This couple in Mexico were considering getting a dog, but fate intervened. A kitten mysteriously showed up at their house, riddled with fleas and other parasites. Lilo needed help, and when he got it, he wasn't about to let these wonderful people go. He became a velcro cat, following them everywhere.
The guy says it makes "zero sense" that Lilo just showed up like that. As an old cat lady, it makes plenty of sense to me. Lilo didn't walk to their home. Someone who cares so little that they didn't get their cat spayed ended up with a bunch of kittens. As soon as they were barely old enough to be weaned, any kitten not given away got a ride to a random neighborhood and was put out. The kitten is desperate for help, and will approach every human until they find a kind soul. I can't tell you how many cats I've gotten that way. You can see more of Lilo and his loving nature at Instagram.
On Valentine's Day in 1991, a new film opened that ruined quite a few romantic evenings. Silence of the Lambs had been marketed with few clues as to its content, and became a monster hit. Thirty-five years later, it is mainly remembered for the character of Hannibal Lecter. People forget that he wasn't the villain in the movie. They forget how little screen time he had. And many never even knew that it wasn't the first time Lecter was in a movie. Anthony Hopkins portrayal of the cannibal killer stayed with audiences forever.
In an excerpt from a new book about Hannibal Lecter, we learn that Thomas Harris, who created Hannibal Lecter as the author of the novel, couldn't watch the movie, or even get through the trailer. Silence of the Lambs made Anthony Hopkins a sex symbol decades after he began film work. Audiences were glad that Lecter not only survived the movie, but gained his freedom. Read how Silence of the Lambs took audiences by surprise and made Hannibal Lecter an antihero. -via Metafilter
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!
These are the words that William Shatner says at the beginning of Star Trek. The rhetorical origins of these words is complex, as is the textual history.
X personality Subcommander Tal shares earlier drafts of the narration by Bob Justman, John D.F. Black, and Gene Roddenberry. They reflect different visions of what the story, originally conceived of as a "wagon train to the stars" would become. Personally, I'm glad that Captain Kirk engaged in little commercial inspection and customs enforcement.
People in Louisville, Kentucky are calling this dog "Lassie" because they don't know his real name. Lassie fits, though, because the dog is a hero like the fictional female Collie. WLKY News reports that police searched a neighborhood for a missing 3-year old boy. The weather was cold and the boy was insufficiently dressed for it, so officers had a strong sense of urgency.
A local dog, who appears to be a stray, attracted the attention of one officer, who followed the dog into a home lot where a SUV was parked. The child had locked himself inside. Police freed him and took the child to safety.
A pet tortoise escaped a fire in Southern California after a heat lamp fell and ignited the shed where she lives.
— AccuWeather (@accuweather) February 10, 2026
Security camera footage shows the tortoise, named Leo, moving to safety as flames spread behind her. Leo’s owner was not home at the time, but neighbors were able… pic.twitter.com/pADeOkR5TN
People magazine reports that on February 8, the home of Leo, a female sulcata tortoise, caught on fire when her heatlamp malfunctioned. Her human, Hyeri Tom, was away at a Super Bowl party when the incident took place.
Surveillance camera footage shows Leo sprinting away from the flames to safety. Neighbors noticed the fire and put it out.
The recoil of a rifle can leave quite a bruise if you aren't properly braced. Most people only have to learn this lesson once. A young man named Rob noticed this force and imagined making a jetpack out of the recoil force of a rifle. Is this at all plausible? He submitted it to Randall Munroe and Henry Reich of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama) as a theoretical question. They tackle those questions seriously, no matter how dumb they sound. The answer is "sort of," meaning that you could do it, but it would be difficult, ridiculous, and not worth the effort.
But there are guns that have more powerful recoils than a mere rifle. And that's where this theory gets interesting. Not that we're ever going to try making a jetpack from a gun, but the existence of a gun that could do it is both interesting and unnerving.
Suspended animation in movies is an easy way to skip very long space flights. Launch, go to sleep, and wake up on a habitable world light years away to find that you are no older. These fictional trips often involve low temperatures as a sort of cryopreservation. The idea of suspended animation came from hibernation, when animals sleep through the winter until there is more food available in the spring.
Except that's not how hibernation actually works. It doesn't require cold, and it doesn't necessarily involve sleep. And it can vary depending on the animal and the conditions it is hibernating to escape. Hibernation, or torpor, is the animal's ability to reduce its metabolism, therefore requiring less energy. In an era in which we are considering long distance space travel for real, a reduction in energy consumption would be quite useful, even more so than combatting the boredom of traveling in space for years. The question of aging is another factor. Will humans ever be able to hibernate to "bear" long space trips? If we can, it probably won't resemble what you've seen in movies.
Before you start packing, keep in mind that you will need cold weather gear. Hd 137010 B is Earth-like in the sense that Antarctica is Earth-like. Pat Brennan of NASA says that this world lies at the outer edge of the habitable zone of the star that it orbits. It's slightly larger than Earth, so perhaps the gravity is bearable.
