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Photo: Igor Siwanowicz
Focus Magazine has held a photography contest for the last four years featuring pics from various research projects. Second place (in Captivating Research) this year went to Igor Simanowicz for this shot of a praying mantis’ threat display. The rest of the selections over at SpiegelOnline are also impressive.
Siwanowicz’s praying mantis finds herself in good company, among a coral-like vascular system, a robotic seal bringing comfort to dementia patients and an explosion of activity in a neuron cell. The collection presents a fascinating look at the work being done in laboratories around the world.
The picture doesn’t have to be taken by a pro like Siwanowicz, just as long as it makes research more accessible to the non-scientific community.
Link | via Twisted Sifter
Sixteen percent of Australia’s greenhouse emissions come from agriculture, so scientists there are busy trying to solve the problem of … burping sheep?
"Ninety per cent of the methane that sheep and cattle and goats produce comes from the rumen, and that’s burped out," John Goopy from the New South Wales Department of Industry and Investment told ABC.
"Not much goes behind – that’s horses."
The scientists in New South Wales have been conducting experiments in specially designed pens where they measure how much gas sheep emit by burping. They have found, from tests on 200 sheep so far, that the more they eat, the more they belch.
The scientists’ goal is to breed sheep that burp less: Link
With all the debate going on with health care, you’d be forgiven if you want to skip this post. But I think I’ve found the solution to making health care affordable for Americans: just outsource it to Thailand.
Eric Wahlgren of AOL’s Daily Finance has the story of medical tourism:
Like some 47 million other Americans, Nancy Sowa (pictured) doesn’t have health insurance. So when her doctors last year told her she needed a total hip replacement, the office manager for a non-profit did what a growing number of U.S. citizens are doing: She headed abroad. At Wockhardt Hospital in Bangalore, India, the 56-year-old was put up in a hospital "suite" far swankier than what she would typically find in the U.S., with a computer, fridge, cable TV, sitting area and an extra bed for her travel companion.
More to the point, the two-hour surgery in July, performed by an orthopedic surgeon trained in the U.S. and Australia, was a success. Four months later, the Durham, N.C. resident is feeling like her old self again, going for long hikes and planning her next vacation. The final tab for the procedure, including rehabilitative therapy and round-trip airfare for two? $12,000. That’s a fraction of the $45,000 to $90,000 she had been told the surgery would cost at home.
"I wouldn’t have been able to do the surgery in the United States," says Sowa. "I didn’t have to explore taking out a second mortgage or tapping family members because I had this other option."
What would Robocop, Hellboy, Batman and other comic characters look like if they had beards? You don’t have to wonder anymore. Behold Croatian illustrator Vanja Mrgan‘s series "Bearded": Link – via Laughing Squid
One frigid Friday morning, animal control got a call about a cat that may or may not be alive under a deck. When they got there, they found a cat so cold it was rigid. Its eyes were closed. There was no movement. And then …
Here’s a heartwarming tale of how people at the Teller County Regional Animal Shelter fought to bring the cat (aptly named Icee) back from the brink of death:
"Whatcha got there?" the shelter director, Mary Steinbeiser, asks when officer Cheri France arrives and puts the carrying crate on the counter.
"A cat," France says. "I’m not sure if it’s still alive."
Steinbeiser pulls the black and white cat, so cold it’s rigid, out of the carrier. The eyes are closed. There’s no movement. This is an awful moment for anyone who loves animals. She steels herself. And then hears the tiniest squeak.
The women exchange glances. It looks really bad. But Steinbeiser
thrusts the cat at France, who unzips her jacket and presses the cat close to her body, then zips back up …
Sharon Peters of USA Today’s Paw Print Post has the story: Link
Quick, when you think about working in a hotel, what do you think about? Being a receptionist? Part of the cleaning crew? How about a coin polisher, a mud manager and … a duckmaster?!
