is willing to take a loss on the candy itself, but she doesn't want to waste them, and doesn't want to pay to dispose of them. She's already contacted food banks, but they could only handle 22,000 bars. Do you have any suggestions? Read about the candy bars and the dilemma of overstock at CBC.

My first thought was that she should sell them by mail order at a discount and charge for shipping, especially now that she's been in the news. The sell-by dates on the big shipment are still a couple of months away. -via Metafilter

This is Cerro de los Siete Colores, the Hill of Seven Colors in English. You'll find it in the Andes, in Argentina's Jujuy province. Tectonic movement revealed the earth's many layers of sediment and their amazing colors. The dark brown is rich in manganese and is about two million years old. The red layer is a mixture of red clay and sand laid down three to four million years ago. The brown and purple layers are around 90 million years ago and are colored by the ratio of lead and calcium carbonate. The yellow is also from that period, with a layer heavy in sulphur. The white layer is limestone, at least 400 million years old.

The legend of the hill is that the children of the village of Purmamarca at its base decided to paint the hill one day, and snuck away for seven nights to leave it as you see it today. Read more about Cerro de los Siete Colores and see more gorgeous pictures at Kuriositas.

(Image credit: travelwayoflife)

You may have seen a popular TikTok video by Bergman Joe in which water finds its way through a maze with the utmost efficiency. It's an animated simulation, so Steve Mould (previously at Neatorama) felt challenged to recreate it in the real world, just to see if he could do it.

Water in a maze presents some interesting ideas. Trapped air in a maze will force the water to work more efficiently (and only if you can make your maze airtight), but surface tension will force it to work less efficiently. Mould made several different sizes of mazes to see how the different factors changed the overall scheme of the fluid dynamics involved.   

As a bonus, you'll also learn the basics of making your own maze, which is interesting even if you never consider trying it. This video is only a bit more than seven minutes- the rest is for the sponsor. -via Metafilter

The Meyer lemon is named for intrepid “plant explorer” Frank N. Meyer, who discovered the lemon variety in China in 1907. His story alone is worth checking out the history of the Meyer lemon, but he did not live to see his namesake lemon become a sensation in the United States. It was more fragrant and hardy than other available lemons, and soon it became a standard tree in California household gardens, bearing lovely fruit for those who owned one. Grower in Texas and Florida followed suit.

But then in the 1940s, it was discovered that the Meyer lemon tree was the cause of citrus tristeza virus (CTV), commonly called “quick decline citrus” virus. The disease was getting out of hand because the Meyer lemon trees carried the virus, but was more immune to its effects than other trees. Therefore the lemon trees did not show symptoms for years, but aphids carried the virus to orange and grapefruit trees, which succumbed much more quickly. The war was one to eradicate Meyer lemon trees in the US.

Yet we use Meyer lemons to this day. Read how the eradication program was carried out, and what saved the Meyer lemon, at Atlas Obscura. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Burkhard Mücke)

This little skit may seem funny in a "back in my day..." way, but the way we pay for things today is altogether weird. I got used to paying for everything with a credit card because of the points, but then stores won the right to add a surcharge for their expenses, so I try to have some cash on me lately for small purchases. Most of my regular bills go to a credit card automatically, and I pay that once a month with a phone transfer from the bank. I use PayPal for mail order. My kids use debit cards and Venmo. Or at least one does; the other doesn't have any money, so it's all credit.  

I still write checks for bills where the drive-through window is close by, and for taxes. But stores either won't take checks at all, or they don't need you to fill them out at all because they just run the check through a machine and get the money transferred. It never occurred to me that a store would give up on checks because the cashiers can't read cursive. But I'm not surprised that young people don't write checks. The banks won't let you open a checking account until you're 18, and by then it's a bit late to get your parents to show you how to do it. Now I'll step down from my soap box and let you tell us how you feel. -via Nag on the Lake

Once upon a time, feature-length movies were filmed in shoots of two to six weeks, but that was back when they didn't have to worry about color, sound, focus groups, or marketing. Now movies can take years to complete. You can blame competition, audience expectations, and big budgets. But Rocky was a blockbuster zipped up in no time at all. Maybe that's because it was a story Sylvester Stallone had dreamed about for years already. You could say the same thing about a band's first album, which might contain original compositions that the band had been playing for years. The second album is not so easy. But sometimes when inspiration hits, you go with the flow and don't worry about refining, especially if you're as talented as Freddy Mercury.

A few other really successful projects came about in astonishingly short time, including architecture, video games, and one very fast mountain climber, in a pictofacts list at Cracked.