John Manley of Wilmington, North Carolina suffered frequent pneumonia and coughing spells for over a year before the real culprit was found: there was a jagged inch-long piece of plastic lodged in his left lung. It turned out to be part of a utensil from Wendy’s Hamburgers. Manley was referred to Dr. Momen Wahidi, director of interventional pulmonology at Duke University for removal of the object.
Wahidi said Manley’s case presented challenges because so much scar tissue had formed around the object. But he was soon able to uncover more and more of the mystery item. He called out letters — an A, a B, a U, an R.
“We figured out during the case that it was saying hamburger,” Wahidi says. “But why would something that says hamburger be in this patient’s body?”
Manley thinks he probably inhaled the plastic when he gulped a drink. He now drinks with a straw. Link -via Terra Sigillata
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Traditional lederhosen can cost up to €700 a pair, and one good beer spill can ruin them. So what are you going to wear to Oktoberfest? Austrian restaurant owner Peter Kolb has an alternative: swim trunks he designed that look like lederhosen will be on sale during Oktoberfest in Munich.
“You wouldn’t even need to wash the beer off, it’s a fabric that dries immediately,” he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The shorts look remarkably like the real thing, with elaborately embroidered deer heads, a front bib and traditional side stitching. They retail at €79, a fraction of the cost of the leather alternative.Alpine traditionalists who last year complained about the growing trend towards cheap lederhosen imported from Asia may cry heresy at the sight of Kolb’s lederhosen. After all, they’re manufactured in China and don’t contain a scrap of leather.
But Kolb insists he is helping to introduce Alpine traditions to younger generations, and is even exporting the region’s folk culture to a global audience.
Link -via Metafilter
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One of the most amazing things about plants is their ability to grow through all kinds of obstacles. When trees manage to do so, the spectacle is even more amazing because it is on such a grand scale. There are even more cool ones when you follow the link.
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The travel industry may be suffering during these tough economic times, but hotels in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have found a way to attract new visitors – let them sleep in beds of freshly raked hay in converted barns. For as little as 8 Euros per night ($11 U.S.), backpackers, couples, families, and (in the case of one German hotel) groups of up to 60 can bond by eating together around a camp fire and then
rolling around in the hay.
Without the need for new construction, heavy laundry bills or other forms of high energy consumption, hay hotels are also an effective means of low-impact, sustainable tourism.
Link – via holeinthedonut
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The Daily Telegraph has assembled what it considers to be the twenty strangest ads ever placed on Craigslist. These include a chair that Ralph Nader once (possibly) sat in, a drunk clown, and a woman who would like to rent out her bathroom. Here’s one for a vast collection of papal mitres — Pope hats:
“Because of this terrible economy, I’m having to shut down my business. I have OVER 1300 Pope hats (replicas) that I REALLY need to get rid of. The pope hats came from China and are a little too small for most adult heads and are also irritating to the skin, so you would need to have long hair or wear a smaller hat underneath (just like the REAL POPE). Dogs do not like to wear these pope hats, but maybe a large cat or maybe a nice dog would wear one.”
Image via flickr user Beechwood Photography used under creative commons license.
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David Derbyshire writes in The Daily Mail that ancient Britons may have developed a sophistated land navigation system among various sites and markers. Amateur archaeologist Tom Brooks has analyzed 1,500 prehistoric sites and found a pattern:
He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles – these are triangles with two sides the same length.
This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.
For more complex journeys, they would have broken up the route into a series of easy to navigate steps.
Anyone starting at Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, for instance, could have used the grid to get to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.
Mr Brooks added: ‘The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.
At the link, you can see a map illustrating Brooks’ hypothesis.
Image by flickr user Danny Sullivan used under creative commons license.
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Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photograher who takes pictures of electrical charges. His exhibit “Lightning Fields” is currently on display at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to directly apply electricity to film. The above image is entitled “Lightning Fields 128, 2008.”
Previously on Neatorama: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Henry VIII Photos
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Courtesy of the British Medical Asssociation, Wired has a collection of seven videos from the 1930s showing common surgeries. They’re good demonstrations of what has changed and what hasn’t in the past seventy years of medicine. The video above is of a Caesarean birth. Others include brain, ovarian, and tonsil surgeries. Note that these videos are medically graphic and not for the squeamish.
