A 12-year-old boy visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his school stuck a wad of gum to a $1.5 million abstract painting "The Bay" by Helen Frankenthaler.

Holly Academy director Julie Kildee said the boy had been suspended from the charter school and says his parents also have disciplined him.

"Even though we give very strict guidelines on proper behavior and we hold students to high standards, he is only 12 and I don’t think he understood the ramifications of what he did before it happened, but he certainly understands the severity of it now," said Kildee.

Link

Haraldur Sigurdsson of the University of Rhode Island discovered the lost kingdom of Tambora, which was wiped out by a giant volcanic eruption in 1815.

Records suggest that the eruption of Mount Tambora was one of the most violent in human history.

Some 10,000 local people were killed by flows of hot gas, ash and rock. As many as 117,000 died in total as disease epidemics and starvation due to crop failures contributed to the death toll.

The year 1816 became known as "the Year Without a Summer" because of the global cooling that followed the eruption due to the release of huge amounts of volcanic ash into the atmosphere.

Link

Why settle for that boring and blah wedding cake topper? Go with these awesome weird wedding cake topper. Link

Dr. Hinke Osinga and Professor Bernd Krauskopf crocheted this magnificent Lorenz manifold, "the two dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system".

The final result consists of 25,511 crochet stitches and took Osinga about 85 hours to complete. However, this wasn’t just done for fun. Their work gives insight into how chaos arises and is organised in systems as diverse as chemical reactions, biological networks and even your kitchen mixer.

Link - there’s even an instruction on how to do it, if crotchet & math are your things. (Thanks Jen!)

Phil Dalton of John Downer Productions used a fake salmon with a camera inside to record bears diving for salmon.

Each camera costs about £10,000 to develop and build, and Mr Dalton said several were damaged by the programme’s over-inquisitive subjects.

But apart from a impromptu swim downstream when it broke away from its fixings, the Salmon-cam survived relatively unscathed.

"Initially the bears gave it a lick and bite," Mr Dalton said.

"But when they realised it was not a real fish and didn’t taste of anything, they left it alone."

Link (via Underwater Times)

I really don’t know what to say about Geoffrey’s work of art - judge for yourself. Link (via Gordon Keith Blog)

For more naughty cereal boxes, see: Link (via WFMU Beware of the Blog)

Andy of Bike Furniture Design has been creating playful furniture from bicycle rims, handlebars, frames, and wheels since 1990. Link (via Militant Platypus)

This crazy musical instrument was designed in 1650 by Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century German Jesuit scholar.

The piano was designed to raise the spirits of an Italian prince who was too stressed out. The musician would select cats whose voices were at different pitches then arrange them in the pens accordingly. The piano delivered sharp pokes into the tails of the cats.

Link (via Nothing to do with Arbroath)

Did you know that Benjamin Franklin made a "Plan", kind of like commandments for more righteous living and kept it until his death? He even made a form to keep track …

For example:

10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.

11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

Link (via Digg)

More than 60 years after the end of WWII, a distributed computing project called M4 Project cracked an Enigma message by brute force.

The message? It was sent by a submarine saying how it was forced to submerge during an attack.

According to the organizers of M4, their open-source message-breaking application managed to crack one of the three messages early last week.

The translation of the message is as follows:

Radio signal 1851/19/252: "F T 1132/19 contents: Forced to submerge during attack. Depth charges. Last enemy position 0830h AJ 9863, (course]) 220 degrees, (speed) 8 knots. (I am) following (the enemy). (Barometer) falls 14 mb, (wind) nor-nor-east, (force) 4, visibility 10 (nautical miles)."

Link

Birmingham News published a collection of never-before-seen photos of the civil rights movement in Alabama, forgotten for decades in an equipment closet:

The section is the result of research by Alexander Cohn, a 30-year-old former photo intern at The News. In November 2004, Cohn went through an equipment closet at the newspaper in search of a lens and saw a cardboard box full of negatives marked, "Keep. Do Not Sell."

