oof

these are images from a 1930s pamphlet that endorsed kudzu, entitled "stop gullies: save your farm"

These horses went extinct in the wild 60 years ago! They were reintroduced in other parts of Mongolia and Central Asia earlier than they were reintroduced on the Steppes, but having them back here has been generational conservation work. It's truly amazing.

These horses and other kinds of horses are probably different branches of evolution, which is CRAZY AWESOME. Modern horse breeds trace back to one branch, and these dudes evolved separately. They have 33 chromosome pairs whereas the horse you're used to seeing in movies and TV shows (or riding if you too are a horse girl - gender neutral title of expertise) have 32.

Despite this, you can interbreed these two species and they will have fertile offspring. That's really rare! (A common equine cross between species, the mule, is an always-sterile offspring of a donkey and a horse, for instance).

I did have to look the exact numbers up here, full disclosure, but it's believed that Przewalski's horses and other breeds have a common ancestor about between 160,000 and 38,000 years ago

The horses you see on cave art? These guys!

It's likely that Attila the Hun and his armies rode these horses (though hard to prove decisively)

Part of the conservation efforts around them involved CLONING to avoid a genetic bottleneck. ISN'T THAT DOPE. You can read more about that here

These are the only truly wild horses. All other "wild" horses -- Australian brumbies and American mustangs, for instance -- are feral descendants of domesticated horses, which is partly why you can see such a wide range of heights, colors, conformations, etc in those populations.

first, an alternative to the doorbell:

We cut the bell away, attached a spring to the wire and to this another piece of wire, which had a block of wood fastened to one end and the whole was so contrived that the least pull of the bell handle at the door woudl send the block of wood with a dull, heavy, thud, to the floor of the room and the ... vibration it caused never failed to attract our attention.

but the one that brought tears of laughter to my eyes was this alternative to an alarm clock:

We had one [alarm for waking deaf sleepers] in our house ... for a long time and it always worked perfectly. The simplest is a cord attached to teh alarm wheel of a clock, passing from the drum to a point in the cieling over the head of the bed, where a small spring or trap is fixed with a little wire, upon which a pillow or cushion can be hung. The alarm being set at the desired hour, when it strikes, the drum winds up the cord and the pillow ... drops upon the sleeper, who is aroused thereby.