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Blogger Kevin J. Guhl has a list of twelve Smurf figurines that probably shouldn’t have been marketed to children, including scenes of intoxication, gambling, murderous rage, and wardobe malfunctions. Pictured above is a Smurf soon be drunk off his Smurf, if not Smurfed from alcohol poisoning. All images are courtesy of Smurfs über-site Blue Buddies.
This dentist no doubt inspires confidence in his patients with his tower made from 28,000 teeth from previous patients:
This 8ft tower of teeth is foul, and the summit of 15 years work by Yu Qian, a Chinese dentist who is trying to raise awareness about dental hygiene by word of mouth. Or, as it turns out, an awesome viral film gone global.
His piece of art is made from 28,000 human teeth (URGH). So far he has treated 100,000 patients, and ‘harvested’ 28,000 diseased teeth from his patients.
Link via The Presurfer
It may be counterintuitive (and hard to digest for parents like myself who always have to tell our kids to wear shoes when playing outside) but going barefoot may actually be better for you.
Here’s a New York Times article by Amy Cortese about the controversial movement of running barefoot (or barely barefoot anyhow, as these runners still wear thin rubber running shoes like the ones shown to the left):
Recent research suggests that for all their high-tech features, modern running shoes may not actually do much to improve a runner’s performance or prevent injuries. Some runners are convinced that they are better off with shoes that are little more than thin gloves for the feet — or with no shoes at all.
Plenty of medical experts disagree with this notion. The result has been a raging debate in running circles, pitting a quirky band of barefoot runners and researchers against the running-shoe and sports-medicine establishments.
Naturally, Nike and other large shoe manufacturers aren’t amused:
The shoe industry giants defend their products, saying they help athletes perform better and protect feet from stress and strain — not to mention the modern world’s concrete and broken glass.
But for all the technological advances promoted by the industry — the roll bars, the computer chips and the memory foam — experts say the injury rate among runners is virtually unchanged since the 1970s, when the modern running shoe was introduced. Some ailments, like those involving the knee and Achilles’ tendon, have increased.
Link (Photo: Jodi Hilton for The New York Times)
Businesswoman Shari Arison, who happens to be Israel’s richest citizen worth some $2.7 billion by Forbes’ most recent estimate), has revealed a secret: she can see the future!
This is much bigger than a parlor trick. In her new book published this summer in Israel, the 51-year-old Miami native says she felt the Indonesian tsunami sweeping over the land two months before it happened and sensed Hurricane Katrina pummeling New Orleans. In an interview, Arison says she also "saw the writing on the wall" before the global economic crash. Reading about Arison’s extrasensory perception makes you ache for a heads-up, maybe a blog entry or a tweet or a phone call to Brownie or Greenspan or somebody who might have helped.
Arison explains that she has finally dropped the fear that has held her back from doing more about what she has perceived. Armed with the insight gained through work with Florida-based psychiatrist Brian Weiss, a proponent of regression therapy and the exploration of (take your pick) deep memories or past lives, she says she is ready to go public with her visions and bring together her spiritual and business goals.
Unfortunately, seeing the future isn’t the secret to her wealth. She got rich the old fashioned way … by inheriting her fortunes! Link
(Photo: Andrea Bruce for The Washington Post)
If a shotgun wedding isn’t fast enough for ya, you can get married in the world’s fastest church: a mobile wedding chapel (converted from a firetruck) owned by Rev. Darrell Best.
His 1942 firetruck is by no means a Ferrari, but it is equipped as a fully functioning chapel.
"I’ve had it up to 55 mph," Best said. "It gets a lot of attention on the highway."
Mechanics from the Country Music Television show "Trick My Truck" did the conversion after Best’s family wrote to the program last year. The chapel has stained-glass windows, a pipe organ, an altar and two wooden pews.
Couples recently paid $100 to get married in the tiny church at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. "It fits me, the bride, the groom, the best man and the maid of honor," said Best, of Shelbyville, Ill. "It gets a little crowded, but it works."
Kim Janssen of the LA Times has the story: Link
Be careful if you dive in a Canary Island underwater cave called the Tunnel of Atlantis.
