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Remember the movie Alien, where the monster has a second jaw that comes out of its throat? Well, it turns out that Mother Nature had thought of it first:
In a lightning-fast swimming maneuver, slender-bodied moray eels clamp down on their prey with a forward set of toothy jaws. In almost the same instant, slender muscles sling an inner set of grapple-like jaws onto the prey — which can be nearly as wide as the eel itself—and pull it towards the animal’s gut.
Jokingly, Mehta noted that the mechanism was oddly similar to that seen in creatures from the movie "Alien." "One person I showed it to even asked me if there wasn’t a second eel inside," she said.
Links: MSNBC | News@Nature (with video) – Thanks Inna!
Neatorama reader Chadwick Matlin told us about a website to track the 2008 US presidential candidates as they campaign across the country using a Google Maps mashup:
We’re tracking the presidential candidates as they campaign across the country via a Google Maps mashup. We’re integrating YouTube video, timeline sliders, and a local news feed in order to bring the campaign events into an intuitive, customizable forum. We’re hoping the visual presentation and customizability of the data can help journalists and the average citizen get a feel for the trends of this campaign and what it says about how our primary system works.
As you can see, at the time of this posting, everyone’s over in Iowa: Link – Thanks Chadwick!
A major theme of Australian performance artist Stelarc is the concept that the human body is obsolete. As such, his past artwork included hanging himself on a flesh hook suspension, attaching electrodes that control his body and then connecting the control to the Internet so those who logged on can move his muscles at will, and saving his liposuctioned fat for an exhibition.
Now, he’s on to modifying the human body, starting with getting a lab-grown ear implanted on his forearm!
Link : Gallery Non-Linkjacked Flickr Photoset | Stelarc’s website [may have NSFW images] | Wikipedia Entry – Thanks Nikola!
Street artist Eine started out painting graffiti on four shop front rollup shutters in London to spell his name with big bold letters, but soon branched out to put colorful typography everywhere.
Links: Eine’s website | Info on his gallery show at Creative Review – Thanks Patrick Burgoyne!
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Carl Huber of the WAREHOUSE wrote an article about his experience donating blood to the Red Cross. He wrote:
"You Have Too Much Blood" – so why not go donate some at the Red Cross?
I secured permission from the Public Relations department of the Red Cross to photograph my donation visit. I want you to join me on a trip in an effort to help people get over their fears and trepidation about donating blood. Come on everybody – wouldn’t it be great if the Red Cross’s only problem was too many donors?
Here’s a fun little game/viral ad à la Tower Defense for KFC, where you have to build and upgrade towers of fast food to kill hunger pangs before they reach your brain.
Link [Flickr] – Thanks Casper Moller!
Comments Off Here are the answers to a few burning questions about pug dogs:
Can pugs sleep while sitting?
Effectively, no, they can’t.
Can a pug do the Moonwalk dance [wiki]?
Yes, it’s in their genes.
Could a pug be used instead of a bowling ball?
Sure, it has the perfect shape.
Can pugs fly?
No, they can’t.
So Apple announced new iPods. I was curious if Amazon already had a listing and searched for “iPod Touch.” The answer was “no,” but the number one result was the suspiciously familiar looking device you see above. It has the oh so clever name: Touch Screen 2.8″ inch LCD MP4 player 2 GB. Video, music, game, recorder, etc. all-in-one
The product description on Amazon says:
We have conducted a comprehensive test on this unit, and we only sell units of first class quality. The sound and video of this MP4 player is just super. The large LCD screen really can bring video (movie) to your hand. The converter converts MPEG-4 to AVI file for viewing on this player at a speed of 20MB/mins. A movie can be converted in around 10 mins. The touch screen is so easy to use and you don’t even need to use any buttons or read the manual. The operation is completely intuitive. The sound quality is supreme. Of course, we also need to mention the downside. The FM radio, like most FM radios on MP4 players, is subject to orientation and can’t compete with a dedicated radio. The built-in MIC and recorder provides very clear recording. The most impressive things of this player are: Large LCD screen with good resolution, super sound quality and touch screen control. The player itself is also well built, clearly separate it from other cheap imports.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a product description that volunteered a downside before.
Here’s Belarus’ version of the Death Star:
Foreign printed guide books also sometimes are not so serious about this structure: “Some say it looks like a diamond. We say it looks like the Death Star. In either case there’s no denying that the collosal, new home for the National Library now being constructed on the city outskirts is an example of the Soviet ‘bigger-is-better’ school of architecture. Worse yet, this pet project of Lukashenko’s is partly paid for by money donated ‘voluntarily’ (meaning not voluntarily) by students and school children. When completed, it’ll be big enough to house a whopping 15 million books. The National Library only has 8 million in its collection, so there should be plenty of space leftover for restaurants, gyms, and for the president to roam the hallways in a black cloak, breathing Vader-like while dramatic music plays in the background.”
