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To raise money for heart disease research, Rob Ginnivan ran a half marathon not through, but over Canberra, Australia. He placed a treadmill in a hot air balloon and took off. The run was especially challenging because he had to make short strides and the basket tilted at different angles:
Mr Ginnivan’s right leg seized up during his last two kilometres, as the tilt of the basket had him effectively running up hill, but he said he was delighted to complete the feat in a time of 2 hours and 18 minutes. [...]
A veteran of 18 marathons on six continents, Mr Ginnivan said before taking off that the biggest challenge of running in midair would be taking small steps when he was used to being able to stride out.
Link -via The Daily Telegraph (where there’s a video)
Photo: Colleen Petch
Culinary genius Stef of The Cupcake Project saw that two of the great joys of the human experience, sausage and cupcakes, need not be separate. Her cupcakewurst consists of cupcake batter poured into hog sausage casings (pig intestines), then baked.
A seven-year-old girl left this note on her parents’ computer desk. They are considering password-protecting the computer. I can laugh because this is not my child, but if it were, she’d find out what a nightmare life can really be! Link -via HuffPo
Photo: Bo Barker Jørgensen
It may sound like the plot of a Syfy movie, but it's real: scientists have discovered that bacteria can survive being buried for 86-million-years in deep-sea mud.
LinkThe scientists jammed a large metal pipe 30 meters into the sea bottom and used a piston to suck out a long column of reddish clay. After hauling the sediment onboard, they probed the core with a needlelike sensor to measure the oxygen concentration in each layer. The researchers knew how much oxygen should have diffused down into each section of sediment from the seawater, so any "missing" oxygen meant microbes had consumed it.
Moving deeper through the core is like moving back in time, studying older and older communities of microorganisms. "We can use the Pacific as a natural experiment that has been running for 86 million years," Røy says.
Screen Junkies brings us a painfully honest trailer for the movie Transformers, telling you all the revelations the real trailer ignored. Language slightly NSFW. -via The Daily What Geek
The Grill Sergeant BBQ Apron – $19.95
Do you consider grilling to be a combat sport? You need the Grill Sergeant BBQ Apron from the NeatoShop. This medal worthy apron includes:
Winning the war against the grill just became a whole lot easier.
Father’s Day is June 17th. Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Father’s Day gift ideas!
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Well, who among us hasn’t tried this approach? Unfortunately for this Russian man, he got stuck three floors down:
“An eyewitness reported to the regional rescue service that there was a man in the chute … The rescuers’ crew found a man, who was stuck at the fifth floor, in the garbage disposal,” a spokeswoman for the emergency services said.
Pictures released by the emergency services showed the glum-looking man sitting helplessly in the chute before he was cut out.
It was not immediately clear what prompted the man to make such a desperate attempt to flee his girlfriend.
Link | Photo (unrelated) via tootao
Stealing from shops by stuffing things in pockets is easy for thieves, but stealing guitars by stuffing them down your pants? Now that takes skillz:
Authorities say two men entered the Spencer's Music Store at 1717 S. Mur-Len Rd. in Olathe about 2:30 p.m. April 12. One suspect distracted the salesperson while the other suspect placed a guitar down his pants, then left the store.
Jeff Tice, Spencer's owner, said he noticed the guitar had been stolen.
"I looked up and saw an empty spot on the wall and no one was playing it in the store. So I realized it was not in the store," Tice said.
He checked his surveillance video and discovered the thieves stole two guitars worth more than $5,000.
"You can't make that up," Tice said. "It's huge."
I love this! A bath towel that pixelates your body in real life! The Censorship Towel is an art project from the Carmichael Collective, the folks who brought us Piñata Anatomy, but we can hope that this idea makes it into stores sometime. See more pictures at the project site. Link
On a Brazilian beach, the ad agency Ogilvy a shower that looks like a giant soda fountain. Would you like to get drenched in Sprite? This is your chance. Or it’s water. The ad is kind of vague about what’s coming out of the shower. Content warning: NSFWish swimwear images.
Link -via That’s Nerdalicious!
Oh,
Arby's. When Ryan Hart, 14, bit into an Arby's roast beef sandwich last
week, he got a bit more than he bargained for. The "bonus" meat
was a severed finger!
Steve Hall, environmental health director for the Jackson County Health Department, tells the Citizen Patriot an Arby's employee had sliced her finger while operating a meat slicer and left her station without immediately telling anyone what happened. Other workers were filling an order before they became aware of the situation, Hall says.
The restaurant did not close.
