Last year, we posted about a plan to train crows to pick up litter, specifically, cigarette butts. Here's a way that can happen. The Crowbox is a vending machine for crows. It's set up in stages, to train birds how to use it, and crows are pretty smart and learn quickly. This demonstration video uses quarters, but there's no reason you can't use cigarette butts or something else that crows can easily find. If you'd like to make your own Crowbox, the plans and instructions are here. -via Metafilter
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Looking for an affordable place to live in Manhattan? If your concept of "affordable" is flexible enough, you might check out this 140-square-foot apartment on the Upper West Side. Yes, that's 140 square feet. For $1375 a month. The bed barely clears the door, and the refrigerator is stacked above the bed. There is a toilet and a shower stall, tucked into different corners, without doors. Windows? Fageddaboudit! See more pictures, and a floor plan, at the real estate listing. -via Digg
There's no doubt this is a much-loved dog. But humans can't be there all the time, school and all. Bear has figured out how to harness the power of the trampoline to toss a ball for him to catch! Yes, Bear is pretty smart. -via Tastefully Offensive
Not long ago, we posted Ashley Newman's People Pot Pie. Newman is a special effects artist, and her pies are made of latex. Tons of friends sent that video to baker Andrew Fuller of Guy Meets Cake, who already does gruesome cakes featuring monsters and body parts. It inspired him to go ahead with an idea he'd been considering: making an edible pie with a creepy face! This is a mint cherry pie with edible decorations. Yes, even the hair is edible. If you want to order one, check with him through Facebook for availability. See more views of this pie at Instagram. Read about Fuller's work (and Newman's) at Atlas Obscura.
Modern DNA sequencing is adding to our knowledge of human migration and evolution at an astonishing rate. Back 100,000 years or so, there were several hominin species wandering the earth: Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals, and Denisovans -and possibly others. We know that these humans interbred and left traces of DNA, but now we have an example of a human whose two parents were different species. A bone fragment of a girl found in a Russian cave in 2012 was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.
The fragment was identified from among 2,000 bone fragments excavated from the Denisova Cave. With a technique called collagen peptide mass fingerprinting, Slon and her colleagues determined that the bone had a hominin origin, though they didn’t know the species. From the bone’s cortical thickness, they inferred that Denisova 11 was at least 13 years old at the time of her death; six DNA extractions and subsequent genome sequencing revealed her sex. Meanwhile, radiocarbon dating determined the bone was at least 50,000 years old, an estimate that was refined as more data were recovered. Slon says that “from genetic data, we can make a rough estimate of the individual’s age, and we think she lived around 90,000 years ago.”
Comparing her DNA to known gene alleles belonging to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and present-day humans in Africa revealed her unique parentage.
What's really amazing is that so much information can be gleaned from one fragment of a bone. Read about the discovery at Inverse. -via reddit
(image credit: Petra Korlević)
Trying to keep up with the rest of the flock, this sheep went headfirst into a tire swing -but didn't make it out the other side. Any attempt to flee, in any direction, just lifts her off the ground. We assume the shepherd helped her escape, after having a few laughs and recording it so that the entertainment value spreads beyond the pasture. -via Laughing Squid
We've posted collections of bad album covers, but here's one full of LP cover art you probably haven't seen before. Maybe it's because they included albums from around the world, or maybe it's just the result of diligent searching, but these are hilariously awful.
Some are misguided, while others are sincere but low quality. And a couple are obviously parodies, yet still rank for their bizarreness.
See 30 such albums in a gallery at Vintage Everyday. -via Bored Panda
You may have seen videos where an acclaimed musician plays Guitar Hero and messes up hilariously. In this video a trained surgeon tries a virtual reality program called Surgeon Simulator. Dr. Johnson C. Lee says he never got to use virtual reality during his medical training. They weren't going to make this easy for him: he's a plastic surgeon, and his mission here is to perform a heart and brain transplant! -via Buzzfeed
When there's a problem with a municipal water system, the utility agency issues an advisory to the public, usually telling us to boil our water for safety or to use only bottled water. People do that, and when the danger is passed, go back to business as usual. But when Washington, DC, had a boil water advisory last month, the National Zoo had a problem. Some of their rare and exotic animals require hundreds of gallons of clean water daily, and others live in water. It was time to get creative.
The Amazonia exhibition at the Zoo replicates a rainforest habitat and staff quickly realized that the exhibition’s 28,000-gallon reservoir was the key to getting the entire park through the event, which lasted about 48 hours, says Nick Little, Aquatic Life Support Systems (LSS) operator. He and dozens of other staff hustled behind the scenes while few, if any, Zoo visitors had any inkling of trouble afoot, the Zoo operated on a normal schedule through the duration of the incident.
