But there’s no fat shaming here. In brown bears, large amounts of body fat are indicative of good health and strong chances of survival. The bears need stores of fat to help them survive hibernation, which can last for up to half of the year. Over the course of winter hibernation in the den, a bear could lose up to one third of its body mass. In preparation, this time of year the bears are entering hyperphagia, a state in which they eat nearly non-stop. Since July, the bears have seen dramatic and transformative weight gain that will be on full display during Fat Bear Week.
The voting happens each day at the park's Facebook page. You'll see a couple of pictures of each bear in competition to show how well they've gained weight over the summer. The winner will be crowned after the championship round closes next Tuesday. Go, bears! -via Metafilter
Who is the greatest monster in horror movie history? Dracula? Frankenstein? Those guesses say you don't watch all that many horror films. The staff of The Ringer has constructed a list of the nine "best," meaning scariest, movie monsters, and there isn't one Universal Classic Monster on it. Only a few in the list are human or resemble humans. Most headline their own movie franchises, but one appears in movies that are completely unrelated to each other. See all of them at The Ringer.
Here, watch something beautiful. Photographer Mark Ellis recorded images of the sky over Minnesota from 2010-2018, including the aurora borealis, and compiled the footage into this lovely video. The song is "Almost Too Late" BY Dan Schwartz. You can read about the art and the science of the video at the vimeo page. -via Bad Astronomy
Dan Martin of the webcomic Deathbulge (previously at Neatorama) went to Finland for the Helsinki Zine Fest and got arrested for sexual assault. Understandably, he tells us the story in comic form. Read the rest of it here.
Have you ever experienced unexplained phenomena that gave you the impression of a ghost? A sudden cold chill, a feeling of dread, unexpected sounds in the night? Folklore and horror films give us an easy explanation- your house is haunted by a dead person who never left. There might be a more scientific reason for that feeling, like infrasound.
Infrasound is sound at levels so low humans can’t hear it (though other animals, like elephants, can). Low frequency vibrations can cause distinct physiological discomfort. Scientists studying the effects of wind turbines and traffic noise near residences have found that low-frequency noise can cause disorientation [PDF], feelings of panic, changes in heart rate and blood pressure, and other effects that could easily be associated with being visited by a ghost [PDF]. For instance, in a 1998 paper on natural causes of hauntings [PDF], engineer Vic Tandy describes working for a medical equipment manufacturer, whose labs included a reportedly haunted room. Whenever Tandy worked in this particular lab, he felt depressed and uncomfortable, often hearing and seeing odd things—including an apparition that definitely looked like a ghost. Eventually, he discovered that the room was home to a 19 Hz standing wave coming from a fan, which was sending out the inaudible vibrations that caused the disorienting effects. Further studies also show links between infrasound and bizarre sensations like getting chills down the spine or feeling uneasy.
That's only one of six plausible explanations for hauntings you can read about at Mental Floss. I was surprised that "cat" wasn't one of them. I always blame strange sounds, moved objects, and the feeling of someone in my bed on my three cats.
Cole and Marmalade meet their new housemates, Zig Zag and Jugg, but only after a gradual program to get them used to each other first. Along the way, we can marvel at the cat paradise that Chris Poole and his family have made their home into.
In the past, orchids were a symbol of conspicuous consumption. The flowers are beautiful, yet their value lay in the fact that they were hard to propagate, demand exact conditions to survive, and take years to bloom. Orchid lovers could devote their lives to the challenge of caring for them, or spend ridiculous amounts of money buying more. Today, a few of the 10,000+ species of orchid can be bought at stores all over for the same price as other houseplants. What happened?
It took around 400 years of trying for anyone to understand what makes an orchid seed grow into a plant. The smallest orchid seeds weigh less than a microgram and are as tiny as a human sperm, and for many years scholars in Europe believed that orchid flowers grew from fermenting semen left behind in fields and forests by goats or birds. Only in the 16th century did a scientist first identify and describe their seeds.
Europe has hundreds of orchid species of its own, but the orchids that drove plant people to madness and obsession came from across the ocean. In the early 1800s, naturalists started shipping flouncy, bright cattleya orchids from tropical Brazil back to England. These flowers grow larger than a person’s palm, and they drip with color and ripple along their petal edges. But no one could figure out how to create more of them. A single pod can contain millions of seeds, and all of them might fail to grow, whether they’re sown on pieces of fern, strips of cork, patches of moss—at one time growers tried anything that seemed like it might work. Demand for these tropical orchids kept rising, but no one in Europe could reliably produce them. Orchid fever ran so hot that the wealthiest orchid lovers hired professional collectors to travel to faraway jungles and send plants back home.
The great orchid turnaround began when plant physiologist Lewis Knudson began studying why orchid seeds were hard to grow in the early 20th century, and continued when cell biologist Donald Wimber experimented with orchids in the 1950s. Read the fascinating history of orchids at Atlas Obscura.
