What would Batman use as an umbrella? Probably this Tuuci MANTA Parasol, which is inspired by "the graceful ocean flight of the Manta Ray".

Just £85! Link

You’ve seen sofa beds before … boring! But I bet you haven’t seen this: a sofa that converts into a bunk bed!

Link – via zxcvzxcv

Adam Brandejs made this animatronic "flesh" shoe that can be controlled by an MP3 player:

The shoe is stitched together with multiple pieces of latex rubber cast out of moulds made from my own skin. The shoe’s toe and heel raise and lower as it occasionally vibrates/pulsates, and twitches on the floor as if it were still alive. The movement is not constant, and usually causes people to jump back while they are in the middle of leaning in for a closer look.

Link – via Make

See more mesmerizingly beautiful artwork of Thomas Briggs: Link – via LightChaser

Billy Windsor, a regimental goat of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, was demoted for refusing to keep in step at Queen Elizabeth II’s 80th birthday:

The goat was marched before the CO after being reported for "unacceptable behaviour" by his handler, also known as the goat major.

Six-year-old Billy is on his first overseas tour since joining the regiment in 2001, and according to one parade onlooker is unlucky to be in the dog house.

"I thought he was immaculately turned out on the night and marched quite well, but Billy does have a reputation for being a bit frisky and temperamental," he said.

Link – via Nothing to do with Arbroath

David Attenborough narrates the story of this scary, giant (13-inch long!), bat-eating centipede in Venezuela.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via A Welsh View

If you like this, you’d probably like: Giant Mouse-Eating Centipede previously on Neatorama.

From the website:

Since the military provides just 6 to 12 computers for every 1,000 or so troops, time limits of 10 to 15 minutes per day are often enforced at Morale Welfare Recreation Cafés (the complicated name for military internet cafés). Anyone who sorts through spam, reads forwarded articles and jokes, then tries to respond to “real” email knows 15 minutes isn’t enough. …

It should come as no surprise, then, that some enterprising military personnel have engineered an alternative. Hajjinets, the common term for troop-owned ISPs, have sprung to life on almost every base around Iraq. A typical Hajjinet is built and maintained by one or two soldiers and can provide nearly 24-hour internet access (until the region is stabilized and electrical lines can be installed, generators must occasionally be powered down for maintenance). Most Hajjinets are small, serving between 20 and 30 troops, but ISPs serving as many as 300 are known to exist. In a country wracked by war, where even the capital city receives only intermittent electricity, where people’s lives are in constant peril, and where even basic necessities are scarce, this is no small victory.

Link – via Madville

AP Photo / Juan Manual Villasenor

We’ve featured Manuel Uribe of Monterey, Mexico, on Neatorama before, with amazingly warm outpouring of support for Manuel, who made a desparate plea for medical help for his morbid obesity.

Doctors responded with generous offers to perform gastric bypass surgery free of charge, but first Manuel had to lose some weight the traditional way: by dieting. And diet he did:

"I feel better now. I can stretch and move a bit more," Uribe said Monday, flanked by Dr. Barry Sears, creator of the Zone diet, who came to check on his progress.

"Before I would eat 4 eggs, rice, beans and tortillas for breakfast," Uribe said. "Now, I’m learning to eat the right way."

In fact, Manuel’s been doing so well by dieting that doctors are postponing plans of the surgery because there may be no need for it:

Dr. Carlos Ballesta of the Laparoscopic Center in Barcelona, Spain, also visited Uribe on Monday to discuss possibly performing the procedure.

"The goal is for him to keep losing weight, because if his morbid obesity responds to the diet then there is no need for the surgery," Ballesta said. "We’ll intervene if his medical treatment fails."

Link | Previously on Neatorama: Heaviest Man in the World

When the dust gets thick on the back of his Mini Cooper, Scott Wade got busy drawing – that’s because he’s an artist that uses dust as his medium of choice!

Link – via Linkfilter

Damian Renzello loved his backyard ice rink, but wanted smoother ice that so far has only been found in indoor rinks. So he build his own zamboni:

He has mounted a snow blower on the front of a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle, added an ice scraper blade underneath and mounted a water tank connected to pipes and hoses that lays down a film of water to create a glass-like finish to outdoor ice.

Called the Bambini Revolution, the machine will sell for about $30,000 to outdoor ice skating enthusiasts.

