At this point, most people are well aware that the bees are in trouble. Last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially placed seven species of Hawaiian yellow-faced bees on the endangered species list. They believe their decline in population is the result of a long list of threats to the species, including predation, habitat loss, and human involvement.

Bees are pollinators and crucial to our ecosystem; we depend on them for much of our produce. Around 30 percent of the world’s crops rely on cross-pollination [PDF]. If you want to help the tiny buzzing insects from dying out completely, here are some small things you can do.

1. PLANT THE RIGHT THINGS

Bees are steadily losing ground in our modern culture. Flowers and gardens are dwindling, meaning less and less food for the hungry bees. You can help protect the species right in your own backyard by starting a bee-centric garden. Plant flowering plants native to your area with a preference toward single flower tops like marigolds, tulips, and daisies. Double flower tops and hybridized plants don’t yield the same level of nectar as single flowers tops, so it’s harder for bees to reach the pollen. You should also try to have something flowering all year, so make a calendar for your garden that includes flowers in spring, summer, and fall.

Once your bees have something to eat, you can build a potential home for the visitors. Leave a place in your garden open for bees to burrow, and add some branches or bamboo for wood-nesting bees. And always remember to only use natural pesticides and fertilizers that won’t harm the bees who stop by.

2. LET SOME WEEDS GROW

Controlling gardeners are going to have to loosen their iron grip for the sake of the bees; a healthy collection of dandelions and clovers can actually do a world of good. The leafy intruders—along with various wildflowers—offer substantial and much-needed nutrients. Dandelions in particular are extremely beneficial to bees, as well as other pollinators like butterflies, beetles, and hoverflies. Because these yellow weeds flower between March and May, they’re ready to be pollinated just as the bugs are waking up from hibernation. Each flowering dandelion can have up to 100 florets, meaning plenty of food for your buzzing buddies. Laying off the pesticides will also keep the air poison-free and more accessible to bugs who would like to visit.

3. BUY LOCAL RAW HONEY AND BEESWAX

Buying honey and other bee products from a local beekeeper is a great way to support local pollination. As long as the beekeeper knows what they’re doing, they won’t harm or disturb the bees in any meaningful way. Often bees make a surplus of honey, so they won’t notice if we take some for ourselves. Beeswax is used to coat the honeycombs and is either sliced off by the beekeeper to get to the honey or burrowed through by the bees in the winter—either way it’s discarded, so it would be a waste not to use it.

4. LEAVE OUT WATER FOR THIRSTY BEES

It turns out bird baths aren’t just great for birds. Bees need water just like all animals, so they seek out shallow puddles and bird baths to quench their thirst. You can get a bird bath or leave out a small saucer to help hydrate the bees in your neighborhood. Bees like to share information, so if you keep your water source consistent, the local pollinators will get wise and come visit. Just make sure to include a small rock or other object for them to perch on while they drink—bees are unfortunately not equipped with tiny floaties.

5. GO SHOPPING

There are plenty of products on the market that will help you help bees. If planting a full garden is too much work, you can opt for seed bombs. The little clusters of seeds can be tossed in areas like your backyard or an empty lot where they’ll eventually turn into a colorful patch of wildflowers. You can also try seed money or pencils that can be planted in the ground to grow flowering and edible plants.

Another option is to look into getting a Flow Hive. After an extremely successful Indiegogo campaign, the simplified beehive is available for purchase. The honey comes from a tap, making the extraction process easier for humans and bees alike.

6. VOLUNTEER

Feeling committed? There are plenty of ways you can give your time to helping the bees. You can host a bee hive and agree to have a bee block situated in your backyard. The New York Beekeepers Association offers a program where people can offer up available yards or rooftops to keep hives for urban beekeepers. The program matches people up to help encourage more hives in the city. You can also volunteer to join the Back Yard Beekeepers Association. The Connecticut-based group provides information for fledgling beekeepers and organizes educational programs for the community.

7. GET POLITICAL

Sign a petition and let your government know that you care about the declining bee population. This petition is a call for the EPA to suspend use of pesticides and this petition asks your representative to support the Saving America’s Pollinators Act. If enough people come together to fight this problem, real change can happen.