Finding microbes living deep underground is surprising, although it's happened before. But researchers were very surprised to find cyanobacteria, which normally requires light for photosynthesis, living in deeply-buried rock in Spain. A team led by Fernando Puente-Sánchez of the Spanish Centre of Astrobiology in Madrid dug a borehole 2011 feet deep and examined the sample they brought up. The presence of cyanobacteria was so unexpected, they dug another hole to control for contamination. The cyanobacteria was there, also.
So what’s going on? How can these microorganisms survive at such extreme depths with no access to sunlight and scant traces of water?
Observed through a microscope, the subterranean cyanobacteria appeared similar to their cousins that live on the surface. Genetic analysis, however, told a slightly different story; the enigmatic cyanobacteria produce enzymes that convert hydrogen into useful energy. And revealingly, the researchers observed lower levels of hydrogen within the air pockets of the rocks where the cyanobacteria lived compared to areas in which they were absent. This suggests the underground microbes are consuming hydrogen gas to get their fuel.
The discovery is all the more weird because species without access to light and water are thought to have restricted opportunity for mutation and evolution. But life, uh, finds a way. Read more about the underground cyanobacteria at Gizmodo.
Christine McConnell (previously at Neatorama) became an internet star because of her intricately-decorated baked goods, her creepy sense of style, and her awesome cosplay. She's parlayed that success into her own Netflix series called The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell. It's part cooking show and part sitcom, as she makes treats for her creepy collection of animated talking pets. -via Laughing Squid
Expectations were high for the movie Star Wars: The Last Jedi last December. If you followed opinions on the internet, you may have been surprised at the vehement anger over Rain Johnson's episode of the Skywalker saga. We know that Star Wars fans are the harshest Star Wars critics, but this time it felt different. And it was. Morten Bay of the University of Southern California has published his research about the social media backlash against the movie, and found that it was highly influenced by Russian social media users, whether people or bots, and what might have been an exercise in covert influence.
Bay suggests that reputation may not be earned, and instead “finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments,” as he writes in the paper’s abstract. He continues, “The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society. Persuading voters of this narrative remains a strategic goal for the U.S. alt-right movement, as well as the Russian Federation.”
The paper analyzes in depth the negative online reaction, which is split into three different camps: those with a political agenda, trolls and what Bay calls “real fantagonists,” which he defines as genuine Star Wars fans disappointed in the movie. His findings are fascinating; “Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively [about the movie] was likely politically motivated or not even human,” he writes, noting that only 21.9% of tweets analyzed about the movie had been negative in the first place.
Four lanes each from four directions, and everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere else. According to redditors, this is Warsaw, Poland, at the intersection of Grojecka and Wawelska.
Yes, there are traffic lights, but they malfunctioned last month during a rush hour rain storm, so this happened. -via Digg
This map by Hackernoon used data provided by the dating app Hater to determine which foods are most disproportionally disliked, relative to how other states feel about those foods. Take a look around, and it appears that many states' pick for the worst food is less about how the food actually tastes, and more about what that food represents. The environmentally-minded coffee connoisseurs of Washington state hate Keurig K-Cups. Macho Montana hates pumpkin spice flavors. And while Texas cattle ranchers love steak, they hate seeing it overcooked. Some make sense, like Kansas disliking shellfish. The shellfish they get isn't as fresh as it would be anywhere else. A few states are confusing, like Missouri. There must be a story somewhere about the last bite of a hot dog. See the enlargeable image at Hackernoon. -via Uproxx
Horror films have never gotten much respect at the Academy Awards. Over 90 years, only six horror movies have been nominated for Best Picture, and you could argue about whether some of those were really horror films. Now, imagine that the Oscars had a category for Best Horror Film. What movies would have won that prize over the past 40 years? The Ringer took this fantasy exercise and ran with it, coming up with five nominees for every year since Halloween came out in 1978, and crowning an imaginary Best Horror Film winner from those nominees (with short critiques and video clips) for each year. Some of those years were thin on great horror, while others had so many good movies that it's hard to compare them with each other. And whether or not you agree with their choices, you'll have a great list of movies you might want to watch or re-watch in October.
This happy heifer is definitely playing fetch and obviously having a wonderful time! She can't pick that big ball up in her mouth like a dog would, so she soccer-kicks it back to the woman. As the top commenter at YouTube says, this is the type of thing that makes you go vegan. -via Laughing Squid
This looks like a close-up of the xenomorph from Alien. But it's green! This is the South African succulent Faucaria tigrina or the Tiger’s Jaw. Photographed from different angles, you'll see that the Tiger's Jaw shares another xenomorph feature: the jaws-within-jaws. No, it's not a meat-eating plant. According to Plant Africa, the toothy shape of the leaves is optimal for collecting moisture from water vapor in the air. See lots of pictures of Faucaria tigrina at Kuriositas.
