Behavioral ecologist Maren Huck rigged 16 cats with video cameras and followed their everyday cat lives. For four years. Huck and animal behaviorist Samantha Watson recently published their study in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. The project was actually a test of the technology, and the paper is about the use of cameras in animal studies, but you can learn an awful lot about cats from seeing the world through their eyes for years at a time.
When they were in their homes, the cats spent a lot of time following their humans around. They liked to be in the same room. A lot of my students were surprised at how attached cats were to people.
You know you need sleep. You have a proscribed amount of time to get it. You are tired enough to sleep for days. But for some reason, you just can't catch a nod. If you are suffering from insomnia, or even if it just happens every once in a great while, listen to this advice from AsapSCIENCE. -via Digg
Quotation marks are used to denote a quote. Over time, journalists got into the habit of using quote marks to connote something they themselves would never say, but someone else did, implying that the journalist does not believe it. This use led to the rest of us reading short quotes as something you shouldn't believe, or sarcasm. However, people who make signs often use quote marks for emphasis, which ends up conveying the opposite of what they intend.
Sign makers: you can make certain words bold, italic, or even underlined for emphasis. Don't use quote marks, or you'll end up in a post like this. See 17 examples of misguided quotations at Buzzfeed.
You may have seen videos of the Berezka Dance Ensemble before. Their eerie, floating style has often been described as a traditional ethnic Russian folk dance. It's a tradition that goes all the way back to ...1948.
Unreal, right? The dance, also spelled “Beryozka”, was invented in 1948 by Russian ballerina and choreographer Nadezhda Nadezhdina and literally means “little birch”, as the women would usually dance holding birch twigs. Today, it endures as one of Russia’s most iconic dance troupes, but Nadezhda was always quick to say that this wasn’t your average folk dance – this was the dance of the future. “Beryozka’s dances are not folk dances,” she said, “They are dances whose source is the creative work of the people. But composed by me”.
There are a few places on earth where basalt pillars extruded through the surface due to volcanic activity and left towers made up of hexagonal columns. The Devils Postpile near Yosemite is one, the Giant's Causeway in Ireland is another. There's also one in Mumbai, in the middle of the city, called Gilbert Hill. But Gilbert Hill has not been revered like the others.
Gilbert Hill was declared a National Park in 1952, and a Grade II heritage structure in 2007. However, the current condition of this highly encroached-upon natural wonder shows that neither its legal status as a National Park nor its inclusion in the heritage list has made any difference. There are two temples on the top of the hill, accessible by stairs. The vegetation that once surrounded the hill has given way to buildings and dingy slums. The people who live around this geological monument are barely concerned about the hill because of their own struggle for survival. The only people who visit the site are scholars, historians and devotees of the shrines.
An old man works on a technology project with the purpose of reliving a perfect moment from his past. The moral is, you've got to enjoy those moments, because memories are the best things we'll ever have. The Last Dance, written and directed by Chris Keller, is a new short film from Neill Blomkamp's project DUST. -via Geeks Are Sexy
In the mid-19th century, American silver companies were doing pretty well, thanks to the tariff of 1842. It drove imports down, but expanded the supply of silver (and gold) because of the coins used to pay the import tax. Reed & Barton did well, and so did Tiffany & Co., but the real winner of the silver business was the Gorham Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island. Gotham silver became legendary, not only because of the tariff that provided the materials at a lowered price, but also because of modern machinery, lavish design, and advertising that used the new tool of photography.
Because Gorham did much of the literal gilding during the Gilded Age that followed the end of the Civil War, the RISD exhibition and Rizzoli book devote a good deal of space to the insane variety of silver pieces Gorham offered customers in the second half of the 19th century. At one point, Gorham included as many as 1,000 different pieces of sterling and silverplate in its catalog, from humble crumb scrapers to elaborate epergnes.
The show and book also pay particular attention to a service commissioned by Henry and Elvira Furber, who made their fortune in the insurance industry. The commission, executed between 1866 and 1880, would eventually consist of 816 pieces—this service for 24 actually included 24 asparagus tongs—for which 20 oak cases were custom built by Gorham. Nor is the Furber commission even the most excessive example of Gorham’s output. For example, according to data culled from Gorham’s costing ledgers from the late 1880s, a single tea service might require more than 700 hours of elaborate chasing. That translates to three months worth of 60-hour weeks by a single worker, all to make the act of drinking a cup of tea more pleasant.
Dr. Susan Mackinnon needed help during an operation on a patient's leg. She had trouble tracing the saphenous nerve and its branches. So she consulted a medical text, the Pernkopf Topographic Anatomy of Man, with its highly-detailed illustrations, to find the nerve. She was able to complete the surgery and save the patient's leg.