Link

The video clip that made it round the Net after Brian Finkelstein of Washington DC posted it on YouTube and got picked up by digg:

A Comcast technician came to replace a faulty modem. After spending an hour on hold with Comcast’s central office, he fell asleep on my couch. I’ve been in my apartment for three weeks and my internet connection is still non-functional. This is my tribute to Comcast, their low quality technology and their poor customer service.

Comcast was not amused, and fired the guy. They also fixed the customer’s problem.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] via digg and Boing Boing

Just because adults and children can’t stay together all the time, it doesn’t mean that they can’t play together:

Fripon is a pair of devices connected to each other with a wireless connection. One of the devices is set into a standard kitchen equipment to make triggers and another is set into a children’s toy to make an action.

The employment of the kitchen equipment suddenly makes the toy lively. For example, when a parent opens a kitchen cupboard, a soft toy rabbit raises its hand. When a parent turns on a kettle, a toy car starts to run.

The connection of these causations gives children and parents a chance to wonder what each other are doing. Even if they engage in different things in different rooms, they can feel as if they are sharing times through the ordinal objects.

Link

Jeopardy! uber-champ Ken Jennings [wiki] got a big head made of styrofoam that he doesn’t know what to do with! From his blog:

So, like many of you, I’m sure, I have this huge styrofoam version of my head sitting in the garage. It was part of a parade float here in Salt Lake last July, and after the parade they very kindly called me up and asked me if I wanted the huge head. I said yes. What if I said no and then someday I needed a huge styrofoam version of my head? Then I’d feel pretty dumb.

But I have yet to do anything really cool with it. I didn’t knit a huge Santa hat for it and put it on our roof last Christmas. I haven’t been sculpting styrofoam likenesses of Brad Rutter and Jerome Vered so I could make a little Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions version of Easter Island in our backyard. Big Ken has just been gathering dust in our garage. But he just keeps smilin’! What a trooper.

And now we’re moving to Seattle. I can’t really see paying the movers to pack it up and bring it with us, but I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away, either.

So what do I do with the Big Ken Head? Discuss here. Best suggestion wins a prize.*

*Note: prize may be a big Ken head. You pay shipping. Offer void where prohibited by law or your mom.

Link – via Metafilter

Karl Johaentges took this very cool photo of a man practicing tai chi in front of an essay by Emperor Xuan Zong of the Tang Dynasty carved into a cliff in Taishan, China.

See more of Karl’s cool photos at: Link – via Ursi’s Blog.

Deep in the forest of Borneo, scientists of the World Wildlife Fund discovered specimens of the Kapuas mud snake (Enhydris gyii) that can change colors like a chameleon.

"I put the reddish-brown snake in a dark bucket. When I retrieved it a few minutes later, it was almost entirely white," says Mark Auliya of the Alexander Koenig Museum in Bonn, Germany, and WWF consultant. Auliya was part of a team that discovered the snake while conducting a survey of reptile diversity in the park in 2003.

The chameleon-like snake is "quite astonishing", comments Stefan Ziegler of WWF Germany in Frankfurt. This is the first new snake to be discovered in around five years, he says.

It is possible that the behaviour is a "warning or a defence mechanism", says Ziegler. Rapid colour change has been recorded as a defensive behaviour in several other snakes. In some cases the colour change is achieved by the snake elevating its scales.

Link – via Boing Boing

Jonathan B. Wright discovered tiny doors that, of course, can only belong to fairies….

Link – via Fortean Times

In her project, called "Sugar Coated", Heidi made a life-size, gumball covered HumVee to "comment on pop culture and [remind] us of soldiers handing candy to children in far-flung countries at war with us".

Link – via Jaf Project

Homeopathy is one strange alternative medicine: it holds that a dilute solution of a compound can have healing effect, even if the solution is so dilute that it is unlikely as to have a single molecule of anything except for water.

This makes no sense for Madeleine Ennis, who had been a vocal critic of homeopathy, so she designed the ultimate experiment to disprove it – and discovered that the result is the exact opposite!

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

Part of a very interesting New Scientist article "13 Things That Don’t Make Sense" – via Reality Carnival

A weird weather phenomenon made the skies over Eastern Iowa looks like a scene right out of the sci-fi movie "Independence Day". Local TV station KCRG reports:

I thought I was going to see alien spaceships come down through the clouds," said Casey Dunagan.

