We've posted before about how modern cities are designed for automobiles, which is not necessarily a good thing. But what are you going to do about it? Believe it or not, there are cities who have taken the step of ripping out highways to reduce traffic and bring city life back to people. That doesn't mean those areas are free of streets, but without multi-lane highways, commuters take longer routes around where they once went straight through the neighborhoods. And the results are looking good.

One of the most transformative freeway removal projects not only tore out a dirty highway from a city center, it actually daylighted a lost waterway. An elevated highway had been built through Seoul in 1976 as a way to boost economic prospects in a low-lying area which had become a slum. In 2003, the city’s mayor proposed to remove the freeway and and turn the site into green space, which also required naturalizing the creek that once ran there.

Not only has the greenway become a well-loved part of the city, it has proven to benefit the city in many different ways. The temperature of the inner city has dropped several degrees, and birds, fish and other wildlife have returned to the urban core. Also, since the freeways were removed, fewer people are driving into the city, choosing to take public transit or other options. They even left a few freeway pillars as reminders of what came before.

Read about five other cities that removed urban highways, plus one in the planning stages, at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Flickr user hoteldephil)

In the 19th century, the railroad was the biggest thing going. Like the internet, it connected people across long distances, promoted exploration of new places, and captured the popular imagination. The fascination with trains gave birth to the craze for model trains and the worlds they traveled. Whether they came pre-assembled or you built your own, it was a hobby that reigned for around 100 years. But times have changed.      

In recent decades, selling model trains to children of either gender has been equally challenging, as author and self-described “recovering model railroader” Gerry Souter explained to me recently. He and his wife, Janet, have written a half-dozen or so books on the hobby. “I have breakfast every Tuesday with some friends of mine who run trains,” he says, “and I still have all the kits I built. I love model trains, and I enjoy going to conventions to sell our books.”

Unfortunately, Souter doesn’t see a lot of children at those events. “The average age of a model railroader is 40-plus,” Souter says with a sigh. That may be optimistic: According to a “Wall Street Journal” article published just last year, the average age of the National Model Railroad Association’s 19,000 or so members is 64, up alarmingly from 39 in the mid-1970s.

That’s too bad, because today’s analog model trains have plenty to offer 21st century’s digital kids. Though many trains are sold pre-assembled, there are still a lot of do-it-yourself kits out there, making them a good fit for those inspired by Maker and DIY culture. In addition, despite the historic image of locomotives belching black smoke everywhere they go, real trains are surprisingly efficient in terms of their energy consumption, making them one of the greenest modes of transportation going. As for train layouts, they can be as traditional or as far-fetched as a child’s imagination will allow, snaking through everything from forests of living dwarf conifers to cityscapes constructed entirely of LEGOs.

Read about the rise and fall of model trains at Collectors Weekly.

Jokgu is a piano-playing chicken. We've seen chickens peck at toy pianos and produce sounds, but Jokgu has been clicker-trained and is equipped with a keyboard that lights up the notes in sequence. Still, it can't be easy to get a bird-brained hen to perform a song this well.

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Jokgu's owner, Shannon Myers, has a coop full of chickens who record music under the name The Flockstars. Their music is fairly haphazard, but Jokgu stands head and shoulders above the rest as the real talent of the flock. You can follow the musical chickens and their owners at Facebook. -via HuffPo

Dami Lee says this comic is

Based on a true story of some cool, normal college gals doing cool, normal college things on a Friday night.

I can believe that. But that Friday night turned out to be really memorable. It takes only one such experience to turn you into the kind of person who checks the date on the milk. Check out more of her comics at As Per Usual.

Do you know what happens when you use a road for hundreds of years without paving it? Foot traffic, horses, and vehicles wear away the soil, sinking the road down into the ground. Europe has many of these holloways, although a casual traveler might not see them because they aren't the well-maintained highways that will get you from here to there in a hurry. Instead, they are attractions in themselves.