Researchers from the Institute for Animal Ecology and Cell Biology in Hannover, Germany were exploring the cave, which happens to be the world’s longest underwater lava tube, and came across an eyeless crustacean previously unknown to science.
What distinguishes this eyeless crustacean from others found in underwater caves is its powerful fangs, which function like hypodermic needles injecting poison into the sometimes larger prey.
Despite its lack of eyes, this crustacean is apparently quite successful in its evolutionary niche. The German scientists believe these creatures may be survivors of an ancient group of crustaceans that were widespread in the Mesozoic oceans more than 200 million years ago.
Photo courtesy Ulricke Strecker via National Geographic News
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
With sound sources bouncing off walls and other surfaces, how is the brain able to sort out from what direction and distance sound is traveling? Robert Goodier explains:
In an April study, neuroscientists led by Sasha Devore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested the widely held hypothesis that specialized cells in the brain actively suppress neuronal response to echoes. Using electrodes in a cat’s midbrain, researchers measured cells’ responses to a sound and its reverberations. They found that the cells that sense a sound’s direction of origin responded more strongly to the first 50 milliseconds of sound waves than they did to the later waves—their activity simply tapered off after the onset of the sound. The tapering response, a much simpler mechanism than the earlier theory of suppression, allows the brain to easily tune in to original sounds and pinpoint who or what is making noise.
Image by flickr user mystical child used under creative commons license
One hundred years ago to this day, German doctor Paul Ehrlich developed the first effective chemotherapy drug. Specifically, he was trying to find a cure for syphilis:
Ehrlich and Japanese student Sahachiro Hata produced their 606th preparation of an arsenobenzene compound in 1907. Ehrlich watched on Aug. 31 two years later, as Hata injected chemical No. 606 into a rabbit with syphilitic ulcers. The next day, no live spirochetes could be found on the animal’s ulcers, and within three weeks, the ulcers were completely gone.
After testing the drug on mice, guinea pigs and many more rabbits, Ehrlich and Hata sent their miracle cure to the chemical firm Hoechst, which marketed it under the name Salvarsan. The drug became an almost instant success around the world, although many criticized Ehrlich for creating a chemical that might encourage promiscuity.
The Walt Disney Company has agreed to buy Marvel Entertainment, which includes 5,000 comic book characters, including Spiderman, Captain America, the X-men, and the Fantastic Four.
Under the terms of the agreement and based on last week’s closing price of Disney, Marvel shareholders would receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own.Based on the closing price of Disney stock on Friday, August 28, the total transaction value is $50 per Marvel share or approximately $4 billion.
Get ready for plenty of speculation on what this will mean for the comics. Link -via Fark
Thousands of people turned out for an attempt to break the world record for the number of people doing a simultaneous Thriller dance in Mexico City. Organizer Javier Hildago says 12,937 participated on Saturday, which would have been Michel Jackson’s 51st birthday. Officials from the Guinness Book of World Records will take some time to determine whether all those people completed the entire dance routine. The current official record is 242 dancers from the College of William & Mary. Link
The following is a reprint
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader
Plunges Into the Universe.
Throughout history, intrepid adventurers and successful armies of conquest
have marched on their stomachs. The wagon trains and cattle drives that
opened the American frontier would have stalled without Cookie and his
chuck wagon. Camp cooks have always ruled their little kingdoms, be they
isolated lumber camps, mine operations, or construction projects.
All of which NASA researchers took into consideration as they prepared
to breach the frontiers of space.
MERCURY POISONING?
 Unfortunately
for the early Mercury astronauts, Buck Rogers and Isaac Asimov had more
influence on their meals than Martha Stewart might have.
The menu consisted of unidentified snacks: cubes textured like dog biscuits,
freeze-dried powders as appetizing as Mojave Desert dust, and tubes of
glutinous matter resembling toothpaste but not nearly as flavorful. The
cubes crumbled, the powders wouldn't dissolve, and those tubes - they
were the first to go. Fit fare for Martians, maybe, but not for humans.
(Photo: NASA)
NAME THAT FOOD
 Gemini
astronauts had it better. Packaging improved. The ever-adventurous food
scientists at NASA now dared to identify the food for their astronauts
- for example, shrimp, chicken, applesauce.
