If you're not an angler, you might be surprised to see this kind of gruesome sign near fishing piers. When this one was posted at Reddit, it sparked a bunch of Three Stooges jokes. But a few folks helpfully explained why you need to poke the eyes out of a fish before throwing its dead body in the water.

An intact fish carcass will float. Even a fish that has been filleted will float when the head is intact. Poking the eyes out will release that buildup of gasses inside so the fish carcass will sink to the bottom. In the natural world, a dead fish will be consumed by other creatures pretty quick. One that floats will be food for birds, and one that sinks will be food for bottom feeders, like crabs. But in the natural world, a dead fish is in itself rare, as they more often are consumed before dying of other causes.

So this is only a problem when humans are involved, throwing away fish or partial fish they have caught. Floating fish either draw too many seagulls to populated areas, or else the floating decomposing fish cause a mighty stink. Now you know.

(Image credit: u/Bryllant)

When you flush a toilet, the violence of the water rushing through expels water droplets into the air that are so tiny we can't see them. But a new study from University of Colorado Boulder shines a light on the phenomenon- literally. Using laser lights and high-resolution cameras, they bring us a visualization of the kind of flush you get in a public toilet. This video involves a new toilet with only tap water in it.

The study found that these airborne particles shoot out quickly, at speeds of 6.6 feet (2 meters) per second, reaching 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) above the toilet within 8 seconds. While the largest droplets tend to settle onto surfaces within seconds, the smaller particles (aerosols less than 5 microns, or one-millionth of a meter) can remain suspended in the air for minutes or longer.

These measurements came from the use of an optical particle counter. Toilets in most homes don't flush quite so powerfully, but they do expel particles. Closing the lid while flushing helps somewhat, but lids are rare in public toilets. And this is why I moved my toothbrushes inside a cabinet years ago. -via Boing Boing

Merle Oberon starred in many Hollywood films in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, and was the only Asian actress to have ever been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. But Hollywood didn't know she was Asian. Oberon was born in Bombay in 1911, when India was under British rule. When she broke into show business, Oberon let it be known that she was born in Australia to white parents and moved to India as a child. She wouldn't have been accepted as a leading lady if it were known she was mixed race (if you consider the British and Indians to be different races- this was really about color).

Oberon was an avid user of skin lightening creams, which contain what the FDA considers dangerous amounts of mercury. This could have contributed to her later skin and health problems. Oberon kept up the ruse about her origins almost all her life. She was invited to Hobart, Tasmania, and celebrated as a hometown girl, which caused her to almost have a breakdown. Even those closest to her didn't know she was born in India. They didn't know who her parents really were until after her death. It's possible that Oberon herself didn't know the full story. Read about Merle Oberon and the secrets she kept at Messy Nessy Chic.

The short documentary Dress a Cow takes us to the Canfield County Fair in Canfield, Ohio, where every year farmers bring their prettiest (and most patient) cow all gussied up to show off in the annual Dress a Cow competition. The cows are cleaned, groomed, and finally dressed in themed costumes for the big day. There are cows dressed as other animals, as Disney princesses, and as inanimate objects of some sort, leading one to think that maybe the selection of costume has something to do with the results. We don't really know, as the judges are just local judges, the kind that preside over courts. They have no particular expertise in the cow field. The judges and spectators are very appreciative of the contestants and their owners' efforts, because it's not easy to design a costume for a cow, much less dress one up! -via Nag on the Lake

In 1982, a Boeing 747 was being flown by British Airways from Kuala Lumpur to Perth on one leg of a London to Auckland flight. They were well over the ocean when strange things started happening. The passenger compartment started filling up with blue smoke, even though there was no fire detected on board. Then the crew started seeing bluish flickering lights. They recognized St. Elmo's fire, but had never seen it so strong.

Within two minutes, the situation suddenly went from strange to alarming as engine No.4 surged and flamed out. The crew immediately performed the engine shutdown drill, cutting off the fuel supply and arming the engine fire extinguishers just as they had been trained. But less than a minute later engine two also flamed out, followed almost immediately by engines one and three. The crew could scarcely believe it: all four engines had failed almost simultaneously – something which had never happened before on a 747. The mighty airliner, with 263 people aboard, had suddenly become the world’s biggest glider.

What the crew didn't know was that they had flown through a cloud of volcanic ash, thrown up by the erupting Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. Weather radar doesn't detect volcanic ash clouds. The ash did even more damage, as the plane's interior lost its pressure and the windshield became opaque. Should they drop to a lower altitude so they could breathe, or try to maintain altitude to make it to the nearest airport in Jakarta? How would they land if they can't see? Would they have to land a 747 on the water? Read the story of British Airways Flight 9 at Today I Found Out. 