Judy Mandell of the Los Angeles Times writes about the more unusual behind-the-scenes hotel jobs. Take for instance, Jason Sensat’s job. He’s the Duckmaster at the Peabody hotel:
At the Peabody hotel in Memphis, Tenn., five mallard ducks live in a penthouse on the roof. At 11 a.m. each day, they march to the lobby, where they splash in the fountain until 5 p.m., when the ceremony reverses. Duckmaster Jason Sensat feeds, cares for and trains the ducks.
"Many think this is a fun and glamorous job, and quite often it is with media interviews, travel and celebrity honorary Duckmasters — but it’s also a dirty job, as cleaning up after the flock is part of the job too," Sensat says.
Read the rest: Link | Jason’s official page at The Peabody
Everyone’s favorite Scottish Fold Internet star would like to show you trickz. Previously on Neatorama: Maru, the Box Loving Cat, Maru Returns, Maru Gets a BIG Box, Maru Makes Faces. -via Unique Daily.
Etsy seller Podkayne Studios sells nativity sets that remember the Christmas story just a little bit differently. Dinosaur, Star Wars, Pokémon, Indiana Jones and other themes are available.
Link via Geekologie
Paris-based artist Olivier Kosta-Théfaine burns images into ceilings using only a cigarette lighter. His medium is an extension of a common form of street art in the neighborhood in which he grew up. Pictured above is an untitled piece created in Brussels in 2007. You can view more images and read an interview with the artist at the link.
Link via DudeCraft | Artist’s Website | Video Interview with the Artist
Steve Irvine makes ceramic pinhole cameras. He writes “I like the organic look of these cameras which contrasts with our usual notions of cameras being machine-made, high tech devices.” The cameras are quite functional, as you can see from the photograph below, taken with the camera above.
Link via Make | Photos: Steve Irvine
The zoo of Warsaw, Poland, has a pair of prehistoric humans (or actors depicting them) on display over the weekend:
Organiser Maria Mastalerz says the weeklong “performance” aims to attract interest in a play, “Caveman,” showing in the Polish capital. But she says it also carries a message that humans today are not all that different from their prehistoric ancestors.
Dressed in furs and animal skins, the young woman and man smoked a fish over a fire Friday, poking it with a stick, or stared from behind bars at startled zoo visitors.
Video at the link.
This periodic table of cupcakes is for a chemistry nerd’s birthday party. Each cake is labeled with an element and color-coded by its state of matter. I hear hydrogen and helium are very light and fluffy. Looks like someone already ate ununseptium. Link -via reddit
Maureen Alarid of Off Beat Bride created this invitation for her wedding, featuring Admiral Ackbar’s prudent advice about marriage. Alarid writes:
The wording [on the back] is my favorite part. It reads: ‘[We] request the honor of your presence as two geeks save the princess, resist the dark side and pledge their lives (extra, or otherwise) to each other.’ And we snuck a Hyrulian crest in there too!
Link via Geekologie
The food blog Eating the Road presents this handy flow chart that you can use whilst shopping for cereal. Which cereal should you buy? The chart allows you to factor in issues such as current state of intoxication, nationality, ChurckNorrishood, and cultural pretentiousness. Larger image at the link.
Link via Radley Balko
The World Wide Web is big. Really big. As of July of 2008, Google found 1 trillion (that’s 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once. The search engine has only indexed a fraction of those web pages (the last count I found was 25 billion in 2006).
But that’s nothing compared to the "Deep Web" – a part of the Internet that is not easily accessible by search engines (for example, dynamically generated content that exists only momentarily). People have estimated that the Deep Web is several orders of magnitude larger than the "surface Web". There is, however, another part of the Deep Web that is more sinister: the dark side of the Internet used by criminals.
Andy Beckett of The Guardian wrote:
The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google they’re getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it’s a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don’t know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."
"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" – the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working. [...]
Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, ‘It’s probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"’ he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."
In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available."
