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Cat odor scares mice away … and yet, it’s also like an aphrodisiac. It seems like a mouse who smells like cat urine is particularly popular with the ladies!
To see if a whiff of cat might serve as a mouse repellent to help keep rodent pests away, researchers exposed mice to cat pee for eight weeks.
Unexpectedly, two months of cat odor did not lead to cowering mice, as one might expect from constant threatening. Instead, researchers found it led to aggressive males. These were more than twice as likely fight with other mice than rodents exposed to rabbit urine for the same amount of time.
And such combative males smelled delectable to females. When presented with male pee, females that were in heat spent more time sniffing urine from males exposed to cat odor for weeks than ones that had inhaled rabbit fumes.
Photo from andycarvin [Flickr], who noted that the photo was taken by researchers at the Sakano Lab in Japan. The mouse was genetically modified to block a particular olfactory receptor, and as a result, lost its fear of cat.
Remember the Flash game Cursor*10, where you get to play with your (temporally displaced) self?
Here’s another one of the same ilk: Chronoton by Scarybug at Kongregate.
It’s about a robot that goes back in time for some reason. (His best friend is a talking pie!). Use your time machine to interact with past versions of yourself in this puzzle/platformer!
Twenty six year old Jero looks like he’s trying to break into the music industry. With his decidedly urban, hip-hop look, you’d be forgiven if you think that he’s a wannabe rapper… That is, until he starts singing!
Jero, as you’ll see in the clip above, is going to be the first professional black enka [wiki] singer in Japan: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Japan Probe has more info:
According to the biographical information on his JVC Music site, Jero’s Japanese grandmother exposed him to enka music, building a great love in him for traditional Japanese music. Jero hadn’t planned on becoming a musician, and had actually graduated from the University of Pittsburg as a computer engineer, but a chance runner-up victory in a karaoke contest led JVC Music to scout him. He’s been in Japan for two years for vocal training and he will be releasing his first CD later this month.
Link – Thanks Geekazoid!
It’s hard to buy something different for Mom when she 1) already has a lot of things, 2) doesn’t ask for anything, and 3) you’ve bought her all the traditionally sentimental gifts you can think of over the years. Trueroots has some suggestions for geeky gestures that will surprise Mom on Mothers Day. And they don’t cost much, either. Link -via Digg
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Just exactly how much food are we throwing away uneaten? Ursula Hirschkorn, 36, of North London kept a diary for a week to discover just how much food her family throws out, and the amount is staggering:
The average family throws away £610 of perfectly good food each year — much of it totally untouched — according to
figures released this week. That works out at £11.73 a week. And all of that adds to the £10billion of waste across the country.
According to the new "Rough Guide to England" travel book, England is a nation of "animal-loving, tea-drinking charity donor who love nothing better than forming an orderly queue."
That, and "an irritating and insular country full of overweight, binge-drinking, reality TV addicts," the guide warns tourists:
Gone, it seems, is the image of a genteel country awash with Englishmen politely tipping their bowler hats, groping through the London fog and being kinder to pets than kids.
The writers confess to bafflement over the quirky English, concluding that of the 200 countries the guide reviews there is none "so fascinating, beautiful and culturally diverse yet as insular, self-important and irritating as England."
They said the English are proud of their multi-culturalism and are united by one thing — their sense of humor.
But there are constant contradictions. In a country priding itself on patriotism, they have a Scottish Prime Minister, an Italian football coach and a Greek married to the Queen.
Even with all that, my trip to London some years ago was the best vacation I’ve ever had! Link
Watch out beer-loving, porn-watching, iPod-listenin’, yacht owners! The big meanie State of California is out to tax you:
As state leaders hunt for politically palatable solutions to the swelling budget shortfall, some Democrats are proposing unorthodox ways to generate cash.
Strip clubs, six-packs, grocery bags and iTunes downloads are all in their sights as alternatives to broad income or sales tax hikes. So are gas guzzlers and yachts — and a tax loophole for criminals. [...]
