We humans think we are so much smarter than cats. But cats have just managed to fool humans into thinking so. They trained us to feed them, shelter them, and clean up their mess for nothing in return but a little entertainment. And when we aren't looking, they do exactly as they please. Who am I kidding? They do exactly as they please even when we are looking! 

Redditor foflexity was eating outside with his family, and the cat was annoying, so he put the cat in the shed. This tomcat has stolen food before. It didn't take long for the cat to escape. Putting the cat back into the shed was not working, so foflexity set up a camera to see how the cat was getting out.

See? cats don't need opposable thumbs to conquer the world. They just need to be smart enough to figure out how a mechanism works. It looks like foflexity's cat is that smart. -via Laughing Squid

Remember when Michael Jordan retired from basketball and decided to be a professional baseball player? That didn't work out so well. But there have been people who managed to conquer one sport and then pivot to another with surprising success. If you had to name a multi-sport athlete right now (besides Jordan), who would you think of? Probably Jim Thorpe. Thorpe won gold medals for the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics, which are multiple sports in each event already, but then was stripped of his medals when the Olympic Committee learned he played semi-pro baseball as well. In this age of the Olympics being dominated by professional athletes, that seems weird. Even at the time, it seemed unfair because he had to earn a living somehow. But you might be surprised to learn that Thorpe also played professional football later in his life! There are quite a few other pros who conquered more than one sport, and they deserve more recognition for it. Read about eleven of them in a list at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Hulton Archive)

Have you ever wondered what to do in a medical emergency if you're all alone? If you live alone, it might be time to look into one of those panic button devices. Those are pretty good if you've fallen and you can't get up, but what if you're choking? Well, let's take a lesson in just that. This is a bona fide public service announcement from Fire Department Chronicles, with information worth remembering. But it's also quite funny, if you don't happen to be dying as you watch. -via Digg

In 1978, Reno sculptor Dave Fambrough was inspired to use a Volkswagen Beetle in a metal rendering of a giant spider. He called it "The Volkswagen Beatle" for some reason. It stood 18 feet high and had legs made of irrigation pipes. Although he had planned to make a series of huge spider sculptures, Fambrough made only one other, and moved to Mexico in 2006, selling his "1928 Dodge Tarantula" on his way out. You can see pictures of a Fambrough's Volkswagen Beatle, now restored as a "black widow" spider, at its 2015 installation at Scudder's Performance in Sparks, Nevada. And it's still there! Now if we could just find out who bought the Dodge Tarantula and where it ended up, I'll be tickled. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Flickr user rocor)

DNA is strange. While gene sequencing can give us all kinds of information, constructing a family tree is still complicated. If the number of ancestors we have doubles every generation we go back, pretty soon your ancestors will outnumber the people that were alive at the time. It stands to reason that we are all kin if we go back far enough, so why do we find so many ancestors we aren't related to?

The Tech Interactive tackled a rather common question: "How is it that I know that my great grandmother was married to a Native American, but when I had my ancestry checked, I showed no Native American ancestors?" The simple answer from many internet forums would be that great-grandma fooled around on her husband. But there are other reasons for the disappearance of DNA. The chart above shows how a great-grandfather's DNA (green) might disappear from your profile. That's not likely for all 23 pairs of chromosomes, but it's possible to completely lose an ancestor's DNA as genes recombine over more generations. There are other reasons that have to do with history, and the history of DNA research, which you can read about at The Tech Interactive. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: AL Fortier)

British vlogger Half-Asleep Chris (previously at Neatorama) has two cats, Ralph and Bella. Ralph, like many cats, wants to eat very early in the morning, and wakes Chris up at 6AM to feed him. Chris does not like that, so he built a contraption that enables him to feed Ralph from his bed. Oh, no, nothing as simple as a container of cat food and a bowl to serve it in. Nor is it a computerized automatic feeder. This is a marble run, scaled up to accommodate kitty puzzle balls filled with kibble, and then scaled up again to ridiculous proportions with obstacles and decorations and long tubes that have the cats running all about the house to get their breakfast. He calls it the Meow Stopper, which is a totally tortured acronym he explains in the video.

Chris releases ten balls at once. Will they all make it through the miniature golf course, the Paddington Bear jungle, and the hamster cage? But even more important, will Ralph stop meowing and eat his breakfast? All questions will be answered in a video that's worth every minute. -via Laughing Squid

When you eat at McDonald's in America, the food is the same no matter what your location. The fries are made from potatoes grown in Idaho, and your burger is most likely made from Texas beef. But in historical terms, that's a fairly recent innovation. Before chains, restaurants mostly served what was locally available. This went double for seafood restaurants, where freshness makes a difference between success and failure. What was on the menu was what fishermen brought in, and many of the top seafood restaurants built their reputations on certain dishes they knew they'd be able to supply.

But that supply changed gradually over time. A genius study from the University of British Columbia had team members digging up historic menus from seafood restaurants in Vancouver, Anchorage, and Los Angeles. They managed to unearth archives of restaurant menus dating back to the 1880s, from hundreds of restaurants in Vancouver alone. Sorting them out by year and location, a picture began to emerge that was probably not at all apparent to the chefs who created those menus. They merely dropped a type of fish or seafood that became more difficult to get, and added another that became more plentiful. Over 130 years, the available catch changed considerably in each of the cities. Read what this data tells us at Hakai magazine. -via Atlas Obscura

The staff at Northwest Trek Wildlife Park in Eatonville, Washington, had a great idea for a fundraiser. They put art supplies in some of the bear enclosures. The idea was that the bears would walk through the globs of non-toxic paint on the floor and then leave paw prints in bright colors on the paper that covered the floor. The paw prints could be sold as artworks to patrons of the park. But one bear named Fern had a better idea. She shoved her face in the paint, several colors worth, and used her own snout to create a masterpiece! It's an example of abstract art, of course, but her keepers think it's priceless. This brings a whole new meaning to the term face painting.

