Now this cat is a hero! Pets show their love in different ways. Dogs like to be cuddly and super friendly, while cats can be standoffish-- that doesn’t mean they don’t love their owners! Take a look at Piran, for example. This cat managed to alert rescuers to save her owner who fell 70 feet into a stream: 

The woman had fallen through some barbed wire and had come to a stop in a stream below.

Tamar Longmuir, 38, was informed of her missing neighbour by the woman's friend on and immediately started searching her farm in Bodmin, Cornwall.

“The cat is very attached to her, and he was going back and forth in the gateway and meowing, so I decided to go and search the maize field,” Tamar Longmuir told reporters.

Longmuir then went to the field and started calling the woman’s name.

At first Longmuir’s cows responded but then she said that she heard the woman’s call for help.

“Without the cat waiting at the gate to that field, it could have been hours later that I or anyone else would have checked there,” Longmuir told Sky News.

Image credit: Tamara Longmuir

It’s a good thing someone was brave enough to jump to the rescue! A party guest jumped on the back of an alligator after the animal bit (and didn’t let go) of the hand of its trainer. The animal trainer was injured when she was feeding the alligator during a girl’s birthday party. Lindsay Bull said that she fed the alligator, named Darthgator, ‘hundreds of times in the past,’ but the animal was a little pushy during that time:

At first, she thought the alligator would do a quick bite and release, but then she felt it bite down harder.

"He thrashed and at that point, I realized this is going to be a serious, potentially really big injury," she said.

Bull climbed into the alligator's enclosure and wrapped her legs around him because she wanted to be able to move with him in the water. She feared that if she was standing on the ground when the alligator started to roll, the force might rip her arm off.

Within seconds, Donnie Wiseman shouted for help before scrambling into the tank and jumping on the alligator.

"It was like instant relief. For a minute, I'm there going through this by myself and then all of a sudden, Donnie was up there on the platform yelling at me, 'what do you want me to do?'" Bull said. "I can't imagine that it was easy for him to jump in and jump on his back."

Wiseman showed CNN Salt Lake City affiliate KUTV the scrapes and scratches on his torso from the alligator's scales and said Bull remained calm throughout the entire ordeal.

Image credit: Scale And Tale Utah

Frank Olito  lists ten reasons why he believes that taking the train is better than flying when it comes to traveling. After taking a 19-hour trip on an Amtrak train from New York to Chicago, Olito realized that there are benefits in riding trains compared to boarding an airplane. While the journey was not worth the $550 price tag, the lack of long lines, not worrying about baggage limits, and other reasons made the writer prefer trains over airplanes. Check his full piece here. 

Image credit: Aris

If the professor takes their time and effort to draw extremely detailed figures on an actual blackboard for class, I’ll certainly pay attention! A young teacher at Shude University of Science and Technology in Taiwan went viral online thanks to his detailed anatomical blackboard drawings. Zhong Quanbin only uses a ruler and chalk to produce some extraordinary artworks: 

Interestingly, even though most of his detailed artworks focus on the human body, Zhong Quanbin doesn’t teach human anatomy. He teaches Anatomy illustrations and Drawing Skills at the Department of Visual Communication Design, at Shute University, and he is so good at his job that he has been commissioned by several medical schools, both in Taiwan and in China or Japan to teach their students how to draw the human body.

“Yes, we have a textbook. But we don’t read it, we draw it,” Zhong said about his class at Shute University. “Students, majoring in this area, cannot learn by just reading the pictures on books. Instead, we learn while drawing something. In my classes, students have to draw what I am demonstrating on the chalkboard.”

Image credit: Zhong Quanbin/Facebook

When ancient Egyptians were buried in their huge and lavish tombs, a lot of their riches were left in their graves. These items were believed to follow the deceased to the afterlife. One of the items that were left to facilitate the transition to the afterlife are sandals. Now these funerary sandals aren’t like our regular leather ones, no! Sandals for dead royals were often crafted in shimmering gold: 

Among royal burials, these rich golden sandals were often occupied by small golden “caps” for the fingers and toes. These are called finger and toe stalls. They protected the extremities of the mummy in burial. According to ancient Egyptian beliefs, the dead were supposed to be entombed as complete bodies—sometimes including prosthetic limbs. Non-royal mummies also were buried with stalls of lesser metals and even clay. Today, most stalls date to the 18th dynasty of the New Kingdom. From about 1550 to 1290 BCE, this period includes the famous boy king Tutankhamen.

