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“Sure, if you act like an a-- then you’re going to get called out for it, like you should. But if you just act like a normal considerate adult, so many strangers are happy to have a conversation about anything at all,” the reddit user wrote. “Godd-- I love this town. Thank you Philly for another wonderful visit and great conversations with random strangers. No one does it better than you.”

But it’s not just conversations. I’ve sung with strangers on the streets of Philly more times than I can count now. Once, while walking down Market Street, I encountered a guy pushing a cart who was singing “Looovin’ you is easy cause you’re beautiful” at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t help but sing back “do do do do do dooo AAaaah!”

“Yeah, that’s right! You like that song?” he asked.

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

According to respondents in the Preply survey, Philly’s biggest faux pas is talking on speaker phone in public.

this is the funniest headline i've ever seen

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Portsmouth Magistrates' Court heard on Friday that Layton Richards, 29, from Brownlow Close in Portsmouth, had been charged with 24 shoplifting offences.

Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary said he had stolen the chocolate between 6 January and 18 April.

Richards targeted 19 shops across Hampshire, Dorset and West Sussex, and took £3,463.96 worth of produce and products.

Ch Insp Marcus Cator, from Hampshire and Isle of Wight Police, said: “This sentence is just one result of an ongoing and dedicated focus on targeting our most prolific offenders as effectively as possible.

“We have been working in strong partnership with retailers regarding offenders who repeatedly target stores and victims with their persistent, and often intimidating, criminality."

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For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.

But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.

As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.

So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.

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Invasive mice are devouring albatrosses alive on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, so conservationists have come up with an explosive solution — "bombing" the mice.

Mice have been wreaking havoc on Marion Island, between South Africa and Antarctica, for decades. Humans accidentally introduced the mice in the 19th century, and the rodents have since developed a taste for wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) and other threatened seabirds.

The Mouse-Free Marion Project, a collaboration between the South African government and BirdLife South Africa, is trying to raise $29 million to drop 660 tons (600 metric tons) of rodenticide-laced pellets onto the island in winter 2027, AFP news agency reported on Saturday (Aug. 24).

The project plans to send a squad of helicopters to drop the pellets. By striking in winter when the mice are most hungry, the conservationists hope to eradicate the entire mouse population of up to 1 million individuals.

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The book in question, according to news outlet RomaToday, was Gli Dei alle sei. L'Iliade all'ora dell'aperitivo by Giovanni Nucci who examines The Iliad from the point of view of the gods while highlighting the interpretative power of the epic work to understand current events.

(twitter)

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Sam Rowley's fantastic image of mice brawling over crumbs on a London Underground platform won the London Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year LUMIX People's Choice award.

"With the majority of the world living in urban areas and cities now, you have to tell the story about how people relate to wildlife," Rowley told CNN.

Over the course of a week, Rowley staked out multiple train stations each night to find the shot.

Sir Michael Dixon, Director of the Natural History Museum, Sir Michael Dixon said that the image "provides a fascinating glimpse into how wildlife functions in a human-dominated environment."

The mice's behaviour is sculpted by our daily routine, the transport we use and the food we discard. This image reminds us that while we may wander past it every day, humans are inherently intertwined with the nature that is on our doorstep – I hope it inspires people to think about and value this relationship more."

(tweet)

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The pop phenom came out with a 44 percent “favorability rating” among likely voters across the country, falling just short of Trump’s 47 percent and the 48 percent who favor Harris.

But 34 percent had unfavorable views of Swift, which is much better than the results for Trump, with a 51 percent unfavorability rating, and Harris with 49 percent.

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did you know you can maybe grow tits if you hit yourself hard enough and often enough

Over 70 percent of the German battalion's soldiers have been diagnosed with significant gynecomastia. Military officials have promised to keep an eye on the men's breasts.

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Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?

After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.

We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.

This prompted so many questions. Does this mean the insect apocalypse is over? Are pollinators saved? Did we unravel the web of maladies known as colony collapse disorder?

But let’s start with the most important question: Is there, in fact, a bee boom?

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The Roanoke-Chowan News Herald reports the Woodland Town Council denied approval of the solar farm and put a moratorium on others after citizens expressed distrust and fear of the solar panels.

One resident, a retired Northampton County science teacher, reportedly said she was concerned that photosynthesis would not happen after she said she observed areas near solar panels where plants were brown and dead because they did not get enough sunlight.

Another resident reportedly questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her that solar panels didn't cause cancer.

According to the newspaper, solar farm companies seeked placement around Woodland because it has an electrical substation and the solar power generated by the panels can be hooked up to the electrical grid.

Three other solar farms had previously been accepted by the town council.

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Research shows that the more masticating we’re doing, the more nutrients we’re coaxing out of our food, which is good for our guts.

“One study looked at almonds, and they compared people who chewed the almonds 10 times versus 40 times,” Rossi told us.

“They showed that if you chewed them 40 times, you actually absorb so much more of that good nutrition. ... If you only chew them like 10 times, you’re malabsorbing a lot of it and not getting that full kind of health potential. So chewing your food is really important for extraction of a lot of that nutrition instead of pooping it out.”

However, for many of us, chewing more is easier said than done.

