Scientists from the University of Exeter in the UK were tracking the migratory patterns of oystercatchers when the data seemed to go crazy. One of the birds' tracking devices sent back data to show that it had been to a beach in Orkney, a pizza restaurant, a campground, various tourist attractions, and then to the London suburb of Ealing! While a bird might get a bite to eat at a pizza restaurant, the rest made no sense and the research team assumed that the tracker had fallen off the bird. But then what happened?

Mike German had been on vacation in Orkney, where he found a mysterious device on the beach. He put it in his pocket and forgot about it until he got home, then put it somewhere else and forgot about it. Read how the story comes together and what the university went through to get its tracker back at BBC News. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Mike German)

(Image credit: Virginia Kentucky District Fair)

The 109th Annual Virginia-Kentucky District Fair was held last week in Wise, Virginia. Of the hundreds of photographs posted at the fair's Facebook page, a couple have captured the imagination of the internet.

(Image credit: Virginia Kentucky District Fair)

That's not all. Linda Skeens made a few more winner's lists for her cooking and canning. Oh yeah, she also won three ribbons for embroidery. And more for Christmas decor.

The comments on all the fair's posts are dominated by people who want to meet this woman and taste her cooking. She's been invited to appear on TV and to come to dinner. Linda Skeens has become a Facebook metaphor for a competitor who does not mess around. But so far, she has remained anonymous. She may not want to feed everyone.

a different "Linda Skeens" has been so flooded with messages that she put out a PSA that she's not the baking phemon pic.twitter.com/EaoYF9ulzD

— Annie? Rauwerda? (@anniierau) June 24, 2022

But if Linda Skeens ever emerges into the public, she'll have a ready-made audience for whatever she wants to say, whether it's a lone cooking demonstration or a Food Network series. -via Fark 

Though he was gone all too soon, Robin Williams had a career packed with amazing stories, including tidbits you'll be glad to learn. From a standup class in a Lutheran church to winning an Academy Award, from voiceovers to TV to comedies to dramas, he gave 100% to whatever project was in front of him. He could be a psycho killer, an alien, a wise man, a wiseguy, a cartoon character (both live action and animated), or even an old lady in the 1993 movie Mrs. Doubtfire.

Williams first met the children of Mrs.Doubtfire dressed in full makeup and costume. The kids were told he was Chris Columbus’s mother, and they didn’t recognize the comedian at all, which was the first test to see how convincing Williams was. 

Well, he convinced me. There was very little in the way of cinema that Williams couldn't pull off better than almost anyone else. Read fourteen other neat facts about Robin Williams that might not know at Cracked.

Playing the game "the floor is lava" is a real hoot when you're a kid, because you either achieve a sense of accomplishment or a good laugh when you fail. The stakes are higher when you're an adult made of 200 pounds of muscle, and you paid for the furniture. Daniel LaBelle shows off his parkour skills in his house playing the game for the YouTube audience. He can have his sense of accomplishment; we get the laughs when he fails! It's a good thing he keeps his feet clean. -via Digg

Americans and Canadians are quite alike in most ways, but we recognize a difference in style. Despite sharing a common language, as a group, Canadians are more polite, and Americans are louder. But does that stereotype hold up in ways other than language? Say, in design? Yes, yes it does. Valerie Hammond is a costume jewelry dealer and an expert in antique jewelry. She has written extensively on the pieces designed by Montreal costume jeweler Gustave Sherman.  

During the heyday of G. Sherman & Company, which was the late 1940s through most of the 1970s, “The tastes of the Canadian market were different than the U.S.,” Hammond says. “I don’t mean to say that Canadian women didn't have style because they did, but it was more of an understated elegance, a little more ‘I’m going to wear this to church on Sunday’ than ‘I’m going to wear this to a nightclub.’ Not flashy, more genteel.”

Hammond takes us on a tour of the world of antique jewelry, and contrasts famous designers from Canada and the United States. She also updates us on what the pandemic has done to the antique jewelry business at Collectors Weekly.  

