Have you ever seen an elderly porcupine? Probably not. Their average lifespan is around eight years, but Kemosabe, who lives at Animal Wonders in Montana, is eleven. The porcupine has been battling serous dental problems that left him with only one tooth. As he fought an infection, Kemosabe was on a not-quite-natural soft diet. Now that he's been medically cleared, it's time to find out what fruits he can handle on his own, and which ones he likes best. Listen to his voice- it sounds like a human voice at double speed, like Dave Seville's Chipmunks. See another video of Kemosabe at Laughing Squid.

Javier Larragoiti had just started college in Mexico City when he learned that his father had been diagnosed with diabetes. The teenager was studying chemical engineering, and decided to put his studies to work to make it easier for his father to avoid sugar.

“It’s only when you know someone with this sickness that you realise how common it is and how sugar intake plays a huge role,” he says. “My dad tried to use stevia and sucralose, just hated the taste, and kept cheating on his diet.”

The young chemist started dabbling with xylitol, a sweet-tasting alcohol commonly extracted from birch wood and used in products such as chewing gum.

“It has so many good properties for human health, and the same flavour as sugar, but the problem was that producing it was so expensive,” he says. “So I decided to start working on a cheaper process to make it accessible to everyone.”

Ten years later, Larragoiti has patented a process to make xylitol that will also contribute to saving the environment. He nows runs a business he named Xilinat to produce xylitol. Read that story at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image: Courtesy of Xilinat)

Galileo did experiments to prove that heavy objects and lighter objects will fall at the same rate. This meant that, taken to extremes, a hammer and a feather should fall at the same speed. However, a feather tends to float slowly because of air resistance. During the Apollo 15 moon mission in 1971, astronaut David Scott had the perfect opportunity to prove Gaileo's point, because there was no air to cause drag on the feather. And some falcon on earth never knew how far a part of him flew. How about that? -via reddit

In the 1950s, surgeons were working hard on correcting heart problems. A big stumbling block was the surgery itself- namely, keeping the patient alive long enough to do the repairs. One such patient was Stephen Joseph Brabeck, born in 1950 with tetralogy of Fallot, a cluster of four heart defects. That was unfortunate, but he was lucky to be born when he was, and in Minnesota, where cutting-edge heart research was happening.     

In 1954 at the University of Minnesota, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei started using another human being (generally the patient’s parent) as a surrogate heart-lung machine, linking the patient and parent together during the operation. The controversial procedure risked two lives during a single operation, but Lillehei went on to perform 45 procedures in the early 1950s—with a 40 percent mortality rate for patients.

Meanwhile, just 10 miles away at the Mayo Cinic, Dr. John H. Kirklin pursued a mechanical solution that had so far proved elusive. As a medical student, he had long dreamed of the possibilities of open-heart surgery, including a treatment for the very ailment afflicting Brabeck. In a paper he co-authored on the first 50 years of open-heart surgery, Dr. Richard C. Daly, a Mayo cardiovascular surgeon, related comments Kirklin later made about the challenges of open-heart surgery in the 1940s and 1950s: “My fellow residents and I filled pages of notebooks with drawings and plans of how we would close ventricular septal defects and repair the tetralogy of Fallot once science gave us a method to get inside the heart.”

Kirklin assembled a team to come up with a mechanical life-saving device, and in 1955, 5-year-old Brabeck was one of the first humans to test the Mayo-Gibbon heart-lung machine while undergoing heart surgery. Read the story of the revolutionary machine and the little boy who grow up to be a cardiologist at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: National Museum of American History)

Men in Black International will be in theaters June 14th. Also, Screen Junkies is doing an Honest Trailer series on summer blockbusters, and the original Men in Black was just such a hit in 1997. So it stands to reason that they'd do an Honest Trailer for the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones buddy cop movie. What's strange is that that they hadn't done one already. To catch up, they cover Men in Black and its two sequels all in one Honest Trailer.   

Redditor F_o_i_e_B_u_m_p has found a great use for all those old cathode ray tube TV sets that take up so much room. He gets them from a recycling center and adds action figures to recreate scenes from movies! Above is his rendition of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

His future plans are to recreate scenes in television sets for Evil Dead, and possibly Poltergeist and The Ring, which might require some "thinking outside the box." -via reddit

Update: Forget all the above. The images were appropriated and misrepresented. The artist is actually Rickey Williams, who sells these pieces. Check out many more of his dioramas at Instagram. -Thanks, 10Questions!

This guy is epic lol pic.twitter.com/kMLZJes2tj

— Damascene Sage(@PsychologyDoc) May 16, 2019

This guy has some skills. Unfortunately, they are not the type of skills you could use to make a living. I came up with that line before I found out that indeed, he makes a living doing this sort of thing. This is Jiemba Sands, a member of the Sands Family Circus. He has been performing with his parents and siblings in Tasmania since he was three years old! See more of his stunts at Instagram and at YouTube. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: @spicyyash)

Those kids are having so much fun... you could be tempted to join them. Yeah, climb that ladder, crawl through the playhouse, plant your butt in that child swing. Maybe you'll fit, maybe not. Those apparatuses are designed for small children.  

(Image credit: mmendozaf)

You might get lucky and meet some really nice firefighters, but also know that they will tell stories about you for years to come. See a ranked gallery of 30 people who got stuck using children's playground equipment at Bored Panda.