50 years ago, the Apollo 17 astronauts captured an iconic Earth view of the “Blue Marble” as they set sights on the Moon. Today with #Artemis, this time-lapse footage showcases the Earth-Moon transit as @NASA_Orion captured our home planet and the Moon on flight day 13. https://t.co/H9oHsgiHfW pic.twitter.com/ZHIxYKnJy0

— NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) December 7, 2022

When the moon comes between the sun and person looking at it, that's a solar eclipse. When the shadow of the earth blocks our view of the moon, that's a lunar eclipse. So when the moon blocks our view of the earth, would you call that a terran eclipse? Wait, how can the moon block our view of the earth? It happens when we send a camera to the other side of the moon, which is what NASA did with the Artemis 1 mission. On November 28th, while Artemis was looping around the moon, it set a record for the furthest spacecraft designed to carry humans (even though it wasn't carrying humans this time). That was 268,563 miles (432,210 kilometers). It broke the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. As for the eclipse pictured above, NASA calls it an "Earth-moon transit." I think terran eclipse is a better term, but that's just me.

Strangely, several commenters at YouTube called this video a fake because the moon is shown bigger than the earth, and we know that's not right. I wonder where they think the camera is? Read more about the accomplishments of the Artemis mission at Space.com. -via Damn Interesting

Wildlife photographer Jennifer Hadley snagged the top prize in the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography competition. The above image, titled 'Not so cat-like reflexes' was declared the overall winner for 2022. You can go ahead and laugh; the cub was okay. Hadley was in Tanzania and saw two lion cubs in a tree. One was acting like he wanted to get down, but didn't know how. He found a way. You can see the entire sequence of photos here. 

After much agonizing he went for it and hilarity ensued. There was a collective gasp as he fell but don’t worry, he landed on his feet and walked away unscathed, perhaps with just a bruised ego. I imagine him thinking, I hope no one saw that. Oh kitty, I got it all on camera.

We hope it was a learning experience for the cub. The same photograph also won Hadley the Alex Walker’s Serian Creatures of the Land Award. Hadley also won the Affinity Photo 2 People's Choice Award with this image entitled 'Talk to the Fin.'



You can see all the award winners and highly commended photos, too, in this year's winner's gallery.

People had plenty to worry about in 1929, like the Wall Street crash that ushered in the Great Depression and the difficulty of getting a drink. On top of that, people who owned parrots started dying. When word got out, people were very concerned, and even started abandoning or killing their parrots, which were a very popular pet at the time. The culprit was psittacosis, which scientists knew very little about at the time, and had no cure.

The news media had a field day with the illness, first stoking panic, then pulling back to say the disease was overblown, then stoking panic again. Scientists worked overtime, and research into parrot fever led to the establishment of the National Institute of Health. Cracked tells the tale of parrot fever and the 1929 panic over the disease, strangely, in a series of pictofacts images.  

In showing us the world's creatures most worthy of a laugh, Ze Frank has encountered some very weird animals. Many have impressed him so much that they deserve an award, but for some superlative accomplishment that no other awards will cover, because they're being all sciency and back-to-nature. So he had to make up his own awards show.

With categories like Animals That Look Like Ants, Most Horrifying Orifice, Oh So That's What You Sound Like, Most Creative Use of Mucus, Most Adorable Thief, An Ass That's Happy to See You, and Least Likely to Become a Team Mascot, you can imagine some of these animals are pretty gross. Or if you've ever seen a True Facts video from Ze Frank. While technically SFW, this video contains jokes and images that you don't really want to discuss with your supervisor. Or your kids. The video has a one-minute ad at 4:24.

Once upon a time, there was a popular comedian who had a TV series. In the series, his high school teacher character ranted about government corruption and was secretly videotaped, leading to his unlikely election as president. Then the plot came true in the real world. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. His main qualifications were that 1. his showbiz career trained him to be a very effective communicator, and 2. he loves his country. Zelenskyy inherited a nation that had a chunk occupied by Russia, partisan fighting in another region, and a bureaucracy riddled with corruption. Then there was that unpleasantness that led to the impeachment of a US president.