"Somebody loses a finger, and you keep sending food out the window? I can't believe that," says Ryan's mom, Jamie Vail.
What is so awesome that it merits pumping your fist victoriously for 16 hours? That would be pumping your fist victoriously for 16 hours. So James Peterson of Akron, Ohio superglued his hand closed and then pumped his arm continuously in an effort to get into the Guinness Book of World Records:
Fist pumping to the song Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, Peterson stopped just after 3 a.m. Saturday at Manny’s Pub on Brown Street near the University of Akron.
Peterson, an unemployed electrician from Green and self-proclaimed “veteran fist pumper,” said he did not suffer any serious pain from the 16-hour effort, but “I did get a nasty sunburn on my arm.”
If I ever meet Mr. Peterson, I’ll give him a high five and a fist bump to honor his achievement.
Photo: Paul Tople/Akron Beacon Journal
USA
Literary Map by Geoff Sawers and Bridget Hannigan
Map
of Literary Britain and Northern Ireland by Geoff Sawers
This one is fantastic: Designer Geoff Sawers created a hand-lettered, literary map of the United States and Britain by featuring authors according to their approximate locations. Via Frank Jacob's Strange Maps
Now imagine Luke training on Dagobah under the Incredible Hulk. Or Kermit the frog. Or, worst of all, Gary Coleman.
Scratch that last one. I suspect that Gary Coleman would have been strong in the Force.
Link -via reddit | Image: Stephen Wildish
Photo: @Grace_White/Twitpic
Teenager Patrick Gonzalez is a Spurs fan, so he wanted to show his love for his favorite player Matt Bonner by getting a unique haircut. Problem is, the school said "don't" to the "do": Link
A woman in Orange County, California discovered that rock collecting can be a dangerous hobby, when the rocks she’d collected from the beach earlier that day suddenly ignited in her pocket!
Here’s the scoop:
Orange County Fire Authority officials tell the newspaper that the woman collected the rocks on a nearby beach, returned home and “was standing in her kitchen … when the pocket of her cargo shorts caught fire.”
“I talked to the paramedic who treated her, and in his 27 years in responding to calls near the beach, he’s never seen this,” Fire Authority Capt. Marc Stone told the Register. “The rocks were still smoking when firefighters took them to the hospital.”Now, they’re being tested. It’s possible, Stone said, that phosphorus in the stones may have caused the combustion.
And they say hobbies like rock and shell collecting are a safe and relaxing activity.
Remember the Harvard
men's baseball team that danced to Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me
Maybe" while on a road trip? Well, the Southern Methodist University
Women's rowing team did one better. They wrote on their YouTube page: "Ball's in your court, Harvard Baseball"
Hit play or go to Link
[YouTube]
As a parent, all I can think of is: They're not wearing seatbelts! Seatbelts!!!!
If you’ve wondered where rock god Prince has been hiding out for the last few years, it appears that he has been undergoing some radical anti-aging treatments.
But now he’s back and looking even more youthful than when he started his career in the late 70s, ready to hit the stage complete with scooter and Purple Rain era wardrobe.
I’m glad to see that he’s moved past that whole name change debacle and has chosen to embrace his roots. Now he just needs to hit the playgrounds and find a girl wearing a raspberry beret!
If you think completing the triathlon is hard, try doing it while juggling the entire way (yes, even while swimming). That's what Joe Salter did* last month.
This 31-year-old public school counselor from Pensacola, Fla., pulled off the incredible achievement on April 21 when he swam a quarter-mile while juggling three balls, then biked 16.2 miles while juggling two balls in one hand and ran four miles, also juggling.
Even more amazing: He did this all in 1 hour and 57 minutes
Salter, who has been juggling since he was 8, got into "joggling," the act of juggling while running, back in 2008 and soon became obsessed with that sport's Holy Grail: Completing a complete triathlon while juggling.
"For a long time, it's been a joke among the joggling community," Salter told The Huffington Post. "About 10 months ago, I started training to do it."
Almost as amazing as Salter's feat is the fact that there is indeed a "joggling community."
*yes, a mini-triathlon but still an amazing accomplishment
Still Film of an Oak, by Noel Myles
Photographer Noel Myles does collages like nobody else - I'm particularly fond of this one of an oak tree, composed of shots taken at different seasons.
Check out the rest of Noel's portfolio here: Link
This Is A Job For Superman Reusable Folding Drinkware Bottle – $7.95 (Sold Individually. Front and Back Shown)
It’s a pouch! It’s a bag! No! It’s the This Is A Job For Superman Reusable Folding Drinkware Bottle from the NeatoShop.
