A Florida woman named Kris Hedstrom has filed a lawsuit against her neighbor, Heather Dayner. Hedstrom seeks a paternity test for five Nigerian dwarf goats — Bella, Gigi, Rosie, Zelda and Margoat — that she bought from Heather for $900.

According to the lawsuit, Hedstrom believed the goats… could be registered with the American Dairy Goat Association, a group that records goat pedigrees. Registered goats have higher values than unregistered goats.

Dayner, who has been selling goats at Baxter Lane Farm for about 10 years, typically provides information to her clients so they can register their animals themselves.

She said the father goat was registered, but the Tampa Bay Times reports the American Dairy Goat Association rejected Hedstrom’s application to register the babies because Dayner is not an active member.

[...]

Dayner offered to refund the money in exchange for the goats.

Apparently, Hedstrom had been calling the police on Dayner constantly for three months straight and even trespassed on Dayner’s farm.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: HoppingRabbit34/ Wikimedia Commons)

Walter Murch was contemplating bar-headed geese. These geese spend their summers in Kazakhstan or Mongolia, and their winters in India. To migrate, they must fly over the Himalayan Mountains. That's a feat that requires world-class lungs, so Murch decided to write a story for his granddaughter explaining how they work.

All mammals, including us, breathe in through the same opening that we breathe out. Can you imagine if our digestive system worked the same way? What if the food we put in our mouths, after digestion, came out the same way? It doesn’t bear thinking about! Luckily, for digestion, we have a separate in and out. And that’s what the birds have with their lungs: an in point and an out point. They also have air sacs and hollow spaces in their bones. When they breathe in, half of the good air (with oxygen) goes into these hollow spaces, and the other half goes into their lungs through the rear entrance. When they breathe out, the good air that has been stored in the hollow places now also goes into their lungs through that rear entrance, and the bad air (carbon dioxide and water vapor) is pushed out the front exit. So it doesn’t matter whether birds are breathing in or out: Good air is always going in one direction through their lungs, pushing all the bad air out ahead of it.

How did birds get such great lungs? They inherited them from dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs! When I was growing up in the 1940s, there was a category in biology called Aves, which meant birds. But scientists have now folded Aves into a category called Dinosauria, and those dinosauria, like pigeons and seagulls and geese, are flying all around us today. If you want to know what a dinosaur probably tasted like, eat some chicken!

But how did dinosaurs evolve the great lungs they eventually bequeathed to birds? The answer involves plants, gravity, fungus, and oxygen. Oh yeah, and dinosaurs. The entire story, delightfully told at an understandable level, is at Nautilus.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Rodrick rajive lal)

It appears that DNA evidence shows that huskies, malamutes, and sled dogs descended from Siberian wolves. The genomes of modern Greenland sled dogs were compared to a 9,500-year-old sled dog found in Siberia and a 33,000-year-old Siberian wolf. Curiously, the genomes suggest that sled dogs did not descend from any lineage of American wolves.  

The site at Zokhov Island that yielded the 9,500-year-old sled dog genome also includes physical evidence of sleds and harness materials. Bone analysis has led one team of scientists to suggest that the site may represent the earliest-known evidence for dog breeding, with sledding as a goal, and that the process may have started as long as 15,000 years ago.

The sled dogs’ genetic history aligns with archaeological evidence. Together, the findings suggest the dogs have been established for nearly 10,000 years and have spent those many millennia doing the same things they do today.

What were sled dogs doing back then? Evidence shows that they were helping to transport large game, such as polar bears and reindeer, to human communities. Read more about the study of the lineage of modern sled dogs at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Markus Trienke)

Magnus Egerstedt of Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering watched sloths in Costa Rica and was inspired to create a robot that was just as energy-efficient, if a bit slow. The result is SlothBot, a robot that slowly monitors the environment at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

Built by robotics engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to take advantage of the low-energy lifestyle of real sloths, SlothBot demonstrates how being slow can be ideal for certain applications. Powered by solar panels and using innovative power management technology, SlothBot moves along a cable strung between two large trees as it monitors temperature, weather, carbon dioxide levels, and other information in the Garden’s 30-acre midtown Atlanta forest.

All that, and it's cute, too! -via Laughing Squid

Face it, girl, he's just not that into you. Julie Nolke (previously at Neatorama) plays three friends discussing a man. I've heard this exact conversation both among friends and in my head, and the upshot from my many years of experience is to listen to the Julie on the left. Contains NSFW language. -via reddit

Johnny Harris goes on a rant about the standard American breakfast, but it has a lot of interesting information in it. American breakfast comes in two versions; the "diner breakfast" which he describes as IHOP serves it, and the sugar-encrusted cold cereals that paid for all those Saturday morning cartoons. These are not the only ways to eat breakfast, and we can all benefit from expanding our menus ...or even skipping breakfast. The video is 10:40; the rest is promotion and ads.  -via Digg

When cartography enthusiast Cameron Bennett went into quarantine in March, he needed something to keep him busy. His solution was to build an accurate topographical map of Idaho using accurate data and cartographic software. To acquire the necessary blocks, Bennett used LEGO's precise purchasing system:

If you run out of pieces in one or more colors (as I did) and are too stubborn to downsize and start over (as I am), Lego offers the ability to order exact pieces using their Pick-a-Brick service. Be warned, shipping times were especially slow under COVID restrictions. Through some quick searches, I found a handful of Ebay vendors peddling pieces at slightly more competitive prices, with less control over piece and quantity selection.

-via Flowing Data

The photograph above has not been filtered nor Photoshopped. It's a rainbow swamp!

