Never before has Jabba looked so sensitive with his deep brown eyes and sweet little stuffed bunny. He’s part of the Star Wars Exhibit previously mentioned on Neatorama.
This stunning castle was created by Japanese art student Wataru Itou. It took four years of dedication to bring to fruition. It is complete with electric lights and a working train. The exhibit is called “A Castle On The Ocean” and is on display in Tokyo.
Link Via BoingBoing
It’s important to keep kids feeling comfortable and happy, even when they need to watch out for poisonous gas clouds -or at least, that must be the theory behind this Mickey Mouse gas mask sold in WWII. Paranoia and consumerism sure make for an interesting combination.
Link Via Consumerist
It’s been over six decades since Chuck Yaeger broke the sound barrier, but photos of fighter jets hitting Mach 1 has always fascinated us. Here’s a new photo of an Air Force F-22 Raptor aircraft breaking the sound barrier while performing aerial maneuvers in the Gulf of Alaska:
The phenomenon is not well studied. Scientists refer to it as a vapor cone, shock collar, or shock egg, and it’s thought to be created by what’s called a Prandtl-Glauert singularity.
Here’s what scientists think happens:
A layer of water droplets gets trapped between two high-pressure surfaces of air. In humid conditions, condensation can gather in the trough between two crests of the sound waves produced by the jet. This effect does not necessarily coincide with the breaking of the sound barrier, although it can.
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

With the passing of musical legend Michael Jackson, the game of comparative history can begin: who do you think is the biggest musical icon of the past century – Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, or Frank Sinatra?
Asylum blog has the low down comparing The King, The King of Pop, and the Chairman: Link
We’ve featured pen spinning before on Neatorama, but this activity is virtually a popular sport in Asia. There’s even a club of pen spinners [warning: self-starting audio] in Thailand made up of (all young males, as far as I can tell) pen spinning enthusiasts.
Urlesque blog has a selection of some of the neatest pen spinning tricks ever posted to YouTube. And to think that all I can do to my pen now is chew its end! Link
Popular Mechanics bought eight science kits for kids, reviewed them, and found instructions on the ‘net for replicating the same experiments with materials many people have on hand.
…homemade experiments can be just as complex and educational (while costing up to $100 less), so we found alternatives to each of the boxed kits that teach similar lessons just as well. Bottom line: Whether preassembled or drawn from kitchen cupboards, science kits can be educational and fun.
Link -via Geek Like Me
Developed by MITERS, a group at MIT who build things, this souped-up shopping cart can achieve speeds of up to 45 mph! I don’t know, it doesn’t look all that safe to me. Link
They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other.
Read more about annelid worms and see more videos, if you have the stomach for it. Link -via a comment at Digg
A hippopotamus in Alkmaar, South Africa was desperate for a dip to escape the heat, and climbed over ten foot walls to bathe in a water tower! Once in, he couldn’t get out on his own. A farm worker spotted him -or rather, spotted two big nostrils poking out of the water.
Equipped with a hydraulic crane and a cage, hippo hunter Chris Hobkirk and his team from the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Association set to work. In a four-hour operation, they drained the tank and used poles to gently nudge the hippo into the 3m-long (10ft) steel cage before winching it to safety.
Mr Hobkirk – who has rescued more than 180 stranded hippos in the past six years – said it was a tricky procedure but he was glad with the outcome.
‘Maybe we got lucky with this one. In the past, I have removed hippos from small dams. In those cases, the water levels have always been much lower so this was different.’
No, not a tattoo though undoubtedly it would make an excellent anatomically-minded example that would rival this famous skull face tattoo we had before on Neatorama. The gruesome painting is actually printed paper by Paris-based photographer Laurent Champoussin.
Vanessa Ruiz of Street Anatomy asked Laurent what inspired his art series titled Cardiovascular Paper:
I’ve always been interested by the écorché model. I was inspired by the classical representations of Andréas Vesalius, Charles Estienne or Adrian Van Den Spieghel. My idea was to play with the partial, the uncovered (open/discover) of an essential part of ourselves. I also wanted to work on the propagation, the invasion. My will was to design the model, to file down it like a texture and I hope, somewhere like a poetry.
More at Street Anatomy Blog: Link | Laurent’s website and blog – via Cakehead Loves Evil
Fancy fast food takes regular old fast food and turns it into gourmet (looking) food. I’m sure it doesn’t taste as good as real four star cuisine, but it sure does look delicious. Best of all, there’s plenty of recipes so you can duplicate the efforts.
