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If you forgot that birds can fly and it's awesome, these photos will remind you.

"It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... Oh, wait. It actually is a bird!"

All photos by Xavi Bou, used with permission

Photographer Xavi Bou snapped his first photo about 15 years ago. He kicked his career off in the fashion and advertising industries, but before long, his animal-loving roots took over. He itched to turn his lens toward the natural world.


"Like an amateur naturalist, I can recognize the tracks of many animals," Bou said in an email. "One day I asked myself, 'What track would be left by birds in flight?'

With that question, a new project was born — one he calls "Ornitographies."

Bou takes dozens of photos per second of birds in flight, often more than 1,000 in one sitting. Then he digitally stitches them together into a single image.

The results reveal complex, chaotic, and strangely beautiful patterns.

"I'm amazed by how gorgeous even their flight is, the trace or the draw that they make while flying," Bou said.

His work captures nature's hidden beauty, which is anything but random.

Different kinds of birds have unique and distinct ways of navigating the sky. Remarkably, Bou reveals those patterns with his photos.

Some birds shoot up and down, like a roller coaster. Some fly straight. Some flap frantically. Some glide with little effort.

Bou's photos have earned praise from publications and fellow photographers all over the world.

As for why people like his work so much, Bou said, "When you read about it and realize what is in the picture, it's quite surprising."

And he's right: Most of us can peer out the window and spot a robin or a blue jay on occasion. We might even catch a pigeon stealing some crumbs off the sidewalk.

Yet Bou's photos show many of these same birds doing things we've never seen before. His photos force us to look at the natural world around us in a new and profound way.

That's pretty incredible.

Joy

Sorry, Labradors. After 31 years, America has a new favorite dog.

The American Kennel Club has crowned a new favorite.

via Pixabay

A sad-looking Labrador Retriever

The sweet-faced, loveable Labrador Retriever is no longer America’s favorite dog breed. The breed best known for having a heart of gold has been replaced by the smaller, more urban-friendly French Bulldog.

According to the American Kennel Club, for the past 31 years, the Labrador Retriever was America’s favorite dog, but it was eclipsed in 2022 by the Frenchie. The rankings are based on nearly 716,500 dogs newly registered in 2022, of which about 1 in 7 were Frenchies. Around 108,000 French Bulldogs were recorded in the U.S. in 2022, surpassing Labrador Retrievers by over 21,000.

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Pop Culture

Woman was mocked online for calling an $80 purse a 'luxury item.' Her response went viral.

"I'm so grateful that my dad was able to get me one. He worked so hard for that money.”

@zohtaco/TikTok

Zoe Gabriel, showing off her new purse from Charles & Keith

Insults of any kind are painful, but jabs towards someone’s financial status are their own breed.

In January 2023, Singapore-based Zoe Gabriel was on the receiving end of this particular flavor of mockery when she posted a TikTok about a purse from local retail brand Charles & Keith—a gift bought for her by her father.

In her excitement, the 17-year-old called the bag, which costs around $80, a “luxury” item as she unwrapped it. Her excitement was sadly cut short by some of the negative comments she received.

One comment seemed to stand out above the rest and prompted Gabriel to post an emotional response video.

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Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS.

On May 25, the show’s Instagram page posted a touching video of an off-the-cuff moment between Barrymore and a fan during a taping of her show. In the clip, Barrymore realizes that someone in the audience is crying. So, instead of ignoring the fan, she jumps to action to see what is the matter.

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PeacefulBarb's "7 Things Adult Children May Need to Hear"

Just like there are no hard-set rules for raising children, there is no perfect guidebook on how to be a supportive parent to an older child. As parents watch their kids grow and start their own families, it can be hard for them to navigate the new role they have in their lives.

That’s why Barb Schmidt, who goes by PeacefulBarb on TikTok, shared her list of the ‘7 Things Adult Children May Need to Hear’ from their parents. It’s a great starting point for parents who aren’t sure what their older children need.

Schmidt is an international best-selling author, sought-after motivational speaker, mindset coach and mindfulness teacher.

Here’s her list:

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Education

Nurse explains how babies breathe in utero and the internet is amazed

A new mom asked how babies practice breathing, and Nurse Jen delivered an answer that's blowing people's minds.

Nurse explains how babies breathe in utero.

There are so many questions out there that we don't realize we want to know the answers to until someone else asks. Once the question is in the vicinity of our ear holes, suddenly we're like, "Oh, yeah. How does that work?" That's pretty much how this TikTok video went for a lot of viewers, myself included.

I have had four (yes, four) children exit my body, and it never dawned on me to ask further than the initial question of how babies breathe in there. It's a question that most new moms either don't think to ask or ask only once and get a similar answer to the one I received, which is that they take in oxygen via their umbilical cord connected to the placenta, so they don't need to breathe in the traditional way we think of until after birth.

But when a new mom asked the people of the internet how her unborn baby was able to practice breathing without drowning, Jen Hamilton, an OB nurse, decided to answer in a video.

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A mother with a megaphone goes on strike.

Every parent knows that sometimes their kids, especially teenagers, can say things in the heat of the moment they don’t really mean. But the mother at the center of this story took her teenage son’s outburst seriously and turned it into an opportunity to teach him a lesson. The question is, did she go too far to make a point?

A 35-year-old mom wanted to learn if she had been too hard on her 14-year-old son, so she shared her story on Reddit’s AITA subforum (we've abbreviated the forum's name to avoid printing foul language). AITA is where people vote on whether the poster was right or wrong in how they handled a situation.

“Lately, he has been acting out a little at home and school, so I decided to sit him down to try and figure out what was happening,” the mother wrote in a post that received over 800 comments. She said that the boy had been cursing out his parents as well as his teacher.

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