But that makes us wonder who got the honor of cleaning Fern's face when the painting was completed. That's what interns are for, you know. -via Fark

Peter Gabriel left his band Genesis in 1975. Two years later, he released his first solo single, "Solsbury Hill." The song went to #13 in the UK, and #68 in the US. Gabriel went on to record several #1 songs, but "Solsbury Hill" had an afterlife of its own. Almost a quarter-century after its debut, it started showing up in movie trailers. And why not? It's a pleasant, bouncy tune that sounds familiar to the audience even if they don't recall the song. To those who know the song, it conveys the theme of a personal journey. "Solsbury Hill" has also appeared in countless advertisements on radio, TV, and the internet.

Gabriel doesn't regret licensing the song for commercial use, although he admits it might be overused. However, it started out as a very personal illustration of his journey from Genesis to retirement to a solo career. Read how the song came about and what it means, as well as its metamorphosis to an advertising staple, at Mental Floss.

Arthur Hardy publishes a New Orleans Mardi Gras guide. He had been searching for decades for a rumored film clip of the city's 1898 Mardi Gras parade, the first one ever filmed. The rumors were true, and he finally found it this past March in, of all places, Netherlands. The Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam had a clip, less than two minutes long, the Holy Grail of New Orleans history documentation.

Taken on February 22, 1898, the film depicts six floats from the parade. The theme that year was “Harvest Queens,” per the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. People carried silver bell-shaped placards before each float to commemorate the Rex Organization’s 25th anniversary.

People sure did dress up to watch a parade back then! The found footage was debuted to the public last month, and will be a part of an exhibit on the Rex Organization's 150th anniversary. I read that and thought, "I bet that's on YouTube already." You can read the story behind the film and the search for it at Smithsonian.

Craniopagus parasiticus is a condition of a conjoined parasitic twin that consists of a head joined to the other twin's head. The parasitic twin has either no body or an underdeveloped body, and cannot live without the autositic twin. Only ten cases have ever been documented, and only four survived birth. Of those four cases, one died shortly after birth, and two died from complications after surgery to remove the parasitic head. That leaves the earliest case known, that of a boy born in 1783 in Bengal, India.

The boy, whose name is not recorded, was exhibited by his parents for money for some time, and became rather famous. After he died from a cobra bite at age four and was properly buried, he was the victim of grave robbery and was dissected. The examination revealed a completely separate brain for the parasitic twin, which raises some serious questions. His skull now resides at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Read about the short but eventful life of this child and what was found out about his, or possibly the plural "their", anatomy at Amusing Planet.

In a region of northwestern Saudi Arabia called AlUla, anything ancient civilizations left behind is pretty much still there. With no water, no vegetation, little sand, and no archaeologists until recently, artifacts and structures don't end up buried or hidden. Exploration has revealed the existence of a culture here dating back to the Neolithic period, 7000 years ago. What's more, they built 1600 huge rectangles of stone walls, called mustatil, that are best seen from above. Scientists believe they have something to do with an ancient religion.

Thomas, McMahon and their teams have since unearthed evidence that suggests cultic practice. They've uncovered large numbers of cattle, goat and wild gazelle skulls and horns in small chambers in the heads of the mustatil, but found no indication that these were kept for domestic use. Since no other animal's body parts were found, it led the team to deduce that these were sacrificial. It further suggested that the animals were sacrificed elsewhere. This is important because it is evidence of a highly organised, cultic society, much earlier than was previously thought – predating Islam in the region by 6,000 years.

Read what we know about this ancient civilization so far, and see more of the mustatil, at BBC Travel.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Royal Commission for AlUla)

Not long ago, we looked at the many kinds of dumplings made around the world. But where did they get their start? The oldest documentation on dumplings we know of is a 1,700-year-old recipe found in China. While the Chinese might not have invented dumplings, they certainly made them popular, and exported that enthusiasm to other cultures. In this TED-Ed lesson, University of Michigan professor Miranda Brown traces the spread of dumplings around the world and looks at how they were altered and adapted to work with local resources and cultures. That means people learned about them, and then made them with what they had and what they liked to eat.  And that's why we have so many kinds of dumplings today. Warning: this video might make you hungry. It sure worked on me. -via Laughing Squid

On Independence Day (meaning the holiday, not the movie, but that's included, too), you'll find plenty of lists of facts about US presidents, and we've posted a lot of them over the years. Cracked went in another direction and gives us facts about fictional US presidents from movies and TV. There are way more of them than you realized. None of the 16 presidents are repeated, but they still didn't get to my favorite, Kevin Kline in the 1993 movie Dave. But I also liked President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

You can see the rest of the pictofacts at Cracked. Then let us know who your favorite fictional president is.

When we think of flight simulators, we first think of video games, then we think of the computerized training programs that military pilots use to prepare for battle. But the first flight simulators came way before computers were available. The Link Trainer was a flight simulator used to train pilots during World War II! Tom Scott gives us an opportunity to look inside the "blue box" that new pilots used for practice instead of planes during the war. It looks a bit like the coin-operated kiddy rides you see at grocery stores, and it is entirely mechanical. The Link Trainer would move according to how the trainee worked the controls, and instructors could change the machine's response to simulate different weather conditions. You have to wonder how it simuated a crash. It's altogether a really cool piece of technology for its time, and even cooler as an antique.