Designer Aheda Zanetti created a new "Islamic bikini" and sportswear she called Ahiida (and everyone else calls "burqini").

Link to Herald Sun article | Ahiida website

Noriko Okamoto and Isao Inouye of the University of Tsukuba, Japan, discovered a unique microorganism they called "Hatena".

Hatena is unique because it is a snapshot in the evolutionary process of endosymbiosis, where one creature incorporates another, thus creating a new form of life.

These creatures can resemble plants or animals, but during one phase of its life it resembles a predator. At another stage, Hatena carry a green, photosynthesizing alga inside. It divides during that phase, giving rise to two daughter cells — one green and one colorless.

The colorless daughter develops a feeding tool and eventually engulfs another green alga, the scientists wrote.

Link

For more cool pictures of clouds, see: The Cloud Appreciation Society

Workers at the Stadium Club in Jacksonville, Florida, discovered what they believed to be an image of Jesus at the bottom of a nacho warming tray.

No words whether it’ll end up on eBay just yet.

Link

Thousands of tourists were evacuated from the Disney’s Grand California hotel when a giant christmas tree caught on fire!

Link

Heather makes great artwork out of driftwoods – see her other artworks here: Link

Charhira Kozma at Georgetown University
found over 50 ancient tombs in Egypt depicting dwarfism.

"Dwarfs were accepted in ancient Egypt; their recorded
daily activities suggest assimilation into daily life, and their
disorder was never shown as a physical handicap."

Link

German towns are preparing to put "No Prostitutes Here" signs over fear of an army of call girls coming for the 2006 soccer World Cup.

The idea for the signs came after a German man, named only as Michael G, was arrested for soliciting a prostitute in a restricted area in Dusseldorf.

In court he claimed he had no idea picking up a prostitute in that area was illegal.

Judge Dirk Kruse admitted that he also didn’t know which areas were legal and which were not and said: "We need some kind of sign to make it clear."

Link

For more of Margot’s artwork, see: Link

Ah, the controversial San Francisco Police Department video…

A parody video that features uniformed and plainclothes San Francisco police officers and racist and sexist stereotypes has led to the suspension of at least 20 police officers.

In a press conference Wednesday evening with Police Chief Heather Fong, Mayor Gavin Newsom described the video as a series of skits showing situations demeaning to Asians, African-Americans, homosexuals and transsexuals. Police Chief Heather Fong called the videos “egregious, shameful and despicable.”

If you haven’t seen it yet – it’s time to check it out. Link

The "Nun Bun", a cinnamon bun bearing an uncanny resemblence to Mother Theresa, was stolen Christmas morning!

The Nun Bun gained worldwide attention in 1996 when a customer nearly took a bite of it before recognizing the revered nun in the folds of flaky pastry.

Link | Bongo Java’s Nun Bun Page

Faroe Islands, located halfway between Iceland and Norway, is usually an idyllic and very scenic place. Except when it’s time for Grindadráp, a controversial whaling event where pilot whales are herded onto the beach and then culled.

Whether you agree with whaling or not, you’ll find these pictures noteworthy.

Link to Mario Paoluzzo’s images (via growabrain) | Wikipedia entry

Mathematicians Matthias Weber, David Hoffman, and Michael Wolf discovered a new minimal surface called a genus one helicoid – a structure thought for over 200 years not to be mathematically possible.

What is a minimal surface?

"A minimal surface is formed when the pressure on both sides of a surface is the same," Weber explained. "’For example, when you dip a bent coat hanger into soapy water, the soap bubble that forms on the hanger is a minimal surface." These soap bubbles can have various shapes, depending on the shape of the coat hanger, but in every case the bubble is trying to minimize surface tension, he said. This happens when the bubble has the smallest possible surface area.

Link to News Article | Various neat minimal surfaces

Menssana Research’s Breathscanner 1.0 is a billion times more sensitive than a police breathalyzer, and can be used to check for asthma, ulcers, and trouble with a heart transplant.

Recent tests of the Menssana device have been encouraging. In a 2003 pilot study of 201 women, some of whom had diagnosed breast cancers, the breath test identified 88% of those cancers. The test’s accuracy is comparable to a mammogram.

And in a 2004 clinical trial that involved 407 volunteers, including 195 patients with untreated lung cancer, the breath test picked up nearly 91% of the tumors.

Link to ZD Net Article | Link to Menssana Research

What happens when you put a frog inside a 16-Tesla magnetic field at the Nijmegen High Field Magnet Laboratory? It levitates!

In fact, it is possible to levitate magnetically every material and every living creature on the earth due to the always present molecular magnetism. The molecular magnetism is very weak (millions times weaker than ferromagnetism) and usually remains unnoticed in everyday life, thereby producing the wrong impression that materials around us are mainly nonmagnetic. But they are all magnetic. It is just that magnetic fields required to levitate all these "nonmagnetic" materials have to be approximately 100 times larger than for the case of, say, superconductors.

Link | Gallery of Levitating Objects (Thanks Tony!)

Owen, the baby hippo rescued after a flood, has found a new friend: Mzee, a 100-year old tortoise in a wildlife sanctuary in Mombasa, Kenya.

According to a park official, they sleep together, eat together and "have become inseparable".

Link

What do you get when you parody popular songs using "karaoke-style backing music with vocals provided by audio pronunciation samples from online dictionaries"?

Link

For more of Heidi’s artwork, see: Link

Thom LaBean and Christopher Dwyer of Duke University exploited the self-assembling properties of DNA to create the world’s first mass produced nano-structures (here a 4×4 grid spelling – what else – DNA!). Link

What’s better than a baby panda? Sixteen baby pandas, of course!

Sixteen panda cubs, shown with their expert caretakers, debuted Friday at the Wolong Panda Research Center in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province.

Professor Zhang Hemin, head of the Wolong research group, said that the species has produced more cubs than ever before, with sixteen born and nurtured at his center at the Wolong base, and another two born in the United States.

Link

Craig Venter, who became famous for completing a privately-owned map of the human genome in 2000, is spearheading the effort to make the first synthetic lifeform.

Dr. Venter, 59, has since shifted his focus from determining the chemical sequences that encode life to trying to design and build it: "We’re going from reading to writing the genetic code," he said in an interview.

Venter’s team aim to construct a simpler version of Mycoplasma, a bacterium commonly found in human’s reproductive and respiratory tracts. The bacterium has a small genome in the first place: with only one chromosome and 517 genes.

Link
(via World Changing)