Month: January 2017

Shelters have a hard time finding adoptive families for elderly pets, animals with disabilities or chronic medical conditions, large animals that need special facilities, and working animals who have outlived their usefulness. Some people have stepped up to provide permanent care for these animals, so that they can live out their lives in comfort and security.    

1. OLD FRIENDS FARM

Many thoroughbreds are born each year, but only a few can be champion racehorses. Of the rest, some become pets and a few will be used for breeding stock, but even they become old eventually. In 2002, the public was shocked to hear that 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand was sent to a slaughterhouse. The Boston Globe film critic Michael Blowen was already trying to raise money to start a thoroughbred retirement farm, and the response to Ferdinand’s fate brought in enough donations to open Old Friends in Georgetown, Kentucky. That’s where former champion racehorses live out their retirement years alongside thoroughbreds that never raced—160 horses in all. The farm in Georgetown and its other locations in Franklin, Kentucky, and Greenfield Center, New York, are open to the public daily. Pictured above is 1997 Kentucky Derby winner Silver Charm, who is now a resident of Old Friends.   

2. CHIMP HAVEN

For decades, the U.S. produced medical breakthroughs with the help of experimental lab animals, including hundreds of chimpanzees. When animal testing began declining, research centers found themselves with a surplus of elderly chimps. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) founded chimpanzee retirement farms, funded through the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection (CHIMP) Act.

Chimp Haven in Keithville, Louisiana, is the National Chimpanzee Sanctuary, home to more than 200 retired research chimpanzees on 200 acres of forest land. The chimps are free to roam, build their own nests, and associate with each other as they please. The staff at Chimp Haven interacts with the chimps to ensure they have veterinary care, complete nutrition, and enrichment.

3. HEARTS THAT PURR

Elderly people worry about what will happen to their cats if something happens to them. In Tucson, Arizona, they know that their pets can be taken in by Hearts that Purr Feline Guardians. The cats that come into their care live in a family environment, but the demand is more than the home can provide. Founder Jeanmarie Schiller-McGinnis began a foster care program to help alleviate overcrowding by placing cats with other elderly people who could use a companion pet. The foster cats remain under the guardianship of Hearts That Purr in case something happens. Some of the cats are available for permanent adoption.     

4. HOUSE WITH A HEART

Dogs of advanced age and dogs with disabilities have a hard time finding homes because they present unique challenges and potential expenses not usually associated with the many younger dogs available for adoption. In 2006, Joe and Sher Polvinale turned their Gaithersburg, Maryland, home into a pet sanctuary for such hard-to-place canines. Joe has since passed away, but Sher continues to run House with a Heart Senior Pet Sanctuary, a retirement home for elderly and special needs dogs. With the help of a team of volunteers, the dogs get proper care and lots of affection.  

5. SHEBA’S HAVEN RESCUE

Sheba’s Haven Rescue in Inverary, Ontario, Canada, is both a retirement home and a hospice for dogs. It takes in shelter dogs with incurable illnesses, disabilities, or limited lifespans and offers a loving family environment and palliative care. The resident dogs have three acres to explore, and orthotics, such as wheels, for those who need them. Dogs that are able can visit a local nursing home to spend time with human residents on Wednesdays. Dogs that were considered unadoptable have a permanent home at Sheba’s Haven.       

6. THE SHANNON FOUNDATION

The Shannon Foundation is a farm in St. Clair, Missouri, where all kinds of retired pets and farm animals can live out their lives. Current residents of the 100-acre farm include dogs, cats, horses, llamas, pigs, goats, chickens and other poultry, deer, a Fennec fox, and exotic pet birds. Some are special needs pets from shelters, others came when their owners died, and some were rescued from abusive situations. A few of the younger animals—including sugar gliders, emus, and horses, as well as cats and dogs—are available for adoption.  

7. THE CENTER FOR ELEPHANT CONSERVATION

In May of 2016, Ringling Bros. Circus officially retired their last 11 circus elephants to a sanctuary in Florida. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Center for Elephant Conservation sits on 200 acres of land between Tampa and Orlando. The facility holds 40 Asian elephants who have either retired from the circus since 1995, or are offspring of retirees.

