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You read about fast foods of Europe and Asia and Australia, now in the third part of the series, HealthAssist takes a look at fast food from South and Central America. For example, in Panama:
Fondas are one of the most popular places to grab a meal on the go. These small kiosk-type restaurants serve their food from glass boxes heated by a light bulb. Most, if not all of the food served in fondas are fried – rice, hojaldres, pork chunks, empanadas. Fondas also serve a soup called sancocho. Sancocho is a type of chicken soup flavoured with onion and cilantro.
Link -Thanks, Karen!
A new procedure to help people with damaged corneas is showing promise in three patients so far. A team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney takes stem cells from the patient’s good eye and cultures them in a contact lens. When the cells have multiplied, they place the lens over the patient’s affected eye and leave it for around three weeks. During that time, the cells begin to grow into the damaged cornea and help regenerate it. In effect, it’s a stem cell transplant from one eye to the other.
Researcher Dr Nick Di Girolamo said: ‘The procedure is totally simple and cheap.
‘Unlike other techniques, it requires no foreign human or animal products, only the patient’s own serum, and is completely non-invasive.
‘There’s no suturing, there is no major operation. You don’t need any fancy equipment.’
The contact lenses used in the operation are already widely used after eye surgery.
The researchers hope the technique can be adapted for other parts of the eye, such as the retina, and even elsewhere in the body.
65-year-old Hou Guoying recently had a bullet removed that had been lodged in her face for 42 years! She was shot accidently during the Cultural Revolution in China in 1967.
The bullet apparently hit her when it ricocheted through a wall during a fight in between rival factions of Red Guards.
But doctors initially told her that her wound was only superficial, the Chongqing News reported.
Constant headaches and difficulty eating eventually led to an x-ray in 1978 that revealed the bullet.
She had refused an operation because of poor medical facilities in Chongqing at the time – resulting in three more decades of discomfort.
This year, the pain began to spread to the rest of her body, so the bullet finally came out. Hou is recovering from the surgery. Link -via Arbroath
Korea: Kimchi, a fish, some seaweed looking thing, and some colorful mystery items.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is doing something special during the band’s final tour. By offering special concert packages and encouraging donations, they have raised over $850,000 to help Eric De La Cruz get heart transplant.
De La Cruz was turned down from transplant lists because of the lack of transplant centers in Nevada. Reznor became aware of his situation after De La Cruz’s sister, former CNN.com news anchor Veronica De La Cruz, began a fundraising campaign on her website. The campaign is as much to raise money for Eric as it is to raise awareness of Nevada’s limited transplant opportunities, and to petition Senator Harry Reid and other Congress members for improved legislation.
Link to story. Link to donation information. -via reddit
Your spray can empty after a hard night graffitying? Don’t toss the can! Remember the environment, and recycle it into something cool.
That’s what artist Jake Rankin of Portland, Oregon, does: he takes spent Krylon cans and turn it into a lamp. Best yet, the on/off switch is the paint nozzle.
(No words on whether you get the faint smell of fumes whenever you turn it on). Breeze Block Gallery has ‘em for $60: Link – via Coolbuzz
Photos: otisarchives2 (left), modcult (right)
Are cave paintings signs of intelligence of ancient cave dwellers or are they just scribbles of crazy cavemen?
Take a look at the two photos above. The one to the left is a painting made by a patient at St. Elizabeth’s hospital. The patient had a case of dementia praecox (eventually classified as schizophrenia) and used a pin or fingernail to scratch paint from the wall, creating pictures symbolizing past events in the patient’s life and represent a mild state of mental regression.
Jeb of Modcult made this intriguing observation:
You know, everyone assumes cave paintings were made for some sort of vaunted religious or technical purpose, but maybe in olden times they just sent their crazy people into a cave. I mean, that’s basically what we do now.
