The organization Wildlife S.O.S. runs an elephant shelter in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, India. They recently opened the first hospital for elephants in India as well, adjacent to the shelter. The Wildlife SOS Elephant Hospital has state-of-the-art equipment like wireless digital X-rays, thermal imaging, digital scales for massive animals, ultrasonography, and facilities for quarantine and tranquilization of the huge mammals.

The hospital, inaugurated on Friday in the Hindu holy town of Mathura, is spread over 12,000 square feet and is designed to treat injured, sick or geriatric elephants.

“I think by building a hospital we are underlining the fact that elephants need welfare measures as much as any other animal,” Geeta Seshamani, co-founder of Wildlife SOS, the non-profit behind the hospital, told Reuters TV.

“That captive elephants are not meant to be used and abused but instead have to be given the respect which an animal needs if you are going to be using the animal.”  

Read more about the hospital at Reuters. -via Mashable

(Image credit: Wildlife S.O.S.)

You've seen them in the movies- big, strong debt collectors who won't take "no" for an answer. They exist in real life. Ozy heard from a guy who once worked for a shady New York outfit that fronted money to gamblers, which meant collecting could be difficult. The title of the article is I Broke Legs for a Living, but that only happened once, and it was an accident. But while intimidation was often enough, he did have to resort to violence occasionally.  

The least amount I’d been sent out to collect was $400. I used to get a percentage of what I collected. The most? Around $60,000. For the $400 one, I just brought a hammer and put it on the table between us where the guy worked. He paid on the spot. The $60,000 was a little harder. No one wants to part with that kind of money. He had lots of excuses — what he called reasons. I told him it was simple and that if he didn’t pay, I didn’t get paid.

Anyway, he got tough and so I had to go out there. Now I was pissed. My day’s in the shitter, my schedule is shot to hell. We catch him and beat the holy living hell out of him, but even with that, there’s an art. I mean, if you beat him so much the guy can’t get home to his family and they have to get involved somehow, well, then it automatically gets twice as difficult since everybody has an idea of the right thing to do in this case. And, of course, the right thing is never “just pay him.”

Read more of Les' recollections on collections at Ozy.

(Image credit: Flickr user Lauren Powell-Smothers)

A security camera was trained on the cat door of this home, so you can assume that funny things had been happening, and the family was trying to figure it out. Maybe this raccoon had attempted burglary here before! In this instance, Fluffy sprang into action to defend his territory. "Territory" is what cats call their food dish. -via Geekologie

The organizers of Montreal Comiccon also put on a free mini-event called Montreal Mini-Comiccon, with a Christmas theme. How do cosplayers incorporate Christmas into their costumes? Take a look at a gallery of pictures that tell us at Geeks Are Sexy.

The art center in the town redditor strangeloop527 lives put up their Christmas tree. This is a genius statement designed to provoke thought and conversation on the state of modern art, the ephemera of art, and the futility of spending large amounts of money on art. If you looked at this and said, "I don't get it," then you'll want to revisit the biggest art story of 2018. Now it all makes sense, with a Christmas theme.  -via reddit

Two hundred years ago, life was very restricted for young women, but it was also dangerous for a young woman without the protection of a family. So when Harriet Moore's mother died in 1816, the young Irish girl put on boy's clothing and became John Murphy. Murphy became an itinerant laborer, following jobs here and there, and moving on when anyone became suspicious about her identity.  

During her time in Shardlow, Harriet gained employment at the local salt works and lodged in the nearby village of Aston-on-Trent, with a Mrs Jane Lacey who had a daughter, Matilda (born 1808). Matilda found herself pregnant by the village butcher, a married man, but she was also in love in love with John aka Harriet.

Somehow, Mrs Lacey discovered that John was actually Harriet – blackmail began. Mrs Lacey told Harriet that if it was discovered that he was a she, she would be transported. Mrs Lacey arranged for Matilda’s child to be raised as if the child were John’s and that John should marry Matilda.