Scientists studying the ecology of the Wolong National Nature Reserve in southwest China found a curious shot when they checked a camera trap in April. It was a juvenile giant panda, estimated to be between a year and two years of age. But this panda had no black fur! Even its claws are white. More scrutiny revealed that the animal is an albino, and has the distinctive pinkish eyes that confirm the condition.

Because albinism is a hereditary condition—it comes from a recessive gene—there’s “a ‘whitening’ mutant gene in the giant panda population in Wolong,” as noted in the Sichuan press release. As the Wolong conservationists pointed out, should this panda grow to maturity and mate with another albino with the same mutated gene, it could result in yet another albino giant panda, or further propagation of the albino gene at the very least. The conservationists are planning to step up their monitoring of the area to learn more about this possibility, and to study other animals in the region.

Read more about the discovery at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Wolong National Nature Reserve)

Auralnauts gets into the act of re-editing the original Star Wars film to bring it more in line with what we now know about the story. They convince us step-by-step of the utter futility of such projects. The weirdness builds up to a ludicrously overlong light saber battle as the climax, and then feeds us a couple of perfect punch lines. Auralnauts says,

The fix everything ship has sailed. We're on it and there are no lifeboats. It's a one way trip and we have the power of hindsight and a better understanding of the material than the original creators. Featuring the incredible Jesse Gomez as Vader!

In addition to the surreal dialogue, you also have to admit that Jesse Gomez does a phenomenal James earl Jones impression. -via Digg

Military surgeon Joseph Fleming served with the British Royal Navy aboard a hospital ship during conflicts in Africa. His notes from 1873 related a peculiar case, in which Captain H. V. B. suffered from some unknown illness, possibly gall bladder trouble, and died aboard the ship. An autopsy was inconclusive as to the exact cause of death, but it revealed a rather curious anomaly in his heart.    

A small hard heavy circular body, about half-an-inch in diameter (which, on examination, proved to be a leaden bullet), is found encysted outside the pericardium, above the right ventricle and between the origin of the pulmonary artery in front and the ascending part of the arch of the aorta behind.

A really surprising place to find a bullet: less than an inch from the heart, and sitting snugly between the two largest blood vessels in the body. Miraculously, it had not damaged any of these delicate structures. By chance, another of the surgeons on board HMS Victor Emmanuel knew how it had happened, since he witnessed the injury – which had occurred thirteen years earlier and on the other side of the globe.

The captain had indeed been shot all those years ago, but since it didn't seem to bother him much, he had been quickly discharged from medical care. Read the story of the heart with a bullet at Thomas Morris.  -via Strange Company

One of the few things that all living things have in common is carbon. What makes this element so universal? Or maybe it's not universal... after all, we don't know about life outside of our planet. Could other life forms use some chemical besides carbon to bind everything together the way carbon does here? Reactions explores the question, even if they can't supply an answer based on observations -just speculation extrapolated from what we know. -via Geeks Are Sexy

It doesn't happen often, but every once in a great while, some everyday working stiff gets a chance to impress everyone. It takes hard work, timing, talent, and luck, but the stories of those who did it give us all inspiration.  

When Richard Montanez was a boy, he was embarrassed to bring burritos to school because the other kids had never seen them before. His mom's solution was to pack him an extra burrito each day, so he could give one away and make friends. Richard ended up selling burritos to classmates for a quarter each. So is this the prologue to the story of him becoming an entrepreneur and starting his own tortilla empire? Nope! Richard dropped out of school and got hired as a gardener.

And a car washer, and a chicken slaughterer. Then he got a job as janitor in a Frito-Lay plant, until one day the machinery broke down and he got to live the dream: taking home a bunch of undusted Cheetos. Having sadly neglected to stock his kitchen with jars of spare cheese crumbs, Richard rolled the Cheetos in chili powder in the style of elote, a Mexican chili corn snack. And he liked the result so much that he figured Frito-Lay should mass-produce it. He decided to pitch the idea directly to the CEO of PepsiCo, Roger Enrico.

You know how the idea took off, but what you don't know is that Enrico was so excited about the idea that he promoted the janitor, and Montanez later rose to executive vice president. Read five other stories like his at Cracked.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jan Videren)

Jibe-iT Goat Farm in Redding, Connecticut, is hosting the first Goat Live-Action Role-Playing (LARP) event on June 15. No, participants are not going to take the roles of goats. Rather, visitors will help to produce role-playing games for the goats! Attendees are encouraged to come in costume, if that's your thing. The farm is equipped with what you will need for the games, including "activity cards," with suggestions for the goat games. For example,

One goat plays as Frodo, another will be Sauron. Use lawn posts to mark off an area representing Mount Doom. If Frodo visits Mount Doom before Sauron touches him, the world is saved. If Sauron touches Frodo, all is lost.

However, you can bring your own ideas (in fact, you are encouraged to, because "most of the stuff we're writing is garbage"). The rules are optional. The farm will provide food. It sounds like a wild idea, and a good time for anyone, even the goats. Who knows, this may turn out to be the next big thing. -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Laky 1970)

On Monday, some duck herders in Sirajganj, Bangladesh, stopped traffic to get the flock across the road. How many ducks are there? All of them! After a while, I imagined them descending into a tunnel to get back to the original side of the road, just so they could mess with people. -via Digg