Could you imagine staying in the woods alone for a month?
How about six months? A few years? Now try to imagine living alone in the wilderness for 27 years. Christopher Knight, pictured above, did just that, calling the Maine wilderness his home since 1986, surviving largely off of stolen goods from nearby camps.
Knight, 47, was arrested last week for stealing countless amounts of food and supplies over the years, had amazingly never been caught until then.
From Doug Rafferty, spokesman for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, on Knight’s sole contact with another individual during the 90’s:
“The only words that he’d spoken to another person in 27 years was when he said ‘Hi, how are you’ to a guy on another trail that he was walking.”
Read more about Knight’s solitary life on Nation Now.
Photo: Maine Department of Public Safety
Why do roosters crow in the morning?
They’ve been doing it as long as anyone can remember - the silhouette of a rooster crowing against the rising morning sun seems to be ingrained in popular consciousness. But no one knows why.
But two researchers in Japan are trying their darnedest to figure it out:
When the roosters were subjected to cycles of 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dim light, the birds crowed about two hours before the lights came on. In conditions kept constantly dim, the roosters also continued to vocalize early in the “morning,” suggesting that their internal body clocks, or circadian rhythms, were involved in timing their crows at dawn.
For more details on the (unfinished) research, mosey on over to Science Now.
Photo: Barbara Davidson /The Los Angeles Times
The brave new world of…2013
You may not have a robot dog, techno-comforts or kids listening to “futura-rock.” But some of the predictions in this recently-rediscovered issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine largely hold true.
Predictions about the increased prevalence of telecommunication, smarter cars (though ours don’t look as funky as the ones seen above) and globalization all seem to be rather spot-on, considering they were made in 1988!
That said, there’s no way your morning starts out like this:
With a barely perceptible click, the Morrow house turns itself on, as it has every morning since the family had it retrofitted with the Smart House system of wiring five years ago…in the study, the family’s personalized home newspaper, featuring articles on the subjects that interest them…is being printed by laser-jet printer off the home computer – all while the family sleeps.
Read through the full article here.
Photos: Los Angeles Times
It’s still hard to believe this happened: But Dennis Rodman visited North Korea this week, vowing his eternal friendship with the country’s dictator Kim Jong-Un.
In case you missed it, Rodman was brought along as party of a VICE documentary on basketball diplomacy, and spoke at length with Jong-Un, who is reportedly a massive basketball fan.
Follow the entire bizarre series of events here.
Photos: AFP / KCNA, Associated Press /Kyodo News
In observance of the 102nd anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, we humbly present one of the strangest things we have ever found in our archives.
A crazy tale from former Times reporter Mack Reed, who discovered a drug-stuffed duffel stowed in a vault under a backyard hot tub.
I am standing chest-deep in a dank, muddy concrete-lined hole in Silver Lake, staring eye-level into a duffel bag full of high-grade drugs.
It smells strongly of marijuana - despite the fact that someone sealed it tightly into jars, Ziplocs and professionally vacuum-sealed pouches before…
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