Traveling Through Transylvania With Dracula as a Guide. Luke Spencer retraced the travels of Jonathan Harker, as best he could.  
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A Brief But Disturbing History of Creepy Clowns. Clowns have always been creepy, and even murderous.
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The Final Rogue One Trailer Is Here And It Confirms A Major Fan Theory. And we get a short glimpse of Darth Vader, too.
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5 Massacres Where Almost Nobody Died. As far as massacres go, that’s the best kind to have.
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The Fantastic Beasts Franchise Will Span Five Films, and Will Feature Young Dumbledore and Grindelwald. JK Rowling wrote the first two scripts, and may write more.
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TripAdvisor will no longer sell tickets to attractions that exploit animals. The president of the Humane Society acknowledges them and explains upcoming animal animal cruelty legislation.
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In 1920, the small city of Yoncalla, Oregon, elected a woman mayor and put women in all the city council slots. “We Can’t Do Much Worse Than the Men”
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The History of the Halloween Haunted House. They’re older than you think.

Not every inventor is recognized as a genius in their time. And not every invention is recognized as a game-changer when it first comes out. Plenty of inventions and technologies throughout history have seemed considered newfangled, superfluous, or even flat-out dangerous at first glance. Here are eight now-ubiquitous technologies that were unappreciated, underestimated, and feared at their debut.

1. THE PRINTING PRESS

In 1492, the monk Johannes Trithemius, a leading scholar in his time, predicted that the printing press would never last. In his essay “In Praise of Scribes” [PDF], he argued that handwriting was the moral superior to mechanical printing—an opinion surely influenced by the fact that monks working as scribes worried that the printing press would put them out of work.

“The word written on parchment will last a thousand years,” Thrithemius boasted. “The printed word is on paper … The most you can expect a book of paper to survive is two hundred years.” Parchment, the material monks used for their books, is made of animal skin, while paper is made from cellulose derived from plant fibers. Modern paper does degrade because it’s made from wood pulp, but in Trithemius’s time, paper was made from old rags, a material that remains stable over hundreds of years, as the surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible show. Trithemius went on to write that “Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance.” Ironically, his screed was disseminated by printing press, not hand-copied by monks.

2. ICE CUBES

People in cold climates have always had access to ice in the winter, but it was only in the early 19th century that the ice market became global, and it took a considerable marketing campaign to get there. New England’s Frederic Tudor spent decades trying to drum up widespread interest in the ice he harvested from frozen ponds.

When it came out that he was preparing to ship many tons of ice to the sweltering West Indies, he “was laughed at by all his neighbors” back home in Massachusetts—as a local history from 1888 recounts—who thought loading up a ship with ice and setting sail for the Caribbean was an insane undertaking. As the Boston Gazette wrote of his voyage, “We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.” The paper had to preface news of his ice endeavor with “No joke.”

When he did ship a 130-ton load of ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique, in 1806, no one wanted it. People were intrigued by the novelty, but had no idea what to use it for. As his valuable cargo began melting, Tudor was forced to turn as much as he could into ice cream. He lost thousands of dollars on the venture, but eventually, he was traveling the world bringing ice to hot places from New Orleans to Calcutta, plying people with chilled drinks and convincing doctors to use ice on their feverish patients. He’s now known as “The Ice King.”

3. THE TELEPHONE

In advance of Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition of 1876, where Alexander Graham Bell would later debut his telephone, The New York Times published an editorial accusing an early phone inventor, German scientist Johann Philipp Reis (who had died in 1874), of conspiring to empty concert halls. The Times, writing of the telephone as a method of broadcasting classical music, warned that “a patriotic regard for the success of our approaching Centennial celebration renders it necessary to warn the managers of the Philadelphia Exhibition that the telephone may really be a device of the enemies of the Republic.” What if every town in America got a phone, and never had to show up to celebrations like the Centennial in person again? the author wondered. He continued:

“There is so far nothing to indicate that this is Prof. Reuss’ dark design, but as all foreign despots, from the Queen, in the Tower of London, to the Prince of Monaco, in the backroom of his gambling palace, are notoriously and constantly tearing their hair as they … note the progress and prosperity of our nation, it is not impossible that they have suggested the infamous scheme of attacking the Centennial Celebration with telephones.”

