Almost all animal babies emerge from their mother or from an egg able to do the things that its species is expected to do. Mammals feed their young for a time, but even kittens and puppies can walk around on their own at about two weeks of age. Then there are humans, who are spectacularly helpless for a very long time. They can't walk, talk, eat, or control elimination for a couple of years, and even then they need guidance and protection. Why do we have such an extended infancy? 

In one version of the story, Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and was cursed to bear big-brained babies in pain. That's not far from the science version, because humans have enormous brains for their body size, and we had to offload a lot of that brain growing to after birth. Not all of it, of course, as anyone who has given birth will tell you. Human mothers wouldn't survive much more baby brain size. That equates to humans being born relatively premature compared to other animals. Getting a child to maturity is quite a chore, but it also has its upsides, as this video from The Thought Vortex explains.

Mehul Hingu, a world traveler who lives in Mumbai, runs the Instagram account Street Food Recipe. His culinary journeys took him to the city of Nagoya in central Japan, where he visited the Tsuzuki Café. This cafe is situated just below the penthouse floor of a skyscraper, which is the the cafe markets itself as "Japan's highest cafe au lait."

Among the cafe's specialities are a Viennese coffee known as Einspänner, which is topped with a portion of whipped cream. The Tsuzuki Café accepts this vertical challenges by offering a coffee with what looks like a foot-tall peak of whipped cream.

Amusing Planet looks at two very different counterfeiters this month, with unusual stories that earned them notoriety and represent two ends of the spectrum. Both were unassuming immigrants from the former Austro-Hungarian empire. Over in this corner, we have Emerich Juettner, an elderly man who lived alone in a basement in New York City. He spent ten years passing fake bills and led the US Secret Service on the longest and most expensive counterfeit investigation in their history. He was no criminal mastermind. Juettner's bills were poorly manufactured, with inferior paper, hand-painted details, and sometimes even contained spelling errors. The reason he was able to evade the law for so long was because he only printed one dollar bills! People aren't in the habit of examining ones, so the fake money passed through many hands before they were noticed. After Juettner served his time, he made more money from a movie about his crimes than he ever did by counterfeiting.    

On the other end of the spectrum we have Czesław Bojarski, who was not only a counterfeiter, but an artist. Bojarski fled to France during World War II and fought for the underground Polish army. He stayed in Paris after the war, and turned to counterfeiting to support his family. His work was exquisite, and very hard to detect. Bojarski specialized in the 100-franc Bonaparte note, shown above, and traveled far and wide to cover his tracks when passing them. Like Juettner, it took authorities more than a decade of investigation to find Bojarski, who was by then known as "the Cézanne of counterfeiters." Today, his counterfeit Bonaparte notes go for thousands of euros to collectors.    

(Image credit: Banque de France) 

The Hooters restaurant chain, founded 1983, has struggled financially since 1983. The chain offers sportsbar cuisine served by buxom waitresses in skimpy outfits, so the market appeal is primarily toward men who enjoy being served by such women.

Although breasts remain popular, this particular approach to using them for marketing is not thriving. So Hooters is rebranding its restaurants toward a more family-friendly vector. At The Takeout, Rolland Judd has 5 suggestions about how Hooters could keep its name while pivoting in a different narrative direction.

Among them is directing away from "hooters" as a slang term for breasts and toward the slang term for owls--specifically, the owls in the Harry Potter franchise. There would be some intellectual property issues to resolve, but a restaurant that let patrons pretend to be new students at Hogwarts could draw a large customer base.

Photo: Hooters

Here's a fun online tool by Josh Mayfield that lets you generate your own titles cards for different Star Trek series. You can chooses between the Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.

Meet Flaco, Blasco Paterno Castello, Mael Bovey, Jordy, Andrea de Angelis, and Keti Vasadze. These guys are members of the Buldoz Project Crew, Swiss skiers who do "snowless skiing." Oh yeah, they ski on snow, but also down snowless hills, streams, stairs, and any other incline they can find. You may have heard of dry slope skiing, which is done on prepared slopes with artificial surfaces that mimic snow, great for off-season practice, but this is a whole different level. Buldoz goes to places where skates, skateboards, and bicycles are prohibited, but the signs don't say anything about skis because who in their right mind would try it? Yes, they injure themselves. This is a hardcore sport. 

Oh, and before you complain about too much music and not enough information, you should be aware that this is a music video from The Foo Fighters. The song is "Of All People," from their new album Your Favorite Toy. -via the Awesomer 

With recent outbreaks of hantavirus and Ebola virus, and the continuing trauma of COVID, the last thing we need is a another disease to worry about. You need not worry about encephalitis lethargica, because it appears to have come and gone already. In fact, the last known person to have survived the disease died in 2002. However, between 1917 and 1930, it was terrifying. 

People started suffering from a mysterious constellation of symptoms, ranging from tremors to fatigue to drooling. Many slept for days at a time or became paralyzed with locked-in syndrome, in which there's complete awareness, but the body cannot respond. Doctors figured out encephalitis lethargica was based in the brain, hence the name. But they never figured out what caused it. The disease infected around a million people across Europe and Northern America. Half of those who suffered from it died, and many of the survivors had lingering effects, or declined mentally or physically from a resurgence many years later. Read about the mysterious epidemic of encephalitis lethargica at Mental Floss.  -via Strange Company 
  

Rowan J. Coleman is a YouTuber who examines in detail how science fiction television shows and films are composed and acted. In the past, we've seen his explanations of how William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, and the stars of Babylon 5 were highly effective in their roles.

I was devoted to the Original Series as a child and followed closely The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise in adolescence and adulthood, so they seem normal.

Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy seem, to adapt a phrase from Douglas Adams, against the natural order of things. Leaving the storytelling aside, I find these series aesthetically grating as the sets are very dark and excessively large.

But the visual language of these series, sometimes referred to as "NuTrek", is a departure from previous series and films in ways more subtle than lighting and set design. Coleman analyzes how camera motion and shot setup in particular set NuTrek apart from its predecessors.

What do kids say when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up? When I saw the premise of this video, I immediately thought "Astronaut! President!" This reflects the historical era I grew up in, and I well remember being set straight that girls cannot be either. But this graphic video covers children ages 8-12 from 1920 through 2026, and things change. It begins with "cowboy" being the most popular answer, and reflects what children are exposed to over time. Watch how fast "pilot" ascends to the top early on. World War II promotes "soldier." "Astronaut" debuts in 1958 and quickly becomes the go-to profession, although "spy" is pretty popular during the Cold War. "Pro Athlete" takes the top as the Apollo program ends. "Programmer" debuts in 1985. "Dinosaur Expert" hits the list in 1992, a year before Jurassic Park, but the same year that PBS's miniseries The Dinosaurs! aired. "YouTuber" joined in 2007, only two years after the platform launched, and became the real aspiration for children going forward.  
    
Pay attention to what's simmering under the top. "Nurse" and "teacher" were consistently on the list until the 1970s, because little girls assumed those were the only professions open to them. I'm surprised "movie star" stayed so low throughout the period. Also keep in mind that the very question assumes that a grownup will be defined by their job, which is a very American thing. -via Born in Space 
  
    

Warner Bros. animation and Tubi have announced a new project, in which Scooby-Doo goes anime. The series will be called Yokoso Scooby-Doo!, which means Welcome, Scooby-Doo. The premise is that Shaggy and Scooby go to Japan for some kind of food event, and accidentally unleash a pantheon of Japanese ghosts and folklore monsters. Fred, Daphne, and Velma will not be a part of the story, but Shaggy and Scooby find new friends like gadget whiz Takumi, magical pixie dream girl Yume, and Scooby's uncle Daisuke-Doo. And they have the Mystery Machine, too!

Lending credence to the legitimacy of the project, actors Frank Welker (the longtime voice of Scooby-Doo) and Matthew Lillard (who played Shaggy in the films) are signed to voice the main characters. The one available image gives hope that the anime will reproduce the joyful nonsense of the original series. The series is slated to become available in 2027. Read more about Yokoso Scooby-Doo! at Cracked.

Miska is a snow leopard living at the Melbourne Zoo. In January, she gave birth to a litter of four cubs, two males and two females. When she decided the cubs were old enough to leave the nursery and go outside, zoo videographers were there to record the cuteness. The chubby, fluffy cubs tried running, jumping, and playing in the big new world as best as their little legs could, while Miska kept an eye on them just in case they needed help. This milestone was also the right time for the cubs to get their first veterinary check, in which they were weighed, vaccinated, and thoroughly examined. They all seem quite healthy, if a bit confused. One stood out as being extra spicy over the indignity.  

If you want to see them being born, you'll find that video at Laughing Squid. The cubs have since grown more agile and willing to pounce on each other -and their mom- as you can see at Facebook. 

Everyone knows the tallest man ever recorded was Robert Wadlow, who grew to 8' 11". But you should also learn the story of the man who held the record previously, at an estimated 8' 9". His name was John Rogan, and his height was estimated because the weight of his bones left him unable to stand or walk before he reached his full height.   

Rogan was born in Tennessee in 1867 to formerly-enslaved parents. His height was unremarkable until he was twelve, when his bones began to lengthen rapidly, keeping him painfully bedridden for a couple of years. The most likely cause was a benign tumor on the adrenal glands, exacerbated by ankylosis that fused Rogan's joints and left him unable to walk by adulthood. 

Rogan had plenty of opportunities to join a sideshow, but he refused to be put on display, and was wary of those who wanted to study him. He wanted to live a normal life with his family and support himself with honest work. Since Rogan couldn't work on the family farm, he built a cart pulled by goats, and worked as a porter hauling luggage for railroad passengers. After his death, the family took extraordinary measures to ensure his grave couldn't be robbed for his remains to be put on display. Read the story of John Rogan at Utterly Interesting. 

Sheila Wallis is a British artist noted for her highly realistic yet also imaginative paintins and drawings that include portraits, nude figure studies, and watercolors.

She came to my attention on Instagram for her illuminated illustrations that include the use of gilding.

Rabies is an awful virus that doesn't work the way most viruses do. Once the symptoms start, it's fatal, and it's a particularly unpleasant death. You lose the ability to swallow, which is why the phrases "foaming at the mouth" and "hydrophobia" are associated with rabies. That's because the virus spreads through saliva, and successful viruses cause symptoms that enable them to spread to new hosts. The good news is that you can be vaccinated for rabies after exposure, and MinuteEarth will explain why that's so. 

You might think, well, why don't we just vaccinate everyone against rabies? My daughter is a veterinarian, and had to be vaccinated. It cost her $900. That's cheap compared to the cost of treatment after exposure. But for some reason, we can get our dogs and cats vaccinated for $30 or so. And that's turned out to be the best way to keep rabies under control in the modern world.

Victoria Dauberville is a French ballerina and choreographer who performed professionally for many years in Belgium and France. Last year, while on a cruise to the Antarctic on Le Boréal, she had the opportunity to perform on an unusual stage: the bulbous bow of the ship.

Unlike the theater on the fourth deck of this cruise ship, the bulbous bow is only accessible with a zodiac boat. Dauberville wore a classical dancing costume and slippers to dance with grace on the slippery surface while surrounded by ice-filled waters and frozen air. The video recording of this event promptly went viral.

-via NEXTA