Photographer Amos Chapple (previously at Neatorama) works for Radio Free Europe. He went on an illegal tusk hunt in Siberia with the agreement to not share any names. See, the idea is that ivory from mammoth tusks are "ethical" in that no animals are killed to obtain it. That does not make the plundering of mammoth remains legal. But the market for such ivory in China is too much to resist. In posting the album of images to reddit, Chapple said, "Every summer, men head into the Siberian wilderness to hunt for mammoth tusks, I joined one expedition & watched tuskers get rich, get drunk & nearly die." When someone remarked on the photo of the mosquitoes biting bare feet, he said,

That's me :). I needed to show how big a deal the mozzies were, that was the most effective way I could do it in a photo.

I fell in the river. When I took one shoe off to squeegee my sock the mozzies descended - then I realized it was a good photo so I took the other shoe off, waited for 40 hellish seconds & took this pic.

The things a photographer will go through for the right image! You can read the extensive story of the expedition here, or a shorter form in an imgur album.  

The staff of the Philadelphia Zoo became concerned when their pregnant gorilla Kira didn't give birth after an entire day of labor, and veterinarian Donna Ialeggio thought she might need a cesarean section. The zoo had arranged a partnership between their gorilla breeding program and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in 2009, in case there were problem births. Up until now, there was no need for intervention from the university's doctors. But last week, the zoo called in ob-gyn Dr. Rebekah McCurdy, who had been named as a backup specialist.

The team was nervous about doing a C-section. Gorillas have been born in this way before, but the recovery period can be rough for such active, climbing animals. The team knew that once Kira was back in her enclosure, they wouldn’t be able to get close enough to check her bandages. They knew that Kira is a fidgety gorilla, with a habit of picking at scabs. And most of all, they weren’t sure what to do about the baby while she was recovering. Gorilla infants stay with their mothers for years, and the keepers didn’t want to disrupt those first critical moments, when the bond between mother and baby solidifies.

Ialeggio asked McCurdy what she’d do if the patient was a human. “I’d pull the baby out,” McCurdy said.

And that is exactly what she did. Kira successfully delivered a five pound baby boy, and mother and child are doing fine. Read about the entire birthing event at the Atlantic.

(YouTube link)

-via Digg

Yeah, adults have a way of looking at things and seeing them as they are. Nothing wrong with that, but wouldn't it be great if were more like children, who look at something and see what fun can be made of it? Or at least how cool it is! This is the latest from Chris Grady at Lunarbaboon.

If you like Lunarbaboon, you'll want to check out his book, Lunarbaboon: The Daily Life of Parenthood.  

Psst… wanna buy a pair of shoes? These sneakers are up for auction at Heritage Auctions, and they can be yours if you are the highest bidder. By the time the auction ends on Sunday, the price is estimated to go to around $30k. Slate tells us,

In the early 1990s, Apple built prototypes for a pair of blocky, white sneakers, exclusively for Apple employees. With their sateen tongues and vintage rainbow logo, they’re either a normcore dream or the ultimate dad shoe, and they quickly disappeared into obscurity. In 2007, one of these rare items emerged on eBay and sold for $79. Now another is on the market—the only other, according to Heritage Auctions—but it won’t go for a pittance.

It's probably not Apple fanboys making those bids, but sneaker collectors who know a rarity when they see one. Oh, they are size 9 1/2, if that makes a difference to you. Make your bid at Heritage Auctions. -Thanks, John Farrier!   

(Image credit: Heritage Auctions)

In 2006, Neill Blomkamp produced a short film called Alive in Joberg that was so impressive that he got a studio deal to expand it into a feature film, which was 2009's District 9. The movies Elysium and Chappie followed, but did not do as well. Maybe Blomkamp is going back to the scheme that worked for him before. He has released a brand new short to the internet, Rakka, starring Sigourney Weaver. Some parts of this video are pretty gory, and it contains NSFW language.