This was one step for mankind, but still a long way from the real thing.
Maybe that's why astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich
aboard a Gemini flight in 1965. Gus Grissom ate it, but Young was officially
reprimanded (the first astronaut to be reprimanded for anything).
THE AGE OF TANG
Tang ad from 1971
Grissom may have washed down that sandwich with a swig of Tang. Pillsbury/General
Foods had been trying unsuccessfully to foist the powdered orange drink
on a highly suspecting public for three years. But once Tang qualified
for the space program, sales shot up. Everybody wanted to try the "drink
of the astronauts."
THE END OF HIGH-FLYING HASH
As the Apollo program went into orbit, NASA's faith in the skills of
their astronauts improved. This time it actually provided them with spoons
- another leap forward. But special containers had to be designed to overcome
the near-weightlessness of the cabin. Nobody wanted their pea soup stuck
to the ceiling any more than they wanted to have to chase after shrimp
that had floated off their dinner tray. Another boon was hot water to
rehydrate those powders; that meant fewer lumps and better flavor. Still,
no one in orbit was getting fat.
PLEASE PASS THE POTATOES
Skylab food heating and serving tray with food, drink, and utensils. The
tray contained heating elements for preparing the individual food packets.
(Photo: NASA)
Skylab, launched in 1973, changed everything - it had an actual dining
area, with a table and chairs (that diners had to strap themselves to).
Utensils now included not only a knife, fork, and spoon, but also a pair
of scissors for opening food packets. A refrigerator and a freezer completed
the homelike atmosphere. With things looking up on the equipment side,
the food side got better, too. Astronauts could now select from 72 items.
They seemed to have everything but a maître d' and a decent wine
list.
EATING LIKE EARTHLINGS
Given the confined dining space, an astronaut's food choices were more
contingent on the development of packaging, preparation, and serving equipment
than on available foods. The concoctions were already available. Earthbound,
we've got egg substitutes, hamburger extenders, chocolate bars without
cocoa, artificially flavored and colored fruit, and so on. In space, so
do the astronauts - but they've had to wait for suitable packaging.
PACKAGING THE MOVABLE FEAST
Food preparation aboard the space shuttle STS-4 in 1982 [YouTube
Link]
Space shuttle meals limit each astronaut to one pound of packaging waste
daily, a day's food supply having a gross weight of 3.8 pounds, including
snacks (this means that more than 25 percent of a meal package is meant
to be thrown away - and if you think that's a lot, have a look at almost
any frozen dinner available to us nonastronauts).
Months ahead of a flight, astronauts plan their own meal. Engineers review
their choices to make sure they won't weigh too much (the meals, not the
astronauts). Then nutritionists review the menus to ensure the shuttle
won't be harboring a junk food addict or a budding anorexic. Too much
packaging and too much waste food (what we Earthlings call leftovers)
could screw up the garbage compactor. Just prior to the flight, the food
packages are individually color-coded and stored in the shuttle galley.
A MEAL THAT STICKS TO YOUR ... TABLE
To an astronaut, the single most important technological advance for
space flight wasn't all-purpose duct tape or crazy glue, it was Velcro.
The individual packages containing a full meal could be Velcroed to a
tray and all opened at the same time. Previously, packages had to be opened
one at a time and consumed before the next was opened. Otherwise, the
first package could float away while the astronaut snipped at the top
of another. Shuttle crews can now have a full-course hot meal reconstituted
in a recognizable form and on a dinner tray within 35 minutes. Not bad.
KITCHEN WIZARDRY
NASA chefs were no slouches. When the tricks of conventional cookery
didn't work, they invented some of their own. Many of their offerings
were provided with varying amount of water removed from them. "Add
water and eat" or "Add water, heat, and eat" were about
the only directions astronauts needed. Breakfast was a breeze: cereal,
sugar, and powdered milk in a single pouch. Add water, and voila! It would
snap, crackle, and pop with the best of them, even if it didn't come with
a prize.
You can taste some of this handiwork in commercially available camping
and trail foods. (And we can thank NASA impetus for those small, full-panel
pull-off lids on cans - they thought of them first.)