If average people used average finger and toe stalls, what sort of sandals were they buried with? Braided papyrus and leather were common materials. A sturdy sole was attached to the foot by straps much like modern sandals. Sandal makers specialized in crafting these items for the living and the dead. Among the many paintings of everyday life included along tomb walls, these ancient cobblers make appearances. Today, most extant sandals are funerary in nature, preserved underground in tombs. While many of the examples below date to the 18th dynasty, the sandals and use of stalls continued well into the period of Roman Egypt.

image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Move over, usual box-esque architecture! Triangles can be an ideal choice when designing a building or a home. According to Yanko Design’s Srishti Mitra, a triangle’s three sides can provide steady support and reinforcement. To prove that triangular architecture is gaining traction in the field of architecture, Mitra lists some of the very best designs: 

Liyanage’s Cliff Cabin, as he calls it, suspends from the side of a mountain, hovering in midair. In his 3D conceptualization, Liyanage visualizes Cliff Cabin locked in place above four support beams that are bored into the cliffside to create a secure enough foundation for Cliff Cabin to rest atop. In addition to its bottom support, four high-tensile cables are attached to the cabin’s roof and balance the cabin by drawing it back away from the cliff’s edge, evenly distributing the weight of the cabin. Globular spheres lock the cables in place and add an elegant and tidy touch to the cabin as a whole. Cliff Cabin takes on a primarily triangular shape, with right triangle glass facades sharpening the cabin’s sides and protruding out to their center of convergence.

To view the full list, check the article here! 

Image credit: Thilina Liyanage

I’m pretty sure you can get another job and you’ll earn some money, but the point here is that mathematics can earn you a big amount of cash. It isn’t obvious at first because a person graduating with a mathematics degree might be more likely to join academia, but a lot of jobs need mathematicians. Science Focus has the details: 

Maths opens up a huge variety of rewarding careers, both intellectually and financially. A 2012 survey revealed that the 10 per cent of the British workforce employed in mathematical science occupations were punching above their weight, contributing 16 per cent of the UK economy. Maths also made Larry Page and Sergey Brin multi-billionaires when they used it to invent the algorithm behind Google.

Despite what some say about calculators, computers don’t make maths obsolete. Instead, their ever-increasing power opens up new opportunities to apply it, such as Artificial Intelligence. A smartphone is maths incarnate.

Many applications use mathematical methods invented specifically for that purpose, but a few rely on maths that originated for totally different reasons, often just because of a mathematician’s fascination with following their nose.

Image credit: Jeswin Thomas

Watching the entire footage honestly made me feel a little dizzy. It’s still amazing, though! Filmmaker Ellis van Jason released a video of his first person view (FPV) drone shot of diving over the edge of Angel Falls in Venezuela, the tallest waterfall in the world. Here’s a fun fact: without a use of a drone, the mesmerizing footage would be impossible to capture: 

Unlike typical drones, FPV drones are controlled using a headset that has a live transmission of the flight that puts the pilot in a visual position that feels to them as if they are driving the drone from a tiny front seat.

Many drones are capable of showing the perspective of descending down the waterfall, but only FPV drones have the aerial speed and maneuverability to do so in a way that makes the pilot — and the viewer — feel as though they are flying.

“It’s like you’re a bird,” van Jason says to CNN. “You can fly wherever you want.”

Well, this is strange. The bodies of some Tibetan monks remain fresh after their death. To be more specific, when these monks died, their bodies remained in a meditating position without decaying. This phenomenon, which lasts for two or three weeks, is being investigated by experts:

The scientific inquiry into just what is going on with thukdam has attracted the attention and support of the Dalai Lama, the highest monk in Tibetan Buddhism. He has reportedly been looking for scientists to solve the riddle for about 20 years. He is a supporter of science, writing, "Buddhism and science are not conflicting perspectives on the world, but rather differing approaches to the same end: seeking the truth."

The most serious study of the phenomenon so far is being undertaken by The Thukdam Project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is one of the founders of the center and has published hundreds of articles about mindfulness.

Davidson first encountered thukdam after his Tibetan monk friend Geshe Lhundub Sopa died, officially on August 28, 2014. Davidson last saw him five days later: "There was absolutely no change. It was really quite remarkable."

Image credit: Chantal Lim

Dave Raymond initially worked as a mascot for the Philadelphia Phillies, an American baseball team. Raymond used his 17-year experience portraying the lumpy, green birdlike creature that is known as the Phillie Phanatic to establish the mascot industry and the industry standard for handling, creating, and portraying sports mascots for publicity and entertainment: 

Raymond told the Flyers this at the outset. It was the very first thing he said: “You guys know we’re going to get creamed, right?” He said they could roll out the next Phanatic, and it wouldn’t make any difference — a team like theirs needed to prepare for a reaction that could last up to three months. But Joe Heller, then the Flyers’ vice president for marketing, said the team was ready for it, and Raymond knew right then that it was going to work, because the only projects he has worked on that have ever failed, he says, are the ones that didn’t have the full support of their organizations. That’s his first principle: complete commitment to the initiative.