We might assume that "transported" in this story meant sent to Australia. John, terrified of marriage, fled to another town, but eventually was persuaded to marry Matilda, who then had another child. But Murphy had an alternate plan- she put on women's clothing and became Harriet again- and married a man! Read the story of Harriet Moore and John Murphy, with the twists and turns chronicled in surviving documents, at All Things Georgian. -via Strange Company

(Image source: UCD Spec Collections)

That's it! No more sun for us. pic.twitter.com/xWU7zi5Z2C

— northierthanthou.com (@Brimshack) November 18, 2018

The sun went down last week on an American town, and won't rise again for two months. Utqiaġvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, is 330 miles above the Arctic Circle. The sun dipped below the horizon on Sunday, November 18, and is expected to return on January 23, 65 days later.

It's a common misconception that Utqiaġvik and areas north of the Arctic Circle are completely dark during this 65-day polar night.

Civil twilight, defined as the point when the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon, allows sufficient light to see objects outside. This civil twilight period is about 6 hours long near the beginning and end of polar night but shrinks to about 3 hours in the heart of the polar night just before Christmas.

Where will the sun rise? That depends on where you are standing. Within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, the sun doesn't appear to go up and then down. It circles around in the sky, and when it sets and rises, it skims around the horizon, as seen in this video (3:25 to 3:45, although the whole thing is great to watch). The Geophysical Institute has a webcam stationed in Utqiaġvik, so in case you want to see it at night, you can do that any time of the day. The scenery doesn't change much. Read more about the long night in Utqiaġvik at The Weather Channel. -via 22 Words

The avocados available at your local supermarket are almost all Hass avocados, grown in Mexico year-round. But there are many kinds of avocado, and one enormous variety from the Dominican Republic called the Carla has spawned a lawsuit by the company Aiosa, who owns the first Carla tree and patented the fruit, against the distributor Fresh Directions International for selling Carla clones. What's so special about the Carla avocado?    

“If you can keep yourself in the market longer and you have a late variety, then you maintain your position in the market, and you can sell fruit,” said Jonathan Crane, a tropical fruit specialist at the University of Florida. “So Carla is a late variety that the Dominican Republic avocado industry purposely is growing to enter that late, late market.”

That’s not the Carla’s only asset: Its flesh also manages to stay fresh for up to eight hours after being cut open, so eaters can save it for later.

And yes, it’s enormous. In 2016, when it went on sale at British retailer Marks & Spencer, the Daily Mail marveled at its girth (“the giant ‘Carla’ avocado that is FIVE times bigger and weighs 1kg”) and the Metro declared it “terrifying”: “It looks like a mango. It is not a mango.”

The upshot is that there's a lot of potential money riding on the right to sell the Carla. Genetic tests show that the Carlas sold by Fresh Directions are identical to the ones sold by Aiosa, the patent holder. However the lawsuit turns out, the story brings up a lot of questions. Since the Carla was discovered among Aiosa's West Indian avocado trees, instead of being developed by breeding, should it really be patented? Should living things ever be patented? What if Fresh Directions already had a Carla tree by, say, a gift of Carla branches from Aiosa's founder to his brother? Read about the avocado war at Buzzfeed.

(Image credit: Aiosa)

Last week's row between two dart throwers over who farted was not the first, not will it be the last, public squabble over flatulence. The story inspired Lucas Reilly to look up historical fart controversies from ancient Egypt to this year. Here's one you may not have gotten wind of yet.

The Secret Service will not only take a bullet for the president, they’ll also take the blame for the Commander-in-Chief’s errant cheek squeaks: Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States, would often fart and blame it on his Secret Service agents, loudly saying, "Jesus, was that you? Show some class." (This must have come as a shock to Lyndon B. Johnson, who once said, “Jerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.")

Read the stories of five other farts in the news, not including the darts competitors, at Mental Floss.

Did you eat too much for Thanksgiving dinner? Can't stay out of the leftovers? Overdo it just a bit? Time to reach for the Pepto, or Bromo-seltzer, or whatever you have to relieve an upset stomach. But which one is best for your symptoms? It all depends on what you expect a stomach remedy to do. The ranking of brand name stomach remedies ends up clumping them by ingredients. Not all ingredients are equal. In fact, some will help totally different symptoms from what you have. Check out the things you should know about stomach relief at Mel magazine.