Then in February of this year, Russia attacked all of Ukraine, including the capital of Kyiv. Zelenskyy could have evacuated, but he famously said, "I need ammunition, not a ride." Since then, he's been busy enlisting material help from other countries and rallying his own citizens in defense of Ukraine. An example is how he visited Kherson in person just two days after the Russians withdrew, despite security concerns. Knowing the danger, he also knew it would be an important symbolic gesture to Russia and the world, and a boon to the Ukrainians of Kherson. Read more about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Time's Person of the Year for 2022, at Time magazine. -via Fark

(Image credit: The Presidential Office of Ukraine)

Nature is brutal. About 50 species of ant engage in keeping slaves of another species. The most efficient and ruthless of them is Polyergus. Their main activity is raiding nests of Formica ants to take their babies and put them to work. Or at least the ones they don't eat. Sometimes they take over an entire colony of ants to make them slaves. Their two-tiered colonies consisting of a relatively few cruel bullies that don't even get along with each other and the many more who do their work may remind you of some human societies we've heard of. However, ants, lacking any kind of agency, are doomed to continue this because that's how they evolved. Kurzgesagt explains how Polyergus acquires and maintains their slaves. We also learn some pretty interesting, if disturbing, things about ants along the way. The last two minutes of this video is a promotion.

The Tasmanian tiger is no more, and it was never a tiger. The thylacine was the world's last predatory marsupial, and there were 5,000 or so of them in Australia, mostly in Tasmania, when Europeans colonized that country. Blamed for livestock deaths, the settlers hunted them in the 19th century until they went extinct in the 1930s. We have film footage of a thylacine supposedly named Benjamin at the Beaumaris Zoo, who was thought to be the very last Tasmanian tiger. But now we find that there was another.

A female thylacine was sold to the Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. This thylacine was not documented at the time because the transaction was illegal. But she was there, and she outlived Benjamin. When she died, a taxidermist preserved her skin and bones for educational purposes. No one knows how long it's been since those bones were seen, as they were stored at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and only recently uncovered. The discovery is important, but the fate of the Tasmanian tiger is no less sad for knowing one specimen lived a little longer. Read about this new discovery at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting 

Why buy Christmas yard decorations when you can use what you already have? Wild Bill Knowles has a spare Chevy S-10 that most likely doesn't run anymore, but he knew it would come in handy for something someday. The same with that garage door opener, which still works but isn't needed for the garage. He used the truck for a unique Halloween roasting spit display that you saw on Spooky Daily a couple of months ago, and he promised the truck would be back for Christmas. Bill is good to his word, and it looks like the neighbors didn't mind too much, because the pickup is now floating above his yard, flying some unnamed green Christmas character around. It doesn't matter that the truck doesn't run, as it's being pulled by a reindeer on a John Deere. I suspect there might be skeletons underneath those costumes. If you are near Berkshire County, Massachusetts, be sure to look it up! -Thanks, Bruce!

Whether it's a huge federal government or a small village, democracy brings us the never-ending tension between following rules and procedures and actually getting things done. The yard of the municipal animal shelter in Manteca, California, has grass, weeds, and thorns growing out of control, as well as gopher holes. Volunteers have been bringing their own lawn mowers to cut the grass, but they are urging the city to do something about it. The problem is that the city's public works department doesn't have a small lawn mower appropriate for the job. After months of waiting for a solution, the shelter again requested action. City staff assured shelter volunteers that they are working on specifications and will hire a contractor to do the work. But the real kicker in the news article comes here.

The fire department has a residential style -lawn mower such as the one the animal shelter needs to cut grass at the Powers Avenue station.

The station, however, currently doesn’t have grass to cut as the city let it die to comply with its drought rules not to water ornamental grass.

There doesn't seem to be an easy solution to the problem. Maybe the shelter could confiscate a goat. -via Fark

(Image credit: DuffDudeX1)

My local hospital recently installed a system of pneumatic tubes. They send test samples to the lab and deliver drugs from the pharmacy with it, all in one building. This is a quantum leap above that. Tom Scott is at the University of British Columbia, where he's investigating the Rabbit Line that sends radioactive materials from a particle accelerator to a hospital a couple of miles away. Since these isotopes have a very short half-life, they are sent by underground pneumatic tubes because they'd never survive a car ride in Vancouver traffic. We find out what these isotopes are about and how they are used. It's a pretty neat system.

But what threw me was Tom's question that no one could answer, he says. Why is it called the Rabbit Line? Duh, has he never seen a Bug Bunny cartoon? The ones where the rabbit digs underground so fast he misses the left turn at Albuquerque? Makes plenty of sense to me.