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Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that a Mississippi woman blind for the past nine years can see 20/70 after one of her own teeth was surgically implanted in one of her eyes:
To begin the months-long process, doctors removed one of Thornton’s canine teeth—aka an eyetooth—along with part of the jaw and cut it all down to a shape small enough to replace the cornea. The doctors then drilled a hole into it to insert a lens. In order for the tooth to bind to the lens sufficiently, the implant spent a couple months in the patient’s body. In Thornton’s case, it was implanted near her shoulder.
To prep the eye to receive the tooth and lens, the doctors placed a cheek graft over the eye to promote moisture. The final tooth-lens product was removed from Thornton’s shoulder and placed in the center of the eye, in line with the retina.
The MOOKP procedure was developed in Italy in 1963, and has been more common in Europe and Asia, but only about 600 operations have been undertaken. Given the small number of treatments, its safety remains unconfirmed, and other doctors have their reservations. “It requires a sizable team and several operations,” Ivan Schwab, of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, told CNN. “It’s just an extreme variation on techniques we’re already doing.”
Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
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Kris at Low Tech Magazine explains how furniculars, those cable trains that were built up the sides of hills and mountains, often ran on water! The two cars were
connected by cables, so you added 400 gallons of water to the one at the top, to make it heavy enough to roll down the hill while pulling up the lighter one at the bottom.
In Fribourg, Switzerland, they had a much better idea. One area in town is at the top of a hill, and the other at the bottom, separated by about 375 feet of elevation. And if there is one thing that is always flowing from the top to the bottom, it is sewage. Instead of running in a pipe, they pump some of it into the car at the top; at the bottom, they open it up and let it run into the lower sewer.
Link – via treehugger
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So, you’ve got a teapot full of tea and an empty cup, what do you do? Pour yourself an nice and warm cup of tea? No, of course not silly! You put your mouth against the top of teapot and blow as hard as you can, of course! Geeks Are Sexy asked readers to send in their pictures of this stunt and got lots of response, with hilariously varying results.
Some of you did it at home, and others, at work. And while some did a splendid and controlled execution of the feat, others let all hell loose and just blew in the thing as hard as they could.
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Move over, Bao Xishun and Leonid Stadnik (who was stripped of his title) the Guinness Book of World Records has certified that 27-year-old Sultan Kosen from Turkey is the world’s tallest man. Kosen is eight feet and one inch tall! What does Kosen want to do with his new fame?
“The first thing I want to do is have a car that I can fit in, but more than that I want to get married,” he said.
“Up until now it’s been really difficult to find a girlfriend. I’ve never had one, they were usually scared of me. I’m hoping now I will find one.”
He went on: “Hopefully now that I’m famous I’ll be able to meet lots of girls. I’d like to get married.”
Link to story (with video). Link to a biography and more pictures. -via reddit
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The Webby Awards have been given by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences since 1996 for achievement on the Internet. Winners are limited to five-word acceptance speeches. The above video is a compilation of some of those concise and occasionally funny speeches. If you had only five words to say to the world, what would they be?
Via The Presurfer
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These photos are truly spectacular! Wouldn’t you just fall in love with these beautiful creatures? The pains wildlife photographer Kim Taylor took to get these shots are just as interesting!
Swooping low over a garden pond in Surrey, these are the stunning pictures of bats enjoying an evening drink at their favourite watering hole. They are so detailed you can even see the night creatures slurping from the pool with their little pink tongues.
(image credit: Kim Taylor/Caters News Agency Ltd.)
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This is just about the coolest thing I’ve seen today: a giant online collection of vintage educational and toy robots from the 1980s. It made me miss my old Tomy Omnibot … Link – via swissmiss
If you like that, don’t miss the Old Robot YouTube channel.
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CAEN (L) 10 July 1944 – Residents looking after a Canadian bulldozer clearing rubble in the streets. Photo: Archives Canada (R) Photo: Patrick Elie
Historian Patrick Elie took old pictures of the rubble-strewn French city of Normandy in 1944, during the height of World War II, and painstakingly took photos of the same spot from the same general perspective:
Elie, who has devoted his life to chronicling D-Day and the effects of the war on his home country of France, worked tirelessly to find the exact locations of dramatic photographs from 1944 and then took his own photos of the modern-day sites.
