Just published in @PLOSONE!! Meet Mini, the newest genus of frogs from Madagascar!! With three new species: Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature, because I am HILARIOUS. https://t.co/7iPKJPBkId#MiniFrogs #NewSpecies #Miniaturisation #science pic.twitter.com/hAwjfuJlA3

— Mark D. Scherz (@MarkScherz) March 27, 2019

A new study by evolutionary biologist Mark Scherz and his team describe several new species of frogs from Madagascar. These frogs are less than an inch long when fully grown, so the names reflect that. Three species were given the genus Mini, and the species are now officially Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature.  

Scherz said he chose the names as he believes there's room for humour and wordplay in science.

"I am a big proponent of wordplay, and so far there aren't any amusing taxonomic names for reptiles or amphibians in Madagascar — the closest thing is Lycodryas cococola, a snake from the Comoro islands to the west of Madagascar, named by my colleagues a few years ago," he added.

"A fun name is valuable for outreach, and in this case we have chosen names that are actually informative about the nature of the animals; they are all diminutive frogs, among the smallest in the world."

Read about the three minis and some other new frog species at Mashable.

Milanese cartographer named Urbano Monte made a nine-foot-wide circular map of the world in the 1580s, with spectacular attention to detail, which was more accurate than most maps of the time. Instead of centering the earth over his own home, he centered it on the North Pole.

Monte's map is quite impressive as a work of continental-scale cartography. He gets a lot of things right, relative to his sixteenth-century peers: California is not an island. Africa is fairly accurately delineated, and Europe and the Mediterranean are quite accurate. But that's not what makes the map unique. It's the fact that the enormous scale of Monte's vision gave him space to crowd his map not only with a tremendous amount of local cartographic detail, but with tiny illustrated figures (of demons, monsters, unicorns, and more), mini-maps of major cities, and highly eclectic captions.

While the map is a study in geographic accuracy, the drawings and captions are highly subjective, and often entertaining. See details and commentary from Urbano Monte's world map at Res Obscura.  -via Strange Company      

(Images credit: David Rumsey Map Collection)

When the first Tyrannosaurus rex was discovered in 1902, he became King of the Dinosaurs. Large and ferocious, the T. rex was made into a movie star and fueled children's fantasies for decades. The dino's reputation was unmatched.

But this would come to a crashing halt in the 1990s, starting with a single line of dialogue from Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park: “Don’t move: He can’t see us if we don’t move.”

Despite the fact that both the 1990 book and the 1993 film Jurassic Park gave the T. rex its proper reverence, there was one glaring error in their portrayal of the T. rex which would undermine its real-life ferocity: Its vision. In both the book and the movie, the T. rex is said to have “visual acuity based on movement,” which means — as quoted above — it can’t see you if you don’t move. In the book, this was introduced as a suspense-building plot device, explained away as the T. rex’s vision being limited due to the frog DNA in its system (some frogs do suffer from this, it’s true).

The movie was taking some license with the science. Still, the more we learned about T. rex, the lamer he seemed. And it's not just the feathers and those little arms the internet loves to poke at. Read about how we are constantly being disappointed in T. rex at Mel magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Durbed)

The internet is full of mashups featuring two things that seem to be opposites, but this one takes the cake. Goth Crocs are for those times you wants to be hardcore, but also comfy and casual. When you feel both nerdy and extreme. These are a real product, from Etsy seller HeavyCreamStore. The pants chain is an optional accessory. -via The Daily Dot

(Image credit: Nat Miller)

Digital cameras scan a scene from side to side to record an image. In panoramic mode, they scan quite a distance to capture, say, a landscape. But if someone, or something, moves while the scan is in progress, the result can be pretty weird.

(Image source: Panorama Fail)

You can't get pets to stand still for a picture, so they are ripe for scanning photography glitches. Which can be pretty funny.

