If ever you have kids, then consider living in a place full of parks and lawns, as well as other greenery, as these could improve children’s IQ, apparently.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Belgium has found that children who grow up in areas with little greenery are at risk of scoring lower on IQ tests. In their paper posted on the open access site PLOS Medicine, the group describes their study of children's IQ and the amount of greenery where they were growing up, and what they found.

Prior research has shown that children who grow up in areas with less greenery experience more cognitive problems than those who grow up in greener areas. In this new effort, the researchers have found that growing up with less greenery can also reduce a child's intelligence.

Details about this study over at MedicalXpress.

(Image Credit: Tama66/ Pixabay)

Want to dye your dog’s hair without spending a penny? If yes, then just do this: let your dog play on freshly cut grass, and see the results after a few hours. It’s a win-win situation, actually: you get to dye your dog’s hair, while he gets to have fun. The only downside to this one, however, is that you don’t get to pick the dog’s color — it will always be green. But hey, the dogs love it, and I have pictures from Sad and Useless that will prove it!

See the pictures over at the site.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

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Wasn’t expecting to land it, pleasantly surprised 😏 #cardistry

A post shared by SEAN O. 📱 (@notseano) on Aug 23, 2020 at 9:44am PDT

Sean O. is a master of cardistry: the flourishing movement of cards in complex movements, seemingly without effort but actually only through talent and long practice. In this routine, he twists a deck (I'm sure there's a proper technical term in the field) while tossing one card swinging around his back and returning into the deck.

-via Born in Space

The USCGC Kimball, which is based in Hawaii, held a swim call on Wednesday. That's when the ship halts and allows crew members to go for a swim in the ocean. They posted a rescue swimmer and watchmen because it's always a bit dangerous to conduct a swim call.

Why? Well, there are sharks in the area. And while about 40 swimmers were in the water, an 8-foot shark swam up to them. One coastie armed with a rifle fired shots at the shark very close to his shipmates. According to Good Morning America, everyone made it safely back on board--including the unicorn floatie that you can see drifting at the end of the video.

Because normal-sized backscratchers only scratch a small part of your back, why not upgrade to this oversized backscratcher which could cover a large area?

The plastic rake measures 7.5″ across at its widest point, and has 15 tines that flex to match the contours of your back.

The tool only costs $24.99, which is pretty affordable, in my opinion.

What do you think?

(Image Credit: Redneck Backscratcher/ The Awesomer)

CanyonChasers gets an alert from his security system when someone comes onto his property. A surveillance camera shows who it is. This summer, it went off every evening at about the same time. What is he going to do about it? I think you'll enjoy the scheme he came up with. -via reddit

Vancouver author and Chinese history buff Xiran Jay Zhao introduces us to the poetry of Lu You, who lived 800 years ago. A few of his poems, written over a span of years, tells how he became a cat person simply by getting one cat to protect his books from rats.

decided to do a separate thread for this so here we go: how Song dynasty poet Lu You poem-liveblogged his descent from cat owner to cat slave 800 years ago

The year is 1183. Down On His Luck scholar-official Lu You gets a cat because rats keep munching on his books. 1/? pic.twitter.com/MdMgVdiY5V

— XIRAN, Chinese History Educational Memer (@XiranJayZhao) August 28, 2020

Subsequent poems hint that the cat later gets fish to eat, and then a rug to sleep on, and even catnip. Then come more cats. Eventually (we don't know if it's the same cat) his cat doesn't even bother with rats, and Lu You doesn't mind because he has become a cat person. But that's not the only term that could be used.

thank you for the hella vintage cat content!!!

— isweedan (@isweedan) August 28, 2020

Read the entire sequence (eight poems) in this Twitter thread, or at Threadreader. Those who have cats will understand completely. -via Metafilter

A lion named Frasier managed to sire 35 cubs in an 18-month period, despite the fact that he was an elderly cat, 19 years old when that particular adventure started. Frazier became famous for his feat, and even starred in a movie- although he was less successful as an actor than as a leonine sex symbol. Learn Frasier's story in the above video from Popular Science. -via Digg

Why do salt and pepper always go together, and why are they the only two additives found on all restaurant tables in Western nations? It wasn't always this way, and to find out how it happened, BBC Ideas gives us a short history of both salt and pepper. -via Laughing Squid

In Chicago, the Uptown tunnels connect the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge with several theaters and other businesses underground. Why would tunnels be built connecting unrelated businesses? Stories abound of the 1920s, when Prohibition made the liquor trade illegal, and Al Capone made a fortune supplying the city with booze.   

Numerous theories about the tunnels’ purpose abound, largely surrounding the Green Mill, a 1920s speakeasy and now classic jazz club. It was founded as Pop Morse's Roadhouse in 1907, a place for mourners to gather after funerals at the two nearby cemeteries. In 1910, it was sold and renamed the Green Mill Gardens, complete with bathrooms in the basement.