After Bell introduced his telephone to the world, his father-in-law and business partner, Gardiner Hubbard, famously offered to sell it to Western Union, the company that held a virtual monopoly on U.S. telegraph enterprises. Western Union President William Orton (who had a contentious relationship with Hubbard), turned him down—a decision he surely came to regret when Western Union’s own efforts to develop a telephone were shut down by a patent lawsuit from the Bell Company. Though the exact nature and price of the offer is contentious [PDF], it is now considered one of the worst decisions in business history, since the phone would go on to make Western Union’s telegraph business obsolete.

4. THE CAR RADIO

In 1922, Outlook magazine, a New York-based weekly, breathlessly reported that “This equipment, with which you can listen to the radio concerts while driving in your car is said to be the very latest development of inventive genius for the amusement of the radio fan.”

But not everyone was excited. In 1930, The New York Times quoted an unnamed traffic authority in Washington, D.C. expounding on the potential pitfalls of the technology for drivers. “Music in the car might make him miss hearing the horn of an approaching automobile or fire or ambulance siren,” he told the Times. “Imagine fifty automobiles in a city street broadcasting a football game! Such a thing as this, I am sure, would not be tolerated by city traffic authorities.”

A 1934 poll of Automobile Club of New York members found that 56 percent found car radios to be distracting to the user, fellow drivers, and just “more noise added to the present din” of the road. Several states moved to ban the controversial devices, which opponents argued could lull drivers to sleep. However, a 1939 study found that radios didn’t have any effect on taxicab accident rates, and the bans never became widespread.

5. THE SKATEBOARD

In the 1960s, the relatively new sport of skateboarding had sparked plenty of interest among young people, but not so much among their parents. Many decried skateboarding as a fleeting but potentially lethal craze. In 1965, Pennsylvania’s traffic safety commissioner, Harry H. Brainerd, thought that skateboarding was “extremely hazardous fad,” according to The Pittsburgh Press, and argued that parents “would be well advised not to permit the children to use skateboards until they have been instructed in and understand basic, common sense rules of safety for their use.” He wasn’t the only one that thought kids couldn’t be trusted to ride early skateboards without killing themselves. The liberal political organization Americans for Democratic Action petitioned the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1979 to ban skateboards outright, saying that “The design of the skateboard itself cannot be improved in any way to make it safe.” Needless to say, kids kept skating.

6. THE WALKMAN

Sony’s first Walkman portable cassette player came onto the scene in 1979, changing how people listened to music. But not everyone bought into the pet project of Sony CEO Akio Morita at first. In his book Made in Japan, he recounts that in the beginning, “It seemed as though nobody liked the idea. At one of our product planning meetings, one of the engineers said, ‘It sounds like a good idea, but will people buy it if it doesn’t have a recording capability? I don’t think so.’” Even once the product was developed, Morita says, “our marketing people were unenthusiastic. They said it wouldn’t sell.”

It did sell—in 1982, the Daily News of Bowling Green, Kentucky declared that it was “now clear that the Walkman and its successors not only sell and sell from Anchorage to Ankara, but also appear to have become a semi-permanent appendage to most of the world’s ears.” It had attracted a different kind of criticism by then, though. Municipalities started trying to ban people from wearing headphones while walking across the street, arguing that it was a safety hazard. A law fining people $50 (or 15 days in jail) for wearing a headset while crossing the street—even if the music is off—is still on the books in Woodbridge, New Jersey today.

7. THE CELL PHONE

In 1981, telecommunications consultant Jan David Jubon was skeptical of how popular the rumored new devices known as cell phones could be. “But who, today, will say I’m going to ditch the wires in my house and carry the phone around?” he said in The Christian Science Monitor.

Even Marty Cooper, known as the “father of the cell phone,” didn’t predict how ubiquitous mobile phones could be at that point. “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems,” Cooper told the paper. “Even if you project it beyond our lifetimes, it won’t be cheap enough.”

8. THE iPHONE

On the cusp of the debut of the first iPhone in 2007, several tech writers made bold predictions about how hard it would fail. “That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone,” TechCrunch’s Seth Porges wrote in a piece titled “We Predict the iPhone Will Bomb.”

Bloomberg writer Matthew Lynn argued that “The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant.”

Unsurprisingly, the CEO of Microsoft wasn’t a big fan of the new phone either. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” then-CEO Steve Ballmer told USA Today in 2007. “No chance.” In December 2014, the iPhone had captured almost 48 percent of the smartphone market in the U.S.—though those numbers have dropped since then—compared to the Windows phone’s less than 4 percent.

