Back in the 1970s, there were as few as 200 golden lion tamarins in the wild. That's when efforts began to save the South American primate. Though still an endangered species, the population of the tamarin species in Brazil and other parts of the Atlantic Forest has rebounded to around 4,800 in a recent survey. The Golden Lion Tamarin Association in Brazil tells us that three factors are helping the tamarins.
About three dozen farmers are participating in a program to increase the tamarins' habitat area. One of those farmers, Ayrton Violento, has converted part of his farm to native fruit trees and he also has a nursery to provide trees to others in the reforestation program. Violento happily reported seeing more tamarin families living on his farm in recent years.
Between 2014 and 2019, the tamarin population dropped by more than a thousand individuals due to a yellow fever outbreak. Hundreds of tamarins were inocculated with a vaccine derived from the human yellow fever vaccine, and the outbreak subsided.
Also, the illegal pet trade was rampant in the 1960s, but strict enforcement against poachers has alleviated the problem, at least for tamarins. Read the details of this good news about the golden lion tamarinds of Brazil at ABC. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Pierre5018)
When a public restroom is this luxurious, you may want to just move in and stay! This sight in Nanjing, China, is the first part you see when you walk into the restroom at the very upscale Deji Plaza shopping mall. The hallway shown leads to a huge lounge packed with comfy seating. From there, you can move into the men's restroom, the women's restroom, a nursing lounge, or a medical room. Both the men's and women's restrooms also have a dressing room. The seven-room facility was designed by Shanghai-based firm X+Living. Notice the plants in the walls, the glossy flooring, and the light fixtures in the shapes of flowers and bees. The facilities are completely accessible, with room for wheelchairs, movable railing, and bidets. All rooms offer wireless phone charging and call buttons for assistance. I read no mention of an entrance fee. See the fancy fixtures and other details in a series of pictures at Architectural Digest. -via Moss and Fog
(Image credit: SFAP)
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You might have the cutest pet in history, but things can go wrong when you try to take a picture, because animals don't like to sit still and pose for you. They don't like to smile on command, and they can be downright creepy looking, caught on one frame while in motion. For example, Stanley doesn't always look like Slenderman's dog.
(Image credit: Energylegs23)
And sometimes you have no idea what's going on until you get a good look at the picture you took. The cat below was just looking out the window, and the photographer had no idea there was something looking back, until she saw what the flash illuminated.
(Image credit: elliotgranath)
But these animals have nothin' on Pixel. He always looks like that.
(Image credit: Pixel and Sophie)
Check out a gallery of 50 pet pictures that show how weird and creepy they can be at times, from oddly funny to downright terrifying, in a ranked list at Bored Panda.
Alfred Hitchcock always kept us in suspense with eerie stories of all kinds. He was particularly careful to craft his favorite characters, those evil villains. You might suspect at times that Hitch wanted to step into the role of the villain himself. In the short film Master of Suspense, he does just that. This is not artificial intelligence messing with the classics, this is Hitchcock himself, acting suspicious as he always did. Fabrice Mathieu (previously at Neatorama) edited down the relevant bits from the cameos Hitchcock made in more than thirty different films, and added some creative cutting and pasting. A new soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann ties it all together into a coherent narrative.
Master of Suspense also features Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Jimmy Stewart, Janet Leigh, Gregory Peck, and some other stars you might recognize. As in many of Hitchcock's films, a train plays a big part.
-Thanks, Fabrice!
Carl Scheele was an 18th century chemist who had some amazing accomplishments. He discovered oxygen, for instance. He also isolated and identified a slew of other elements, including molybdenum, tungsten, barium, hydrogen, and chlorine, plus a bunch of organic acids. But almost 300 years later, Scheele's name is known best for a pigment he developed called Scheele's Green, which became quite popular, especially in wallpaper. It was loaded with arsenic, however, which was released into the air when fungus consumed the wallpaper.
Scheele himself had a habit of studying his elements and compounds by sniffing them and tasting them, and ended up furthering our knowledge of how dangerous these chemicals can be. When he died at age 43, the cause of death was determined to be mercury poisoning. It probably didn't help that he had, over time, consumed a fair amount of arsenic, chlorine, and other heavy metals along the way. Scheele is only one of five scientists whose work ended up either killing them or making their lives miserable, tragically chronicled at Cracked.
