Here's a story that illustrates the problems that arise when civilization encroaches on wildlife. A leopard mother will often leave her babies someplace she thinks is safe while she hunts. But this one left three cubs in a field that was plowed for crops, which isn't safe at all. She might have retrieved them soon, but someone took the cubs in as abandoned. We don't find out from the video where this was, but it's from Wildlife SOS, which operates in India, mainly to save elephants, so that may be a clue. Anyway, the best place for leopard cubs is with their mother. Volunteers took the cubs to the place where the mother was last spotted (or last seen, as she is presumed to be spotted at all times). And here you have to consider the bravery of the person who is carrying a litter of leopard cubs in the dark where you know the mom is hiding. That's true dedication to the mission! Still, this story has a happy ending, and if anyone was injured, they would have told us about it.
There are truth in advertising laws that tell us you can't label a food product as "butter" if it has no butter in it. But you can label a butter substitute as "I can't believe it's not butter." Some say you only need the second half of that phrase, while the company hopes you only focus on the last word. But I digress. Truth in advertising laws won't help you when a product has used the same name for a hundred years or more. A young American might hear of black pudding and assume it's a creamy chocolaty sweet dessert. It is not. There is no seafood in Rocky Mountain oysters. An egg cream contains no egg nor any cream. And refried beans have only been fried once. That particular misleading name has a logical explanation having to do with the differences between Spanish and English. The Takeout gives us the real ingredients in 14 foods with misleading names, and explains how they were named. -via Fark
(Image credit: Stanistani)
Hurricane was a 69-pound black Belgian Malinois whose career in the Secret Service left him the most decorated dog in American history. In October of 2014, he took down an intruder who had scaled the White House fence and made it to within 100 yards of President Obama and the First Lady. He raced from the east side of the lawn as the intruder fought off another Secret Service dog. Hurricane suffered injuries in the incident that forced him into retirement in 2016. His actions caused the Secret Service to employ more guard dogs to White House duty.
Hurricane was awarded the Secretary’s Award for Valor from the Department of Homeland Security in 2015 and the Distinguished Service Medal in 2022, among other awards. After retirement, his handler Marshall Mirarchi founded a charity called Hurricane's Heroes that provides veterinary care for retired law enforcement and military dogs. Hurricane became an ambassador for the organization, and excelled at that job, too, since he was able to socialize and even play with children while off duty, a quality not found in most security dogs. At almost 16 years of age, Hurricane made one last trip to the White House on February 12th and met with the entire K9 team before he was put down. He was a good dog. -via Metafilter
The movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was the first of the Harry Potter films, released in 2001. It was known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone everywhere besides the US, India, and the Philippines. You would have thought that Screen Junkies would have already done an Honest Trailer for the movie, and they sort of did many years ago. But that was a quick overview of all the Harry Potter films, and didn't go into depth with any of them. However, the first four Harry Potter movies are being re-released in theaters this year, with The Sorcerer's Stone now playing in select theaters.
Oh, they find enough to criticize in the film, but your reaction will most likely be "Man! Those actors are young! And short!" After all, it was 24 years ago and they were little kids who all grew up to be famous adult actors long before their time at Hogwarts ended.
Over at TYWKIWDBI, Minnesotastan talks about natural tree fractures and what to do about them. You can trim a tree to promote scar tissue and recovery, but not all broken trees can be saved. Sure, you can just remove a broken tree, but there's a better solution. "Fracture pruning" and specifically "coronet cuts" are practices that promote rotting. But why would you promote rotting? It couldn't be good for the tree!
No, but it would be good for the tree's descendants, and other species of plants, animals, insects, fungus, and microorganisms. A dead tree, or a rotting log on the forest floor, is an entire ecosystem. Different kinds of fungus break down the hard parts of the wood, softening it enough for insects to move in. Birds, bats, and other animals come and eat the insects and the fungus. The softening tree provides shelter for some species and nutrition for others, including new plants that may take root there, from mosses to trees. Meanwhile, the decaying wood that isn't consumed becomes compost for the forest floor. Read about the crucial role of rotting wood in a forest ecosystem at Knowable magazine.
(Image credit: redditor narkotikahaj)
NASA has released the results of its engine performance tests on the new X-59 research jet, which is not built for space, but has the potential to change air travel down here on earth. You might not know this, but civilian planes that travel faster than the speed of sound were banned in the US in 1973 because their sonic booms could shatter glass and frightened the daylights out of people on the ground. And that's why passenger jets cannot travel at 800 miles per hour. Even in Europe, the Concorde was phased out for being too expensive to operate.
But NASA intends to upgrade commercial flight with the X-59, bringing back airline travel at faster than the speed of sound. The X-59 not only has a quieter jet engine, it is mounted on top of the plane to reduce shock waves going to the ground. It also sports a slim fuselage that can slice through the air, again reducing shock waves.
They would have done much better getting their point across if they showed us the jet with natural sound. Read up on the advantages of the supersonic X-59 jet at Gizmodo.
(Top image credit: Lockheed Martin/Gary Tice)
Children's books are under the gun, but it's been that way for a long time. Usually it's for content that may be too sexual for some tastes, or too violent, or because someone's feelings were hurt. Sometimes the most innocuous books get a ban because people read things into them that aren't there at all, which tells us more about the book critic than about the book itself.