During Prohibition, the bar became a speakeasy with Capone connections, so people theorize the tunnels were used to run alcohol up to the bar, fueled by the fact the trap door is still in use behind the bar and alcohol kept in the basement. Others claim the tunnels were used as escape routes during police raids; folks could scamper underground and emerge elsewhere in Uptown as if nothing happened. Other ideas suggest illicit card games and liquor storage.

But the tunnels were not built with booze running in mind.

Still, it's not a great leap to think that these shenanigans may have happened. Read the real story behind the tunnels under Chicago, particularly the Uptown tunnels, at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user Keith Cooper)

In the Madonie mountains of Sicily, Giulio Gelardi works to save the manna industry, in which his family and a few other producers have toiled for generations. This manna is the sweet sap of the ash tree Fraxinus angustifolia. Once used as both a sweetener and a laxative, the natural sap was replaced by cheap cane sugar and artificial medications. But Gelardi has spent 40 years growing, perfecting, and promoting manna for a new generation.     

When I ask if his manna is the one referenced in the Bible, Giulio laughs. “As you can imagine, it’s a source of much debate in these parts,” he says. However, the biblical descriptions of manna being “like coriander seed, white” with a taste “like wafers made with honey” are consistent with Giulio’s product. Did it come from heaven? If we consider the phrase allegorical, then yes, it comes from up high and drips down onto the ground. Could it have sustained a generation of Israelites for months and helped them survive harsh conditions? Maybe. People have survived on less nutritious foods. By all accounts, if this is not the very same manna described in the Bible, it might as well have been.

Learn about manna's history, production, and future at Atlas Obscura.

If you grew up watching classic Disney movies or Warner Bros. cartoons from the Golden Age, you've no doubt encountered "facts" about the animal kingdom that are totally wrong. Some of these myths were continuations of misguided common knowledge from an earlier era, while others were supposed to apply to just one character. But children don't know that Bugs Bunny's carrot-chomping habit was a family-friendly substitute for Groucho Marx's ubiquitous cigar. And some things we learned about animals were just made up of whole cloth to make an interesting story.

See 18 pictofacts containing totally wrong information about animals from TV and movies at Cracked.

A woman of Omagh, Northern Ireland posted a photo of an angry dog she found eating a dead rabbit on the side of the road. What a weird thing to do. Disgusting and quite daring if you ask me. Who knows what diseases this wild dog could have had or whether it would savagely attack anyone who gets close to it? But, she decided to let her huge heart shine by letting the dog inside of her car and inside of her home. This shouldn't go well. She'd be lucky if it did.

While driving with this wild dog on her way home, she noticed how angry and 'wicked’ it acted. Ok, so she likely just thought that the dog just needed tender unconditional love from its family, and so she kept driving with this thing in her car for miles. You have to admit that this woman was quite brave to have continued to drive while this angry wild dog remained in her possession. Most of us would've pooped or at least peed our pants doing such a thing.

The dog was without a collar when she found it, she says. So she only hoped that if she wrote a post online that it would find the owner.

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United Airlines’ first class nuts are on sale. You don’t have to take any of their flights (with the pandemic, I’m not sure you can anyway) to get a taste of the airlines’ snack. The airlines stopped serving these nuts to passengers to reduce contact between passengers and flight attendants, as One Mile At A Time details: 

As a result, GNS Foods has more than 30,000 pounds of excess nuts… that’s a lot of nuts!

As Kim Peacock, owner of GNS Foods, describes the situation:

“Not only are we left with bags of mixes, we are also left with the raw ingredients and ingredient contracts from the suppliers. We were asked to maintain United’s costs on their mixes for one year. In order to do that, we had to sign raw ingredient contracts for one year. 

Now we’re left with these contracts. If nut prices rise, then you can sell the contract at a profit. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Nut prices fell, and the raw ingredient suppliers are looking to us to make up the difference! The other question is, ‘Where to go with all of these nuts?'”

Peacock believes these will be “scooped” up in no time:

Image via One Mile At A Time

An Indian travel company has announced a new bus service that can take passengers from New Delhi, India to London. The cost per passenger will be around $2,700. Private tourism company Adventures Overland will also take care of the passengers’ visa requirements, as Travel Update details: 

The package will also include stay at 4 or 5 star hotels. Overall, the bus will cover approximately 18,000 kilometers in 70 days.

Adventures Overland on August 15 announced the “first-ever hop-on/hop-off bus service between Delhi and London”, named “Bus to London”. People taking this tour will travel through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and France.

The idea was pushed by one of the co-founders of Adventures Overland after he and his colleagues did a road trip from India to London for three consecutive years in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Adventures Overland co-founder Tushar Agarwal told IANS, “We planned this trip after a lot of people passionate about travelling expressed their wish for a road trip to London. This was announced on August 15 and we hope that the first bus to London will be flagged off in May 2021.

Image via Travel Update