Anyone who has dogs, children, or family members who refuse to use coasters will love this affordable and easy hack to fix scratches on a wooden table. Kait Schulhof, known as A Clean Bee, shows in a viral TikTok video that all you need are some walnuts and natural furniture polish to get your table looking scratch-free. "Just scrub the walnut over any scratches, divots, or worn areas. As you scrub, oil is released from the walnut, which can eliminate the appearance of scratches in the wood,” Kait says in the video. To finish the job, she rubs the wood down with a simple homemade wood polish made from olive oil, distilled white vinegar and a citrus essential oil to give it a nice glossy shine.​The hack is not only clever but also a big win for the environment, using simple, natural ingredients instead of harsh chemicals. "Every time I do this, I am just amazed by the results. It's just one of those cleaning hacks that seriously works,” Kait says.Did you know a walnut can repair scratches on wood surfaces? It’s like magic!  @acleanbee TikTok · Kait Katie McDonald at Food52 is also a big fan of the walnut-and-polish hack. But she cautions that there may be better ideas for some types of wood. “This trick only works on finished wood and is most successful with lighter scratches,” she writes. “Deep grooves and darker woods will likely need the help of floor polish. Oh, and you want to hold off on using nuts if you have a precious antique; that's better for a professional to look at.”

At 1:30 am on a Monday morning in February, an AMBER Alert went out in southern Louisiana about a missing 10-year-old girl from New Iberia. It was believed she had been kidnapped and driven away in a 2012 silver Nissan Altima.A few hours later at 7 am, Dion Merrick and Brandon Antoine, sanitation workers for Pelican Waste, were on their daily route when they noticed a vehicle that fit the description in the alert.The sanitation workers thought it was suspicious that a silver sedan was parked alone in a field in St. Martin Parish."Something told me, like just look, I said what is that car doing in that field like that? What the car doing? Guess what, that's the dude with the little girl," Merrick said in a Facebook Live video. "That's God."The video has been seen over 1.5 million times since it was posted on Monday morning.To prevent the possible kidnapper from escaping, they parked the large sanitation truck the wrong way on the highway to "Make sure they couldn't get out," Merrick said. Then, they called 911.When police arrived they arrested Michael R. Sereal, the man whose car was mentioned in the AMBER Alert. The police were also able to safely recover the girl who appeared unharmed. She was later taken to the hospital to be evaluated by medical personnel.The Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department's online sex offender registry has a Michael Roy Sereal but authorities wouldn't confirm it's the same man.The young girls' family got in touch with the two men who saved her and have shown amazing gratitude. "I'm just so happy and blessed that I have actually seen the car and we actually responded like we were supposed to respond," Merrick told KHOU.Merrick hopes that his actions will inspire others to be proactive as well. "Don't be scared if you see something. If you know something is wrong, report it," Merrick said. "Call authorities because it could save someone's life."The two men were applauded by the St. John Parish's Sheriff, who offered to buy them lunch."I was just doing my job man. I was just doing my job and actually came across somebody who needed help," Merrick said. "Got me tearing up."The AMBER Alert system was created in 1996 after nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted and murdered while riding her bike in Texas. Since its inception, nearly seven in 10 AMBER alert cases have resulted in children being successfully reunited with their parents.In 17% of the cases, the child's recovery is a direct result of the alert.As of December 2020, 1,029 children rescued specifically because of the system.This article originally appeared on 02.09.21