Appearing as trenches dredged through the earth or tunnels cleared through forests, these ancient pathways called holloways or sunken lanes are found all across the European countryside. They originally began at the ground level, but over the centuries, under the tread of a million feet and hooves encompassing thousands of journeys, the floor of these roads have worn away and eroded down to the bedrock, creating ditches that lay beneath the level of the surrounding landscape. With high banks on either side, many of these ancient thoroughfare then became temporary waterways during rains, which further deepened and widened the paths making them permanent features of the landscape. Some of these paths are twenty to thirty feet deep, and look more like gorges than roads.

You can see plenty of photographs of the different holloways of Europe at Amusing Planet. -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Romain Bréget)

Look! It's a collection of noses! Where'd they come from? Futility Closet explains. See, the philosophy of preserving ancient art changed. In the 19th century, art museum curators would replace the missing noses on ancient Greek and Roman statues with replacement noses, to make them look whole and original. Later, preservationists decided that adding parts hundreds of years later actually ruined the authenticity of those ancient statues, so the replacement noses were removed. Sometimes those noses were collected and displayed, and such a collection is called a Nasothek. The Nasothek pictured here is from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen. -via Nag on the Lake

This picture of Romanian oceanographer Emil Racovitza in his underwater diving suit was taken in 1899. From what we know of photography in that era, cameras were large and fragile, and subjects had to sit for a long exposure to let enough light in. How did they manage that underwater? Photographer pioneer Louis Marie Auguste Boutan, who took the picture, had to invent the equipment to do it -and the underwater flash machine he came up with was thoroughly dangerous, yet it did the job. Read about the tech that went into the first underwater portrait at PetaPixel. -via Digg

When America officially entered World War II on December 8, 1941, Japan, Germany, and Italy suddenly became our enemies. That posed a problem, both cognitively and legally, for the thousands of American immigrants from those countries, and even descendants of immigrants. Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942, which most famously led to the relocation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to internment camps. But it also affected Italian-Americans. More than 50,000 were forcibly relocated, and 600,000 were registered and forbidden to travel outside their cities. And many had their homes and businesses seized.  

One morning in spring 1942, federal officers knocked on the door of a New Haven home. The man who opened the door, Pasquale DeCicco, was a pillar of his community and had been a U.S. citizen for more than 30 years. He was taken to a federal detention center in Boston, where he was fingerprinted, photographed and held for three months. Then he was sent to another detention facility on Ellis Island.

Still with no hearing scheduled, he was moved again to an immigration facility at Fort Meade, Maryland. On July 31, he was formally declared an enemy alien of the United States. He remained at Fort Meade until December 1943, months after Italy’s surrender. He was never shown any evidence against him, nor charged with any crime.

Read more stories of how Executive Order 9066 affected Italian-Americans at Smithsonian. 

Here's a mashup you probably never thought about before. Cosplayer Ginny Di dressed up and posed for a set of photographs depicting Harry Potter characters Hermione, Luna, and Ginny in classic cheesecake scenes inspired by artist Gil Elvgren. The prints from this project are for sale during February only at Ginny Di's shop. Some Harry Potter fans will be getting these as a Valentines Day gift!

You can see all six Harry Potter cosplay images alongside their pinup inspirations at Geeks Are Sexy, and see more Ginny Di cosplay at Instagram.

(Image credit: Josh Randall (left) and Gil Elvgren (right))

Most vertebrates go to any length necessary to protect their vital spinal cord. The barbled dragonfish is not that concerned, and has dispensed with continuous neck bones as a tradeoff for eating bigger prey. A study by Nalani Schnell and David Johnson described the small but scary-looking fish's anatomy as having a gap between the neck and head where no bone restricts its head movement.

Now, to add to the freak show, it appears some barbeled dragonfish have a rather freestyle connection between their head and their body—one that allows them to achieve a 120 degree wide, banshee-like mouth gape.

“We certainly know of no other fishes with this feature,” Johnson told Gizmodo. Most vertebrates have bone-to-bone joints between the head and the neck, including us, he added.

The discovery came about through Schnell’s dissertation work, which focused on the peculiar anatomy of the barbeled dragonfish’s upper vertebra. Her early research showed that these creatures have a “flexible gap” between the occipital bones at the base of the skull, and the first ossified vertebra of the neck. Within this flex region, notochord tissue—a cartilage-like material that runs through the spines of all vertebrates—lacks the typical bony outer casing.