Save yourself from thirst with this environmentally-friendly drink holder. The bottle stands upright when filled an can be folded, rolled, or flattened when empty.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more amazing Water Bottles!
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Or maybe it’s actually a “beby skhwer” cake. Anyway, Cake Wrecks has several baby cakes to cry over, including the one you expect that says “babby.” Link
Meet Shanti, a 36-year-old Asian elephant at the Smithsonian's National Zoo. She turned out to be quite the musical pachyderm: she loves to play the harmonica!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via The Kid Should See This
Image: John Darrell Van Horn/UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging
In 1848, railroad foreman Phineas Gage entered the annals of neuroscience with one unfortunate accident - an explosion shot an iron rod straight up his head. Amazingly, he didn't die - but the damage to his brain changed his personality so much that his friends said he was "no longer Gage."
Now, 164 years later, scientists have mapped the Phineas Gage brain pathways for the first time:
... how does one reconstruct the connectome of someone who died more than 150 years ago, and whose brain no longer even exists? Van Horn and his colleagues used high-resolution CT scans of Gage's skull, from a 2004 study that digitally reconstructed the trajectory of the iron rod as it passed through his brain, and examined the data again to re-estimate its path as accurately as possible.
They then selected structural MRI and DTI data from 110 healthy people from the LONI Image Data Archive. All of these data came from men aged between 25 (Gage's age at the time of his accident) and 36 (the age at which he died). The researchers combined these data to produce a generalized map of the long-range connections in the human brain, and used computational modelling to project the passage of the rod onto it.
These eight students at an unnamed high school in San Jose, California, arranged their yearbook quotes in a manner that answers the question for posterity. Enlarge the picture at Imgur if you can’t read it. Link -via Buzzfeed
I don't have an Xbox nor do I play those shoot 'em up games, but if I did, I'd imagine that headshots would be a bit more gratifying with this: an Xbox controller whose buttons have been modded with real 9mm bullet casings by Etsy seller DieselLaceDesign.
Link - via Obvious WinnerDisco diva and five-time Grammy winner Donna Summer died this morning after a long battle with cancer, which she tried to keep out of the press. Summer was 63 years old. Link -via Boing Boing
Way
back when, parents used to name their kids whatever they like and that's
the end of that.
Then came the Internet, and baby naming suddenly became a bit more complicated:
Fast forward to after a baby is born, and it’s becoming more and more popular to reserve a child’s email, domain name and maybe even Twitter handle, so they don’t have to be something like, “Sophie Miller 582” or “Oscar Sheppard 4”” when they grow up and want their own Internet identity.
“When our son was a month old, we got him a Gmail account,” says Joanna Goldstein, a first time mother in New York City. “For now, I send emails out to our family every week, attaching pictures and sharing his latest triumphs. I hope somebody it will be nice for him to have this journal of his early adventures in his email.”
And then, there’s Jay Z and Beyonce, who took the whole laying claim to a baby name to the next level. They made headlines last winter when they filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to protect their daughter’s name -- Blue Ivy Carter .
Some parents found the whole thing downright crazy. Trademarking a baby name -- only in tinsel town, right?
Jacoba Urist of MSNBC's TODAY Moms has the post: Link (Photo: Shutterstock)
The soon-to-be-in-theaters movie Battleship proves that no idea is too dumb for Hollywood to make a blockbuster out of it. Could other toy-based movies be far behind? How about a film based on Connect Four?
Milton Bradley’s abstract strategy game transforms into an apocalyptic race against time in this sci-fi blockbuster, starring Ryan Gosling and Rihanna as technocratic dictators (and ex-lovers) locked in a perpetual war of mutually assured destruction and reconstruction on the planet Ouroboros. After erecting, then annihilating, exquisite tech-noir skyscrapers and impossibly high vertical farms using strategically placed death discs, it is left to a brilliant but raunchy elderly mathematician (Betty White) to unite the ex-lovers with a perfect-play strategy inspired by James D. Allen and Victor Allis, who solved the game on Earth in the late ’80s. Catchphrases from the game’s TV commercial — “Here, diagonally” and “Pretty sneaky, sis” — are incorporated into the film’s final moments, when the formerly self-centered Gosling asks the formerly obstinate Rihanna how she would like to be kissed.
Read the premises for nine other toy-based films at Underwire. Link
Once again, it’s time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you know what the, um, object in this picture is?
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many times as you like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will each win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don’t include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
Check out the What Is It? Blog for more clues. Good luck!
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