Because you Neatorama readers are so smart, you might already know how sickle cell anemia makes someone resistant to malaria. This apparent evolutionary disadvantage has actually survived through the generations because it makes individuals more fit for survival in other ways.
While sickle cell anemia is the best known of these evolutionary diseases, it is not the only one. Migraines, depression and bipolar disorder are all passed down genetically, and there’s a good reason these traits that seem to be negative haven’t been eradicated through the millenia.
Migraines don’t just cause majorly painful headaches, they also stimulate the nervous system, making people far more sensitive to light and sound. While this doesn’t really help modern day migraine sufferers, it could help save someone’s life in prehistoric times. Scientists speculate that migraines allowed prehistoric men and women to be one step ahead of their predators and their prey, making them more fit for survival.
Source Image Via Migraine Chick [Flickr]
While between 30 to 50 percent of all people suffer from depression at some point, it doesn’t seem the condition would offer any advantages. Surprisingly, depression actually helps people focus on their problems and then think more clearly about the possible solution to the issues that are bothering them.
Studies show that people who are depressed tend to score better on complex problems in intelligence tests than those who are not. Side effects of depression, such as lack of sexual interest and lack of appetite, can even help prevent distractions from our problem solving abilities.
Source Image Via Darkwood67 [Flickr]
Bipolar disorder works in a much different manner. When individuals inherit severe bipolar disorders, they can have a hard time concentrating, making sound decisions, feeling comfortable in social situations and organizing their time. But, when someone gets the right combination of the genes that cause bipolar disorder, they can see increased creativity, courage and productivity.
Source Image Via Ventolinmono [Flickr]
Hey, it’s a holiday weekend, so take 17 seconds to enjoy playing with a baby kitten. -via Arbroath
An elk has been identified as the perpetrator of a murder in Sweden.
In 2008 the body of a Swedish woman was found by a lake; she had been taking her dog for a walk, and failed to return. Her husband was arrested and briefly held in custody.
Now the case has been dropped after forensic analysis found elk hair and saliva on his wife’s clothes… The European elk, or moose, is usually considered to be shy and will normally run away from humans. But Swedish Radio International says the animals can become aggressive after eating fermented fallen apples in gardens.
The relevance of the photo will be compehensible only to fans of Monty Python.
In this two-part post, see animals you may or may not be familiar with all dressed in their best Arctic white!
Animals that live in the Arctic (either full time or seasonally) are adapted to extreme conditions. Many animals who overwinter in the Arctic (like the Arctic fox and the ermine) have a coat that thickens and changes color to white during the winter as camouflage in the snow
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by SnezanaP.
The Airbus A380 is the ultimate in airline luxury, and here are lots of photos to prove it!
The Airbus A380 is a double-deck, wide-body, four-engine airliner manufactured by the European corporation Airbus, a subsidiary of EADS. The largest passenger airliner in the world, the A380 made its maiden flight on 27 April 2005 from Toulouse, France, and made its first commercial flight on 25 October 2007 from Singapore to Sydney with Singapore Airlines. The aircraft was known as the Airbus A3XX during much of its development phase, but the nickname Superjumbo has since become associated with it.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
Kenyan contortionist Lazarus Gitu appears on a German television show. Gitu performs with Circus Mama Africa as The Snake Man. -via Bits and Pieces
Lorrie at Clueless in Carolina recently found a newspaper in her mother’s home announcing the news that World War II had ended. Besides news, it contained sponsored ads celebrating VJ Day.
You could almost feel the joy and relief wafting off of the page. Holding the newspaper made me feel happy, as if the happiness of the people who printed, delivered and received the paper was somehow still preserved. Okay, I’m a weirdo! But I wish I could put it in your hands and see if you felt the same way.
See scans of several ads and features from the Charlotte Observer, August 15th, 1945. Link
Oregon journalist Paul Linnman was 23 years old in 1970 when KATU in Portland flew him to Florence to cover the removal of a beached whale. Officials had decided to get rid of the carcass by blowing it up with dynamite. Almost 40 years later, Linnmann looks back at that fateful day.