Link – via Look At This
Ubersite user Sunny "NFW" G made this very enlightening The American’s Guide to Canada. For example:
#3 Red Green
Forget Tim the Toolman Taylor, we have Red Green.Red Green is the definition of manly. He lives in a lodge up north, thinks up crazy contraptions such as the snowball throwing van, and fixes anything and everything with duct tape.
Forget pirates, ninjas, and your precious Chuck Norris. Red Green is manlier than John Wayne, Atticus Finch, and Sean Connery put together.
Oh, and he only wears plaid … what real men wear. None of this Abercrombie and Fitch business
Link – via Bored at Work
Malaysian blogger Kenny Sia noticed that the Al-Rahji Bank, which has just opened a branch in Kuching, Malaysia, has a unique logo … Would’ve been perfect if they were a sperm bank: Link
[Update 9/5/07: Neatorama reader Inna said the bank logo's nothing compared to this one from Lupin Pharma - Thanks Inna!]
The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks dedicates itself to documenting and making fun of bad punctuation since 2005. Link – via Ueba
It’s a good thing they’re not documenting typsos or bad grammar … Neatorama would so be in it!
It all started as a flame war which got out of hand and ended with real flames burning down a man’s house. Here’s a story about an Internet feud turning really bad:
Barbs were traded, insults thrown and threats made in an environment that grew increasingly hostile. The social networking site had morphed into an anti-social one. And for Tavares, it came to a head when John Anderson, a Yafro member calling himself Johnny Darkness, posted a digitally embellished image of Tavares.
The photo composition showed Tavares cradling a laptop in one arm, a pistol in the other and wearing a shirt with a pocket full of pens. [...]
Tavares flipped. Anderson taunted him, daring Tavares to make good on his threat to "come and kick my butt", never believing for a moment that someone who lived 2000 kilometres away could physically threaten him.
But on October 9, 2005 – after driving from his base in Virginia, near Washington, DC – Tavares pulled up near a compound in the small community of Elm Mott near Waco in Texas.
There he knocked a hole in the side of a mobile home between a propane gas container and the hot water system, poured in a mixture of petrol and Styrofoam and ignited the flammable cocktail with a flare. Moments later, the home belonging to John Anderson was engulfed in flames.
Link – via Cowboy Caleb
Ball of Being is a hypnotically beautiful animation by Koert van Mensvoort with music by Artefact.
An online flashclip of a dancer without a body. Featuring atoms, planets, balls, globes, foam and molecules. It is uncertain whether we are entering a microscopic nanoworld, virtual spheres or an immeasurable universe far away.
Link -via Grow-A-Brain
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Atomic Rockets has everything you might want to know about space suits, in facts and in fiction. Cool photos, too! Link -via Everlasting Blort
Facial hair, that is…
Apparently, you can make a tidy fortune off of entering your waxed whiskers in Mustache Competitions. Check out the winner of this featured contest!
(Just for the record, I prefer my husband clean-shaven. Trying to kiss him through all that hair would be like trying to smooch a Komondor.)
Link [Reuters video]
Andrew WK is not just a rock star, he’s an advice columnist for a the Japanese magazine “Rockin’ Out!” This is actual audio of AWK giving advice to his Japanese readers, as animated by Scott Bateman.
The question is very strange. Can we really argue with his answer? YouTube.
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In the wake of Owen Wilson’s attempted suicide last week, mental_floss has a surprisingly long list of celebrities who have suicide attempts in their past, but then turned their lives around.
Halle Berry – admitted to Parade magazine that, distraught over her failed marriage to baseball star David Justice, she tried to end her life by carbon monoxide poisoning.
Nadia Comaneci – while she denied it for years, the gymnastics legend was so stressed out (due to several factors, including her parents’ divorce) that she tried to end her life by drinking bleach just two years after her 1976 Olympics success.
Richard Pryor – later admitted that the fire that injured him while free-basing cocaine in June 1980 was really a suicide attempt.
Some of these cases you may have heard of; others will surprise you. Link
Amazon says:
Relive the magic of your favorite Elvis performance with this talking robot from WowWee–a lifelike singing and talking bust of the best-selling solo artist in U.S. history. Designed using motion-captured facial animations and a leather jacket styled from the Elvis Presley ’68 Comeback Special, the robot lets you listen to, sing along with, and learn more about the life of the King of Rock and Roll. The robot offers four primary modes: Alive mode, which animates Elvis, tracks movements, and makes the occasional famous Elvis remark; Song mode, in which Elvis sings eight of his best-loved songs; Monologue mode, where Elvis describes his life and times; and Sing Through mode, which lets you sing along with Elvis or turn his vocals down and sing over the top (requires separately sold microphone). The robot is the next-best thing to inviting the King himself into your living room, and offers the added bonus of being physically possible.