Seen close-up and head-on, an illusion knit wall hanging might look like a mundane collection of stripes gently snagged by cat claws. But step a few paces to one side, and an image emerges. It can be simple: a checkerboard or a snail spiral. Or it can be complicated: a landscape view of the Great Pyramid of Giza, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, or Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Whatever the image, the subtle trick on your eye that allows you to finally see this “illusion” isn’t much of a trick at all. It’s just knitting.

Knitting works like this: You build up a swatch of it by forming a row of yarn loops on a knitting needle, then pulling more loops through them, one by one, with a second needle. Each loop shows its rounded top on one side of your swatch, and its beginning-and-end-strand bottom on the other. A whole row of those rounded tops makes a puffy ridge; that’s called a garter-stitch row. A whole line of those bottoms lies flat; that’s called a stocking-stitch row. So, even though that seemingly cat-scratched wall hanging looks as planar as paper, because of those garter- and stocking-stitch rows, its surface is actually 3D. That’s how you create illusion knitting.

As far as anyone knows, illusion knitting originated with a Japanese knitting teacher named Mieko Yano. In the early 1980s, she moved to Sweden to get married; packed along with all her earthly possessions was a slim booklet that explained how to make what she called “magic patterns.” At some point, the booklet was translated into Danish, which is how it came to the attention of another knitting teacher named Vivian Høxbro, who went on to publish her own book about the technique, which she called Shadow Knitting. Her designs were simple, but a slew of people have been experimenting with the parameters of illusion (or shadow) knitting ever since.

The simplest kind of illusion knitting uses one color of yarn. From the front, you see a swath of, say, green. From the side, you see an alternating checkerboard of green squares. Or take the knit below, which appears to be a multicolored grid straight-on but from an angle reveals circles within the grid. 

How does illusion knitting show you two different images? From the side, unlike from the front, your eye catches on the raised garter-stitch ridges that delineate the pattern, and it glosses over the stocking-stitch valleys. Helping this along, a rough surface—the raised garter-stitch ridge, in this case—“tends to look darker than a smooth surface,” according to Derin Sherman, a physics professor at Cornell College in Iowa who studies optical illusions, among other topics. Sherman tells mental_floss, “That’s because, while light often gets caught in the nooks and crannies of a rough surface, it just bounces off a smooth surface”—our flat, stocking-stitch valley.

The kind of illusion knitting that gets you to Marilyn uses two colors of yarn: one light, one dark, in alternating stripes. The most basic explanation of how this works is that the light-colored yarn accentuates stocking-stitch valleys, pushing them into the background; the dark-colored yarn accentuates garter-stitch ridges, pulling them into the foreground. 

Sherman says a good way to visualize how to create this effect is to imagine strips of clay, both dark and light, laid out on a table. “Where you want the picture to look dark, raise the dark clay stripe to create a small dark hill, and lower the white stripe to create a small light valley,” he advises. “Looking straight down shows dark and white stripes, but from the sides the hills stand out, so the patterns appear.” This bit of technique alone isn’t quite enough to make Marilyn pop out of some yarn, but it more than gets you started.

British math teacher Steve Plummer—who uses knitting and crochet to explain math concepts—creates complex images, including Charlie Chaplin in the style of Warhol, a tiger head, Rossetti’s Sybilla Palmifera, and a 3D fractal Menger sponge, seen below. (All of the animations in this story come from Woolly Thoughts, the website of Plummer and fellow math teacher/knitter Pat Ashforth.)

The knitting itself isn’t complicated; even beginner knitters can do it. But any pattern first has to be made into a chart. That’s where the challenge lies. Plummer explains to mental_floss, “The smallest detail I want to show must be at least one stitch across. This determines the scale of the completed piece.” Once he’s figured that out, Plummer places a grid over his entire drawn image. “Each square on the grid represents one stitch, and each row of squares represents one row of knitting,” he says. He then decides which areas on the image will be dark or light, and colors the grid in accordingly. On average, it takes him 100 hours to chart one piece of illusion knitting.

To date, the most impressive use of illusion knitting might be by Austrian artist Tanja Boukal, who’s exhibited strikingly realistic portraits based on gritty newspaper photos of armed women prepared for combat. Is this as far as illusion knitting can go?

Sherman, who is not a knitter himself, sees the potential for more. He suggests the underlying formula could be enhanced by using different colors to shade ridges on either of their sides, so you’d see different images depending on whether you viewed the work from the left or right. But, he admits, “It would be hard for a human to knit.”

