A team led by psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland found that visual illusions that befuddle adults don't effect children as easily. The pair of orange circles in the above illusion are slightly different in size. The blue dots will either accentuate those differences, or mislead the eye into thinking they are bigger or smaller than they are. In an experiment, participants of different ages were asked to identify the circle that looked bigger.

For 4- to 6-year-olds, accuracy of size perception for misleading images remained at about what it was for control images. Misleading images increasingly elicited errors from older children and tricked adults most of the time. Adults made almost no errors on helpful images. Kids from age 7 to 10 erred on a minority of helpful images, while 4- to 6-year-olds performed no better than chance.

The results suggest that considering context in images is something we learn as we age. Link

Drive sober in Salinas, California, and Tuesday could be your lucky night. At a certain DUI checkpoint, some motorists who pass through will be awarded a free turkey!

This is the seventh year Salinas police have added a giveaway to the Thanksgiving week DUI checkpoint.

It's become so popular, Salinas police are now asking drivers not to go through the checkpoint more than once just to try to win a turkey.

Police keep the location secret ahead of set up.

The turkeys were donated by police, businesses, and private citizens. http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local-beat/Why-Drivers-Flock-To-One-DUI-Checkpoint-70989117.html -via J-Walk Blog

(YouTube link)

These festive robots were built from RoboBuilder kits and synchronized to some classic holiday tunes. OK, just pretend that those little squeaks and servo motor noises are jingle bells. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Denver Post recently uncovered a collection of photographs taken by Durango, Colorado photographers William Pennington and Lisle Updike between 1915 and 1920. They were featured in the newspaper in 1974. From that article:

These pictures, bearing the stamp of their studio, were recently discovered in a long forgotten file of the Denver Post library.

The two young photographers supported themselves with their portrait business, but satisfied their artistic urges by traveling around the Four Corners area in a wagon taking pictures such as the ones appearing on this page.

“There was no money in taking pictures of Indians,” Updike, 84, said from his winter home in Phoenix, Arizona. His sons and grandsons now operate a chain of Updike studios in Utah and Arizona.

Updike died a couple of years after the original article appeared. The linked post features 16 of those prints. Link -via Cynical-C

(image credit: The Pennington Studio)

The annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade rolls through New York every year, but how much do you really know about the annual production? Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will test your memory ahead of the big event. I scored a miserable 20%! Surely you can do better. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/41371

Illustrator Christoph Niemann looks at the identification of leaves in a whole new way. See a collection of leaves from trees you never knew existed, like the Fast Forwood and the Alder Ego. Link -via Swiss Miss

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A cat spruces up a fennec fox. -via YesButNoButYes

Mmmm, beaver! Bug Girl posted these beaver recipes from a 1960 pamphlet entitled Good Eating from Woods and Fields, which also includes instructions for cooking muskrat. Link -Thanks, ersatz soubriquet!

See more from the booklet in her Flickr stream.

British citizen and experienced sailor Laura Hughes and her friend John Cochrane were battling gale force winds off the Turkish coast when a rope got caught in her boat's propeller and killed the engine. She sent a Mayday signal and a boat responded, but the crew demanded 10,000 euros for their rescue -more money than Hughes had. So she jumped in to swim to shore. But she had some precious cargo to take with her -two dogs and their nine puppies who were born during the boat trip!

So, wearing a lifejacket, Miss Hughes jumped out of the boat, carrying the nine Rottweiler puppies 'African-style' by balancing the crate on her head and holding the side with one hand while swimming with the other.

Mr Cochrane and the two adult dogs also jumped off the boat and swam to the nearest beach at the Greek resort of Lalissos about 100 metres from their boat.When they got to the shore, exhausted, they were helped by German tourists from a beach hotel and members of the emergency services.

The British Embassy found Laura and John a hotel room for the night - and the puppies spent the night at a local Greek police station.

Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: KNSNEWS)

The folks who bring you the Merriam-Webster dictionary select their top words of the year not by how trendy or new they are, but by which words are the most looked up in their online dictionary. This year, nine of the top ten words are easily linked to big news stories. For example, the word people look up more than any other was "admonish", which had to do with Rep. Joe Wilson's interruption of president Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress in September.

Wilson's interruption wasn't exactly an act of admonishing, since that word (defined by the Visual Thesaurus as "warn strongly" or "take to task") usually implies a gentler, not so confrontational approach. Admonish made the news the following week when the House of Representatives voted on a resolution disapproving of Wilson's conduct. The resolution wasn't so strong as a rebuke or censure, so admonish fit the bill in many of the press descriptions.

Other words on the list include philanderer, pandemic, and rogue. Link -via Metafilter

(vimeo link) Some things are so obvious, it only took a quarter-century for someone to think of this. (via b3ta)

This 1936 ad for Camel cigarettes encourages you to stop and smoke between each course of your Thanksgiving feast. Link to Flickr page (full size). -via Metafilter

Can't decide what kind of pie to serve after Thanksgiving dinner? Make them all in one pie pan! Cakespy at Serious Eats experimented with pecan, apple, and pumpkin pie recipes to make this triple threat. The best results came from the pie divided into sections, as seen in the picture. The recipes are included. Link -via Unique Daily

Maité Roël of Bovekerke, Belgium is the youngest victim of the first World War. As a disabled war victim, she carries a veteran's card that entitles her to reduced train fares, but gets suspicious looks when she uses it. Roël was only nine years old when an RAF bomb that was inadvertently thrown on a bonfire nearly destroyed her leg. She underwent 29 operations and was addicted to morphine for ten years.

"We went on a scout camping expedition to Wetteren and I remember now that it was an old military camp," Maité recalls very slowly. She has tiny dreadlocks that hang down her slim face and a silver ring in her nose – not the usual face of a First World War victim. "It was July 6th, 1992. I knew nothing about war. I remember we all built a fire using bricks round the outside and the other kids starting throwing logs on it. I was tired and so I went a few metres from the fire so I could sleep. Then there was a sudden explosion – I woke up and saw sparks from the explosion. Everyone was running and shouting and I tried to get up and I couldn't. Everyone was looking at me and I looked down – and I saw that my left leg was hanging by a piece of skin."

Roël is under the care of the Belgian Institute for Veterans' Affairs and War Victims. She has no interest in learning about the war that affected her life. Link -via YesButNoButYes

(image credit: Laurent Lenclud)

A strange assortment of prehistoric crocodilyform fossils have been found in Africa. Crocodilyforms are ancient cousins of today's alligators, crocodiles, and caimans.

For instance, the rodent-like RatCroc had buckteeth for rooting through the ground after tubers or simple animals.

The flat-bodied PancakeCroc was the "ultimate sit-and-wait predator," Sereno said. The animal would lie motionless and "wait for something stupid" to swim into its rail-thin, 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) jaws, which were lined with rows of spiky teeth.

DuckCroc had a long, smooth, sensitive nose to poke through vegetation as well as hook-shaped teeth to snag frogs and small fish in shallow water.

And the plant-eating DogCroc had lanky legs that meant it was likely spry enough to run into the water if threatened.

By far the mightiest of the lot, BoarCroc was a 20-foot-long (6.1-meter-long) "saber-toothed cat in armor" that ate dinosaurs for dinner.

DuckCroc and DogCroc were previously known to scientists, and the rest are new discoveries by a team headed by Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. The expedition found fossils of all five in Niger and Morocco. Link (with video) -via Digg

(image credit: Mike Hettwer/National Geographic)