Long ago, people said that cats should never be allowed near babies because they would snatch the baby's breath away. Later on, I heard that cats who appear to be doing that are just investigating a baby's mouth because it smells like milk. That makes sense. Now, after a lot of experience with cats and babies, I realize that cats know what human babies are, and find them attractive the same way people find infants of all species adorable.
Amanda got a tuxedo kitten and named him Sushi. Sushi likes Amanda, but absolutely loves baby Xiomora. Double squee! Sushi learned quickly how to climb into the crib and despite his young age, he became her guardian angel. They spend so much time together that Sushi knew immediately when Xiomora became ill. And even afterward, Amanda knows when Xiomora's diaper needs to be changed, because that's the only time Sushi leaves her side.
When I was a young adult, my dad would always ask if I'd checked my oil lately. I'd been reading a dipstick since I was too young to drive, along with other car maintenance tasks he taught me. But all these years later, I realize I have never looked for a dipstick in my current car. Not only do I get regular oil changes, but the car itself will nag me to get one when odometer reaches the recommended interval. Does it even have a dipstick?
Fewer and fewer new car models come with a dipstick at all. Instead, they have a warning on the screen if your oil level gets low. It's all run by the car's internal computer. Sure, it's a modern convenience, but internal auto computers can have their own problems, and can even stop performing some tasks. Drivers with no dipsticks have encountered problems with ever more complicated systems. Read about the death of the dipstick and what could possibly go wrong at Jalopnik.
(Image credit: Environmental Protection Agency)
We are all familiar with Medusa, the mythological Gorgon with snakes for hair and the ability to turn men to stone just by making eye contact. But how much do you know about her backstory? In ancient Greek mythology, she was a straightforward monster that needed to be killed for the safety of humankind. But in a later retelling by the Roman poet Ovid, Medusa started out as a perfectly normal young woman who was raped and then blamed for it. Her punishment turned her into a monster in more ways than one, first by making her a Gorgon, then by hate, shunning, and the quest to murder her. Ovid's story is tragic, and some might say cautionary, but much richer with the themes of trauma and injustice. In this TED-Ed lesson from historian and archaeologist Laura Aitken-Burt, we get an animated version of Ovid's Medusa story. -via Geeks Are Sexy
It was a great day when tracking animals went from finding them embedded with arrows to putting bands on their legs. Now an even less burdensome method is being tested to track an endangered species.
The Welsh water vole was once found across Wales, but now is limited to a few small populations, making them almost extinct. Studying these creatures is a problem, because they are small, shy, and can be mistaken for rats. Scientists want to track water voles to find their preferred habitats so that efforts can be made to accommodate them. But how to find them? Maybe the answer is glitter.
An experiment was conducted on some Welsh water voles raised in captivity. They were fed edible purple glitter smeared on apples in the hopes that they would produce sparkly poop. Finding glittery poop in the wild would help conservationists determine where the voles have been even when they don't want to be seen. The test was deemed successful when sparkly purple poop appeared. The next step is feeding glitter to wild voles. The real challenge will be to feed voles without feeding other wild species as well. -via Metafiler
(Image credit: Peter Trimming)
Actor George Wendt passed away yesterday at age 76. Wendt appeared in several TV shows and quite a few movies, but he was best known for his role as Norm Peterson on the sitcom Cheers, which ran from 1982 to 1993. Norm was the bar's most loyal customer, and Wendt earned six consecutive Emmy nominations for the role. He appeared in all 275 episodes. Norm's nightly entrance into the bar was a reliable running gag on the show. He enters on the left and is greeted by all. Someone asks how he's doing as he makes his way to the far end of the bar, and is rewarded with a one-liner. This video is a compilation of every one of those scenes in chronological order. It's 18 minutes long, since it covers eleven years, but you can come back to it later if you want to see them all. The plot remains the same throughout. -via Laughing Squid
Slovak engineer Stefan Klein scooted ahead of companies working on prototype helicopter hybrids and electric flying machines to bring his AirCar through testing and certification in Slovakia. It is scheduled to go into mass production this summer, the world's first flying car to do so. The AirCar will be manufactured by Klein Vision and is expected to be available in early 2026. This vehicle looks like a large expensive sports car, with wings that unfold at the touch of a button. It uses an old-fashioned gasoline engine, and requires a runway of about 300 meters (984 feet).
That doesn't mean the skies will be full of flying cars anytime soon. To use the AirCar, operators must be both licensed drivers and licensed pilots. And the cost of an AirCar will be between $800,000 and a million dollars. That means you and I will be safely relegated to the ground while millionaires fly overhead. However, you might want to keep an eye out for when these bigwigs crash into each other directly above you. Read about the AirCar and see a video clip at ZME Science. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Klein Vision)
When we first heard about the live-action remake of the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was suddenly a lot of hype, and a lot of criticism for all kinds of reasons: the casting, the CGI dwarfs, the opposing political opinions of its stars, and of course, the usual rants about the wisdom of producing live-action remakes when we already have perfectly good animated classics. When the movie finally opened a couple of months ago, after a year's delay, you didn't hear much. Oh, it made money, but not enough to cover its costs, and Snow White became the biggest box office bomb so far this year. The reviews were mixed, but the bad ones were scathing. Critics liked Rachel Zegler's performance and hated everything else. Since you might not have seen it, Screen Junkies is here to explain what went wrong with Snow White in this Honest Trailer.
A few years ago, redditor Josh Wright converted an old treadmill into a belt sander.