Elephants are unique among animals in so many ways. Their massive size, of course. Their funky trunks that function like a fifth limb as well as a literal hose. The fact that they weigh thousands of pounds but can walk almost completely silently. Their high intelligence and complex social behaviors.And now, apparently, their individualized "names."New research from Kenya indicates that elephants may have something akin to human names, which they use to communicate directly to specific members of their herd. According to Reuters, elephant researchers had noticed over the years that sometimes an elephant would make a vocalization to a group and all the elephants would respond, but sometimes the same elephant would make a similar call to the group, but only one elephant would respond—almost as if it had been called by name. Researchers studied the vocalizations of 100 African savannah elephants in Amboseli National Park and Samburu National Reserve to see if they could determine whether or not that's what was actually happening. Using a machine-learning model, they identified vocalizations that appeared to be tied to specific individuals, then tested them on 17 elephants whose "names" they may have discovered. Sure enough, when a vocalization that the model had identified as being addressed to a specific elephant was played on audio, that elephant responded by moving toward the audio source and behaving more enthusiastically, making more vocalizations in return, than when a vocalization that was apparently directed toward someone else was played.“They could tell if a call was addressed to them just by hearing that call,” said behavioral ecologist and lead study author Mickey Pardo of Cornell University (formerly of Colorado State University).According to the study published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution journal, this kind of name usage is rare in the animal world. Bottlenose dolphins and orange-fronted parrots will call individuals with specific sounds, but they do so by simply mimicking the calls of the animal they're addressing. That's not what the elephants appear to be doing. "Instead, their names seem to be arbitrary, like human names," Pardo said, according to Reuters. "Addressing individuals with arbitrary names likely requires a capacity for some degree of abstract thought."Part of what makes studying elephant vocalizations tricky is the range of sounds they make. We often associate elephants with a loud trumpet-like sound, but Pardo said the name vocalizations are found in the lower, rumbling noises they make.“The rumbles themselves are highly structurally variable,” said Pardo, who conducted the research while working at Colorado State University, according to NPR. “There's quite a lot of variation in their acoustic structure.”One of the most common usages of elephant names discovered in the study were from mother elephants to their calves, seemingly to calm them down or check in with them. But Pardo told NPR that while they knew the vocalizations they played were directed at specific individuals, they weren't able to isolate the actual "names" of individual elephants from the vocalizations in the study."If we could do that, we could answer a lot of other questions that we weren't able to fully figure out in this study,” Pardo said.Some of those questions include: Do elephants all use the same "name" when they're addressing the same elephant? Are they names or nicknames? Do elephants talk about each other? Do they say other elephants' names when they're not around? There are more specific linguistic questions as well. "We still don't know the syntax or basic elements by which elephant vocalizations encode information," Colorado State University conservation biologist and study co-author George Wittemyer told Reuters. "We need to figure that out before we can make deeper progress on understanding them."What the study found does indicate, however, is that elephants are even more mentally and socially sophisticated than we thought. "Certainly, in order to address one another in this way, elephants must learn to associate particular sounds with particular individuals and then use those sounds to get the attention of the individual in question, which requires sophisticated learning ability and understanding of social relationships," Pardo said, according to Reuters. "The fact that elephants address one another as individuals highlights the importance of social bonds—and specifically, maintaining many different social bonds—for these animals."

Douglas Scott grew up on Washington's Olympic Peninsula in the dying shadow of the timber industry that had supported the region for decades."Nearly every home had a bright orange or yellow sign reading 'This home supported by timber dollars,'" Scott wrote on Outdoor Society.While the region has also been recognized for its succulent seafood, temperate climate, and stunning natural formations, nothing shaped the community — or the physical landscape — quite like logging did.The tension in the air between the loggers and the environmentalists throughout the 1980s was thicker than the trees being cut down."I heard from old timers in the Harbor about how environmentalists were ruining the region, and I was told by environmentalists that loggers were killing everything in sight," Scott recalled.But to understand the full impact of deforestation on the region, it helps to take the bird's eye view.Here's a satellite image of the Olympic Peninsula from 1984. The white region in the center are the mountaintops in Olympic National Park; you'll also notice the grey and brown areas along the western and northern coasts of the peninsula."When I moved away from the area in 1997, there wasn't much of a logging or mill economy in dozens of towns around the region," Scott said.By that time, tourism had begun to take the place of timber as the region's major industry — which was probably helped along by the fact that the trees were slowly but surely starting to recover, enhancing the already stunning vistas that drew visitors.Here's how the Olympic Peninsula looked by the time that Scott and his family left the area; you'll notice the western and northern coasts are just a little bit greener than they were 13 years prior...Those great green arbors continued their gradual recovery into the 2000s...And they're still going today.But those isolated moments don't tell the whole story of the region's recovery. It's even more remarkable when you can see it in action...We don't always notice the world changing right before our eyes, but the decades-long view of the Olympic Peninsula shows the true power of nature.It's not just the trees, either; according to Scott, the replenished forests have also had a positive impact on the local salmon population and other treasured natural resources.That doesn't mean we shouldn't use the natural world, of course. We still need wood, for example, but now we know there are sustainable ways to use it without recklessly damaging to the planet.The Earth was built to take care of itself. We just need to let Mother Nature do her thing.This article originally appeared on 12.22.16

A ridiculous reason. The post The Oasis lyrics Liam Gallagher refuses to sing: “Never sings it live. Ever” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Perfect enough for rock and roll. The post The Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger struggled to sing: “I didn’t really hit the notes that great” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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Some of their songs are climbing the charts again decades after being released.