Link – via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival
Here’s a trivia for all you Trekkers to talk about during the previews of the new Star Trek movie. Did you know that the Vulcan salute – you know, the "live long and prosper" hand signal invented by Leonard Nimoy:
Nimoy felt that there should be some kind of distinctive greeting among Vulcans, analogous to a handshake or a bow. Alan Dean Foster’s novelization, based on an early script, has Spock kneeling before the Vulcan matriarch, T’Pau, who places her hands on his shoulders, like royalty dubbing a knight. But Nimoy didn’t care for this. Previous episodes had already established that Vulcans are touch telepaths. Therefore, a touch on the shoulders would be an invasion of privacy. Instead, Nimoy drew upon his own Jewish background to suggest the now-familiar salute. Back in the 1960s, hippies who watched "Amok Time" thought the salute was a variation of the two-fingered peace sign. But we Jews knew better. The Vulcan salute came not from protest marches, but from the pulpit of Nimoy’s childhood synagogue.
The Vulcan greeting is based upon a blessing gesture used by the kohanim (koe-hah-NEEM) during the worship service. The kohanim are the genealogical descendants of the Jewish priests who served in the Jerusalem Temple. Modern Jews no longer have priests leading services as in ancient times, nor do we have animal sacrifices anymore. (Yes, people really do ask about that!) The sacrificial system ended with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in the year 70. C.E. However, a remnant of the Temple service lives on in the "kohane blessing" ritual (duchenen in Yiddish) that is performed on certain holy days.
Link – via grow-a-brain
by Rande Daykin
Move over, LOLcats! There’s a new meme in town. Here’s LOL Fat Cats: Link (Now, why didn’t I think of this?) – via Nag on the Lake
Previously on Neatorama: Top 15 Amazingly Fat Cats
Morris Cerullo in a poster advertising for his "Mission to London" (Photo: LoopZilla)
Loan modification and debt cancellation are hot businesses right now. So hot that God himself apparently decided to get in on the action.
Here’s a story of how one man built himself a surging evangelistic ministry, complete with "God’s debt cancellation" program – yours for the unbelievably low payment of a mere few hundred bucks:
Emotional on-air pitches generate much of the money used to pay network salaries. In March, Morris Cerullo appeared on Inspiration’s “camp meeting” with a message to fire up prospective donors.
“Is anybody ready for the greatest financial breakthrough you’ve ever experienced in your life?” he asked.
The elder Cerullo, a Pentecostal minister, at times appeared to speak in tongues. His gravelly voice periodically rising to a shout, he urged members of the audience to fill envelopes with $900 donations.
“When you sow for your financial anointing, the windows of heaven are going to open for you,” he said. “ … In the next nine months, you are going to experience more financial blessings than you’ve ever experienced in your life! 100 fold! Debt cancellation!”
Soon, these words appeared on the screen: “Call now with your $900 offering and receive God’s debt cancellation.”
Ames Alexander and Tim Funk of Charlotte Observer have the investigative report: Link – via Raw Story
Tonka the tortoise was found in San Mateo County in California after it had been attacked by a dog that had bitten off one of her legs. Rescuers were afraid she would never be able to move normally until one of them had the idea to attach wheels from a Tonka truck to her. Now she really gets around!
Local resident John O’Dea, 35, has now adopted Tonka and said she loved nothing better than roaming in the vegetable patch and going for ‘walks’.
Surfer John said: ‘She is doing really well and loves roaming around the vegetable garden on her shiny new wheels.
‘She has a particular fondness for tomatoes.
‘I take her for ‘walks’ regularly around my neighbourhood, I think she likes the speed but I do get a few funny looks.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ccmushroom.
