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Here’s an absolutely amazing story about Abigail and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins:
Despite sharing a body, the twins have different tastes in food and clothes. Some of their clothes are altered so that they have two separate necklines in order to emphasize their individuality. According to a TLC documentary (discussed later) in 2006, they negotiate what they will wear each day. They will usually have separate meals, but sometimes will share a single meal for the sake of convenience (e.g. each takes a bite of a hamburger). [...]
They appeared in a follow-up documentary on The Learning Channel on December 17, 2006 filmed around the time of their 16th birthday, in which they discuss dealing with puberty and getting their driver’s licenses.
They successfully passed their driver license exam, both the written and driving tests. They had to take the tests twice, once for each twin. Both control the steering wheel, Abby controls the pedals and gear stick, and Brittany controls the turn signal.
Link [wiki] – via Eatnineghost
Last year, archaeologists in discovered the world’s oldest artificial eyeball in an ancient city of what is now Iran:
Archaeologists in Burnt City announced unprecedented discovery of an artificial eyeball, dated to 4800 years ago, in this historic site.
Announcing this news, director of Burnt City archaeology excavation team, Mansur Sajadi, said that this eyeball belongs to a sturdy woman who was between 25 to 30 years of age at the time of death. Skeletal remains of the woman were found in grave number 6705 of Burnt City’s cemetery.
Regarding the material used to make this artificial eyeball, Sajadi said: “The material this artificial eyeball is made of has not yet been determined and will be assessed through later testing. However, at first glance it seems natural tar mixed with animal fat has been used in making it.”
This cute little pink seal is actually a stun gun in disguise! It’s no taser, but it’ll still give an unsuspecting friend a zap he won’t soon forget.
Link – via Endless Parade of Excellence
Last year, MySpace Senior Research Engineer Kunal Anand created some graphs of song structure using Graphviz, based on previous/next words of some of his favorite songs. Link
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Brunel University industrial design and technology student Luke Pannell created this "Star Wars" helmet to help bicyclist breathe better:
The helmet was created to filter out particles which irritate hay fever and asthma sufferers.
It covers the cyclist’s nose and mouth with a shield behind which the filtered air circulates.
Used air is expelled via a plastic tube when the cyclist exhales.
Link – via Crunch Gear
From China Daily:
Three giant pandas play at the China Giant Panda Research Centre in Wolong, southwest China’s Sichuan province January 4, 2006. The pair of pandas to be sent to Taiwan as a goodwill gift will be revealed Friday
Guess which pair is sent off? Link
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Vintage tin ray guns installation
Vintage metal lunch boxes installation
Lost Found Art is a design company that specializes in installations of art made from antique and vintage pieces, with a big dollop of pop culture and humor.
Check out more of their neat collections here: Link
Image Credit: calamur [Flickr]
From the streets of Mumbai, India, here’s a photo of an auto rickshaw (nicknamed “tuk-tuk,” probably because that’s what they sound like) modded to look like a helicopter! – via Gadling – Thanks Marilyn Terrell!
You Don’t Know Jack is a fun game that tests your knowledge of pop culture – did you know that you can play the online version for free?
Right now, Episode 19 is playing: Link – Thanks Jim Perry!
Meet the Airborne Laser aircraft, a new futuristic defensive (?) weapon used to shoot down enemy missiles. Link – via Cellar Image of the Day
A very good example of being at the right place at the right time.
Link [Flickr]
Links: [Boston Globe Article] [Wikipedia Entry] [MySpace tribute] [YouTube video] – note that the YouTube video is NSFW!
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Subtitled “The story behind the face on the bottle,†this article at Modern Drunkard Magazine has the stories behind Johnny Walker’s striding man, the Captain Morgan pirate, the Bacardi bat, and more. Link -via Dump Trumpet
1-World Globes offers globes from 3 to 30 feet in size (the one above is 20 feet).
These giant display globes range in price, depending on size and features (indoor/outdoor, rotation, illumination, mounting, etc.). 16′ diameter giant like the one shown at Olympic dinner is available for $40,000. A 6′ diameter giant price starts at $4,950.
Link – via Stuart Witts
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Bao Xishun [wiki], the world’s tallest man, shakes hand with He Pingping, the world’s shortest! Link
Previously on Neatorama: Mongolian Tradition for World’s Tallest Man
Freelance electrical engineer and artist Scott Amron has an online exhibit called "Die Electric," where non-electrical objects are converted so they can plug into electrical sockets (or in the case above, light bulb socket) and "plug potential leaks" of electricity.
Link [Please don't try this at home, playing with electrical sockets is just stupid] – Thanks Scott!
Image Credit: The Atmosphere, published by Prentice Hall (2001)
Miss C’s post The Tesla’s Tower of Power – about Nikola Tesla’s never-completed project of building a tower to control the weather (among other things) got me looking for other weather modification past projects.
Here’s a strange one from Austria, circa 1899:
Weather modification has been around since the beginning of recorded history, when people used prayer, dances, wizardry, and black magic. It was not until near the beginning of the 20th century that more drastic measures were taken toward weather modification. The first major device was tested in Austria for two years and was named "hail cannon". These 300 feet tall cannons were muzzle-loaded and shaped like a cone cylinder. They used it to fire mortars into the clouds believing that the smoke particles would prevent hail by acting as condensation nuclei.
After completing a two-year test, no hail was observed in Austria, while the surrounding provinces had severe hail damage. Believing that this test proved that the cannons were successful, other areas in Europe began using them for the protection of their cash crops. This resulted in a "cannon fever" in Europe which made Italy deploy over 2000 cannons by 1899. The fever was soon lost when the cannons proved ineffective. Although this attempt and many others failed, inventors also developed successful weather modification inventions during the nineteenth century. Some of these are smudge pots, sprinklers, and wind machines used to fight frost
Link – via BLDGBLOG (a neat blog about architecture, btw)
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Can’t make this up, folks:
Iranian intelligence operatives recently detained over a dozen squirrels found within the nation’s borders, claiming the rodents were serving as spies for Western powers determined to undermine the Islamic Republic.
"In recent weeks, intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran’s borders," state-sponsored news agency IRNA reported. "The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services."
Link – Thanks David R!
The conventional wisdom that the invention of printing press led to an upsurge in literacy in the later Middle Ages is wrong.
According to Dr. Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University, the development of literacy was owed to the increased use of medieval underwear:
“The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags,” says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year’s International Medieval Congress (IMC) at the University of Leeds (UK).
“These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased – which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making.”
Link: EurekAlert | Omni Brain
Meet Adora Svitak, a 9-year-old child prodigy who types 70 words per minute, reads 2 to 3 books per day, and writes historical fiction, fantasy adventure and contemporary fictions. She has written 300 short stories so far. Oh, and she writes poems too.
From a Good Morning America interview with Diane Sawyer:
She may be small, but she has big ideas, and, thanks to writing, she has the means to express them. At an age when most kids are still eking out simple sentences; Adora is staggeringly prolific. Her grasp of grammar, structure and syntax would be considered advanced in most high school classrooms, and her complex and intriguing plots lead readers to wonder what else Adora has up her sleeve. Hearing a seven-year-old casually use words like ‘fatalistic’ and ‘immolate’ is so startling, it’s almost humorous, but once you get used to it, it’s easy to slip into a conversation about books or politics and forget that the person you are talking to rides a bike with training wheels and sleeps with a stuffed bear.
Link [music starts automatically on splash page] – via CNN Young People Who Rock