Some say it looked like a scene from the movie “Independence Day.” Others had more down-to-earth descriptions. It almost reminded me of ocean waves rolling in," said Suzanne Staab. I thought it looked like a nice frothy cream on a latté," said Robin Morris.

Link – via Cellar Image of the Day

Bet you didn’t know this about Superman:

He started as a bald villain! One of the all-time greatest good-guy superheroes actually began life as a big, bad bald guy bent on world domination! Comic creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster first drew him as a villain in a January 1933 story called "The Reign of the Super-Man," which appeared in an issue of their comic fanzine Science Fiction. It bombed, so they reimagined him as a superhero.

Forty Things You Don’t Know about Superman: Link – via Presurfer

From the website:

"Lali," an 8-week-old female Indian rhinoceros calf, makes her public debut at the Wild Animal Park alongside her mother, Gari. Lali, which means darling girl in Hindi, is the 50th born at the Wild Animal Park since two of this endangered species arrived in 1972.

Link

Does anyone know what type of insect this is? A very neat collection of macro photography of insects (and frogs): Link – via Cynical-C.

Hit play or go to Akbank ad Link [YouTube] or TalkTalk ad Link [YouTube] – via Ursi’s Blog.

The Daddle is a Dad’s saddle for horsing around… A superb way to monetize an age-old, free way to play with your kid!

Link – via Arbroath

Heather Peoples’ Chinese crested dog "Archie" is ugly – really ugly. Actually, it’s so ugly that it won the 2006 World’s Ugliest Dog Contest at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California.

The competition was fierce – there were lots of ugly dogs. And hackers, too – what’s a contest nowadays without a little hacking intrigue:

“The top four leaders were each missing around 35,000 votes. Clearly there was something very suspicious going on,” Vicki DeArmon, the California-based organiser of the event, said yesterday. “We were getting angry e-mails from owners and fans demanding to know what had happened. People were quite steamed up. There was a lot of finger-pointing — and paw-pointing.”

Way to go, Archie!

Links: Sonoma-Marin Fair Announcement | Gallery of Uglies Dog finalists | Times Online: Hacker | CBS5 Video Clip

Previously on Neatorama: Sam, World’s Ugliest Dog and news of his death.

Scott Fraser shot this video of thousands of European starling birds flocking and almost bringing down a tree.

Previously on Neatorama: Millions of migrating starlings create a "Black Sun"

Link [Google Video]- via digg

This beautiful photo, from Earth Picture of the Day, is captioned:

The photo above was taken at 4:04 a.m. (local time in Arizona Time) from the Saguaro Astronomy Club — about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. A Messier Marathon telescope was used to make this image showing the rising Milky Way seemingly adjacent to low clouds, which are being illuminated by light pollution from Tuscon. Note, the brilliant object at upper right is Jupiter.

Link

Janet’s a freelance illustrator from Illinois who has many more cool illustrations on her website: Link – via Ursi’s Blog

What causes the unusually strong hurricane season of 2005? There are two theories: rising sea surface temperature and natural ocean cycles (such as El Niño)

A new scientific study suggests that rising sea surface temperature caused by global warming is responsible, instead of natural ocean cycles.

Using worldwide SST data since the early 20th century, Trenberth and Shea calculated the individual contributions of global warming and the AMO to Atlantic SSTs. They subtracted the irregular Atlantic temperatures from the temperature patterns in the rest of Earth’s tropical and mid-latitude waters.

Their calculations show that about half, or 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit, of the Atlantic SST increase was due to global warming, while only 0.2 degrees owed to the AMO. The remainder of the increase could be explained by the aftereffects of the 2004-2005 El Nino and normal year-to-year variations in temperatures.

Link

From Abandoned But Not Forgotten, a website dedicated to abandoned building and sites in the United States:

Recently, there has been some big hype going on in the small county of Lexington. Lake Murray is home to the island called "Bomb Island" where the air force used to do test bombing runs and assorted other activities, leaving many pieces of history to be found.. Like this B25(EDIT: thanks for the clear up) bomber. A private collector organized this retrieval of the plane and plans on preserving it at a state university or something like that.

Link – via Fosfor