If you want to say you've been to a lot of foreign countries in a hurry, it's best to use a loophole. Sixteen-year-old Asher Boiskin of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was going for a world record for how many nations one could visit in one day, and ended up with 35, with 32 stamped visas. He did it by visiting Embassy Row in Washington, DC. See, embassies are considered part of the country that it represents. Boiskin spent months setting up appointments at 49 different embassies! Traffic problems kept him from getting to them all. Boiskin still didn't achieve a world record, as someone else visited 47 embassies using the same scheme, but not in the US. -via Fark

Catnip and another plant called silver vine contain five chemicals that, when combined, make a cat altogether euphoric. These chemicals also repel mosquitos. What's more, when the plant is rubbed, chewed, or crushed, the insect repelling properties are magnified. Cats are more attracted to catnip or silver vine plants that have been crushed or damaged, and they also tend to crush or damage the leaves themselves. Rubbing or rolling in catnip distributes the chemicals around the cat's body, protecting it from mosquito bites, and licking or chewing the leaves causes the chemicals within to disperse more readily. When the five chemicals are produced synthetically, the cats respond in the same way.

This may give us a clue as to why cats like catnip. Of course, they like the high, but did they evolve the ability to get high on 'nip in order to take advantage of the mosquito repelling properties of the plants? Did cats who enjoyed catnip get an evolutionary benefit when they chewed or rubbed against the plants, like maybe fewer mosquito-borne diseases? Another question that cames to mind is, what about all this is beneficial to the plant? Read about the research into catnip and silver vine at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Julia Wolf)

The endangered gorillas that Dian Fossey studied and worked to save are still there in the Virunga Mountains of central Africa. They are still under threat from poachers and habitat loss, but some populations have actually grown in the past ten years. One of the reasons is a group of ten dedicated veterinarians of the organization Gorilla Doctors. They head out into the bush with armed guards and trackers to check on the health and welfare of the gorillas. They treat illness to keep it from spreading through the population, and often care for wounds caused by animal traps.



Atlas Obscura interviewed veterinarian Jean Bosco Noheri, known as Dr. Noel, about Gorilla Doctors' work. He told a story about a desperate mission to save a baby gorilla that had a snare around its neck. The gorilla family was guarded fiercely by several silverbacks that didn't trust the humans. That story shows the great lengths these doctors will go to in order to save one gorilla at a time. Read how they accomplished that at Atlas Obscura.

In 1984, Weird Al Yankovic released "Eat It," a parody of Michael Jackson's mega-hit "Beat It." The official video for "Eat It" was a shot-for-shot remaking of Jackson's video, only funnier. But it wasn't the only version recorded. Recently, a friend of Yankovic's came across a "B-roll" as he was digitizing footage of the video shoot. From Yankovic's YouTube page:

Basically this is a take where the director just points the camera at the star of the video, who just does anything they feel like doing for the duration of the song.  It's insurance, in case for some reason the production runs out of time and doesn't get all the shots they were hoping to get. I'm pretty sure NOTHING from this take got used in the final video, but I still thought it was stupid/amusing enough to share.

Indeed it is. It's basically three minutes of Yankovic playing with food as he lip-syncs, just as you'd expect. -via Digg

 

Norway is home to many ancient petroglyphs showing boats dating back 3000 years and more. The conventional wisdom about these petroglyphs was that they were religious icons, a fantasy showing people departing for the afterlife. But great leaps in archaeology over the past few years lead scientists to believe that these were real boats that carried large crews all over Europe, as far as Italy, for trade. Advances in precise dating of the petroglyphs, along with discoveries of settlements and DNA sequencing, show that Norway had a rather Viking-like Bronze Age society 3000 years ago, long before the Vikings who ruled for just 300 years around a thousand years ago.  

The Bronze Age saw a great leap forward in civilization, as societies learned the many uses of metal. There is no evidence of tin or copper mining among Bronze Age Norwegians, but they had bronze. Previously thought to be nomads, recent digs have revealed that people lived in elaborate settlements of the era, complete with tools and jewelry made of bronze ands other metals brought in from far away. DNA from 3000-year-old remains indicate that while almost all men were local, many of the women came from other nations. This indicates a booming trade between Bronze Age Norwegians and other countries of Europe.

A recently-discovered boat dating back to just after the end of the Bronze Age is very much like the ancient petroglyphs, and shows that ancient Norwegian boats were fairly sophisticated, made from planks of wood instead of only shaped logs as was previously thought.    