With its sometimes-swampy landscape stippled with soaring cypresses, Congaree National Park in central South Carolina looks like a prehistoric diorama. And occasionally it also resembles a Lisa Frank folder come to life. When conditions are right, standing water appears orangey, blue, and pinky-red—hues usually reserved for garish school supplies or swirls of melted sherbert on a hot day.

Find out the precise conditions that cause this colorful effect and how you can see it yourself at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: National Park Service)

As one who has dealt with the dinner dishes for more years than I care to admit, one thing I will admit is that this headline kind of floored me. Dishes must be clean! Clean them all the way! Well, that's what I tried to teach my children. Then I stopped to think, I use two coffee cups over and over, one for tea and the other for coffee. I don't wash them often; I just rinse one as I switch to the other. Yes, they get stained, but a little Comet will fix that ...later. So no one is perfect, and some people would like to wash their dishes less.  

For real: So what if there’s a little sauce residue here, or a bit of caked-on food there. I mean, a half-assed rinsed-out glass of lemonade isn’t going to hurt anybody, right?

Incredibly, the experts agree. “Unless you’ve been working with raw meats or a plate that’s been used by someone who has been sick, the risk is quite low, and so [keeping your dishes perfectly clean] may not be as important from a microbiological perspective,” says Jason “The Germ Guy” Tetro.

Read what's important and what's not important in dishwashing from a microbial viewpoint at Mel magazine.

Ze Frank found an animal to make fun of that's closer to our own genome than most of his targets. The fact that macaques are taxonomically close to us, relatively, may make you uncomfortable because this video contains lots of monkey butts. However, macaques turn out to be pretty smart.

It won’t be a surprise if you haven’t heard about it, as the ambitious pitch got nowhere. Jon Burton, founder of LEGO series stalwarts Traveller’s Tales, shared footage from a scrapped Lord of the Rings / Hobbit game attempt he and the studio made. Kotaku has more details: 

Technically, it was a pitch for a Hobbit game, to be based on what was at the time a project still headed by Guillermo del Toro (Lord of the Rings director Jackson would only take over later). But in order to best capture the feel of Middle Earth without actually having seen any of the visual design that had been done for the Hobbit films, Traveller’s Tales decided to use iconic sequences from Lord of the Rings to illustrate their vision and tech.

Sadly, as Burton says, the pitch never got anywhere because rights holders Warner Bros. wanted a game that ran alongside the movie, not recreating its events. And it’s not like TT didn’t then get to make two LEGO games based on The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings a few years later anyway.

image via Kotaku

Mental Floss once again makes us think very hard with their new brain teaser, this time making us guess which of these 41 pasta names are real. While some can be easily identified as real pasta names, others aren’t, and as someone who isn’t very familiar with the Italian language, I was left with nothing but my gut feel. Despite that being the case, I still was able to guess 12 pasta names correctly.

Check out the quiz over at the site and tell your score in the comments below.

(Image Credit: Mental Floss)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, more commonly known as NASA, is planning to send astronauts back on the Moon once again. But unlike before when the Apollo missions left 96 bags of human poo on our planet’s only natural satellite because they didn’t have toilets back then, the agency is now planning to build a space toilet stationed there.

And in order to create the best Moon toilet the Solar System has to offer, NASA wants to hear from members of the public who might have ideas on the best way to manufacture an easy-to-use lunar restroom.

Today, NASA is announcing the “Lunar Loo Challenge,” a competition in partnership with HeroX to come up with the best space toilet for the agency’s future human lunar lander. As part of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024, the lander will take astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon’s surface. That means the restroom on board has to be versatile: it will need to work in orbit, where the astronauts will be weightless, and also when astronauts are experiencing one-sixth of Earth’s gravity on the lunar surface. And without much gravity, things can get a little messy if you don’t prepare.

More details about this challenge over at The Verge.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

With its furry skin and its bill that greatly resembles that of a duck’s beak, not to mention that it lays eggs much like other birds, one would really have a hard time classifying the platypus. Is it a bird, or is it a mammal? Throughout many decades, scientists have been really puzzled by these strange creatures, with the taxonomists taking over eight decades just to decide if they were mammals or birds.

The platypus was first described in literature by George Shaw in the British Museum, who, along with many of his contemporaries, suspected it was a hoax. Most early scientists correctly assumed it was a mammal based on its fur, but working only from skins they knew nothing else. The dried bill strongly resembled an actual duck beak, and its first Latin name was Platypus anatinus: the flat foot duck. The name stuck even though these creatures were renamed Ornithorhynchus anatinus, which, for the record, means duck-like bird snout.

The more nineteenth century biologists learned about platypuses, the more confused they became.

Learn more about these strange mammals over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: Stefan Heinrich/ Wikimedia Commons)

Drones may be the cooler and safer method to deliver stuff into people’s homes especially during these trying times. There’s just one problem, however. They have a short battery life, and a very limited flight range, only capable of flying for about half an hour per battery charge. With these factors in mind, scientists now look for ways in order to conserve a drone’s battery, which thereby increases a drone’s effective flight range. One suggestion that they have is that drones hitch rides on top of public buses.

Led by associate professors Mykel Kochenderfer and Marco Pavone, a team at Stanford University started by creating computer models in which drones were making deliveries in North San Francisco and Washington, DC. These models incorporated the existing public bus networks, with up to 200 drones per city delivering as many as 5,000 packages.

Through their study, the scientists found out that through this method, drones could quadruple their effective flight range.

Check out New Atlas to know more about this study.

(Image Credit: pixel2013/ Pixabay)