It wasn’t all bad

The Lion of Mosul, a massive stone artefact dating back to about 860BC that was destroyed by Islamic State in 2015, has been recreated in meticulous detail by computer scientists in Britain. Based on dozens of amateur photos of the Assyrian statue taken in the Mosul Museum in Iraq, a 3D-printed model has been created and is on show at London’s Imperial War Museum. It is only a third of the size of the three-metrehigh original, but includes all the stonework’s original flaws. A cockatoo that became famous a decade ago when a video of it grooving to the Backstreet Boys went viral has now been found to have 14 distinct dance moves. A team at Tufts University in Massachusetts analysed Snowball dancing to Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust and Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna

Have Fun, and logged everything from the “headbang with lifted foot” to “the vogue”. The team says that Snowball’s ability to move to the beat illustrates the cockatoo’s high-level cognitive control and creativity, and contradicts the view that “spontaneous and diverse dancing to music” is a solely human trait.

An ice cream seller who was inundated by tiresome requests from Instagram “influencers” to eat for free at his Los Angeles truck in exchange for promoting it on social media has found a way to profit from the trend. This week, Joe Nicchi posted a sign on his van that read: “Influencers pay double”, and posted it on Instagram with the tag #Influencers Are Gross. The sign became an online hit, and his business is now booming. “We’re the anti-influencer influencers,” he said. “It’s weird, but I think it’s really fun.”