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It’s been a while since Neatorama’s last co-blogging post, so it was a pleasant surprise when Hanan of the always neat grow-a-brain blog suggested that we do another one, with the topic of: the world’s smallest. Also check out the very first co-blogging Neatorama ever did (also with grow-a-brain): Crime and Punishment. Thanks Hanan! |
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World’s Smallest Teddy Bears To make these tiny beauties, she had to weave the thread, stitch the bears’ bodies, arms, and legs, turn them inside out, stuff them, and then stitch them all together before embroidering the details! |
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World’s Smallest Man Meet the world’s smallest man: Nelson de la Rosa [wiki]. He’s just 54 centimeters (about 1 3/4 feet) tall! |
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World’s Smallest School This world’s smallest elementary school in China only has one teacher and one student! |
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World’s Smallest Baby to Survive Rumaisa, the world’s smallest baby to survive weighed only 244 grams (8.6 ounces) – less than a can of soda – when she was delivered by caesarean section after just 26 weeks of pregnancy. |
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World’s Smallest & Most Wondrous Works of Art Wigan [wiki] uses rice and grains of sand and sugar for his sculptures. His artwork are so small that he has to work between heartbeats to avoid hand tremors! |
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World’s Smallest Website The self-proclaimed world’s smallest website is only 18 by 18 pixels! |
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World’s Smallest Pancake You can also make your very own teeny tiny pancake (with a dubious method, no less!) |
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World’s Smallest Violin Eric Meissner made not just one, but two of the world’s smallest functional violins (the smallest one is 1 5/8" or 4.1 cm long). |
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World’s Smallest Fish The title, however, is contested: two other fish, the 7 mm long male stout infantfish (Schindleria brevipinguis) and the 6.2 mm long male anglerfish (Photocorynus spiniceps) said that they should’ve been the world’s smallest fish. |
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World’s Smallest Brewery |
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World’s Smallest Living Organism Once Baker had found gene segments (ribosomal RNA) from three Archaea, he was able to fish the microbes out of the slime soup and found that they were extremely small, around 200 nanometers in diameter, the size of large viruses. Bacteria average about five times this diameter. |
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World’s Smallest Cat The cute cat fits perfectly in a regular 8 oz glass! |
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World’s Smallest Dog OK, so how about the world’s smallest dog? Meet Ducky from Charlton, Massachusetts, the who holds the current title of the world’s smallest dog. He’s just 1.4 pound and 4.9 inches tall! |
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World’s Smallest Cattle
The world’s smallest cattle is a rare breed of an Indian zebu called the Vechur cow. The average height of this breed of cattle is 31 to 35 inches (81 to 91 cm). The photo above shows a 16 year old Vechur cattle as compared to a 6 year old HF cross-breed cow. |
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 Photo: Duckweed Pictures |
World’s Smallest Flowering Plant and Seed The fruit of Wolffia augusta is about 0.2 mm (1/100th on an inch) long and weighs about 70 microgram – it is smaller than a single grain of salt! |
 Image: Cosmic Variance |
World’s Smallest Distance Unit But why is it important? Turns out, it is a physical unit of measurement that can be defined exclusively in terms of five universal physical constants (often referred to by physicists as "God’s units"). At this scale, it is thought that gravity and space-time cease to exist and quantum effects dominate. |
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World’s Smallest Robotic Hand Made by Yen-Wen Lu and Chang-Jin "CJ" Kim of UCLA, the world’s smallest robotic hand can make a fist to grasp objects smaller than 1 mm across! |
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World’s Smallest Movie Theater The world’s smallest public movie theater is this 770 square feet (72 m²) Cinema dei Piccoli [website in Italian] in Villa Borghese, Rome, Italy. It has 63 seats and has been in operation for over 70 years! |
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World’s Smallest Guitar Dustin Carr and Harold Craighead of Cornell University’s Nanofabrication Facility created the Nano-guitar – it’s only 10 micrometers long (about the size of a single cell). The guitar strings are each about 50 nanometers or 100 atoms wide! |
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World’s Smallest Horse The little horse was born to Paul and Kay Goessling, who specialize in breeding miniature horses, but even for the breed Thumbelina is particularly small: she is thought to be a dwarf-version of the breed! But apparently her small size didn’t hamper her attitude: But despite this massive difference in size, it is feisty Thumbelina who rules the roost over the stallions and racehorses on her 150-acre farm. (Source: Daily Mail) |
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World’s Smallest Car The wheels are made from buckyballs at 60 atoms apiece. The "car" has a chassis, axles, and even a pivoting suspension! |
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World’s Smallest Linux Computer The Picotux 100 is only slightly larger than an RJ45 connector! |
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World’s Smallest Church Cross Island Chapel, "The World’s Smallest Church," sits on a wooden platform in the center of a pond. A billboard near the road details everything you need to know: "Built in 1989. Floor area 51 inches by 81 inches (28.68 square feet). Seats two people. Non-denominational. Dedicated as a witness to God." Years ago we read a newspaper account of a wedding held at Cross Island Chapel, with only room to accommodate the minister, bride and groom. The rest of the wedding partyanchored nearby in small boats. Guests on shore imagined how the vows went. It’s open to the public on request, and accessible only by boat. |
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World’s Smallest Toilet
And finally, world’s smallest toilet, winner of Most Bizarre (how appropriate) micrograph contest. |
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