The caption of the photo above:

March 1965: Thousands of marchers walk 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery to bring attention to the low numbers of black registered voters in the South. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers had been trying to register more voters.

Link

This picture was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. Link

In their new book Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution, Donna Hart and Robert Sussman argue that early humans are often dinner for wild dogs and cats, hyenas, eagles, and crocodiles.

… the scientists analyzed primate fossils and determined that 9-10 percent show evidence of death from predation. This evidence includes teeth marks on bones, claw marks on skulls and, most dramatically, holes in an early human head into which sabertooth cat fangs fit.

Link

From the website:

Like the salad served at the Pizza Hut but dislike the idea that it’s expensive and you are not allowed to take more than once? Here is a guide on how you can maximize your return of investment, invented by some creative Taiwanese students.

Link (via J-Walk Blog)

The owner of this Korean fish started to notice that its face have begun to look more and more human over the last couple of years. (via Underwater Times)

In Désirée’s photo series titled "Camouflage", a suit is painted in such a way that the wearer seems to "disappear" into the background. Link (via Militant Platypus)

UrlyArt makes a photo mosaic using screenshots of websites. This particular one is of Dick Cheney in hunting garb from hundreds of websites covering the news of his shooting incident. Link (via Jaf Project)

Giraffe Manor was built in 1932 by Sir David Duncan, just a few miles outside of Nairobi, Kenya.

It is now a lodging, a very unique lodging:

Exclusive, spacious and elegant, it is the only place in the world that you can feed giraffe from your second floor bedroom window, over the lunch table, and at the front door. Guests can feed and photograph the giraffe and the Warthogs at the Manor, and also wander through the adjoining primeval forest to view the bushbuck, dik dik, and more than 180 species of birds.

I have no idea what bushbuck and dik dik are…

Link (via Information Junk)

This stunning color photograph is part of an archive of vintage Middle East photographs at the University of Chicago Library. This photo was labelled "2129 P.Z. Kairo. Bordo du Nil et Dahabieh" taken ca. 1900. Link (via Linkfilter)

Checkout other amazingly beautiful photos from landscape photographer Marc Adamus: Link

Ben Lee of the University of Puget Sound and biologists Dan Shain and Paula Hartzell of Rutgers University went "worming" to Mount Rainier to find out more about ice worms.

Polar bears weather the cold with thick insulation and the ability to generate their own heat. Antarctic cod have blood laced with antifreeze. Ice worms don’t have any of these defenses.

Instead, they have the remarkable ability to boost their cells’ energy production when the temperature drops, Shain discovered. "It’s equivalent to putting more gasoline in your tank," he said.

The worms also possess cell membranes and enzymes that function and stay flexible in temperatures where most animals’ cellular processes creak to a halt.

The downside is extreme sensitivity to heat. At about 40 degrees F, the worms’ membranes melt and their enzymes go haywire.

Link

WeirdMeat.com is a document of one man’s attempt to eat strange food around the world. I mean, really strange food…

Like this one entry called "Vertical Pork Bone" from a Chinese (what else) restaurant in Shanghai:

Yes, it’s a large pig bone, served vertical, with a plastic bendy straw in the center, so you can suck out the marrow. I suppose there’s nothing weird about a pork bone, to most of us, but to serve it like this, with the bendy straw, would turn some weak stomachs out there. It’s the presentation, not the content, that makes it weird.

Link (via Metafilter)

Sir William Herschel, Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor India, was the first to use fingerprints and palmprints on contracts with native Indian " … to frighten [him] out of all thought of repudiating his singature."

Herschel made a habit of requiring palm prints–and later, simply the prints of the right Index and Middle fingers–on every contract made with the locals. Personal contact with the document, they believed, made the contract more binding than if they simply signed it. Thus, the first wide-scale, modern-day use of fingerprints was predicated, not upon scientific evidence, but upon superstitious beliefs.

Checkout more on the History of Fingerprints: Link (via Scribal Terror)

Check out more cute paintings of Michael Sowa: Link