He stripped apart the treadmill (which was no longer useful for its original purpose) and then attached a new 1-HP motor. Wright built a frame suitable to holding up the entire unit as well as make it practical to use. He then experimented with different adhesives for the belt and found that ordinary shellac was the most effective. Wright used the shellac to add sandpaper sand to the belt.
It sands quite effectively. I can see it being useful for very large projects.
You can watch this complete build process here.
What should we call this instrument? It is guitarrdion? An accoritar? The Ukrainian-language website provides us with no information, but the instrument appears to have the bellows and keys of an accordion bisecting an acoustic guitar. I'm not sure what that does to the sound of the strings, but it's quite functional as an accordion.
-via The Awesomer
Argentinian developer Max Comperatore built a website that tracks how many people are engaged in common activities round the world. What The Hell Are People Doing uses estimated statistics from a number of sources to calculate global activities. At the top you'll see how many people are being born, how many are dying, and how many people are watching the stats. Underneath is a list of the things they are doing right now. Sleeping is at the top, which makes sense because we all do it for multiple hours every day. Family care and paid work follow, with half the world's population doing one of these three things. Nice to know that 1.34% of the world is in the bathroom right now. While the activities may change up and down the list, at the bottom I see that more people are making love than are making war. There isn't a category for being online, but you can imagine a large part of entertainment, shopping, paid work, and socializing is done online. Watching these numbers change can be mesmerizing. -via Metafilter
Capuchin monkeys have been caught abducting baby howler monkeys — and no one knows exactly why. Scientists are baffled. See the first-time footage: https://t.co/DsmdRbMhOT
— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) May 19, 2025
Scientists studying capuchin monkeys in Panama have discovered that they use stone tools to perform certain tasks. That's pretty amazing, but they also discovered a disturbing habit among young male capuchins -stealing babies from another species! Checking years of video, they found that this kidnapping goes back to January of 2022, when a capuchin named Joker took an infant howler monkey and walked around with it for days. Over time, other young males started taking howler monkey infants. These capuchins didn't interact with the babies much, and couldn't feed them, so some of the infants died, while others were abandoned after a few days and retrieved by their mothers.
It's not the first time social "trends" have been found spreading among juvenile male capuchin monkeys. There was a time when these monkeys found it cool to stick their fingers up another monkey's nose, and for a time they played a game of hiding things from each other in their mouths. Maybe the fad of kidnapping howler monkey infants will die out in time. Read about the discovery and the possible motivations behind it at Smithsonian.
Dante Brown's Saab broke down on Interstate 610 in Houston. Instead of calling a tow truck, he called his girlfriend to come and tow the car. She brought her Ford Expedition, but had no towing equipment outside of a single chain. They attached the chain to the rear axle of the Saab, which is the last thing you should do, and set off down the highway. The axle soon broke, and as Brown overcompensated in his steering, the car fishtailed wildly across several lanes! Brown was obviously not in communication with his girlfriend in the SUV, and she appeared to be oblivious to the mayhem going on behind her. Or was she? Some witnesses even reported she was laughing.
Police eventually caught up with the pair. No tickets were issued for the traffic incident, but Brown was arrested on an outstanding warrant. Next time, call a tow truck. -via Born in Space
Being an early adopter can come with a price. I once bought a used car that was from the first year of an exciting new model. I eventually realized that this fact explained why it was so cheap- the bugs hadn't been worked out. Around the year 1880, Mark Twain met a man who had built a machine that would set type automatically, replacing the time-consuming job of a compositor, who had to find and set every letter of a printed page. The machine was called the Paige Compositor, which is not a misspelling because it was named for inventor James W. Paige.
The machine resembled something out of The Jetsons, with mechanical arms that did the selecting and typesetting. Twain knew this could revolutionize publishing, and invested substantially in the machine's development. But history tells us that merely replacing a human worker's moves is not as revolutionary as finding a new way to get to the end product. The story of the Paige Compositor also shows us that the people behind a new technology must be evaluated as well as the product.
(Image credit: Scientific American)
Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond has been in the US for years, and is now an American citizen, but still recalls enough about Britain to compare and contrast the two countries. This video is about a grocery shopping trip and some American things that confused him until he got used to them. Why do American cashiers have to stand up all day? Why do Americans refrigerate eggs? (I have a friend with a chicken coop, and only keep eggs in the refrigerator so I remember where they are.) How can you compare the size of milk when the measurements are so different? And then there's the tax thing, which is a surprise to Europeans. Our taxes are added after the sale because each state has a different sales tax rate. Some cities also add another tax. And some states don't tax groceries at all. The video is not as long as it looks; there's a 95-second skippable ad at 2:40.
Who eats more pizza- Americans or Italians? You might guess that the US consumes the most pizza, simply because we have so many people, and you'd be right. But when you take the larger population out of the equation and figure pizza on a per capita basis, the most pizza-obsessed nation is neither the US nor Italy. It's Norway. The average person in Norway eats more than 25 pounds of pizza every year, while in the US, the average is only 23 pounds. Figured that way, the US is second, and Italy comes in fifth.
As you might guess, frozen pizza is particularly popular in Norway, but they also like homemade pizza and pizzerias. Norwegian pizza isn't like the standard American pizza, though, because the toppings reflect a Scandinavian taste. It's possible they could be heavier, too, which would explain the higher consumption in pounds. Read about Norwegian pizzas at Tasting Table. -via Fark
(Image credit: Kjetil Ree)
