Update 2/10/09 – we now have this scarf at the Neatorama Online Store (cheaper, too!): Link
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The Sword-billed Hummingbird is the only bird in the world which has a bill that is actually longer than its body. As such it is unable to preen itself and has to use its feet. This is universally acknowledged as one of nature’s stranger, funnier sights. The length of its bill is so it cal feed on plants with long corollas. As you might expect its tongue is also unusually long.
He is part of a collection of beautiful pictures of ten different hummingbird species. Link -Thanks, RJ Evans!
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We’ve probably all played around with a shopping cart in the store’s parking lot – but Korean artist Jaebeom Jeong took it a step further: here’s Cartrider, a bicycle and shopping cart hybrid!
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I just wanted you to know that I’ve tried hard to avoid the temptation of posting a lot of political stuff on Neatorama because some of you get all worked up in the comment section, but I couldn’t resist this one: the winking Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin in LEGO by ochre jelly.
Link – via The Brothers Brick
Please keep the comment section civil, mmkay?
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Do you dream in color? Or black and white? It turns out that the color of your dreams is determined by what TV you watched growing up:
While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome – even now.
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Almost six decades ago, when Stanley Miller was just a 22-year-old PhD student, he and his professor Harold Urey did an experiment that became legendary in science: Miller mixed basic chemicals that were present in primordial earth and added electric sparks to stimulate a thunderstorm. The result? Miller found traces of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins.
After Miller died last year, his former student found a (scientific) treasure trove: the vials containing dried samples from his groundbreaking 1950s experiment. And when they tested the samples using today’s more sophisticated equipments, they found a lot more stuff:
"We found not only did these make more of certain amino acids than in the classic experiment, but they made a greater diversity of amino acids."
Miller, using the old methods, had found five amino acids; Jeffrey Bada and his teams tracked down 22. What is more, the overall chemical yields were often higher than in the first set of experiments – the mixture appeared to be more fertile.
Professor Bada points out that today, almost all volcanic eruptions are accompanied by violent electric storms. The same could have been true on the young Earth. "What we suggest is that volcanoes belched out gases just like the ones Stanley had used, and were immediately subjected to intense volcanic lightning.
"And so each one of those volcanoes could have been a little, local prebiotic factory. And so all of that went into making the material that we refer to as the prebiotic soup."
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There’s a new diet fad sweeping through Japan: the Morning Banana Diet, where you eat only bananas for breakfast, then anything you want for lunch and dinner … and it’s making bananas a scarce commodity!
Keiko Akai is very annoyed. The attractive 21-year-old university student has been planning to do a banana diet for some time now, but she can’t get started — and not for lack of trying. "I keep going to OK Store, my local supermarket every single day," she says. "In fact, I’ve just been there. There are no bananas on the shelves, and it’s been like that for a month."
Akai has never weighed more than 100 pounds, and is so slim that her waist is swimming in Zara’s smallest size XS skirt. She doesn’t need to lose any weight. But Japanese girls obsessed with diets tend to jump at any trendy new ones, so, when Akai heard about a popular actress who’d lost 26 pounds through the Morning Banana Diet, she had to try it. And the dearth of bananas as her local supermarket, and many others, is testimony to the popularity of the new dieting fad.
(Photo: Eriko Sugita / Reuters)
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Having solved all of its problems like crime and poverty, La Quinta, California, is going after Ageda Camargo. The 83-year-old grandma may land in jail for … an illegal garage conversion!
Camargo, a grandmother of six, has run afoul of La Quinta’s code enforcement in a big way, big enough to put her behind bars.
The city near Palm Springs insists that one of her three bedrooms is really an illegally converted garage. She insists it’s just a bedroom.
"What right do they have to call this a garage?" she asked, walking around the room with its cabinets, sink, bathroom and refrigerator. "I never called it a garage. How do they know it’s not a bedroom? If this is a garage, then they owe me a bedroom."
For 18 months now, code enforcement officials have been after Camargo to turn the bedroom back into a garage. Insisting that her home is her castle, she has ignored more than a dozen warnings. Her resistance crumbled last week when a local judge ordered her to comply or face possible jail time.
"It’s traumatic. It’s like tearing my house down," she said. "I bought this place 30 years ago, and it was always a bedroom. And now they are trying to shove this down my throat."
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If you like stacking up sugar cubes, then you’ll probably dig this: the cinder block-shaped sugarblocks by Audrey Hasen Russell and John Truex of Spiceship studio.
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