(Links open in a new browser window/tab)
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Blues Brother crashing through City Hall
Mashed together by Sifter YouDieJoe, a perfect mix of Blues Brothers and the reality of an angry dude crashing through city hall |
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Malfunctioning Dog is actually a Jazz singer
Who knew that something normally so grating on the ears, could be transformed into sweet, sweet music. |
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Molten Aluminum + Lab Techs = Fail
It really is amazing that no one was seriously injured. Don’t try this one at home. (NSFW – some swearing) |
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The IT Crowd – Drunk In Amsterdam
One of the best moments in the quirky British series. The great news is that they’re coming back for another season! I only hope that Richmond the goth clears up his case of scurvy and also returns. |
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Using an antique modem to dial into the internet
Watch how a 45 year old modem is used with a modern laptop to dial into the internet. Proves that standard protocols go a long way. |
For more of the web’s most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
Digital Inspiration features a map illustrating the countires least affected by the global recession, as ranked according to a survey conducted by Servcorp for the Herald Sun.
Australia takes the top spot followed by China with India and Singapore in equal third place. Qatar is the only gulf nation that figures in this “relatively” recession-proof list.
The data is based on the results of a business confidence survey that was done on international business people of 24 nations to identify which countries they believe are surviving the crisis the best.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by mrsmojorisin.
Andy Baio of waxy.org blog posted 23 photos of backgrounds from various internet memes. Like Garfield without Garfield, the result is strangely disconcerting.
Would you still recognize what these Internet memes are, well, without the actual memes?
These photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something’s amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.
Yawns? Hiccups? Goosebumps? Shivers? They all happen for a reason. Kimberly Fusaro of Woman’s Day spoke with Eric Plasker, author of The 100 Year Lifestyle to find out why our bodies do peculiar things. Take, for example, hiccups:
If you’ve frequently got a case of the hiccups, try slowing down when you eat and drink, suggests Dr. Plasker. Doing either too quickly causes your stomach to swell; this irritates your diaphragm, which contracts and causes hiccups. You may also get hiccups in emotional situations or if your body experiences a sudden temperature change. In both of these cases, the hiccups are a result of a glitch in your nerve pathways, which is why a sudden scare—which might shake up and reset your nerves—can sometimes end an episode.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ahammel.
In a series of photos taken by NASA, you can observe the dramatic disappearance of the Aral Sea in a relatively short period – between 2000 and 2009.
In a series of dramatic photos, NASA has been able to capture the disappearance of the Aral Sea from space. In the 1960′s Russia diverted water from several major rivers to irrigation projects for growing cotton and other crops. The result has been the complete destruction of one what was once the fourth largest inland sea in the world.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by mrsmojorisin.
In 1961 researcher Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts noticed a molecule in this jellyfish that glowed bright green under ultraviolet light (as pictured).
After extracting the molecule from 10,000 specimens, Shimomura found the protein that creates the glow.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by mrsmojorisin.
Comments Off
Seriously, if I had a back yard larger than a postage stamp and a budget that could accomidate more than a nice dinner ever few weeks, I would totally pimp it out with one of these. I mean, come on! Look at that one in Thailand!
The standard pool, in all its sparkly-blue, hot-summer-day glory, is enough to send most hearts aflutter. Add an edgy architectural design or sweeping city view, and you may just have your next dream destination.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ahammel.
A short quiz that tests whether you could pass sex ed. It’s trickier than I thought.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by MatthewInman.
The first draft of Star Wars was pretty awful. Mystery Man on Film takes a closer look at the 1974 version in which the young hero is Annikin Starkiller, Luke Skywalker is an elderly general, and Darth Vader is a minor character.
LEIA
Will we make it? Is there any hope? Stay with me… I love you.Starkiller is slightly shocked at this outburst. The princess starts to cry and clings to him for support.
STARKILLER
No-one is going to die…so stop acting like a child, and start behaving like a queen. What is this silly talk of love? You belong to the people of Aquilae, and my job is to return you to them, nothing more. Now straighten up and get into a lifepod.She’s deeply hurt by his callousness. She breaks away from him and runs down a hallway into a lifepod. He is tired, and angry at the whole incident.