So what happened to this Viking-like Norwegian Bronze Age society? The petroglyphs of the later Bronze Age depicted smaller ships and more illustrations of conflict. Temperatures dropped, and made travel more difficult. And as the Iron Age began, the ingredients for bronze no longer had to be imported, because iron was available in Norway. And so Norwegians kept more to themselves for another two thousands years until the Vikings struck out to conquer the world. Read about these recent findings and what they tell us at Science Norway.

(Image credit: Erik Irgens Johnsen/Museum of Cultural History)

Trey Anastasio, guitarist, singer, and songwriter with Phish, performed a solo show in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Monday. In the audience was a little barefoot girl with a sign that said, "Can I sing Bug with you?" Anastasio called her up on stage and let her perform, and the crowd loved it. So will you. Jovi is confident yet a tiny bit hesitant, and doesn't really know what to make of the applause, but she keeps her adorable smile on and keeps going with the song. You don't have to be familiar with the song or even with Phish to enjoy the sweet interaction between Anastasio, 7-year-old Jovi, and the crowd. -via Metafilter 

In any era, there is the end of an era. We don't know what event will be the last until long afterward, but the last Old West train robbery turned out to be quite a story. By the turn of the 20th century, the outlaws of the Old West were becoming more outnumbered by law-abiding folks every day. And with more people, better communication, and more advanced law enforcement procedures, it was pretty hard to make a clean getaway after a crime. On February 15, 1900, five men boarded the train that had stopped at Fairbank, Arizona. They aimed to take the contents of the safe, but absconded with only $42 and two of them wounded. They left behind an injured train guard and plenty of witnesses. Three lawmen, all from different counties, gathered posses and set off to find the perpetrators, their professional reputations at stake.

One of the bandits, severely wounded, was left to die in the desert after he could no longer sit on a horse. He was found and brought back to town in a delirium. Wells Fargo detectives got involved in the case, as it was their safe and their guard who was targeted. And you won't believe what they found out. The whole story, with an unexpected twist, is told at Truly Adventurous, in both text and in podcast version.

This seems like a really weird question, but Tom Scott had it in the back of his mind since childhood. We get a quite detailed explanation why, which involves a bonkers old TV show, and then he has the opportunity to try it himself. The idea of driving while facing backwards was just a weird idea from the show, but can it be done in real life? Sure, as anyone who ever used a backup camera in a modern car will tell you. But Tom does it the hard way, by having a sponsor build him a vehicle in which all driving would be done by watching a video camera instead of the road. And it can go 50 miles an hour. What could possibly go wrong?  

If you've been in Hong Kong anytime in the last 40 years, you've no doubt noticed Jumbo Floating Restaurant, part of a tourist attraction in the city's Aberdeen Harbor. The restaurant on a boat had an area of 45,000 square feet and could accommodate 2,300 diners at once. One has to wonder how they fed that many people. In 2020, the restaurant closed due to the pandemic. In 2022, the cost to maintain the boat in the harbor was determined to be too high, and it was towed away last week. The plans were to dock the restaurant at a less expensive location to continue maintenance. Those plans are kaput, as the restaurant capsized on its journey.

The tow boat and restaurant encountered "adverse conditions" on Saturday and took on water. On Sunday the 260-foot-long restaurant completely capsized and sunk into the South China Sea where the depth is around 1000 meters. That makes it highly unlikely that there will be any salvage operation. There were no injuries.   

(Image credit: Michal Osmenda)

There is a monument in the cemetery of Pinner Church in the northwest part of London that is unlike any other. In fact, it dominates the tiny graveyard. The triangular monument has a coffin right in the middle-several feet above ground! This is the grave of William and Agnes Loudon, and the monument was erected on orders from their son John Loudon after William died in 1809. Agnes joined him in 1841.  

There’s a legend attached to the monument, because, of course there is.

It’s claimed, roughly, that the descendants of William Loudon, a Scotch merchant, retain the property bequeathed by him so long as he remains “above ground.”

Well, that's not true, as it has been ascertained that there is no body in the above-ground coffin. There are two coffins buried in a vault underneath the monument. So why the floating coffin? Could it be that John Loudon wanted people to talk about his parents and wonder about the monument? Read about the mysterious floating coffin of Pinner at Ian Visits. -via Nag on the Lake