WebUrbanist has more photos: Link | Check out Patrick Elie’s website for more.
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Joe Wilson, Kanye West, and Serena Williams – what do these three have in common? Well, unless you’ve been living in a cave, you probably know that they all got in hot water over their recent outbursts.
But are these incidents anomalies or are they part of a trend of rising rudeness and the general collapse of civility? Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times wrote:
In the wake of these high-profile outbursts across disciplines — politics, entertainment and sports — many Americans have found themselves asking what is going on. To some, it’s not a coincidence but rather the manifestation of a deepening social dysfunction. [...]
Some say it reflects a general collapse of manners, rooted in the anti-authoritarian strains of the late 1960s. Some offer a psychological explanation: that such outbursts reveal the person beneath the mask of a public persona. Some see an element of racial animus at work.
Link (Photo: Jason DeCrow/AP)
On one hand, the Interweb helped people voice their opinions over a wide range of matters very easily. On the other hand, those opinions are often boorish. Comments on blogs, including Neatorama, often degenerate into name-callings. And let’s not even talk about YouTube’s comments – suffice it to say that friends don’t let friends comment on YouTube.
Does this tendency of rudeness on the Net spill over to real life (especially for young people) or is it the other way around? Why are people becoming ruder? What do you think?
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Giant Tinfoil Ball, 2009 by Emily Keegin
I crumple up tinfoil sheets all the time, but never once did I consider what I’ve made was actually – gasp – art. Behold the Giant Tinfoil Ball, by Emily Keegin: Link (includes artistic nudity, NSFW)
Now, if I had only kept my giant wad of bubblegums to compete with her awesome creation …
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Scientists at the Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology in Ukraine have achieved what seemed to be a dauntingly impossible task: they’ve managed to take an image of a single carbon atom’s electron cloud:
This is the first time scientists have been able to see an atom’s internal structure directly. Since the early 1980s, researchers have been able to map out a material’s atomic structure in a mathematical sense, using imaging techniques.
Quantum mechanics states that an electron doesn’t exist as a single point, but spreads around the nucleus in a cloud known as an orbital. The soft blue spheres and split clouds seen in the images show two arrangements of the electrons in their orbitals in a carbon atom. The structures verify illustrations seen in thousands of chemistry books because they match established quantum mechanical predictions.
Link – via Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline
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LEGO MOC by 2×4 [Flickr] | Tron Photoset
Tron is one of my all time favorite Sci-Fi movies and it’s a pleasure to see that almost three decades later, it’s still inspiring its fans. Here’s a fantastic diorama of the Tron Light cycles scene by Flickr user 2×4 we first spotted over at The Brothers Brick blog.
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Forget baseball cards! Here’s The Problem With Young People Trading Cards from the oh-so-crabby-he’s-great Donald Mills of The Problem With Young People Today Is … blog: Link – via Nag on the Lake
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There have certainly been many odd music videos over the years. The short format seems to invite experimentation and risk taking. Brainz has collected 15 of the weirdest videos of all time, including a gem from Leonard Nimoy for his song "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins":
As if Leonard Nimoy needed to prove himself even more odd, the ‘Star Trek’ legend released this gem. “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”, which comes in at number 9 on our list, tells the story of the little Hobbit featured in J.R.R Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”. Beyond weird.
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Being arrested is bad enough without having some embarrassing details publicized as well. Someday, when your grandchildren ask you if you’ve ever been in the newspaper, on TV, or published on the ‘net, you’ll be glad you aren’t these people!
It will be the second offense for Portland’s Gary Moody who was caught hiding inside the pit of a campsite latrine, once again. The creature of the black latrine claimed that he was not leering at the backsides of bathroom goers. His excuse was that he dropped his shirt down the hole; the previous time he stressed that he had dropped his wedding ring (which was never found). Moody entered a plea of no contest to trespassing for which he will serve two years of probation. He is also required to pay a fine of $1,000 and $700 to the Forest Service for the cost of pumping out the toilet tank and screening the contents.
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