Cat owners know that their pets can be finicky eaters, and we even make jokes about cats rejecting expensive gushy noms out of a desire to exasperate us. It might not be the food at all that's causing the problem. It might be the bowl they eat from. If a cat's whiskers are not compatible with the dish, it might suffer from sensory overload that makes eating unpleasant, and possibly not worth the effort. This is called whisker fatigue.

Whisker fatigue is a fairly new diagnosis, one that many (but not all) veterinarians take seriously. When cats have to stick their faces into deep bowls and their whiskers rub up against the sides, the experience can be stressful, prompting them to paw the food onto the floor, fight with other cats or grow apprehensive at mealtimes.

“I think it’s just one of those things where people say, ‘Oh, cats are just finicky eaters,’ and everyone thinks it’s a joke,” said Ms. Gardner, a 51-year-old fiction writer and blogger in Langhorne, Pa. “After reading some articles about this, I was like, maybe this isn’t a joke after all.”

The solution to whisker fatigue is a wider, flatter food dish. Pet companies sell "whisker friendly" dishes just for that purpose, but usually a regular plate works just as well. Read more about whisker Fatigue at the New York Times. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Carsondelake)

I had to look it up. The word "spandrel" was originally an architectural term, then was adopted by biologists to describe just what the comic says.

Evolutionary biology uses the term spandrel for features of an organism arising as byproducts, rather than adaptations, that have no clear benefit for the organism's fitness and survival. In response to the position that spandrels are just small, unimportant byproducts, Gould and Lewontin argue that "we must not recognize that small means unimportant. Spandrels can be as prominent as primary adaptions". A main example used by Gould and Lewontin is the human brain. Many secondary processes and actions come in addition to the main functions of the human brain. These secondary processes and thoughts can eventually turn into an adaption or provide a fitness advantage to humans. Just because something is a secondary trait or byproduct of an adaption does not mean it has no use.

See, this couple could have used their spandrels better. They might have started working in the community garden only to impress each other, but if they had chosen to grow a vegetable that they'd actually want to eat, they would have learned to enjoy the activity. However, if they are happy just watching TV together for the rest of their lives, who are we to criticize? This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park made a map of where the ships are buried under the city. Yes, that's strange. It's notably strange that they know where the ships are, and that there are enough of them to warrant a map, but the real question is why are there ships buried underneath San Francisco? The story goes back to the Gold Rush of 1848. Many ships carried people to San Francisco, but there wasn't much cargo to carry out, and an empty boat makes no money. Contributing to the problem were the sailors who contracted gold fever just like the passengers. Some boats were abandoned, others were repurposed as buildings, and some were used in a land-grab scheme.

A few ships were sunk intentionally. Then as now, real estate was a hot commodity in San Francisco, but the laws at the time had a few more loopholes. “You could sink a ship and claim the land under it,” Everett says. You could even pay someone to tow your ship into position and sink it for you. Then, as landfill covered the cove, you’d eventually end up with a piece of prime real estate. All this maneuvering and the competition for space led to a few skirmishes and gunfights.

As the city grew quickly, the shallow coves were filled in with rock, sand, and debris right over top of unused boats. Today, San Francisco has a subway train that runs right through an underground ship! Read more about these buried boats and see the full map at National Geographic. -via Urban Ghosts

(Image credit: San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park)

"Beat the Freeze" is a bit of entertainment during at Atlanta Braves games, in which a fan gets a chance to race against the character called The Freeze. They even give the fan a 200-foot head start. That head start can disorient a fellow.

this is the funniest thing that will happen at a sporting event this year pic.twitter.com/f6Yq9lErin

— Joon Lee (@iamjoonlee) June 10, 2017

The moral of the story is: don't celebrate until you cross the finish line! As others have pointed out there's a greater-than-zero chance that the whole thing was staged, but it's still funny.  -via Metafilter

Adam West, the man we all knew as Batman, died Friday night in Los Angeles after a short battles with leukemia.

“Our dad always saw himself as The Bright Knight, and aspired to make a positive impact on his fans’ lives. He was and always will be our hero,” his family said in a statement.

West's real name was William West Anderson.

His acting career began in films in 1959. He played opposite Chuck Connors in Geronimo (1962) and The Three Stooges in The Outlaws Is Coming (1965). He has also appeared in the science-fiction film Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), opposite Paul Mantee, and achieved continuing success for the title role in the 1960s ABC series Batman and its theatrical feature film. He has done voice work on The Fairly OddParents, The Simpsons and Family Guy (he voiced fictional versions of himself in all of those animated series) and also Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders.

Adam West was 88.

-via Uproxx

Professors get a real kick out of trolling their students, but this one is not that far from the truth. Scientists often snack on their work, including tube worms. However, in an academic setting, gummy worms go down a lot easier. This is the latest comic from John Sutton at The Petri Dish.

Pat Tobin has ants in his Brooklyn apartment, so he bought ant traps. He didn't see ants going in, so he came up with some alluring signs to draw their attention. Click through this Tweet to see the rest of them.  

The ants won't go in the poison traps so I made some modifications to lure them in pic.twitter.com/9xMFrWlbhK

— pat tobin (@tastefactory) June 7, 2017

You might think that this won't work because ants can't read. Tobin thought of that, too, and made the sign over one trap a literacy center. Is it working? The literacy center sign doesn't seem to be, but at least one ant was observed entering the sexy ant dancers trap. I would recommend trying Terro, that always worked for me.  -via Swiss Miss

Picture a bird hatching from an egg and falling out of the nest in Burma. It landed on a part of the tree that had sap oozing from it and became stuck. More sap fell on the hatchling until it was completely encased in sap. Skip ahead 99 million years, and that bird, now a fossil encased in amber, was found and taken to the Hupoge Amber Museum in Tengchong City, China.