Bored Panda has a ranked collection of 50 of these pet pictures where things go awry at just the right time to make a memorable, if wrong, photograph. -via Everlasting Blort

Common etiquette says that we should stand on the right side of an escalator, so people who are in a hurry can walk past on the left. However, studies show that this method is neither efficient nor safe. So how did we come up with this system, and why is it so hard to get people to change? -via Laughing Squid

In the 1980s, a land line phone in the shape of the cartoon cat Garfield were quite popular, but they faded from sight, as even land lines are disappearing now. But plastic has a long life. French beachcombers on the the Iroise coast in Brittany have been picking up parts of Garfield telephones for 35 years, and anti-litter campaigners know that Garfield phones are going to be part of the area's clean-up efforts. No one knows where they came from, but they keep washing up on the beach even after all these years. The anti-litter group Ar Vilantsou decided to use a Garfield phone as the face of their media campaign this year. That decision led to the source of the phones.   

The media attention on the new campaign, however, drew the eye of a local farmer who remembered the first téléphone Garfield appearing after a storm in the early 1980s, when he was a young man.

He also knew the location of the container - in a secluded sea cave accessible only at low tide.

"You had to really know the area well," he told Franceinfo, which had covered the campaign. "We found a container aground in a fissure. It was open. Many of the things were gone, but there was a stock of phones," he recalled.

The farmer led some Ar Viltansou members and journalists to the secluded cave, where the shipping container remained, as well as a cache of Garfield phones. They had been gradually washing out from the cave for decades. Read the story of the Garfield phones at BBC News. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Claire Simonin/Ar Viltansou)

Imagine having a pet rabbit that's almost as big as you are! Cocoa Puff is a continental giant rabbit that lives in Seattle. Her best friend is the family's preschool daughter. The two are inseparable. Don't miss the toilet paper scene! See more of Cocoa Puff at Instagram.  -via Laughing Squid

This guy, gleefully enjoying a bowl of rice, could easily pass for a modern advertisement or a stock photo. A lot of folks assumed the photograph was faked for internet points. You must admit it is a delightful image, no matter where it came from. The American Museum of Natural History confirms that it came from China over 100 years ago.

The photo was taken during Jacob H. Schiff Chinese expedition when a young German scholar Berthold Laufer was sent to China to investigate the foreign culture. During the 3 years long expedition Laufer gathered 143 photographs, however, there is no information on how he acquired them because there is no evidence that he took the photos himself. There is also no explanation who is the Chinese man in the photo and why he decided to strike a pose like that. However, some people speculate that when a man was asked to pose for a photo, he wasn’t aware of a western tradition to keep s serious face during the process.

Schiff was in China from 1901 to 1904, so the photograph was taken before he returned, but the exact date is unknown. The problem that people have is the smile: we all know that no one smiled in photographs back then. That's obviously not true. Read more about the photograph and the questions surrounding it at Bored Panda.

(Image source: American Museum of Natural History)

In the Cretaceous period, the Gulf of Mexico stretched up into the middle of North America. Water drainage from the highlands filled the gulf with sediment, until it formed the Mississippi River Basin. The river continues to carry sediment south into Louisiana, but it no longer stops there. For 300 years, people have been trying to control the Mississippi in order to protect the valuable river traffic and sea port, and even more so since the oil industry discovered crude in the Gulf. Now the Mississippi is penned in by levees, disrupting nature's cycle of flooding and land-building.   

Here, in black and white, was Louisiana’s land-loss dilemma. Had the river been left to its own devices, a super-wet spring like that of 2011 would have sent the Mississippi and its distributaries surging over their banks. The floodwaters would have wreaked havoc, but they would have spread tens of millions of tons of sand and clay across thousands of square miles of countryside. The new sediment would have formed a fresh layer of soil and, in this way, countered subsidence.

Thanks to the intervention of the engineers, there had been no spillover, no havoc, and hence no land-building. The future of southern Louisiana had, instead, washed out to sea.

