Science

Scottish kids are helping penguins flirt with tiny painted pebbles

A story about wee Scottish baa-bees, romantic penguins, and the perfect excuse to introduce you to the term “pebbling.”

At Edinburgh Zoo, gentoo penguins are entering their annual rom-com era. During mating season, male penguins woo potential partners by offering them smooth, attractive pebbles they can use to build a nest together. This year, though, the birds got an assist from some very thoughtful humans: children supported by the Edinburgh Children’s Hospital Charity, who painted colorful stones for the penguins to choose from.

The kids can watch a livestream of the enclosure to see whether a penguin picks up their pebble, turning the whole thing into a sort of feathery dating show with extremely wholesome stakes. As Erik Barnes reports, families and commenters alike are fully invested in which tiny masterpiece might help spark penguin romance.

All of which gives me the perfect excuse to introduce you to “pebbling,” the internet term inspired by this exact behavior. Pebbling means sharing a small object, meme, photo, or link that says, “I saw this and thought of you.” It’s a tiny bid for connection, whether between partners, friends, or anyone else you’re building a metaphorical nest with.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared the secret power hiding in your flirting style. Which had me wondering… Which movie line has the most flirt energy of all time? I can’t be mad at Jerry Maguire pulling out the win, but I thought The Princess Bride would score higher than 21%!

• “You had me at hello.” Jerry Maguire (32.2%)

• “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy…” Notting Hill (13.8%)

• “As you wish.” The Princess Bride (21.8%)

• “You make me want to be a better man.” As Good as It Gets (29.9%)

Culture

He bought a “vacant lot” for $5,000 and got a lot more than he wanted

An ambiguous auction bid came with a burdensome bonus.

When I say “my street,” I mean the one I live on. When Jason Fauntleroy says “my street,” he means the one he somehow bought at auction for $5,000. What he thought was a simple bid on a vacant lot in Trenton, Ohio, came with an absurd little surprise: Bloomfield Court, the private road attached to it.

In this story by Adam Albright Hanna, that really surreal real estate fluke* quickly turns into a government headache. Suddenly, Fauntleroy is not just the owner of a lot, but of a street lined with five homes, plus all the strange responsibility that comes with it. And that’s before the years-long eminent domain dispute that followed.

* - That was fun to write!

Ideas

20 tips for 20-year-olds that could save you years of chaos

It’s OK to read these tips if you’re already out of your twenties, we won’t tell.

Your 20s are often sold as the decade for messy mistakes, big dreams, and “figuring it out.” Which is cute in theory, until “figuring it out” involves bad relationships, worse budgets, mystery burnout, and realizing no one ever actually taught you how to live.

As Zoheb Alam reports, one Reddit thread asking for the single best piece of advice people wish they’d heard at 20 turned into something much better: a crowdsourced survival guide. A few standouts hit immediately. Learn to cook before takeout becomes a personality. Save and invest earlier than feels necessary. And do not build your whole life around the wrong partner just because you are scared of being alone. It reads like advice from older siblings who have already face-planted for you.

The best part is that this list doesn’t promise some perfect, optimized life. It just offers 20 small perspective shifts that could make adulthood a little less expensive, exhausting, and emotionally weird.

On March 8, 1979, Philips showed off the compact disc to the world, and with it, a shiny little glimpse of the future. When CDs reached consumers a few years later, they were premium tech: Sony’s first CD player sold for about $730 then, roughly $2,400 today, and early albums could cost $17, or about $56 in today’s dollars. But people happily paid for the promise: crisp digital sound, no rewinding, no hiss, no pops, and the magic of skipping straight to any song with the tap of a button.

That promise turned into a juggernaut. By 2000, CDs were the music business’s golden goose, generating about $13.2 billion a year in the U.S., roughly $25 billion today. Then came MP3s, downloads, and finally streaming, which made shelves full of jewel cases feel less like the future and more like clutter.

The CD’s core concept, a laser reading a spinning disc, turned out to be one of consumer tech’s great expandable ideas. It gave rise to the DVD, then Blu-ray, and now Ultra HD Blu-ray. A CD and a UHD disc still look almost identical, but a top-end 100 GB UHD disc could hold roughly 2,300 four-minute songs in CD-quality audio compared with the 15 to 20 tracks on a standard album CD. Not bad for a format family that still looks, at a glance, like it belongs in a 1998 glove box.

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