But soon after this 2014 operation, she began worrying whether she had done the right thing. The meticulous, four-color paintings in the Pernkopf book, which she had received as a gift upon graduating from medical school in 1982, were created by Viennese medical illustrators who were such ardent Nazis they included swastikas and lightning-bolt SS symbols in their signatures. The drawings were compiled by an Austrian medical school dean who fired all his Jewish professors after the Anschluss (Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938), and were based in part on the bodies of people executed by the Nazis. The first of the two volumes was published in 1937, the second in 1941.
Mackinnon and her colleague Andrew Yee reached out to various experts about the ethics of using the Pernkopf illustrations. They included bioethicists, historians, and experts on Jewish law. Read their thoughtful responses to this particular question as it relates to the unique history of the Perkopf atlas at Stat magazine. -via Damn Interesting
Read more about the author of the text, Eduard Pernkopf, at Wikipedia.
Minnesotastan knows butterflies. He can identify all kinds of butterflies and tell you about their diet and lifecycles. Here he tells the story of one particular butterfly that he's kept an eye on for almost a year now. She is a Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) that overwintered on his porch in Wisconsin (yeah, I also was under the impression he lived in Minnesota). The butterfly emerged from her chrysalis just a few days ago.
Everything about this process fascinates me - the metamorphosis of course, but even moreso the remarkable resilience of a creature often portrayed as fragile and ephemeral. The ability to fly upwind when you have the weight and shape of a Kleenex. The adaptability to spend months as a crawling caterpillar, and then after dissolving and reshaping oneself to be able to fly away over a rooftop. This is what fifty million years of evolution can produce. Awesome.
Human feet don't work all that well compared to those of other animals, which came about because we decided to walk upright on two feet that were already perfectly good for climbing trees. We've had to live with the consequences ever since. -via Digg
In 1993, Lorena Bobbitt (now Lorena Gallo) was in the news after she cut off her husband's penis in response to years of abuse. She was the subject of many late-night talk show jokes, and her name became a metaphor for a woman's violent revenge. It was during this time that invertebrate zoologist Terry Gosliner described many new species in his book Coral Reef Animals of the Indo-Pacific. He had to come up with names for around a thousand new creatures. One of them was the Bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois), a predatory sea worm with jaws that snap shut like scissors. A quarter-century later, the name doesn't seem so funny. One woman is on a mission to change the name of the Bobbit worm.
Kim Martini isn’t a marine biologist—she’s a physical oceanographer—but she had known about the predatory worm in question for quite some time. It’s a little notorious among ocean life enthusiasts for its fierce ambushes, the fact that it can grow up to ten feet long, and a memorably scary appearance in BBC’s Blue Planet II series. “I grew up in a time when Lorena was all over the news,” Martini says. “I never really understood the entire story, and so I used to joke about it.” When she read a 2019 profile of Gallo in The New York Times, Martini immediately made the connection between woman and worm. “In retrospect, it’s totally messed up,” that they should be associated with one another through the name of her abuser, Martini says.
Gosliner defends the name, noting that it is spelled differently from Gallo's former surname, that it does bob up and down, and that it is a celebration of Lorena's not guilty verdict. There are other species that have been given problematic names; some were successfully changed, while others were not. Read about the Bobbit worm and other animal names that did not age well at Atlas Obscura.
Forty-nine children from all over the world get together for the song "Lean On Me." The unique way they illustrate the lyrics is amazing. Zippy Portugal commissioned this video to celebrate International Children's Day (June 9). Yeah, it's an ad, but it doesn't seem like one. -via Metafilter
Cracked latest "pictofacts" competition is about costume design. Movie and TV show designers put way more thought into what characters wear than the audience will ever notice. But the most subtle details make for great trivia later.
Some of the entries are obvious, some are disputed, and some are just plain cool.
A British cat named Hatty found herself in a pickle. Friday, she was discovered stuck 30 feet up on the Royal Albert Bridge between Plymouth and Saltash, possibly scared by a passing train, after having been missing from her home for several days. A rescue operation was launched, with a fire brigade bringing in their longest ladder and hacking away at undergrowth. Network Rail was ready to stop trains from crossing the bridge in order to save Hatty. The cat's owner, Kirsty Howden, stood by. Despite luring Hatty with treats, the cat would not come within reach of the firefighters. After several hours, the rescue was finally called off. But Wednesday night, Howden heard a meow.
Ms Howden, 39, said the mischievous moggy wandered back home from the bridge - 500ft (152m) away - at about 23:00 BST.
The mother-of-three said she was just about to join a second rescue attempt when she "heard a miaow outside".
"She is a bit skinny and smelly, very vocal and has now headed upstairs and put herself to bed," Ms Howden said.
Here's an example of two toys together being more than the sum of their parts. 5MadMovieMakers took a toy xylophone and mounted it over a set of Hot Wheels tracks. A group of Hot Wheels '65 Mustangs were aimed at the xylophone, timed to play 374 noted of an original song by EmCee. It sounds simple at the beginning, but escalates into something special quickly. You may marvel at the timing required for this stunt, but the filmmakers admit that it has been edited. -via Laughing Squid