Today, Louisiana is losing "a football field’s worth of land every hour and a half." There is a plan to stop the subsidence by diverting sediment before it reaches the sea, but it may be too little, too late. Read about the plight of Louisiana's land at the New Yorker. -via Metafilter

It's become a stereotype that Asians mix up the R and L sound when speaking English. That's a minor problem compared to the weird sounds coming from English speakers who attempt, but don't quite get, Asian tonal languages. But when you break down the linguistics, the R sound is very complicated, and so is the L, and native speakers of different languages learn to pronounce it differently from each other, and differently within languages depending on where it falls within a word. How complicated can it be? Joss Fong of Vox explains.

Mike Fahey of Kotaku underwent surgery a year ago, and had to be put into an induced coma afterward due to complications. For three weeks, he was heavily sedated and was given paralysis drugs to keep him from pulling out his ventilator. But his mind was working through it all. Fahey remembers his dreams well.

So where was I, as my body lay prone in the intensive care unit at Kennestone Hospital? I was inside of my head. My subconscious wove layer after layer of fictitious narrative, keeping itself occupied as my body healed. I dreamt of superheroes and villains. Of being in exotic lands I’d never had a chance to visit. I gambled for my existence in dark, twisted places. I said goodbye to my life surrounded by my family in the far future. I attempted, through circuitous subconscious methods, to procure pizza and frozen beverages.

This motley collection of visions and medication-fueled delusions have been part of me since the incident. They linger on the edge of my consciousness, rising to the fore during quiet moments, triggered by a familiar sound, sight or scent.

Fahey's account of those dreams relates some of them to his past experiences, some to the medical procedures going on in the real world at the time, and others to his sense of mortality. Read his story at Kotaku.

(Image credit: Jim Cooke/GMG)

You already know that domestic doggo descended from wolves. What might surprise you is how much alike wolves and humans were at one time. Our eventual cooperation was initiated by the dogs, not the humans. The story just gets weirder from there. Enjoy this animated TED-Ed lesson from David Ian Howe. -via Boing Boing 

In the 1970s and '80s, New York City was a very different place. Gangs terrorized the streets, and even more so, the subway trains. Violent crime could be anywhere, and people traveled in fear. In the midst of the mayhem, Curtis Sliwa stepped into the breech and organized the Guardian Angels.

The Guardian Angels put themselves in places where the police wouldn’t go and put their lives on the line in a way most people wouldn’t, which is where the organisation ran into its fair share of controversy over the years. For most New Yorkers however, those red jackets and berets were a very welcome sight, and still are, particularly if you’d almost forgotten they existed after Rudy Guiliani’s crime cleanup saw them fade from public consciousness in the early 90s. When crime rates dropped, it seemed like they were no longer needed by the public, but the Guardian Angels are still very much in operation today, tackling crime not just in New York City, but internationally, through its various chapters around the world. They’re still taking on the bad guys of Gotham’s underworld too, which in 2019, and in the midst of the new #MeToo era, means turning the heat up on the subway’s notorious sexual predators, a mission entrusted to a new female-driven patrol unit of Angels, known as the “Perv Busters”.

Today, the Guardian Angels have chapters in many other cities, and the New York contingent is made up of original members and the generations that followed. Read the history of the group, and what they're up to today at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: mattcarman)

A simple train trip becomes more complicated by the minute. For a cartoon, Runaway is fairly frightening. Still well worth a watch, but I wouldn't show it to young children. And in case you are wondering, the cow is fine. Canadian animator Cordell Barker worked on this film for eight years. He said,

The metaphor of this film is that, whether you notice the jeopardy or not, everybody is trapped on this track, and we’re all going to the same place,” Barker explains. “I’m a bit of a Cassandra. I’m always feeling like I’m looking around and seeing this really apparent jeopardy. But a lot of people I know [have] that kind of disbelief that anything can shake their normal day-to-day life,” he says. “I keep thinking, ‘Man, we’re doomed.'

-via Everlasting Blort