It makes you wonder what difference it would have made if George Lucas had rewritten the prequels a couple more times. Link -via Metafilter
Xenon {wiki} is the heaviest non-radioactive noble gas. It affects your voice like sulphur hexafluoride (previously at Neatorama) and can get you high like nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Don’t try this at home; just watch these guys breathe it. Link (embedded YouTube clip)
We noticed a few comments complaining about ads with sound on Neatorama. We’d like to apologize for that and we want you to know that it’s not cool – we don’t purposely run ads with self-playing audio on the blog
Unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to find that one rogue ad (I haven’t run across it myself), so we need your help: please let us know which ad is the culprit – and if you could, please include the result of this cookie dump, so we can really track down and ban the bugger: http://ad.yieldmanager.com/cookie (you can email both to alex AT neatorama DOT com, if you don’t want to put that in the comment)
Thank you!
This honey cake is baked inside a Honey Baked Ham shell and topped with a lovely little slice of pineapple. It is a one up to the meat to cake ratio of the bacon cupcake.
This masterpeice was entered in the upcoming Stitch Wars exhibit at the Bear and Bird Boutique + Gallery in Florida. The little blue Luke Skywalker is zipped inside for a super Star Wars surprise.
Since its debut a little over a week ago, I've been playing with Wolfram|Alpha. For those of you who don't know, it is an ambitious project by Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame).
Wolfram Alpha (I know, technically, it's Wolfram|Alpha, but I don't want to type in that vertical bar all the time) is not a search engine, in a sense that it returns webpages as query results like Google does - rather, it is a "computational knowledge engine." You and I may simply call it an "answer engine," ask it a question and it'll come up with the (usually right on the money) answer.
What is butter? Wolfie knows - it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert $1 to British pounds, or the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred in Casablanca? How is the weather in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Impressive, eh?
Now, Stephen is a very smart guy. Indeed, he wrote his first paper on particle physics at the tender age of 16, received a PhD from Caltech at 20, and became a professor there at 21. And to be fair, Wolfram Alpha is very young and heavily geared towards computations. Furthermore, the scope of what the engine "knows" in terms of content is limited to areas covered by trusted sources like reference libraries fed to it by its programmers.
But currently, there's one large gaping hole missing from Wolfram Alpha: it is blind to blogs. Sure it knows about the meaning of life, and it has its own blog, but it knows nothing - nada, zip, zilch - about the blogosphere.
Technorati? Maybe you meant technology instead. According to Wolfie, Gizmodo = komodo (the island, the language, or the movie - but strangely not the animal); Techcrunch = Techuchulco (a city in Mexico). Boing Boing = Boina (a volcano).
Ask it about Neatorama and Wolfie thinks that you mean Panorama (which I learned is actually a city in Greece, that, at the time of my query, has a warm 73°F weather with relative humidity of 50%, wind of 7 mph and few clouds).
At least this blog fared better than Lifehacker, which got "lumpsucker" instead.
Heck, ask what is a blog?, and it'll think you're asking about logarithms:
Still, overall, I think Wolfram Alpha is a brilliant first step towards (dare I say it) an artificial intelligence - a universal computer a la Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. And I'm sure the hardworking people over at Wolfram Research will rectify this oversight soon.
But whatever you do, don't get Wolfie mad. This is what you'll get.
If you don't stop, it'll probably shove you out the pod bay door ...
A pseudonymous (presumably) student named Kat Atreides responded to her school’s ban on a large number of books by forming a secret library in her locker, and then loaning out banned books to students:
I go to a private school that is rather strict. Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we’re not allowed to read. I was absolutely appalled, because a large number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well… I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book, because he heard it was very good AND it was banned!
I hope that the school administrators were actually trying to trick students into reading, and weren’t so foolish as to imagine that banning books would lead to teenagers not reading them.
Link via Jessamyn West
image by flickr user florian.b used under creative commons license
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