8. THE ELEPHANT SANCTUARY IN TENNESSEE

Ringling’s Florida facility is not the first elephant retirement village in the U.S., nor the largest. The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee has 13 elephants who retired from zoos and circuses and live on more than 2700 acres in Hohenwald, Tennessee.

9. ELEPHANT NATURE PARK

Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand is a retirement home for elephants that have spent their lives working in transportation and heavy lifting, or were rescued from abusive owners. Elephant Nature Park is supported by tourism, and runs various elephant care projects in Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar.

10. BIG CAT RESCUE

People are enamored with the idea of an exotic pet, like a wildcat, but then find that a full-grown wild animal is too much: too expensive to feed, too strong to live with, and in need of too much time and space. Exotic wildcats raised in captivity can’t go to a normal shelter and can never be returned to their native habitats.

Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida, provides a permanent shelter for big cats and exotic wildcats that began their lives in captivity. In addition to abandoned pets, they take in cats rescued from roadside zoos, circuses, and other stressful situations. The current population includes lions, tigers, leopards, lynxes, cougars, bobcats, servals, ocelots, and more. Their mission is to give big cats as wonderful a home as possible, but Big Cat Rescue also lobbies against the exotic pet trade and works to educate the public about wildlife issues. They also have a great YouTube channel. 

We’ve all seen the vinyl stickers that adorn the back windshields of minivans, cheerfully representing the happy family therein. The graphics don’t just reflect your family—they can also illustrate your passions, like with this Star Wars set. Now, that even extends to all you feline fanatics. If you’re someone with a family full of cats, these “crazy cat lady” stickers are the perfect decals for you.

This quirky sticker set from GAMAGO comes with 19 stickers to put on your cat-mobile. There are 16 cats (along with two toys and a woman looking lovingly at her pets), so even the most ambitious cat owners can properly show off their whole furry family. The decals are meant to stick on the outside of the car and are weather resistant.

[h/t The Daily Dot]

How the Fermi Paradox Works. There are plenty of reasons aliens haven’t invaded the earth yet.
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Don’t Miss These 10 TV Shows Premiering in January. Comedy, drama, remakes, history, there’s something for everyone.
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Star Wars: Darth Vader’s Best Moments from the Marvel Comic. The series told the Sith Lord’s story between episodes IV and V.
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Scientists Say These Are The First Snow Leopard Quadruplets Seen In The Wild. The footage from Mongolia was captured in September.
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These Are The Best Wedding Photos Of 2016 And They’re Stunning. It’s enough to make you want to take the plunge yourself.
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This American Indian artist is reviving Native culture in a big way. Steven Grounds wants to turn an old boarding school from a place of shame into a gallery of art and history.
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The scientific reason you should be watching Planet Earth. It will awaken your sense of awe for the natural world.
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The Era of the Body Snatchers. Grave robbing was once a profitable career.  

Proving that nerdy interests don’t need to be mutually exclusive, io9 reports that a German man named Kevin J. Walter has built a miniature version of the Klingon Bird-of-Prey ship from the Star Trek saga, entirely from LEGO bricks.

Walter told io9 that the project is his way of paying tribute to the TV show’s recent 50th anniversary. From conception to finished product, the model took him around eight years to complete, including a year and a half or so to construct the final version.

The space ship’s model is based on a virtual design, which the LEGO hobbyist tweaked from 2008 and 2010. As for its individual sections, the ship is built from a variety of LEGO parts that Walter ordered from BrickLink—some of which he repurposed in creative ways. (Example: Walter used Bilbo Baggins’s front door to make the ship’s guns.)

Initially, Walter wanted to make the wings moveable, but they proved to be too heavy and frail during the later stages of construction, CBR.com reports. Walter’s mock-up also called for more than 250,000 plastic bricks, but he ended up only using around 25,000. In its final state (including the stand), the ship is a little over two feet long, and ranges in width from 16 inches to nearly three feet.