If you were to read a line in a children's book that said a character licked his lips, a well-read person would know that means they were anticipating eating something tasty. But that went completely over someone's head, or quite a few someones, because that was the line that got James and the Giant Peach banned in Wisconsin once. A spider licked her lips and that was interpreted as being overly sexual. Read about that case and those of eight other books that were banned for the strangest reasons at Cracked.
We all know that blue is not a natural color for food. The exception that proves the rule is blueberries, which have a delicate flavor that belies their dark and dramatic color and doesn't factor into junk food much at all. When we see bright blue candy or blue syrup, that's coded in our heads as raspberry flavor. Or more specifically, artificial raspberry flavor, which is actually pretty good even when it falls short of the real thing. Yeah, yeah, raspberries are red, except when they are black, or white, so how did that flavor become blue? I thought it was just a color assignment because red was already in use for cherry flavoring, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Blue raspberry is its own flavor, even though its artificial. Tom Blank of Weird History Food is glad to share the story of blue raspberry flavoring with us.
The cemetery of Trinity Churchyard in Manhattan had a stone slab engraved with the name of Charlotte Temple. People once made pilgrimages to the graveyard to lay flowers for poor Charlotte, a sympathetic character who died in poverty soon after childbirth, betrayed and forgotten in the city. But she was a character- a fictional character from the novel Charlotte, A Tale of Truth. It's not so well known these days, but it was America's best-selling novel between its publication in 1791 and the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 -and remained quite popular for another hundred years.
Many people who read Charlotte, A Tale of Truth didn't realize it was fiction (the word "truth" in the title could have been confusing). Others knew it was a novel, but also knew that author Susanna Rowson said it was based on a real person. So who is buried beneath the stone slab in New York City? To learn the answer, Atlas Obscura goes into the history of the novel, the churchyard, and the stone, and explains a relatively recent investigation into the mystery of Charlotte Temple's grave.
Storyful reports that Paul Eickhof recorded this video of three turkeys repeatedly circling a particular tombstone in a cemetery in North Dakota.
Why? Popular Science tells us that turkeys sometimes circle potential threats. Their circular motion on the ground reflects their practice of flying as flocks rather than individual.
But why this grave? What is it about the person buried here that the turkeys find so alarming?
-via Aelfred the Great, who understands the scope of the supernatural threat:
The ritual has begun.
— Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) February 16, 2025
Comes now the frostfire, the Unspeaking Men, the Scar in the Sky.
You will curse the day of your birth and yet be unable to look away.
Pray for cold iron. Pray for bones of stone. Pray.
The ritual has begun. https://t.co/GQPykOri0S
They're random, and they don't make any sense. That makes them the perfect tool of communication. That's the idea behind crop circles. But let me back up a minute.
It's obvious to any observer that super intelligent aliens have been keeping an eye on Earth for a long time, trying to come up with ways to communicate with us. So far they haven't hit upon a clear method of letting us know they are there, much less that they are more intelligent than we are. But they are brainstorming. Now, the whole idea of brainstorming is to throw ideas out there, no matter how illogical, in the hopes that it may lead the group to come up with something feasible and effective. As Ryan George demonstrates, it wouldn't be logical to assume that super intelligent beings who could travel from distant galaxies to enslave Earthlings can't figure out a better way to tell us about their plans. This video is less than three minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Mehdi Dakhli is a designer and art curator with a flair for creative furniture designs. His new Muravey Bench is designed to resemble a giant art scurrying through the home. It's an elegant form for a contemporary home that wants to attract the interest of guests without being gauche. Ants convey a sense of order and productivity to a society that cries out for bold new leadership.
And I for one welcome our insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted blogging personality, I can be helpful for rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
-via Toxel
Corporate bigwigs and mafia bosses in Sicily have something in common: they both complain about the "miserable" state of Gen Z recruits.
According to the Daily Mail, a Cosa Nostra don named Giancarlo Romano was caught by wiretap grumbling about how young criminals are too quick in agreeing to turn and become state witnesses when they got arrested. Apparently, the Italian carabinieri have been making these new mafia recruits an offer they can't refuse.
"If you watch The Godfather, the connections he had… he was very influential because of the power that he built at a political level. But us – what can we do?," Romano purportedly said, "'We're on our knees, guys. We think we do business, but these days it's others who do it. We used to be number one, now it's others… we're just Gypsies"
(Image: The Godfather/Paramount Pictures)
There's a special kind of terror that a parent feels when they see their child in sudden mortal danger.
It is never far from your thoughts.
The Guardian reports that Adrián Simancas and his father, Dell, were kayaking in the Bahía El Águila in the Strait of Magellan in southernmost Chile. Dell was recording their trip at the moment when a humpback whale swallowed his son. After a brief moment, the whale spat out the young man and his kayak.
Hypothermia was a serious danger in these frigid waters, so the two went to shore immediately. Adrián was, thankfully, unharmed.
-via Nag on the Lake
This watch is an example of of anti-theft pocket watch designs from the Victorian Era. Antique watch expert Dan Coatsworth explains that watches were so expensive at the time and so easy to steal that the spring-loaded spikes remain in place if the chain is pulled slowly, but project if the loop is pulled quickly. As in Dune, the slow blade penetrates the shield.
Some of the inventors took advantage of the cylindrical shape to craft charming acorn shapes. They all attempted to do harm or at least alarm to the would-be thieves.
-via Steampunk Tendencies