Knitted gauntlet thrown?

All animations courtesy of Steve Plummer and Pat Ashforth

Famed TV painter and personality Bob Ross is known the world over for being one of history’s sweetest, gentlest souls, and thankfully, that attitude extended well beyond his 18-by-24-inch canvasses. Ross was an ardent animal lover, a passion which often made its way onto The Joy of Painting. His crew of animal companions was a big hit among the fans, and showcased Ross’s particular tastes in the creatures of the world. In lieu of cats, dogs, or guinea pigs, Ross took a liking to the very creatures you might expect to see in his happy little landscapes. Our list contains as many of those animals as we could find, and could also serve as lyrics to a Ross-themed revamp of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Many of the clips below are full episodes and you’ll have to skim through a lot of them to get to the critters—or just watch the entire thing. Let’s face it: You were probably going to anyway.

1. PEAPOD THE POCKET SQUIRREL

No single animal got more airtime on The Joy of Painting than Peapod—a tiny little squirrel that, according to Ross, liked to sit in his pocket. While viewers never got a glimpse of that particular bonding experience, we did get to see the painter feed his rodent friend with a bottle (“Aren’t they the most precious characters you’ve ever seen?”), and hold him in the palm of his hand while the furry friend slumbered away (“I like to just watch him sleep”). The “peekaboo squirrel” made a handful of appearances on the show, and was so beloved, he even inspired a successor (see #2).

2. PEAPOD JR.

While the original Peapod might’ve been a special rodent, he was part of a long tradition of Ross being absolutely nuts for squirrels. He often owned several at a time, caring for them in the early stages of life before releasing them out into his backyard. A rotating scurry of squirrels did guest spots on the series, and were a favorite among fans.

3. HOOT THE OWL

Ross’s love of birds was second only to squirrels. One of the avians who got airtime was Hoot the Owl, who appeared on The Joy of Painting when he was only a few weeks old. “He’s nothing but down,” Ross says in the clip above. “As I mentioned earlier, him and I both have the same hairdresser. We’ve both got the fuzz top up here.”

The cute “little devil” (Ross referred to animals almost exclusively as little “rascals” or “devils”), also appeared later on as a full grown bird. Ross had several friends who cared for rescues, including Diana Schaffer (or as he called her, the “bird lady”). On a visit to her home, Ross spent time with sparrows, a hawk, a wild turkey, a baby groundhog, and even whispered some of his sweet nothings to a blind robin, which you can see above.

As for Hoot, Ross reflected: “Old Hoot though, he’s grown. By the time you see this show, he will have been turned loose and he’ll be long gone. By the time you see this he’ll probably have a little condo in Miami and house payments, a BMW in the driveway … he’ll be like the rest of us. All trapped with responsibilities. He may even have children of his own.”

4. A PAIR OF BABY ROBINS

When these fine feathered friends appeared on the show, Ross named them Richard and Cathy after a couple of the show’s camera people. The hungry “little rascals” earned their names because of their similarities to their human counterparts: Richard’s hair was thinning and Cathy was chatty.

5. CHIMNEY SWIFTS

In the clip above, four of these cute “little devils” hang onto Ross’s shirt like we all would if given the opportunity.

6. LITTLE BIT, THE SHERMAN’S FOX SQUIRREL

What’s better than a squirrel? A giant squirrel of course. On one episode, Ross’s friend Cindy introduced him to a Sherman’s fox squirrel named Little Bit, and the rodent lover nearly lost his mind.

7. A GREAT HORNED OWL

Cindy also gave Ross the opportunity to spend some time with a great horned owl, who inspired this lovely reflection: “I like animals so much. I’m tellin’ you, I could just about make a career out of taking care of these little rascals. They’re so beautiful. Isn’t that something?”

8. A SANDHILL CRANE

Another one of Cindy’s creatures was a rescue crane that was born with a twisted neck—a possible result of an abnormality that occurred in the egg. In addition to that encounter, there’s more footage of Ross with the Sherman’s fox squirrel.

9. DEER

While visiting another friend with rescue animals named Carmen Shaw, Ross met a pair of deer (“I love these little characters, I want to take them all home with me”) and a baby raccoon. In another episode, he cradled a baby deer and fawned over the fawn in those signature dulcet tones and all was right with the world. (He mentioned on both occasions that he couldn’t imagine shooting Bambi.)