Calderon said he was moved to push for levies on downloads such as iTunes because state sales tax laws do not reflect the high volume of purchasing that Californians do online. Consumers can download music from the Internet through Apple’s iTunes and other services tax-free, Calderon noted, while they pay sales tax for buying the same music on a compact disc at a store.
His proposal would empower state authorities to collect sales tax on the downloads, increasing the cost of a typical 99-cent song to roughly $1.07. Calderon projects that the bill (AB 1956), which could also apply to pornography downloads, cellphone ring-tones, online books and feature films distributed on the Internet, would raise about $500 million for the state budget.
The idea stalled in committee this month in the face of fierce industry opposition. But like the other proposals, it could be revived at any time, most likely when legislative leaders hammer out a budget agreement this summer.
Calderon said the resistance to his bill did not surprise him. But he is perplexed that he hasn’t been able to get more traction for another proposal: a 25% tax on sex toys, strip shows, pornographic magazines and videos and anything else sold in an "adult entertainment venue."
Assemblyman Charles Calderon’s bill, needless to say, are unpopular:
"Some people are e-mailing, threatening to come and slug me," said Assemblyman Jim Beall (D-San Jose), who hopes to see a $1.80 tax added to the price of every six-pack of beer sold in the state. "We’re getting some pretty nasty comments."
But at least, it’s bringing some people together:
A coalition of porn stars, strippers and others in adult entertainment roamed the halls of the Capitol recently to lobby against the Calderon bill (AB 2914).
Evan Halper of the Los Angeles Times has the story: Link
This very interesting 14 minute video demonstrates the functionality as well as the effectiveness of Germany’s infantry weapons during WWII. Listed is a description of the Karabiner 98K, MP40 Machine Pistole, the famous Luger, the Stielhandgranate or better known as the Potato masher both MG34 and MG42 machine guns and more.
The video appears to be a vintage color film that was probably used for training purposes between 1939-1945 (unconfirmed)
Link: YouTube
If you hit the “Play” button you can listen Peppe Giorri playing this beautiful Gran Vals para Guitarra a.k.a. Valse Grande… If you listen carefully, just after the 15-second mark you’ll probably recognize the so called Nokia Tune, which rings in more than 800,000 phones all over the world every day, making it the world’s most listened to melody. It is also repeated through out the whole vals.
The song is composed by Francisco Tárrega Eixea (1852, 1909) [wiki].
Listen the whole track, it’s wonderful.
Link [youtube video]
Car ads usually feature cars so clean you can eat off of the hood, not one so dirty we wouldn’t even dare write "wash me" with our fingers. Well, leave it to Volkswagen to advertise its Touareg SUV with … mud!
By the way, did you know that the Touaregs are nomadic people who live in the Sahara desert?
Previously on Neatorama: Scott Wade’s Dust Art
In December 1975, Steve Sasson invented something that would, decades later, revolutionize photography: the world’s first digital camera:
It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.
It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.
Photo: blueblythemonster [Flickr]
Flickr user blueblythemonster has the best craft project EVAR: a hand-dyed and embroidered felt Underwood typewriter! Actually, she has more. Lots more: Link
And congrats to blueblythemonster for winning the 2nd Annual Softie Awards for the category "Embroidered to Death"!
Not all comic book chracters are loveable or honorable, or even fathomable. The comics wouldn’t be interesting is they were! But some are so over the top, they’ve made Cracked’s list of the six creepiest. Pictured is a character called Inner Child from Doom Patrol. It’s not even number one! Link
Have you ever considered planning your vacation around the places that made nuclear history?
The Traveler’s Guide to Nuclear Weapons illustrates 160 important homes, offices, laboratories, factories, mills, and bomb detonation sites in the United States. Scaled maps, photos, tour schedules, and site telephone numbers provide atomic tourists with all they need to visit these historic locations, vicariously or in person.
Link -via Everlasting Blort
(image: National Archives)