The fish is apparently unaware of how easy a spinal cord can snap. But since it lives in the deep and can withstand pressures we cannot, it's a safe bet to say that the marbled dragonfish is pretty tough. Read more about the research at Gizmodo.

In this wordless German ad, a man goes for some target practice and fails to impress the shooting range manager. What is it supposed to be advertising? The message is subtle, but effective.

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That's what he gets for forming an opinion before all the facts are in. The eyes have it. Take care of your vision with the proper eye drops. -via reddit

The title sounds like a question a five-year-old would ask, and most of us would reply with something like "I don't know," or "It has to be some color." But it's a valid question, and MinuteEarth has the answers, which give us an amazing glimpse into the complex chemistry of our bodies.

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The main reason we don't have the answers for our kids is that the subject of bathroom functions was once not spoken of in polite society. Or even in school. But it's part of the way our bodies work, so the more we know, the better we can take control of our own health. -via Laughing Squid 

In Las Vegas, it's illegal to abandon a pet. But people do it anyway, just not at a shelter. People who have abandoned pet rabbits by just setting them free have sparked a takeover that might remind one of the movie Night of the Lepus.  

The yards, parks and lots of Vegas are home to thousands of feral rabbits. Known as “bunny dump sites” to the legions of volunteers that care for their residents, they’re strange places, more tragic than adorable, where the human heart clashes with the limited resources of the state. Released by overwhelmed pet-owners and left to breed, the rabbits now overwhelm any attempt at government control, digging up public property, chewing on pipes, and ending up dead in the sewers. To survive, they depend entirely on the kindness of self-identified “bunny-lovers”—volunteers faced with an impossible task.

People feed the abandoned bunnies, but that leads to more bunnies. Local shelters are trying to "trap, neuter, and release" the rabbits, but have limited funds, and that's technically illegal anyway because of the abandonment regulation. Read about the bunny infestation in Las Vegas at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Dave Schweiger)

Movies and TV shows that really grab us never get old. We revisit them time after time and relive the way we felt when we first saw them. However, the people that make those movies age the same way the rest of us do. Scratch that… celebrities age more slowly than the rest of us. Still, when decades pass and we then see a cast reunion picture, it brings home how old that movie or TV show really is. Dominic Monaghan, who played Merry in The Lord of the Rings movies, recently posted this photo of cast members getting together. I almost didn't recognize Aragorn, or Legolas, or any of them outside Elijah Wood (Frodo). How much have the casts of other pop culture franchises changed over the years? See images of them, taken then and again more recently, at TVOM. 

Sometimes a funeral is just a mistake all around. You can't give someone an elaborate sendoff id they're not dead! In these stories of people who were alive at their funerals, they mainly turn out to be either 1. mistaken identity, 2. mistaken declaration of death, or 3. a prank. Each reason makes a great story.  

6. THE REAWAKENING THAT INSPIRED A HOLIDAY

The village of Braughing in Hertfordshire, England, celebrates "Old Man’s Day" on October 2 each year. The tradition dates back to 1571, and the funeral of a local farmer by the name of Matthew Wall. On the way to his funeral, though, one of his pallbearers dropped his coffin.

It’s a good thing he did, because the jolt promptly woke up Wall up. The farmer would live for over two decades more, finally passing away in 1595. His coming back to life continues to be cause for celebration in Braughing.

8. THE MAN WHO TURNED UP DRUNK AT HIS OWN FUNERAL

When Ecuadorian man Edison Vicuna went missing for three days, his friends and family assumed the worst. Especially when the body turned up of a man whose face had been severely disfigured following a car accident. A post-mortem was performed, and the corpse was confirmed to be Vicuna’s.

Only it wasn’t. In fact, come his funeral, Vicuna turned up, drunk, causing mourners to scream in horror. The funeral, as you might expect, was halted, and the body was returned to the morgue, where it was properly identified as belonging to someone entirely different.

Read all the other true tales of people who turned up alive at their own funerals at mental_floss.

(Image credit: Heavensowns)