10. A BABY RACCOON

In a baby raccoon appearance, Ross fed one of the primarily nocturnal beasts with a bottle and said maybe his most disparaging animal comment ever, about how the mammals are sweet as babies, but grow up to be “pretty tough little characters.” He also references burping the little guy, which tragically wasn’t captured for posterity on film.

The children of Gail Freeman’s fourth-grade class in the Bronx had no idea how unusual their curriculum really was. To them, the six-foot-tall, 200-pound robot dubbed Leachim that occupied one corner of their classroom probably belonged to a larger fleet of AC-powered educators. Students would approach Leachim, dial in an access code, and hear their names in halting, slightly distorted speech.

Hello, Susan. How are you? Let us begin our lesson.

Loaded with information about Freeman’s class, encyclopedia entries, a dictionary, and an irreverent sense of humor, Leachim spent three years interacting with students, prompting them to answer multiple choice questions by pressing Yes/No or True/False buttons installed on his chest. His inventor—Gail’s husband, Michael Freeman—had spent $15,000 of his own money developing a resource that could tailor lessons to a variety of ages and learning levels.

Leachim was in use from 1972 to 1975, at which point Freeman began to grow tired of updating his database and setting time aside for repairs. He thought Leachim (an anagram for Michael) had the potential to be mass-produced in order to reach more children.

With his light bulb eyes and relative immobility, Leachim was the prototype. It would be 2-XL who would fulfill Freeman’s ambition to have the world’s first smart toy.

Born in 1947, Freeman’s interest in robotics had always been ahead of his time. At 13, he entered and won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search [PDF] with Rudy, a robot that could be pulled along on wheels and raise a drink tray when a button was pressed on his back. When Freeman became an assistant professor of computer sciences at Baruch University in New York in the 1970s, he developed the more advanced Leachim. Satisfied with the level of interactivity, he wanted to make it portable.

“Little Leachim” was Freeman’s next project, an evolution of Leachim that appeared to have been hit with a shrink ray. At just a foot tall, Little Leachim could sit on a desk and pull from several recordings on an 8-track cassette tape to provide both questions and answers. He might, for example, inquire whether it was true that George Washington was the country’s first president. The user could press a button for either yes or no, which would then prompt the robot to congratulate or admonish the user, depending on his or her answer. Get enough right and Little Leachim would tell a joke; wrong responses earned his ire and a suggestion to study more.

Freeman patented Little Leachim in 1975. By 1978, he had enticed the Mego Corporation—best known for their cloth-costumed superhero dolls—to mass-produce him for a wide audience. Mego developer John McNett renamed him 2-XL (“To Excel”) and, when presented with the issue of the robot being too generic-looking, grafted a chin onto the plastic mold using a discarded part from their Micronauts line.

It took barely a year for 2-XL to charm his way into prime real estate in toy stores. Despite his substantial price tag—many retailers offered him for between $50 and $80—Mego moved more than 200,000 units by the summer of 1979, along with an untold number of 8-tracks covering everything from history to science. Industry observers who insisted an expensive educational toy was a recipe for disaster had been proven wrong.

Freeman himself voiced the robot, which retained Leachim’s sarcasm; more than 2000 pieces of fan mail poured into Mego’s offices each month. In an era where a computer with processing power could sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars, 2-XL stood out.

Despite his educational ambitions, 2-XL was still relegated to toy shelves. And like most popular toys, he didn’t stay there for long. Declining sales prompted Mego to discontinue the product in 1981. Other interactive toys like Teddy Ruxpin appeared, marrying the appearance of sentience with a more appealing exterior.

When 2-XL reappeared in 1992, new distributor Tiger Electronics gave him a facelift. He sported prominent arms and a more defined face. His eyes and mouth flashed in time with his speech, and his lessons (now on a standard audio cassette) were mixed with choose-your-own-adventure-style stories about Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Unlike the earlier model, he also ran on batteries.

Like the original Mego version, Freeman provided his voice—a hyper, stylized delivery (“question” was pronounced “ques-tee-yon”) and jokes (“What do you call two banana peels? A pair of slippers!”) that gave him some charm.