“As Rick Quintero, curator of LSS, was talking with other curators Zoo-wide], we recognized that Amazonia’s huge reservoir was full of water drawn before the crisis and perfectly safe for animal consumption,” says Little. “Our only concern was how to get it out” to any part of the Zoo that needed it.
The entire zoo staff went to work. Read about how a zoo handles a water crisis at Smithsonian Torch. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user Blossom Vydrina)
A science writer will often post about an interesting or important scientific discovery, and have a sentence like "The data is clear." That's a sure invitation for a pedant to show up and correct their grammar, insisting that "data" is a plural noun, so the phrase would be "The data are clear." Normal people don't talk like that, and even in print it just seems weird to the reader.
The controversy stems from whether or not data is to be considered a countable or uncountable noun. As an uncountable noun, it can be used with verbs conjugated in the singular form, but historically it is considered the plural form of the countable noun “datum”, which is Latin for a “thing given” (i.e., “There are 69 datums”).
When I spoke with Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer for the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, he told me that data’s transition between its historical roots and contemporary use is related to a lexical phenomenon called “semantic bleaching,” where a word’s original meaning is lost or diminished over time. An example of semantic bleaching include the contemporary use of the word “literally,” whose Latin root, littera, means “letter.” In the case of “data,” it has transitioned from “things given” to mean something like “a collection of information in aggregate” when used in everyday speech.
To those who write about science, when there is a choice between being literally correct and communicating ideas, communication is the priority. Some readers will be distracted by awkward word usage, while others are distracted by the urge to post an immediate correction. Did those readers completely miss the point of the science post? After all, when you can't see the forest through the trees, there's no use rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. Read about the data controversy at Motherboard. -via Digg
Movies are going from theaters to home video in record time these days. Deadpool 2 was released in theaters on May 18, and went to home video on digital HD August 7, with physical copies available just yesterday. And Screen Junkies was on it immediately, producing an Honest Trailer that deconstructs its wackiness. Or at least that was the plan, until Ryan Reynolds shows up as Deadpool to mess things up. This video contains NSFW language. -via Tastefully Offensive
Data from the lunar surface has offered hints that the moon may have frozen water at the poles, but we now have real evidence, gleaned from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (MMM) that NASA placed on the Indian Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which went into orbit around the moon in 2008. The water ice is in holes, called "cold traps," at both poles, and in some places accounts for 30% of the material analyzed.
That's pretty amazing. It's really weird to think that the moon, with no air and nothing to protect the surface from the blazing Sun, can have ice, let alone ice on the surface! But they do have protection: the Moon itself.
Near the poles, the Sun is always low to the horizon. If you get a deep crater, say, then there can be spots along the floor that the Sun never gets high enough to shine on. They are perpetually dark, and very cold. We know comets and asteroids can contain quite a bit of water, and that can be released as a vapor when they impact the Moon. If there's an impact near a deep polar crater, some of that water may settle there. On the surface exposed to sunlight the water won't freeze, and will eventually get broken up by ultraviolet light. But if it gets into a cold trap, well, it's trapped by the cold.
Read a lot more detail about the latest findings of water on the moon at Bad Astronomy. You can also access the nuts-and-bolts research in the original paper.
(Image credit: Li et al)
Teddy the Dobby Cat (previously at Neatorama) loves doing the laundry. Specifically, he and his sibling oriental shorthair cats enjoy sitting in the dryer with the warm laundry. In this video, he beeps while waiting for the dryer door to open. Here he is with Stache, Bindi, and Dexter.
Dexter is the black cat, and you can guess which ones are Stache and Bindi. See more of these cats at Instagram and Facebook. -via Laughing Squid
We've posted some completely awful recipes and pictures of the Jell-O craze of the 20th century, although those were mostly recipes from the company. Real people make delicious and fruity Jell-O salads from sweet things like fruit, whipped cream, and marshmallows. Or at least they do after one or two experiments with vegetables in gelatin. But at the height of the Jell-O salad fad, the company made things easier with specific flavors made to go with veggies. Celery and mixed vegetables flavors were introduced in 1964. See more of the advertisements and read a couple recipes for the new flavors at ClickAmericana. Yum! See their other vintage recipes here. -via Metafilter
We tend to try common home remedies for common ailments, because going to a professional will take a big chunk of time and money, and you might not even get in anytime soon. These classic self-treatments got a reputation because they seem to work -possibly because many ailments get better on their own with time, and the placebo effect probably helps. Sci Show looks at the research and debunks some of the more common home remedies that just don't work under rigorous study. -via Mental Floss
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