While digging in a rock quarry, a team of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists discovered a massive 2.5 kilometer long and 100 meters deep cave, since dubbed the "Ayalon cave", complete with an underground lake.

In this cave, scientists already discovered 8 new species, who evolved in complete isolation from the outside world, perhaps for millions of years.

Link – via Cellar IoTD

DIY Happy has this guide on how to make your own mosquito trap using a 2-liter soda bottle.

1. Cut the top of the bottle as shown

2. Put 200ml hot water in the bottle, stir with 50gram brown sugar. Put the sugar water in cold water to cool it down til 40C (temperature)….

3. After cooling down, put the sugar water in the bottle then add the yeast. No need to mix the yeast with the sugar water. When yeast ferments, it creates carbon dioxide.

4. When you cut the bottle, dont throw the top part away because that’d be needed for step 4 – you see they put the top upside down to fit into the bottle….

5. Put black paper around the bottle since mosquitos like dark places and carbon dioxide. This mosquito trap will then start working. Mosquitos fly around the corner, so the best place to place the trap is at some dark corner.

Read the full guide: Link – via Make, Thanks Yayo!

I dreamed I was blind and couldn’t see if there was a conjunctive adverb.

Then I had a nightmare about tatty motel room in the middle of a brutal desert, where "the beds are cheap and occasionally feature little black periods and semicolons that reveal themselves to be hungry bedbugs," just as in THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY by Luis Alberto Urrea. I woke up scratching. I remember now that the room didn’t have cable, either.

As part of the Sculpture in the Heights in Ohio, Carol Hummel crocheted a cozy for this tree in front of the Cleveland Heights City Hall. The "tree sweater" was made from brightly colored nylon and synthetic material that will survive the weather:

On the most obvious level, it is a piece of clothing, personifying the tree and keeping it cozy and colorful throughout the year, enhancing the beauty of nature as well as the landscape of Northern Ohio.

On another level, the brightly colored crocheted cozy wraps the tree in personal and cultural nostalgia evoking memories of bygone times and places when life was good.

On yet another level, the cozy softens the strong tree form while also emphasizing it. It is meant to simultaneously caress and encase the tree. The cozy covering the tree fluctuates between comforting blanket and suffocating cover-up; it conceals as much as it protects; it hides as much as it reveals.

This reminds me of Erika Barcott’s tree sweater, as previously posted on Neatorama, just on a much, much grander scale!

Link [Flickr] – Thanks Robyn!

A neat little bar trick – how to make a tower of three empty glasses, stacked on top of each other:

Firstly the glasses should be empty and indentical.
Secret for successful trick: imagine a clock face when you look at the glasses from above, you must remember 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock!
Place your first glass down onto the table or bar.
Place the second glass on top of first glass in the position of 10 o’clock.
Now place the third glass on top of second glass in the position of 2 o’clock.

Link – Thanks Gigz!

The craziest ping pong game I’ve ever seen! Wait for the summersault at the middle of the clip! Link [YouTube]

Brad Borevitz created this neat little program to analyze the State of the Union addresses given by US Presidents from 1790 to 2006:

SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. SOTU focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. You are invited to try and understand from this information the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.

For each State of the Union Address, the analyzer also measures the Flesch-Kincaid score, a controversial yet popular readibility index to suggest at which grade level in an American school for which the text is appropriate. The lowest score (grade level 7.1) was George W. Bush’s State of the Union address on February 27, 2001.

Link (via Metafilter)

Ah, the irony. Found at J-Walk Blog.

This cool overhead photo of the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the space high above the Caspian Sea, was taken by the Discovery Space Shuttle crew.

The ISS is the largest human-made object to orbit the earth and is the result of a joint cooperation of space agencies of many countries. Because the space station always has at least 2 crew members, there has been a continuous presence of mankind in space since November 2000.

Now, some fun stuff about the ISS:

The ISS has seen the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, who spent USD 20 million to fly aboard a Russian supply mission and the first space wedding when Yuri Malenchenko on the station married Ekaterina Dmitriev who was in Texas. Another planned curiosity will be a planned EVA by Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov in summer 2006 in order to hit a golf ball from the station, an event sponsored by a Canadian golf equipment manufacturer.

Link [Wikipedia]

Chinese doctors are considering surgery for a two-month old boy named "Jie Jie" who has three arms:

Neither of the boy’s two left arms is fully functional and tests have so far been unable to determine which was more developed, said Dr. Chen Bochang, head of the orthopedics department at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center.

"His case is quite peculiar. We have no record of any child with such a complete third arm," Chen said in a telephone interview. "It’s quite difficult to decide how to do the operation on him."