His popularity back on the rise, 2-XL came full circle back to Freeman’s original Leachim concept: a 10-foot-tall version appeared on Pick Your Brain, a syndicated kids’ game show hosted by Double Dare personality Marc Summers. The towering robot would ask questions and offer narration on the proceedings.

Unfortunately, the show lasted just one season; in 1995, Tiger ceased production on the new version. In 2002, Freeman and Fisher-Price developed Kasey the Kinderbot, a more personable, LED-equipped toy aimed at preschoolers.

While the toy is impressive, it’s the original 2-XL who preceded Siri, Amazon’s Echo, and other two-way communicative devices to intrigue children who might otherwise be indifferent to an educational experience. In mimicking artificial intelligence, 2-XL helped encourage plenty of the real thing.

Some people dream of swimming with dolphins or riding an elephant, but these bucket list goals often come at the cost of harming the animal. Tourist attractions offering these activities sometimes drug, beat, or isolate the creatures into submission—and TripAdvisor has had enough. As National Geographic reports, the travel website announced this week that they will stop selling tickets to venues that are known for animal cruelty. They’ll also team up with advocacy groups to build a portal to teach tourists about humane wildlife treatment.

“TripAdvisor’s new booking policy and education effort is designed as a means to do our part in helping improve the health and safety standards of animals, especially in markets with limited regulatory protections,” said TripAdvisor president and CEO Stephen Kaufer in an official statement.

Earlier this year, the company—which runs the Viator booking service—told National Geographic’s Wildlife Watch that it “wasn’t TripAdvisor’s place” to guide web users’ ethical choices. Now, they’ve changed their mind. Their policy overhaul was prompted by a long-term protest campaign launched by animal welfare group World Animal Protection. They highlighted TripAdvisor’s affiliations with wildlife tourist venues known for questionable practices, and argued that using these animals for visitors’ enjoyment results in psychological and physical harm for the creatures. (National Geographic’s Wildlife Watch, along with other media outlets, have also reported on TripAdvisor’s affiliation with these businesses.)

The travel company will stop selling tickets to a few of the offending outlets right away, and by early 2017 they will have cut ties with all of them. These include attractions that offer elephant rides, dolphin swims, and chances to get up close and personal with tigers, among others. (According to NPR, Viator claims it doesn’t offer travel bookings that involve blood sport, and TripAdvisor already prohibits reviews for places that allow bullfights or captive hunts.) Around this time, TripAdvisor will also launch its wildlife education portal.

Not all activities involving wildlife are banned, though: TripAdvisor will grant exemptions for horseback riding, petting zoos, aquariums, zoos, or ethical nature sanctuaries.

[h/t National Geographic]

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Unlike humans, birds don’t have voice boxes or vocal cords. The organ that allows them to produce songs and sounds is called a syrinx. There’s a big gap in what scientists know about the origins of this organ, because while birds are closely related to dinosaurs, syrinx fossils are fairly rare. Now, scientists have discovered the oldest fossil evidence of the syrinx in Antarctica, and it dates back between 66 and 68 million years, according to a recent study in the journal Nature [PDF].

The preserved syrinx was found in the partial skeleton of a bird from the Late Cretaceous period on Vega Island, located just off the Antarctic Peninsula. It belonged to Vegavis iaai, an extinct bird related (but likely not ancestral) to modern ducks and geese. The fossil was discovered way back in 1992, according to The New York Times, but the lead author of the present study, paleontology Julia Clarke, only thought to examine its vocal structures and look for the syrinx in 2013. 

 
As you can see in the image above, the syrinx is located deep within birds’ chests, branching into both the right and left lungs. Clarke and her team used CT tomography scans to compare the fossilized syrinx to those of 12 other modern birds and the next-oldest fossil syrinx ever discovered in an attempt to reconstruct the evolution of the organ.

The researchers hypothesize that few other fossilized syrinx examples have been found because it’s a relatively newer feature in bird evolution, and is much younger than some of birds’ other respiratory developments or the ability to fly, which came about during the dinosaur age. Non-avian dinosaurs probably didn’t have these vocal organs, this study suggests, although the evidence isn’t entirely conclusive.

It’s hard to imagine what the dinosaur world sounded like, but this suggests that while avian dinosaurs might have honked in a similar way to geese, using a syrinx, non-avian dinosaurs didn’t make those noises. Clarke’s research has previously pointed to dinosaurs making cooing or bellowing sounds similar to crocodiles. Either way, they probably weren’t roaring.