Check out a photo below, or visit Walter’s Flickr page to view more images. And keep your eyes peeled for yet another LEGO project, courtesy of Walter: a 150,000-piece LEGO model of Barad-dûr, or “The Dark Tower,” from The Lord of the Rings franchise. It’s been in the works for more than six years, and Walter hopes to complete it by the end of the year, just in time for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers‘s 15th anniversary in December.

Amazing Klingon Bird of Prey! #flickr #lego #startrek https://t.co/KEtecCyMNw

— Rebel Builder (@RebelBuilder77) December 31, 2016

[h/t io9]

If you’re working out but don’t feel like you’re in any better shape, you might be a “nonresponder.” According to The New York Times, a recent study from Queen’s University in Canada finds that how people respond to exercise regimens varies substantially, and what works for one person may not help another person improve at all.

But that doesn’t mean those nonresponders will never get into shape. They just may need to change up their exercise routine for one that is better suited to their body. The study tested two exercise regimes on 21 active adults. Each of them spent three weeks doing endurance training (like running for an extended period of time) or interval training (doing quick bursts of strenuous exercise, like in CrossFit). After a few months of rest between workout periods, they then switched one routine for the other. Endurance trainees rode a stationary bike four times a week for 30 minutes, while high-intensity interval trainees did 20 seconds of hard pedaling on the bike with a 10 second rest after each interval.

Some of the participants showed improvements in physiological markers of fitness like heart rate and oxygen capacity after one of the workout periods, but others didn’t improve at all. Some were even in worse shape than before they began their assigned regimen. However, each individual responded to one of the workouts, even if they didn’t see results in the other.

To figure out which workout works for you, you’ll need to measure your fitness levels, using your pulse as your baseline number, at the beginning of a new workout routine. Then, after a month of either endurance or interval training, you should check to see if you’ve made improvements in your heart rate, according to the Times. If you haven’t, you should switch to another routine.

[h/t The New York Times]

Getting out of bed in the morning is pretty much the worst. Who wants to leave a cozy, warm bubble and face the cold, harsh light of day? Not us—and apparently not baby dinosaurs, either. Experts say the little tykes may have spent between three and six months curled up in their eggs. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dinosaur embryos are very rare, which means their journey from fertilized egg to baby thunder-lizard is something of a black box. We do know they had a great deal in common with modern reptiles and with birds, and while both groups lay eggs, the length of their incubation periods vary immensely. Bird babies typically take a few weeks to hatch; reptiles can take months. Because dinosaur eggs were so huge, scientists believed they were probably more bird-like than lizard-like, hatching relatively quickly. It seemed probable that birds inherited their speedy incubation period from their prehistoric ancestors.

To find out for sure, the research team examined fossilized embryos from two dinosaur species: the sheep-sized Protoceratops and the gargantuan Hypacrosaurus, whose eggs were roughly the size of bowling balls. 

The researchers used computed tomography (CT) scanners and microscopes to get a closer look at near-invisible growth lines on the embryos’ teeth. “These are the lines that are laid down when any animal’s teeth develops,” lead author Gregory Erickson said in statement. “They’re kind of like tree rings, but they’re put down daily. We could literally count them to see how long each dinosaur had been developing.”

As it turns out, they’d been developing for quite a long time. Little Protoceratops had been in its egg for almost three months; Hypacrosaurus, twice that long.

This long incubation period suggests two things: first, that dinosaurs were closer to modern reptiles than we thought, and second, that those eggs were vulnerable as heck. The longer an embryo sits around in its egg, the more protection and resources it requires, and the slower its development may be once it hatches.

And that sluggish development may have contributed to the dinosaurs’ downfall. The faster a species can mature, develop, and reproduce, the faster it can evolve—a crucial factor in a world buffeted by dramatic climate change like that faced by the dinosaurs.

“We suspect our findings have implications for understanding why dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period,” Erickson said, “whereas amphibians, birds, mammals, and other reptiles made it through and prospered.”