The second is building a back story. That’s the best way to combat the criticism you’re going to get. “It will always be Why,” Raymond says. “We hate it. It looks terrible. Why did you make it look like that?” Your story is your answer. The one that the Flyers came up with was about a monster that they discovered beneath their stadium while doing renovations. Upon finding his lair, the team invited him up for a game. Not a polished tale, not a polished character, but polish is not what the Flyers wanted.

The biggest question, of course, was what this creature would look like. It had to convey the brand’s image, Raymond explained, but more important, it had to look unlike any other mascot out there. The ones with the most distinct appearances are the ones that make the most memorable impressions. That’s Principle No. 3. The Flyers, Raymond says, are the personification of hockey itself: “plodding and big and hulky and weird.” So the team’s designers gave their monster a massive, bulging body and a severe underbite. They gave him an excessive orange neck beard and swinging, deranged eyeballs. They gave him a bellybutton that could change colors. And then they gave him a name — a name that might have been a bit too on the nose, had they given him a nose. They named him Gritty.

Image credit: Victor Llorente for The New York Times

Even with the establishment of different social networking sites, we can’t deny the charm Tumblr provides for its users and viewers on other platforms. Tumblr is a social networking site that was established in 2007, and it’s still active today! The website has been a treasure trove of hilarious posts, and even older posts still circulate around the platform, gaining new likes and reactions. Following the trend of current websites stealing-- I mean, borrowing content from Tumblr, Buzzfeed’s Kelly Martinez’ shares 18 Tumblr posts that are extremely funny. Maybe it’ll convince you to hop in and browse through Tumblr!

Image credit: Kelly Martinez

The Legend of Zelda franchise has released a lot of games. With the re-release Skyward Sword for the Nintendo Switch, new players have a chance to play older games and appreciate the aesthetic and gameplay that led to the 2017 hit, Breath of the Wild. Part of the franchise’s charm is the small villages or towns that the player encounters along the way during their adventures. While I haven’t played all the games in the series, my personal favorite village is Lurelin from Breath of the Wild. The fact that the area is like a secret location you may or may not ever encounter during your gameplay is nice. Alexandria Gribble lists her top ten villages from all Zelda games. Check her full list here! 

Image credit: Nintendo 

Make way for the long-lost piece of Stonehenge! Hell, I didn’t know the iconic location had some pieces missing until now.  The missing piece was taken by Robert Phillips in 1958 while performing restoration work on the monument. Phllips took the cylindrical core after  it was drilled from one of Stonehenge's pillars. Now, after 60 years, scientists have a chance to study the inside of the monument through the core: 

They found that Stonehenge's towering standing stones, or sarsens, were made of rock containing sediments that formed when dinosaurs walked the Earth. Other grains in the rock date as far back as 1.6 billion years.

"We have CT-scanned the rock, zapped it with X-rays, looked at it under various microscopes and analyzed its sedimentology and chemistry," said study lead author David Nash, a professor of physical geography at the University of Brighton in England.

"With the exception of thin-section analyses and a couple of the chemical methods, all of the techniques we used in the study were new both to Stonehenge and the study of sarsen stones in the U.K.," Nash told Live Science in an email.

Stonehenge's central circle of pillars was erected during the Neolithic period, about 4,500 years ago, according to English Heritage, a nonprofit organization that manages historic monuments in England. 

"Sarsens were erected in two concentric arrangements — an inner horseshoe and an outer circle — and the bluestones [smaller monument stones] were set up between them in a double arc," English Heritage said on its website.

Image credit: Sung Shin

BigPicture holds competitions to encourage photographers from all over the world to celebrate and illustrate Earth’s natural diversity. Thanks to the awareness raised by the photographers who joined their annual competitions, the environment gets a bigger chance to be protected and conserved. The winners of BigPicture’s Natural World Photography competition have been released, with Jo-Anne McArthur taking the grand prize for her photograph titled Hope Amidst the Ashes. McArthur captures a resilient kangaroo taking a break in a burned eucalyptus plantation. My personal favorites from the competition are Yung-Sen Wu’s Barracuda (which made me feel like a lot of ‘living swords’ are pointed at me), and Shane Kalyn’s Beak to Beak.

Image credit: Yung-Sen Wu

Hey, if a chimpanzee can practice health and safety protocols, so can you! A chimpanzee in Chongqing, China, was able to copy his keeper’s pandemic safety routine. Watch as the animal washes his hands, and then attempts to put on a face mask, just like the zookeeper. It’s pretty amazing. Check the full video here! 

-via Flipboard 

Image screenshot: USA Today