(YouTube link)

Like his other films, Rakka is set in a post-apocalyptic world. Aliens from outer space take over the earth and make it hell for humans, and they fight back. That's a common setup, but it is done well here, like a combination of the movie Alien and the TV show Falling Skies. Rakka is the first short film from Blomkamp's new film studio Oats. -via reddit

It seems that every human occupation will eventually find its characters in film, leaving those movie characters as favorites for those particular professionals -except for bloggers, they're not at all interesting. And so it is with the pest control professional. It's a battle between man and whatever is infesting the set, which is enough of a conflict for a film, especially if the actor is good, like Bill Murray as Carl Spackler in the 1980 classic Caddyshack. You can argue that he is a groundskeeper, but within the story, his main task is getting rid of a gopher. And he takes that task very seriously. Find out which other exterminators made the list at TVOM.

Frankfurt, Germany, physician Heinrich Hoffman wrote a book consisting of six children's stories and published it in 1845. The original name of the book is rather wieldy, and it later became known as Struwwelpeter, after one of the characters. These weren't just everyday children's tales. They were designed as a threat! The children misbehaved: they refused to bathe, beat animals, made fun of others, and worst of all, sucked a thumb. The punishment for these transgressions ranged from missing dinner to being stalked by Scissorman.   

The book proved enduringly popular. By 1848 it was already in its sixth edition and had sold more than 20,000 copies. One of the most famous stories is “The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb,” a boy named Konrad who was warned not to suck his thumb, lest Scissorman come and cut it off. But he can’t resist. He puts his thumb into his mouth and, lo and behold, the terrifying Scissorman appears and snips off the offending digit. This morbid creature quickly entered the canon, and appeared later in diverse texts such as W.H. Auden’s poetry and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands.

There are only four known copies of the first printing of Struwwelpeter, one of which is owned by the New York Public Library's rare book department. But you can see some ten of the 15 pages at Atlas Obscura. Warning: the images might be disturbing to young children, which was the point.

(Image credit: Heinrich Hoffman/Courtesy NYPL, photographed by Samir S. Patel)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Deborah Sampson was born on December 17, 1760, in Plympton, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of Jonathan and Deborah Sampson. Deborah's mother was the great grand-daughter of William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony. And some of her ancestors were aboard the Mayflower.

Deborah grew up to be much taller than the average woman of her time (5' 0"), and, in fact, she was taller than the average man (5' 7") too. Her full adult height reached 5' 9".

She was not thin or shapely, and according to her biographer, Hermann Mann, "Her weight might displease a coquette." It was reported that her breasts were very small. Her biographer added, "The features of her face were not what a physiognomist would term the most beautiful." A neighbor who knew Deborah in her later years termed her as "a person of plain features."

Okay, you get the idea. Deborah Sampson wasn't the average looking woman of the time, and she was not the kind of girl the local menfolk were going to typically chase or go "hubba hubba" over when catching a glimpse of her.

Tall, broad, strong and not one of delicate feminine features, in 1782, Deborah made her first attempt at trying to pretend to be a man. In early 1782, she donned men's clothes and tried to enlist in an army unit in Middleborough, Massachusetts. Signing up as "Timothy Thayer," and binding her breasts in with a tied linen cloth, she collected a bonus and enlisted.

This video starts out as if it's a failed cute cat video. But Baggy the calico cat got distracted by a lion! Baggy, suffering from "little cat syndrome," thinks she's up to challenging the big cat. It might work against other house cats, but the lion is not the least bit intimidated. She may even be amused at Baggy's antics.

(YouTube link)

The narration is provided by Derek Krahn of the Center for Animal Research and Education in Bridgeport, Texas. -via Tastefully Offensive

Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) customized his car horn to make three different sounds for different purposes. One is a "courtesy honk" that doesn't sound nearly as rude as a regular horn. Wait until you hear the others.

(YouTube link)

Rober shares how he did it, too, with lots of links at the YouTube page to the parts he used, and even a WAV file for the sound. -via reddit

Anyone who uses the U.S. interstate highway system knows to look for the blue signs that indicate what amenities are available at the next exit. You don't want to waste time if there's no gas station there, or you may want to skip to the next exit to find your favorite restaurant chain. But gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and campgrounds aren't automatically included just because they are there, they have to pay have their logo on the signs. Not only that, but states have their standards. For example, businesses often have to be open a certain number of hours a day, or fall within a stated distance of the exit.  