 
The human body is an amazing and expansive place, full of strange twists and turns. It’s likely we’ll never discover all its secrets, but we do have a pretty solid grasp on the major parts. So even though new research has convincingly made the case for reclassifying the mesentery—a folded membrane that connects your intestines to the wall of your abdominal cavity and keeps everything snugly in place—as a single, continuous organ, scientists have not, as some headlines proclaim, discovered a “brand-new organ.” In fact, we’ve known about the existence of the mesentery (pronounced MEH-zun-terry) for centuries; Leonardo da Vinci even included it in his anatomical notes.

The mesentery has historically been seen as a series of unimportant attachments to the abdominal lining. But researcher J. Calvin Coffey of the University Hospital Limerick in Ireland suspected that there might be more to it. He and his colleagues examined the membrane and surrounding tissue under a microscope in 2012. They found that, rather than a group of disconnected but similar pieces, the mesentery was actually all one piece. The researchers published their findings in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology.

 
Inspired by this realization, Coffey initiated a campaign to reclassify the mesentery as a separate organ. He believes that full organ status is the key to understanding what’s going on in our guts.

“Up to now there was no such field as mesenteric science,” he said in a statement. “Now we have established anatomy and the structure. The next step is the function. If you understand the function you can identify abnormal function, and then you have disease.”

His lobbying paid off; the latest edition of Gray’s Anatomy categorizes the mesentery as an organ.

Coffey’s new paper, written with his colleague D. Peter O’Leary, makes a strong case for initiating the mesentery into the organ club. “The mesentery should be subjected to the same investigatory focus that is applied to other organs and systems,” they write.

“This is relevant universally,” Coffey added in the statement. “It affects all of us.”

Though they are small, almost everything you do with your legs requires your knees. Their hinging action allows your legs to bend and straighten, which you need for standing, walking, crouching, jumping, and turning. You might know how often you use them, but here are seven fascinating facts about your knees that might surprise you.

1. Babies are born without kneecaps.

Babies’ kneecaps are made up of soft cartilage that hasn’t yet ossified into bones, so their “true” kneecaps don’t show up on x-rays until somewhere between two and six years of age.

2. The knee connects two bones.

Like the old song goes, the knee bone is actually connected to the thighbone, so to speak. More accurately, the knee is the joint where the femur bone of your thigh and the tibia bone of your shin meet, allowing flexion. The knee joint allows your leg to kick and jump, run and leap.

3. You can walk without a kneecap.

Your kneecap, known as the patella, is a small bone that protects your knee joint. If you are so unlucky as to shatter or break your kneecap badly enough, it will most likely have to be surgically removed. In those cases, though, surgeons do not create or install kneecap prostheses—because you can walk without a kneecap. Kneeling, however, may be a challenge without one, requiring protective gear.

4. For such a small part of the body, it’s prone to many problems.

For such a tiny part of the body, the knee is prone to a large variety of aches, pains, and injuries. Even small repetitive strains can cause serious ligament and tendon injuries, such as tearing of the meniscus or chronic inflammation. The autoimmune condition rheumatoid arthritis, and a collagen disorder known as Ehlers-Danlos, both tend to cause tremendous pain in the knee joint.

5. Knees are a favorite of terrorists and crime groups.

Kneecapping is a nasty torture practice used by terrorists and organized crime groups to destroy the kneecaps, either by shooting a knee, or shattering them with a blunt object. The result is not life-threatening, but it’s extremely painful and permanently disabling.

6. Knees are associated with surrender.

The phrase “brought to one’s knees” suggests a position of submission or desperation; to be “cut off at the knees” usually connotes humiliation or surrender. In ancient Greece, the phrase “on the knees of the gods” (theón en gounasi) meant something was beyond human control or knowledge.

7. Shel Silverstein wrote a poem about knees.

The narrator of the kids’ poem “Stop, Thief!” by famous poet Shel Silverstein imagines someone stealing their knees, and asks a policeman for assistance since “my feet and legs just won’t connect.” Guess they hadn’t had their kneecaps removed!