YouTube star Austin Jones faces prison after child porn guilty plea, coerced teen girls to perform sexual acts live online
U.S. attorney’s office to seek 11-year prison sentence for Jones, 26, on Friday May 3.
The science of why cats like getting into boxes then peering menacingly over the edge
Abigail Tucker, author of "The Lion in the Living Room," explains what's going on when cats hop into boxes: imagination. "Our houses are strange places for apex predators to live 24/7. A lot of cats are just hopelessly bored."
Here's more from Cat Health.
Read the restBoxes Decrease Stress
A study was recently done on cats that were entering a Dutch animal shelter. Some of the cats were given cardboard boxes in their cages and some were not. The cats were then evaluated for stress, using the Kessler and Turner Cat Stress Score, a scientific scale for quantifying stress in cats. Stress levels in the cats that were provided with boxes was much lower than in the ones without boxes.
Crocodile bites human ancestor
Oldupai Gorge in Tanzania is kind of the human race's institute of higher learning. It was one of the places where our ancient ancestors congregated and changed. And it's become famous for the quantity and variety of fossil remains it still holds, giving us way more information about human evolution than we otherwise would have had. We're all alumni of OGU.
But we aren't alone. Other creatures lived in Oldupai besides proto-humans. Some were our food. And some, it seems, might have fed on us.
Crocodylus anthropophagus—that's "man-eating crocodile" for those keeping score at home—lived 1.84 million years ago. Technically, scientists can't say for sure that C. anthropophagus was actually killing people, but there is good, solid evidence that it at least gnawed on them a bit. In a newly published paper researchers analyzed a fossil left foot and a left leg that had once belonged to early hominids and which bear the marks of crocodile teeth. These fossils were found relatively close to fossils of C. anthropophagus. It's not exactly a smoking gun, but it does provide some evidence that the crocodile species and the hominids who'd been bitten by crocodiles lived around the same place and time. Correlation is not causation, but it does wink suggestively, and perhaps flash its sharp teeth.
This paper is a bit weird in that it was accepted for publication back in 2008, but only published this month. In the meantime, a paper that used this research as a source was actually published first. Read the rest