But it's also chilly. That said, it's possible that Hd 137010 B has liquid water if it has a suitable atmosphere.
Proposal: to encourage immigration to this new frozen world, we need a name more appealing than Hd 137010 B. Perhaps "Greenland."
-via Discovery magazine | Image: Artist's conception of Hd 137010 B by NASA
After World War II, the race was on for the US to build more and better technology than the Soviet Union, which gave us many weird projects that were launched without anyone asking what could possibly go wrong. Space, being the final frontier, was at the head of the list (along with nuclear arsenals, of course). But communications was also important. We didn't have communication satellites yet, so the next best thing would be to fling something into space that radio signals could bounce off of, like 480,000,000 copper needles. And they did it! Somehow, no one could foresee the problem of space junk in the early 1960s. After all, nothing was up there, so why would it bother anyone? Project West Ford required several attempts, but they eventually got those needles into space. This video from Half as Interesting is only seven minutes long; the rest is an ad.
LEGO Ideas member PrintNerd used standard LEGO pieces to make models of historical printing presses that really work. On the left is a roller-based press made of 163 pieces. On the right is a lever-operated platen press composed of 312 pieces.
These articulated designs will actually print when used with ink and paper. Like any other printing press, they transfer designs by mashing the design with controlled pressure.
Although other LEGO users use blocks and combinations thereof to engage in printmaking, these projects appear to be rare replications of actual printing machines.
-via Design Boom
The El Camino is an expression of a peculiar part of the American soul. It was a coupe utility vehicle--that is a car in the front and a truck in the back. Sort of an automotive version of a mullet.
The El Camino name refers to a specific Chevrolet model, but Dodge and Ford also produced similar vehicles. But as "Coke" refers to soda generally in the more sophisticated parts of the United States, so does the El Camino refer to this entire type of car.
Jalopnik brings to our attention this custom 1981 Mercedes 280SE that has been chopped and modified into a coupe utility. This combination of European elegance and American practicality is for sale on Facebook Marketplace.
Only one of these five presidents made this list.
Most of the 45 men who became President of the United States were well educated and began public service as lawyers or military members (or both) and worked their way up the political ladder. Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson are well-known for their many accomplishments outside of the White House. Then there are a few you might not realize were experienced in something completely different from what they are remembered for. One president knew seven languages besides English, and worked as an interpreter as well as a diplomat. Another had completed medical school. One had an original proof for the Pythagorean theorem published in a scientific journal. And you may be surprised by the only president who held a patent.
In the run up to President's Day in the 250th year of our country, Smithsonian will, no doubt, bring us lots of history and trivia about presidents. Today they tell us about eight presidents who had distinguished but lesser-known accomplishments outside of their presidential terms.
(Image credit: White House Photograph Office/Barbara Kinney)
In case you want to enjoy Bad Bunny's halftime show from the big football game yesterday, but you don't have much time and cannot understand Spanish anyway, Dustin Ballard of There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) has edited it down into a compact supercut. This version only has the "Eys." Yes, he has certainly ruined it this time. -via reddit
If you want to see the full presentation, it's at YouTube. Since you still don't know Spanish, or maybe you're not all that familiar with Bad Bunny's music, Becky Hammer offers a detailed explanation of every song and cultural element of the show. Be warned that the subject matter is sometimes NSFW. -via Metafilter
A couple more notes: The wedding was real. The grass and bushes were not. Yes, there were people inside the shrubbery, but they sadly did not dance. That was just the easiest way to get the greenery out onto the field and off again in a hurry.
We have plenty of painted portraits of Ludwig von Beethoven, but were they overly flattering? What did he really look like? We might have an idea from a forensic reconstruction by Brazilian designer Cícero Moraes. Moraes did not have a physical skull to work with, but he did have front and side photographs of Beethoven's skull (presumably taken when his body was exhumed in 1863). He fed data from the photographs into a 3D modeling program to recreate the skull in three dimensions. Then Moraes used standard forensic recreation methods to rebuild the flesh of the head and face. The results do resemble portraits of Beethoven, although the portrait artists were obviously impressed by the composer's reputation and character. Read through the process of recreating Beethoven's appearance at Bored Panda.
You can also see how Moraes recreated the appearances of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, although these were done using portraits only.
What's the worst thing artificial intelligence has done to us so far? We could make a list, and one of the things on it would be how it takes the joy out of watching videos on the internet. I can't tell you how many times I've found something that may be worth sharing, and as soon as someone comments that it's AI, the joy is gone.
The short film That's AI! illustrates this concept perfectly. Can that young man really be doing all those backflips, or is it artificially-generated? If you can't believe your eyes online, how can you believe your eyes in the real world? If we can't believe what we see, how are we to ever enjoy or even trust anything anymore? That said, this video is funny, and with the background music, it comes off as an ad. But it's not. And the kicker is that there was no artificial intelligence used in its making. -via the Awesomer