One wrong move by the hapless forklift driver and the whole house of cards falls in. I swear, this looks like nothing so much as a complicated domino fall. Whoever designed this rickety setup is much more at fault than the forklift guy. Unless, of course, this is an advertisement, which I suspect. -via Boing Boing

You might never have heard of the World Ploughing Championships, but the farmers who take part in the competitions are serious about their sport, which require training, skill, practice, and dedication.   

Competitive ploughing is unquestionably a sport, in that it’s an organised physical activity with a governing body and strict rules, but it’s fair to say that the physique of a world-class ploughman doesn’t immediately call to mind a Novak Djokovic or a Cristiano Ronaldo. Ploughing – after sufficient immersion – can quietly thrill in its display of precision and technique, but it is not a pastime that requires fitness or even a healthy BMI. One recent winner of the annual British Ploughing Championship was 82 years old. Boyles has the build of a retired scrum-half; Chappell wears glasses and has a heavy limp – he lost his left leg to a sugar-beet harvester at the age of 17. (In what has become Chappell family lore, he hopped back to his tractor and drove to the farm for help, blood seeping from his stump, his severed leg still in the harvester.)

The following day, Chappell and Boyles would mount their tractors, ploughs rigged to the back, and spend four hours inverting the soil on a plot of land to create a sequence of furrows, burying the old crop and making a seed bed for the new. Nothing would happen very quickly, the event closer to test cricket than a sprint. But, if ploughing somehow lacks as a sport in terms of speed or jeopardy, it also exceeds other sports’ parameters. Like archery, say, it’s an ancient skill, but where archery has lapsed into hobby, ploughing remains a real-life job, one that has been performed for millennia. It’s the oldest profession in the world – second oldest, ploughmen like to say, if you count prostitution.

Like many offbeat competitions, competitive ploughing has its own subculture and its own legends. The Irish are dominant in competitive ploughing, and they stage tournaments with big cash prizes, while Britain's competitions can't even get sponsors. Read about the world of competitive ploughing at The Guardian. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user Smudge 9000)

Disney is preparing a new remake of The Lion King, set for release in July of 2019. Some are calling it the "live action Lion King," but that's not what it is, since the movie is all animated. It's just animated very realistically. What's truly impressive is the list of voice talent attached to the project. Here's a first look, and below you'll see a side-by-side comparison with the 1994 movie.



 -via Tastefully Offensive

Once the Thanksgiving leftovers are stashed in the refrigerator, it's officially Christmas time! While some people spend their holiday season shopping for gifts, putting up decorations, and baking seasonal treats, the rest of us curl up in front of the TV and watch everyone else doing those things. Don't miss a minute of the excitement! Den of Geek has an exhaustive schedule of Christmas movies and TV specials listed chronologically, so you can find out what's on tonight and every day through the New Year. You might want to bookmark it for easy reference. If you've already cut the cable, they also have a streaming Christmas movie guide. 

This is Lisowicia bojani, a newly-discovered dicynodont that lived 237 million years ago, in the Triassic period, when dinosaurs first rose to dominance. But it's not a dinosaur, or even a reptile. It's an early relative of mammals. The popular notion of mammal ancestors is that they were small and hid themselves from carnivorous dinosaurs, and were therefore able to survive the cataclysms that killed off the dinos. The latest specimen of Lisowicia bojani, found in Poland, was the size of an elephant: eight and a half feet tall and 14 feet long.

Indeed, the discovery of the elephantine Lisowicia bojani—a four-legged creature weighing an estimated 9 tons (18,000 pounds)— is rewriting evolutionary history. Dinosaurs, this new research suggests, weren’t the only large animals to romp around the Triassic landscape.

To be clear, dicynodonts were not true mammals. As Niedźwiedzki explained, they’re extinct non-mammalian therapsids—a group of synapsids that includes mammals and their ancestors (synapsids are sometimes referred to as proto-mammals or stem mammals). Dicynodonts are a sister line to the mammalian line, but they’re not our direct ancestors. They’re more like our distant cousins, similar to the way monkeys are distant cousins of humans.

Other dicynodont are known, but they are smaller. The discovery puts a new spin on the line of evolution that led to mammals. Read about Lisowicia bojani at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Karolina Suchan-Okulska)