THANKS HUFFPO I'LL STOP SWALLOWING WHOLE POTATOES THAT'LL FIX ME

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Screams result from the bifurcation of regular phonation to a chaotic regime, thereby making screams particularly difficult to predict and ignore [2]. While previous research in humans suggested that acoustic parameters such as ‘jitter’ and ‘shimmer’ [7-9] are modulated in screams, whether such dynamics and parameters correspond to a specific acoustic regime and how such sounds impact receivers' brains remain unclear.

To characterize the spectro-temporal specificity of screams, we used the modulation power spectrum (MPS) (Figure 1). The MPS, beyond classical representations such as the waveform and spectrogram (Figure 1A and B, upper and middle panels), displays the time-frequency power in modulation across both spectral and temporal dimensions (Figure 1A and B, lower panels). The MPS has become a particularly useful tool in auditory neuroscience because it provides a neurally and ecologically relevant parameterization of sounds [5, 6, 10].

Awesome

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World's largest 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

As with any desktop 3D printer, the Vulcan printer pipes layer by layer to build an object – except this printer is more than 45 feet (13.7 m) wide, weighs 4.75 tons and prints residential homes.

This summer, the robotic printer from ICON is finishing the last few of 100 3D-printed houses in Wolf Ranch, a community in Georgetown, Texas, about 30 miles from Austin.

ICON began printing the walls of what it says is the world's largest 3D-printed community in November 2022. Compared to traditional construction, the company says that 3D printing homes is faster, less expensive, requires fewer workers, and minimizes construction material waste.

"It brings a lot of efficiency to the trade market," said ICON senior project manager Conner Jenkins. "So, where there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot."

After concrete powder, water, sand and other additives are mixed together and pumped into the printer, a nozzle squeezes out the concrete mixture like toothpaste onto a brush, building up layer by layer along a pre-programmed path that creates corduroy-effect walls.

The single-story three- to four-bedroom homes take about three weeks to finish printing, with the foundation and metal roofs installed traditionally.

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This is a tragic and terrible event. On August 16 at 7 a.m., a 60-year-old woman named Denise Prudhomme clocked into her job at a Wells Fargo corporate office in Tempe, Arizona. Four days later, on August 20, building security found her at her desk, unresponsive, and called Tempe Police, who confirmed her death.

Tempe Police are currently investigating the incident but told local Phoenix area 12News that they do not believe the death is suspicious. 

12News interviewed another employee who works at that same Wells Fargo office who shared her perspective about the "troubling" situation:

"It's really heartbreaking and I'm thinking, 'What if I were just sitting there?'" a worker said. "No one would check on me?" . . .  "Her boss had emailed her, he didn't receive a response, so they went to check where she sits and that's how they found her," the worker said . . .  "To hear she's been sitting at the desk like that would make me feel sick," the worker said. "And nobody did anything. That's how she spent her last moments." . . . "I'm just wondering why they didn't formally address employees about it?" the employee said.

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There were more than 100 reports of soda cans exploding on flights in June, Southwest flight attendant union president Bill Bernal told CNN, some of which have injured flight attendants. Bernal predicted nearly three times as many reports of exploding cans by the end of July.

The issue has been happening “for years,” but this year has had more incidents than normal, he added.

Southwest Airlines wouldn’t comment on the number of incidents and injuries or their nature, but confirmed to CNN the issue is occurring.

The hazard is unique to Southwest because the airline doesn’t serve perishable items and so it isn’t required to have refrigerated trucks or storage, CBS News reported. This can expose the cans to extreme conditions heat at several airports in the hottest parts of the country: Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston and Dallas.

The cans containing carbonated beverages are under such immense heat-driven pressure they are like “little bombs” capable of rupturing with the slightest movement, even when they aren’t being opened, according to Kate Biberdorf, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“I don’t want to say that to scare people, but that’s really what you should think of them as,” Biberdorf cautioned.

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Excerpt from this story from The Guardian:

Animal rights groups have said that gunfire killed a beluga whale that rose to fame in Norway after its unusual harness sparked suspicions the creature was trained by Russia as a spy.

The organisations Noah and One Whale said they had filed a complaint with Norwegian police asking them to open a criminal investigation.

Nicknamed Hvaldimir in a pun on the Norwegian word for whale, hval, and the first name of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the white beluga first appeared off the coast in Norway’s far-northern Finnmark region in 2019.

He was found dead on Saturday in a bay Norway’s south-western coast.

His body was transported on Monday to a local branch of the Norwegian Veterinary Institute for autopsy.

The report is expected “within three weeks”, a spokesperson for the institute said.

Regina Crosby Haug, the head of One Whale, who said she hadd viewed Hvaldimir’s body on Monday, told AFP: “He had multiple bullet wounds around his body.”

One Whale was founded to track the beluga, which had become a celebrity in Norway.

“The injuries on the whale are alarming and of a nature that cannot rule out a criminal act – it is shocking,” the Noah director, Siri Martinsen, said.

When he was found in 2019, Norwegian marine biologists removed a manmade harness with a mount suited for an action camera and the words “Equipment St. Petersburg” printed in English on the plastic clasps.

Norwegian officials said Hvaldimir may have escaped an enclosure and may have been trained by the Russian navy as he was accustomed to humans.

Moscow has never issued any official reaction to speculation that he could be a “Russian spy”.