Other states are even stricter; Colorado specifies that restaurants must offer drinking water and be open continuously between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., and Kentucky limits restaurant and gas businesses to within three miles of a rural interchange or within only one mile of an urban interchange.

But even if your business meets all the requirements, and you’ve submitted your online application, there may be competition from other nearby businesses. As for which of those businesses get to be on the signs, that depends on the state’s policy. Colorado rotates the businesses at the end of each contract year, but other states like Michigan give preference to businesses nearer the highway, while still others like Washington use a first come-first serve (with waiting list) approach.

The signs fall into several categories, a specified locations, and the price varies. Read how interstate amenity advertising works at Jalopnik.

(Image credit: Washuotaku)

A total solar eclipse will be visible across the United States on August 21, 2017. In this video, NASA’s Ernie Wright explains the visualization he created of the eclipse's path across the country.

In this visualization, data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter account for the moon's terrain that creates a jagged edge on its shadow. This data is then combined with elevation data on Earth as well as information on the sun angle to create the most accurate map of the eclipse path to date.

(YouTube link)

The Eclipse Megamovie 2017 is an animation that shows how the sun and moon will interact at different locations. Input the town where you plan to watch the eclipse, and remember that I'll be in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. You can study an eclipse map for your state here.

If you can get to eastern Oregon, Atlas Obscura is throwing a two-day eclipse watching party.

-via Kottke

Those who pay attention to such things can often tell the age of a house by certain features of the architecture. You might be able to do that with hospitals, too, if you know something about the history of hospital architecture. Smithsonian offers us a clue with an excerpt from Jeanne S. Kisacky's book Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing. The feature in question here is windows. Did you have a window in your room the last time you were a hospital patient? The answer may indicate how old the facility is.

In the March 1942 issue of the journal Modern Hospital, Charles F. Neergaard, a prominent New York City hospital design consultant, published a layout for a hospital inpatient department that was so innovative he copyrighted it. The plan held two nursing units—groups of patient rooms overseen by a single nursing staff—in a single building wing. For each unit, a corridor provided access to a row of small patient rooms along a long exterior wall and to a shared service area between the two corridors.

The feature that made his plan so innovative—and therefore risky? It included rooms that had no windows.

A windowless room hardly seems daringly innovative nowadays, but in the 1940s it was a shocking proposal for a patient wing. It violated a long-lived understanding of what, exactly, the role of the hospital building should be in terms of promoting health.

To explain how a windowless hospital room became possible, and why it was resisted so strongly by medical professionals in the 1940s, you need to know a little about the history of hospitals and their intended purpose, which you can read about at Smithsonian.

Here we get a look into the Matchbox car factory in Hackney, London, as they built toy cars in 1965. They were designed larger, and then shrunk to make the molds.

(YouTube link)

Parts were die-cast from molten metal and assembled by hand. Today's plastic Matchbox cars are probably are cast by robots, if they aren't being 3D printed already. Also neat to discover: British Pathe has some vintage films that are in color. -via Laughing Squid

During the era of French colonialism, the Vietnamese took coffee and made it their own. Now everyone in Saigon drinks coffee, which is made one cup at a time, with a generous amount of ground coffee, and not in a hurry.

The Vietnamese like their “cà phê” sweet. Real sweet. As if spoonfuls of sugar weren’t enough, they also add sweetened condensed milk. This habit developed because canned condensed milk was easier for the French to import into the country than fresh milk, and the Vietnamese have just rolled with it.

I never sweeten my coffee, so I’ve had a hard time adjusting… Oh, what a liar, I don’t know why I even typed that! It took me like thirty seconds to adjust.

As they prepared to leave Saigon, Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell wanted to learn the secrets of the coffee they had grown to love. They got a barista at their favorite local cà phê shop to teach them how to make their own Vietnamese coffee. And armed with the proper coffee press, they are ready to move on. Where will they live next? Only time, and their first post from a new location, will tell.