Link (via Boing Boing)

If you’re into garage physics experiments, then this website’s for you: Tesla Downunder. It has tons of cool pictures of awesome electronics, laser, ferrofluid and other DIY experiments.

Link

From the website:

This is Disk Combobulation I, an assemblage of thirty 3.5 inch floppy diskettes, slotted and slid into each other gluelessly, embodying a precise five-color pattern. Each diskette is penetrated by diskettes of the other four colors. Twelve five-sided openings are each bordered by the five different colors in a different cyclic order. The six of any one color are arranged in the form of an exploded cube. For any choice of three different colors, there is one point where all three touch in a clockwise order; at the opposite point, they touch in a counterclockwise order. There are exactly two possible arrangements of the 30 disks with all the above properties, giving rise to Disk Combobulation I and Disk Combobulation II. They are not mirror images of each other. Above is the first one, currently on display at the Goudreau Museum in New Hyde Park, NY. The second one of the set was sent to someone as a house-warming present.

See other sculptures by George Hart: Link

Scientists have finally confirmed the origin of HIV: a chimpanzee virus called the SIVcpz, isolated from wild chimps in southern Cameroon, Africa.

It is thought that people hunting chimpanzees first contracted the virus – and that cases were first seen in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo – the nearest urban area – in 1930. …

But SIVcpz has not been found to cause any Aids-like illnesses in chimpanzees, so researchers are investigating why the animals do not suffer any symptoms, when humans – who are so genetically similar – do.

Link

Geneticist Minoo Rassoulzadegan at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis in France and colleagues discovered something very strange: an inheritance of genetic traits, mediated not by DNA, but by RNA!

A team led by developmental geneticist Minoo Rassoulzadegan of the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis in France, made the discovery while working with mice that carry a mutant version of the Kit gene, which plays a role in coat color. Mice that are homozygous for the mutant gene–that is, animals with two copies–die shortly after birth. But heterozygotes, with one mutant and one normal Kit gene, do fine, although their feet and the tips of their tails are white rather than gray. Heterozygotes can be mated to produce offspring with two normal copies of Kit, but to the researchers’ surprise, most of these progeny also had white patches, even though the mutant gene was no longer present.

The effect appears to be due to RNA. In the 25 May issue of Nature, Rassoulzadegan and her colleagues report that the tissues of the heterozygous mice and their progeny had accumulated significant amounts of abnormally small RNA molecules. Recent research has shown that abnormal RNA can interfere with the function of normal RNA–a key player in the cell’s protein production machinery. Because levels of normal RNA involved in producing the Kit protein were reduced in these mice, the team hypothesized that the abnormal RNA was altering the expression of the normal Kit gene. These disruptive RNA molecules may originally come from Kit mutant fathers, who harbor them in their sperm …

Link

Flickr user Richard- took this amazing aerial photo 10 miles north of the town of Grady, eastern New Mexico. The caption of the photo says:

These fields seem to be (look like they are) slowly eroding away into barren wasteland. At 30,000 feet one can more easily see geographic transitions like this and it’s one of the reasons I find flying so enjoyable.

Link (via digg)

Sala at Aharef.info wrote this HTML DOM Vizualizer Applet that allows you to see your website as graphs:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

This one above is Neatorama, of course. See what your website looks like: Link

Storm chaer Eric Nguyen took this amazing photo of a tornado descending from a dark storm cloud and a rainbow in Kansas (of all places – is that Dorothy’s house?).

Link

Yeah, baby, yeah! The ultimate 70s style, found at Omodern.

Susan Witmore wrote a step-by-step guide on how to build your own igloo. You should read it, just in case…

Construction begins with the cutting of snow blocks. In most areas snow falls without compacting enough to allow blocks to be cut. Tramp an area the size of your intended snow block quarry for at least 15 to 30 minutes, then let it rest a half hour. Compaction causes the small ice crystals of snow to melt. These quickly refreeze, forming a more solid building material. The size of the blocks you cut will depend upon two things:

1. How heavy a block are you able to comfortably handle? Your strength and the moisture content of the compacted snow will provide some practical limits to the size of the block.

2. How strong is the compacted snow? In areas where layers of snow have thawed and refrozen, there may be ice layers in the snow. These layers make the snow blocks fragile. If such blocks must be used, they will have to be thicker than those cut from blocks without ice layers. Well compacted, low moisture snow can be cut into large thin blocks.

Link (via Starspirit)

Next Halloween, let Nathan’s fantastic pumpkin creations be your inspiration!

Link

Andrea Koschinsky of the International University in Bremen, Germany and colleagues discovered a supercritical hydrothermal vent on the Atlantic seabed:

Scientists working in the southern Atlantic Ocean have found a 407 °C hydrothermal vent, the hottest yet known on an ocean floor. Although only 5 °C hotter than the previous deep-sea high of 402 °C, recorded in the Pacific Ocean, the new hotspot bumps seawater into the strange state of being a supercritical fluid.