“We’re hearing this noise around us and we realize it is pieces of whale blubber hitting the ground around us (from) 1,000 yards away. A piece of blubber the size of a fingernail could kill you if it hit you in the right part of the head, so we ran away from the blast scene, down the dune and toward the parking lot. Then we heard a second explosion ahead of us, and we just kept going until we saw what it was: A car had been hit by this coffee-table-size piece of blubber and had its windows flattened all the way down to the seats.”
The video taken that day is now the fifth most-viewed internet video of all time. Linnman said not a day goes by that someone doesn’t mention the story to him. Link -via Buzzfeed
Previously at Neatorama: The Infamous Exploding Whale.
Scottish brewery BrewDog has released its newest beer, named Tactical Nuclear Penguin. At 32% alcohol content, it’s the world’s strongest beer:
A warning on the label states: “This is an extremely strong beer; it should be enjoyed in small servings and with an air of aristocratic nonchalance. In exactly the same manner that you would enjoy a fine whisky, a Frank Zappa album or a visit from a friendly yet anxious ghost.”
However Jack Law, of Alcohol Focus Scotland, described it was a “cynical marketing ploy” and said: “We want to know why a brewer would produce a beer almost as strong as whisky.”
The beer has been launched on the day alcohol was at the top of the political agenda with the unveiling of the Scottish government’s Alcohol Bill including proposals for minimum pricing on drink.
Link via Geekologie | Image: BBC News
Yeah, but they’re teddy bears that eat people, so don’t feel too bad. Brian Murphy of CollegeHumor put together five Facebook update pages as though they had been written by Star Wars characters.
The Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of Bristol, UK has built a robot that senses obstacles not with cameras, but sensitive whiskers at the front end:
Researchers at the University of Bristol in England hope to deploy the poodle-size ‘bot in search-and-rescue missions where vision is impaired, like in mines or smoky rooms. Its 18 whiskers move back and forth five times per second. When a whisker bends, a sensor on its shaft signals software to orient the ’bot toward the object. Whiskers close to an object move less, while those farther away make wide, sweeping motions to establish the object’s exact edges.
Link | Bristol Robotics Laboratory
Chris Higgins enlightens (again) with his Mental_Floss post of a collection of videos supposedly showing a Home Shopping Network scenario gone wrong. This is music video for The Avett Brothers’ “Slight Figure of Speech”, courtesy of Funny or Die, with Andy Daly providing some hilarious subterfuge.
But wait, there’s more! You’ll notice an 888 number on the video. Call it. It’s free and meta. And also check out Higgins’ post.
Residents of Axedale, Australia called authorities when they smelled what they believed to be a gas leak. Firefighters responded to the home and found a 120 kilogram pet pig, which they believe to be the source of the gas.
“She got very excited when two trucks and 15 firies turned up and she squealed and farted and squealed and farted,” said fire chief Peter Harkins.
“I haven’t heard too many pigs fart but I would describe it as very full-on.”
Mr Harkins said the family had done the right thing by calling 000 to report a suspected gas leak: “It’s all bottled gas up here and a leaking cylinder could pose a major fire risk.
“It was because we took it so seriously that 15 volunteers still managed to attend the call out at 10.30 on Tuesday night.”
The pig’s owners are embarrassed over the incident and refused to let the pig be photographed. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: AAP)
This cool staircase/slide combo is known by London architect Alex Michaelis. It’s one of 15 awesome staircases featured on Web Urbanist.
Looking to cuddle up with your own bit of disease? Try this breast cancer cell sculpture by Amyof Glitter, Vinyl and Thread. She was inspired by the beauty of the cancer cells and entered her creation in the Good Cause Challenge.
Link Via Craftzine Image Via Glitter, Vinyl and Thread
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