THE LONG HAUL
Astronaut Michael Foale describes what eating in space is like [YouTube
Clip]
And all that while, NASA was gearing up to feed astronauts for prolonged
periods. THe orbiting space station has facilities to provide frozen,
refrigerated, and thermostabilized food (heat-treated to kill off the
bad stuff).
NASA had to give up its passion to just add water - the space station
couldn't generate enough - which meant that astronauts could finally eat
fresh food. Moreover, every four astronauts had their own microwave/convention
oven; no more line ups to liquefy and heat those first cups of morning
coffee.
With all these technical advances has come a quantum expansion of the
menu. Astronauts can choose from nine different cereals, some with fruits;
nine different chicken entrees; ten different vegetables; four flavors
of yogurt; regular, decaf, or Kona (excuse me!) coffee - and that's just
for starters.
CHECK, PLEASE!
Space food samples. Yum! (Photo: NASA)
The menu on space flights seem to have reached such gourmet standards
that private citizens are paying millions just for a short hop. Of course,
there's still no wine list, but when tourists can plan their own menus
months before tying on the bib - that gives NASA a lot of time to procure
the best ingredients, not to mention using the acumen of expert chefs
and the latest technology to ensure optimal quality and freshness.
CHIX IN SPACE
NASA knows that accessing remote space frontiers may require space flights
that last for years, so they've started to figure out ways to fashion
a self-contained, self-sustaining food system - shades of 2001: A
Space Odyssey, not to mention Silent Running.
The cities in space that cosmologist Stephen Hawking talks about will
require the same approach. NASA has already sent (unplanted) tomato and
mung bean seeds into orbit, as well as chicken embryos, just to find out
what effects, if any, space travel would have on them. As it turned out,
the effects were negligible. And NASA scientists have been fiddling with
hydroponics (that is, grown only in water) lettuce in space simulation
labs.
Help in this regard has come from the private sector: The tomato seeds
courtesy of H.J. Heinz, and KFC footing some of the bill for the "Chix
in Space" experiments. (We're getting kind of bored with "spacecraft
metallic" anyway: Make way for billboards in space!) |
|
 |
The article above is reprinted with permission
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
 |
BuckyBalls Magnetic Toy – $29.95 [YouTube Clip]
This is the current rage in the Neatorama Shop: Zoomdoggle’s insanely fun BuckyBalls – a set of 216 balls made from powerful rare earth magnets.
You can shape and mold an unlimited variations of magnetic sculpture (of course, if you get more than 1, you can combine them to create a mega-sculpture!). Tear ‘em apart and snap ‘em back together for hours of fun.
BuckyBalls is this week’s featured product at the Neatorama Shop. For a limited time, you’ll get a free Mystery Gift for the purchase of each BuckyBalls (What will you get? Well, we won’t tell you … it’s a mystery!)
Don’t miss this: Link
What would you add to this cartoon character list of medical afflictions? I’d add Donald Duck (anger or social anxiety disorder) …
Does anyone know who originally created the image above so we can credit it properly? – via Accordion Guy
See also: Presidential Diseases
Kate Dailey of Newsweek’s The Human Condition blog wrote a very interesting post about the role of sports in child development. Is sports beneficial for kids or does it turn jocks into jerks?
The answer – painfully obvious to those who still remember their high school days – came by way of a new psychology study by Richard Lerner et al:
Depending on one’s high-school experience, there are two distinct philosophies about the role sports plays in a child’s development. There’s the idea that youth sports teaches kids discipline and respect, keeps them off the street, and helps them mature into adults: it’s sports that turned athletically gifted but insecure Daniel Larusso into The Karate Kid.
But just as pervasive is the opinion that jocks are jerks, and kids who play sports are mean bullies who will do anything to win, who need to dominate their opponents and who carry that aggressiveness streak off the field. Kids who play sports, this line of thinking goes, are more like Johnny Lawrence, star athlete (and big-time bully) from the Cobra-Kai dojo.
A recent study in the journal Developmental Psychology suggest that jocks really are jerks—if they focus exclusively on sports at the expense of other more-well rounded programs. But kids who both play sports and are exposed to youth-development program like scouting or 4-H show the most markers of personal growth and maturity.