Update: To be fair, Cracked's list could be described as "four scientists who brought destruction upon themselves, and one who brought destruction on everyone." However, Geoduck pointed out that the fifth, Thomas Midgley, was indeed killed by his own invention. Thanks, Geoduck!
You may have seen a visual comparison of the Titanic (the biggest ship of its time) with a modern cruise ship to show how enormous cruise ships have become. You also have to understand they are two different kinds of ships, with different purposes, and that's why they are built that way and look nothing alike. In fact, ocean cruises started out as a new idea that sprung up to keep ocean liners earning money in the off season, and grew substantially when people started traveling by plane. Not only were ocean liners refurbished to cruise, but new ships were designed specifically to make money on cruises alone. Today, cruise ships are pretty much modern resorts in one crowded building that happen to float. But at least you can tell people you've been to the Bahamas without having to drive or find a pit stop on the way. Vox takes us from luxury ocean liners to modern cruise ships and explains why they are so different.
Do you remember that time that the Idaho Department of Fish and Game dropped a bunch of beavers from an airplane and they parachuted into Chamberlain Basin? That was in 1948. The beavers took a look around at their new home and said, "We got a lot of work to do here." And boy, did they ever work! The beavers and their descendants built dams and transformed the area along Baugh Creek into a series of ponds and wetlands, which saved the local flora and fauna from the dangers of drought. Satellite imagery shows that the areas where beavers live are more lush and green than parts of Idaho with no beavers.
In 2018, the Sharps Fire blazed through Baugh Creek. In the aftermath, the picture above was taken. You can see that the creek has its own firebreak, built completely by beavers damming up the water. With the data we now have, ecologists are convinced that bringing in more beavers to other creeks would be a long-term strategy for dealing with wildfires and drought. Read what Idaho's beavers have done since they were resettled at YaleEnvironment360. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Fairfax and Whittle)
A 15-foot-tall statue of the head of the Sopranos family greets passengers at a train station in southeastern Lithuania. https://t.co/vR4kYSGoJL
— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) July 31, 2023
In a famous scene in The Sopranos, Tony Soprano, wearing slippers, boxer shorts, an undershirt, and a bathrobe, waddles out of his home to pick up the morning newspaper left in front of his house.
Now the people of Vilnius, Lithuania can reflect on the majesty of this moment whenever they take a train. This is the right and proper order of things.
Why does this monumental sculpture of Tony Soprano grace this particular train station? Atlas Obscura explains that Lithuanian artist Donatas Jankauskas made it in 2009 for a show appropriately called "Unexpected Places." Jankauskas is noted for his playful use of pop culture figures. After traveling extensively, the 15-foot tall statue found its final home at a train station in the city where Jankauskas first conceived of the premise.
The above image is a particular street in the village of Bauné in western France. The presence of the many painted lines is entirely intentional. Mayor Jean-Charles Prono explains to Euro News that the speed limit is 20 KPH, but drivers frequently reach speeds of 50 KPH. The idea is to make it difficult for drivers to figure out where they're supposed to drive, thus forcing them to slow down.
Some residents are not fond of this paint scheme and say that it makes pedestrian travel more dangerous rather than less. The mayor says that this is not a final design. It was an emergency measure to provide an immediate response to the danger.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Alerte Info Trafic 49
Major League Baseball has a formal and precise definition of a home run that includes all possible means of accomplishing the goal. It's not necessary for the batter to hit the ball over the fence. But, practically speaking, this is almost always how the batter is able to score.
A baseball field is a precisely laid out area, but the fence that separates it from the stands is not. That obstacle varies from stadium to stadium. The Washington Post has a helpful tool that lets us compare the fence lines of different stadia. Pictured above is Minute Maid Park in Houston and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
-via Flowing Data
In the vast spectrum between bankable movie stars and extras scrambling for jobs, there are character actors. They are the backbone of TV and movie productions, actors who are good at what they do and will take roles that don't get top billing. You see them over and over, and you'll recognize them from some other production, but knowing all their names is beyond the average entertainment consumer. Yes, they deserve recognition, and they deserve a successful resolution to the current SAG-AFTRA strike. To help you sort out who's who, Screen Junkies has put together a musical guide to character actors sung in the style of of "Yakko's World" from the TV series Animaniacs. Sure, there are a lot of them, but you can pause the video anywhere and look up the lyrics at the YouTube page. Or you can just enjoy the song and the clips. I predict your response as some point will be, "Yeah, I know that guy, I liked him in that one movie, but I didn't know he was also in that other movie!" These are the kinds of discussions that will make you miss a plot point in whatever it is you're watching.