Such fluids can diffuse through solids a bit like a gas and dissolve materials more like a liquid. In industrial applications, supercritical carbon dioxide and water are used as solvents thanks to these unusual properties. On the ocean floor, supercritical seawater could dissolve and transport minerals from the surrounding rocks differently than at other hot vents.

Link

Margaux Lange made very chic brooches, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and rings out of Barbie and Ken doll parts!

See the entire collection: Link

Robert Cohen, Michael Rubner, and colleagues in MIT’s material science and engineering department have a new, odd plastic material that can both attract and repel water.

Robert Cohen, Michael Rubner, and colleagues started by assembling a nano-structured film made of alternating layers of positively and negatively charged polymers and silica nanoparticles. The film’s structure and a coating of waxy fluorinated silane cause water to bead on it, forming near-perfect spheres that easily roll off. To add the superhydrophilic regions (to which water droplets cling), the researchers applied a naturally hydrophilic polymer to selected areas.

In dry regions of the world, without easy access to clean water, such a material could be used for collecting water. In this application, the hydrophilic areas of the material would attract moisture in the air, collecting water drops that accumulate, until they spill over into the hydrophobic regions and roll into a collecting channel. Currently, in countries with limited access to clean water, the inhabitants typically use large polypropylene fiber meshes to harvest water from fog. …

Rubner’s lab is also taking the technique further. "When we harvest water, we have chemistry built into the hydrophilic area so that it has an antibacterial agent to kill off bacteria and other things that cause harm," Rubner says. This decontaminates the water as it accumulates so that the collected water is safe for use. Applying this technique, the researchers have been able to kill common harmful bacteria in four minutes, he says.

Link (via digg)

Q: Do you get hassled by the police?A: Nope. They have left me alone so far. As long as I obey traffic laws, I am not doing anything illegal. There aren’t any laws against decorating a car or designing your own car. as long as you comply with vehicle codes, use common sense, and drive consciously. I have met many officers who just want to look, take pictures, or ask questions. It’s almost as if they forget for a moment that they are police and they become little kids again…but there’s probably gonna be that one cop out there who’s gonna try to get me for something. They have to realize that I would be stupid to try and get away with anything illegal in that car…I mean, come on. I can just hear it over the police radio: "….the suspects are heading west bound goin about 60 mph….a little faster on the downhill…be on the lookout for a…….black …1971 gothic cathedral…I repeat….1971…. gothic cathedral….the suspects are thought to be armed with a welder and a caulking gun…"

Awesome! Link

Awesome replica of the Delorean Time machine as seen in Back fo the Future movie. The car comes complete with "working" flux capacitor, programmable time circuit, interior details using casting from actual movie prop, movie-accurate Plutonium reactor, etc.

Link (Thanks Yayo!)

Scott Blake uses a unique medium for his artwork: barcodes! This one is, as you can tell, Bill Gates made entirely from barcodes.

Link

British and South African doctors discovered that you can actually rouse semi-comatose patients by giving them sleeping pills!

British and South African doctors have reported the cases of three semi-comatose patients who were revived for several hours at a time by zolpidem, marketed to millions of insomniacs under the brand name Ambien. The drug allows the semi-comatose patients to talk with friends and family for several hours before the effect wears off …

"The effect is amazing to say the least," says Ralf Clauss of the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, UK, who discovered it along with his colleague Wally Nel of the Family Practice in Pollack Park, Springs, South Africa. "They can interact, make jokes and speak on the phone." One of them even mastered catching a baseball.

The treatment was a chance discovery, Clauss says. He recalls that one of the vegitative patients was experiencing restless movements, and that Nel was trying to calm them with the use of a sleeping pill. "Lo and behold, he woke up 15 minutes later," says Clauss. "And so now we’re using a sleeping drug to wake people up in the morning."

Link

You may have seen this before since it went ’round the Net a while ago: Ferrofluid Sculpture (Project Protrude, Flow) by Sachiko Kodama.

According to Wikipedia, a ferrofluid is a specific type of fluid containing nanoscale magnetic particles that respond to a magnetic field.

Freakishly cool, huh? Hit play or go to YouTube Link | Sachiko Kodama’s website

Rob Gonsalvez is a Canadian artist whose artwork features his trademark seamless, surrealistic transformation of objects aptly dubbed "Magic Realism". As you can tell, Rob’s influences include Salvador Dali, René Magritte, and M.C. Escher.

This one above is called "Flight Plan".

See more of Rob Gonsalvez’ artwork: Link | Link (Thanks vurdlak!)