Our good friend Rommel Santor (who coded the Neatorama Upcoming Queue) and Brian "Dag" Houston of VideoSift have just launched a new venture: Tee Virus, an online community where you can create your very own T-shirt design, submit it to the community for feedback, and – if it passes muster – get it printed and sold through the website. Best of all, you’ll earn cash with every shirt sold.
I’ve got my TBIF T-shirt and am happy as a clam with it
Check ‘em out: Link
Our pal Jeremy Gutsche, the founder of TrendHunter Magazine – one of the neatest websites around, by the way – has an interesting new book titled Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying popularized by John F. Kennedy that the Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity. That turned out to be a fallacy, but the reasoning behind it is actually not all that bad.
In his book, Jeremy outlines ways you can utilize chaos and the current economic uncertainty for your benefit (shades of Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel saying "… Never let a serious crisis go to waste" perhaps?). For example:
Crisis creates opportunity
Prior to the Great Depression, the only cereal brand that mattered was Post. After your great-grandfather silenced the piercing bells of his wind-up alarm clock, he savored the delicious taste of Post Grape-Nuts. Launched in 1897, the cereal dominated the marketplace leading up to the 1930s.
As the Great Depression tightened its angry claws on America, Post found itself hungry for cash. The prominent cereal maker assumed they "owned" the market. How could anyone stop lusting for Grape-Nuts? Accordingly, advertising budgets were cut to weather the storm.
As the managers of Post reclined in their rawhide chairs, bracing for a slow economy, a hungry tiger lurked in the shadows. That tiger was the Kellogg Company. Their mascot, Tony the Tiger, had not yet appeared, but his insatiable spirit was already born.
While Post retreated, Kellogg doubled their ad spend. In 1933 their campaigns introduced slogans like "Snap! Crackle! Pop!" and "You’ll feel better": motivational mantras during a gloomy era. The investment paid off. Americans loved the message and sales began to grow. Kellogg’s became the go-to pick for breakfast cereal and your great-grandfather abandoned his beloved Post Grape-Nuts.
The upbeat impact of a crisis is that competitors become mediocre, and the ambitious find ways to grow.
For such a serious topic, the book Exploiting Chaos is a rather breezy read. Jeremy himself acknowledged that our reading habits have changed (I blame texting) – you can browse the colorful book in a sitting. Anyhow, the real gem here isn’t the anecdotes that you get from the book, but the ideas, impetus, or kick-in-the-pants or whatever you want to call it – that you may get from reading it.
Check out the first chapter of Exploiting Chaos, available as a free PDF download here: Link | Exploiting Chaos website | Book available starting Sept 1, 2009 – Thanks Jeremy!
Our pal Asylum blog has compiled 15 of the weirdest magazines still in publication today. Included are Crappie World Magazine (unbeknowst to me, crappie is a type of fish), Bacon Busters (Australia’s hog-hunting magazine – not, I repeat not, a cooking mag) and Girls and Corpses (a self-described "Maxim Magazine meets Dawn Of The Dead" – you’ve been warned).
Check out the whole list here: Link
Designed by Ji-youn Kim, this hanging lamp can shed light in the darkness, but probably won’t make you feel any more secure. What a conversation piece! Link -via Coolest Gadgets
Is the man in this picture dead or alive? It’s not a silly question. In the early days of photography, dead bodies would be photographed for posterity. Often this would be the only picture ever taken of the person. Sometimes the bodies were posed as if they were alive.
There’s something just unspeakably creepy about this fireman. At first glance, he looks like a normal, awkwardly-posed guy from the 19th century. But upon closer inspection, you notice a few tell-tale signs: a rigid pose and fingers, a stand not quite completely hidden behind his feet, which is holding him up by some unseen armature on his back, liberal amounts of rouge applied to too-white cheeks, and those blank, blank eyes.
This picture is available on eBay. See more possibly post-mortem posed portraits at mental_floss. Link
Artist Stuart Semple uses soap and helium to create floating foam clouds in the shape of smiley faces. A machine he developed makes and releases them, thousands at a time, in public places. Link (with video) -via Metafilter