It took a while, but the world has gotten used to the idea of sending encoded signals through the air. First radio and then TV broadcast signals, satellite signals, cellphones, and now wifi and bluetooth. In amongst those, we also got wireless remote controls for our television sets. There were a lot of different methods and technologies developed to enable us to sit on the couch and change the channel. My family never had a remote control when I was young, as my father didn't need one- he had children to change the channel for him. So I missed out on one bit of technology that's still amazing today. It's the remote that didn't need wires or batteries or any power source at all.
The Zenith Space Command went on the market in 1956. It was an improvement over earlier designs that had two problems. First, they depended on a beam of light, but there was interference from sunlight or other light sources, and you had to aim it exactly right to trip the receiver. Second, other wireless remotes depended on batteries, and when they ran down, people thought their TVs were broken. It was the 1950s, after all. Zenith's Space Command remote used neither light nor batteries, and depended on sound to signal the set receiver. It was a a completely mechanical idea that still impresses us today. Read how it worked at the Verge. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Marcin Wichary)
Tom Scott is back out in the road finding weird places to tell us about. Tomorrow Bio is a new cryonics lab in Switzerland. While they store their dead clients at very low temperatures (-196°C), they will tell you that they aren't freezing them. The liquids in the body are replaced with antifreeze, but not the kind you put in your radiator, and the word they use is "vitrify." The dictionary tells us the process of vitrification uses heat and fusion, so they must be talking about something different, although it's not fully explained.
Will this technique work? Will these bodies ever be resuscitated? Most likely not, but the company frames it as a research project instead of a promise. You can't assign numbers to the odds of success in a project like this like you can in a lottery, but like the lottery, your odds of success rise ever so slightly if you buy a ticket.
In order to survive a destination wedding deep in the Guatemalan rainforest, the author must submit to heat, terrain, and a small blood sacrifice https://t.co/Kw43Ct6B4P
— Outside (@outsidemagazine) July 20, 2023
Would you hike for five days into the Guatemalan jungle to the ruins of an ancient Maya pyramid with no facilities in July to watch your friends get married? Melissa Johnson said sure, even though she was ten years older than the other 13 people on the trip. They traveled 60 miles through the lush rainforest and battled high humidity and voracious insects to witness Angela and Suley's nuptials, even though neither of them had any connection with Guatemala. It sounds like a dangerous idea, and it was. Johnson considers herself a brave person, but then she thought about the viruses and parasites transmitted by mosquitos, ticks, and other insects that flourish in Central America. And she was indeed attacked in her sleep, in an episode some might categorize as "too much information." The clandestine wedding was glorious, but then the group decided to take a shortcut back out, without considering how much vegetation had grown over the unused route during the rainy season. It was an adventure you'll be glad you didn't go on, but you can read about it at Outside magazine. -via Nag on the Lake
You might be aware that Vantablack is the blackest color humans have produced. It absorbs up to 99.96 percent of light, but you can't get it because its use is restricted to one artist. But you can buy Musou black paint, which absorbs up to 99.4 percent of light. The effect of either is surreal, as if Photoshop were involved, because we are used to painted surfaces reflecting light. Or any surface for that matter.
James Orgill of The Action Lab had been experimenting with Musou black paint. But then he found that Musou black comes in a fabric, too! So he covered a car in the Musou black fabric called Kiwami, which seems like velvet, except there is no part that shines like velvet, from any angle. At about 2:30 in this video, you get to see a comparison between the fabric and the car's regular black paint. The original paint looks almost light gray! Then he took the car out to show off, both in daylight and at night. I wouldn't want to drive this car in dim twilight without the headlights on. Then he eventually finds out how much light it takes to get a reflection from the car.
This video is only five minutes long. The rest is an ad. -via Born in Space