Unlike modern birds, this newborn hatchling is from a now-extinct branch of the family tree called Enantiornithines. Researchers say they would have looked a lot like modern-day avians, with the exception of some added features such as claws on their wing tips and small teeth tucked away in their beaks.

Read the article about this find at BGR and the scientific paper here. -via reddit

(Image credit: Chung-tat Cheung, Ming Bai, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

There aren't many cat species who swim by their own choice. Tigers are one of them. Sydney's Australia Zoo has a pair of tiger cubs named Spot and Stripe. In this video, tiger expert Giles Clark introduces them to the tiger pool for their first swim. They aren't all that sure about the new concept, but once they are in the water, they are quite at home.

(YouTube link)

This is a clip from the BBC series Tigers About The House, which follows Clark's effort at hand-raising the rare Sumatran tiger clubs. He has to watch Spot and Stripe constantly, lest they stalk the family dog or get into other tiger business. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Of course cats are into physics experiments. In 1975, Jack Hetherington wrote a physics paper called Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He. His co-author has since become famous in science circles, because he was a cat. And that came about because giving him credit was easier than re-typing.  

Before sending it to the Physical Review Letters, Hetherington noticed he’d been using the pronouns “we” and “us” throughout the paper, even though he was the sole author. Instead of editing the piece—which was written on a typewriter—Hetherington cleverly added his cat as co-author.

At least FDC Willard wrote papers, not just pee'd on them! http://t.co/Uhh3QOmArJ #AcademicCats pic.twitter.com/JAL6AQvFkQ

— Academia Obscura (@AcademiaObscura) August 6, 2014

Even more interesting is how the cat got the pen name F.D.C. Willard, which is told at Gizmodo.

Okay, what's going on here? These guys have hairstyles from the 1970s, but they're wearing baseball uniforms from the 1910s. Indeed, this photograph was taken around 1915. The players are from the Israelite House of David, a cult founded in 1903 in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Members were not allowed to engage in sex, drink alcohol, or cut their hair. But they were allowed to play baseball, and so the House of David baseball team became famous in their day -which lasted into the 1950s.

Famous professional players occasionally donned fake beards and joined the team for games, including Grover Cleveland Alexander, Satchel Paige, and even Babe Ruth.(They considered signing the Sultan of Swat in 1934, but decided his hedonistic lifestyle would be a poor fit for the ascetic team.)

The hirsute athletes also popularized the art of the “pepper game,” a collection of Harlem Globetrotters-esque antics where they juggled and tossed balls, made them vanish only to pull them out of their beards, and even played innings while mounted on donkeys.

Playing as far afield as Hawaii and Mexico, the House of David continued to draw crowds until the 1950s, when the splintering of the scandal-wracked commune and rise of Major League Baseball led to a decline in popularity.

You can see plenty of pictures of the House of David baseball team and their junior league trainees at Retronaut.

Every era has its slang terms, but modern life involves life-changing technology: cell phones, the internet, social media, and a huge cohort we call the Millennials. Falling in love in this era deserves its own country song, because there are enough age-specific cultural references to fill quite a few verses.   

(YouTube link)

Ryan Higa (previously at Neatorama) collaborated with songwriter Kina Grannis to bring us this song, a spoof of love in the Millennial age. Be sure to watch it at least through the Coachella recreation. -via Tastefully Offensive

The title of the list at Buzzfeed is 17 Photos Of Weddings So Disastrous They'll Make You Laugh Until You Cry, but I would imagine the weddings were just fine; there was just that one picture where something went totally weird. Most are photobombs, but a couple are unexpected disasters. I'm sure everyone came out alright in the end. A few photobombs involving animals are just adorable, like the one above from an anonymous imgur user, while others are …rude. See the whole collection here.   

Human sperm is very different from anything else in the body. It is the only type of human cell designed to move outside the body to fulfill its purpose. And yet the science of these cells lags behind other studies of the human body. That research had a pretty rocky start. Anton van Leeuwenhoek developed the compound microscope, and was the first to observe live sperm through it in 1677.

Examining his own ejaculate, he was immediately struck by the tiny “animalcules” he found wriggling inside.

Hesitant to even share his findings with colleagues—let alone get a wriggler tattooed on his arm—van Leeuwenhoek hesitantly wrote to the Royal Society of London about his discovery in 1677. “If your Lordship should consider that these observations may disgust or scandalise the learned, I earnestly beg your Lordship to regard them as private and to publish or destroy them as your Lordship sees fit.”

His Lordship (aka the president of the Royal Society) did opt to publish van Leeuwenhoek’s findings in the journal Philosophical Transactions in 1678—thus begetting the brand new field of sperm biology.

It’s hard to overstate how mysterious these squirming, microscopic commas would have appeared to scientists at the time. Before the discovery of these “animalcules,” theories of how humans made more humans ranged widely, says Bob Montgomerie, a biologist who studies animal reproduction at Queen’s University in Canada. For example, some believed that vapor emitted by male ejaculate somehow stimulated females to make babies, while others believed that men actually made babies and transferred them to females for incubation.

It would take another 200 years for scientists to figure out how babies were made, exactly. But sperm research has continued, and yet there is so much we still don't know. Cracking the code of what sperm is made of and how it behaves will pave the way for a male contraceptive someday. Maybe. Read the story of sperm research at Smithsonian. There, the reference to the "wriggler tattooed on his arm" will be made clear.  

You see what happens when baby teeth are replaced with adult teeth. Adulthood isn't any fun at all. Gone are the innocent days of mommy cutting your food for you, and suddenly your school pictures look weird. No wonder the rest of them want to leave, too! This is the latest from The Awkward Yeti.