A few years ago, redditor Josh Wright converted an old treadmill into a belt sander.

He stripped apart the treadmill (which was no longer useful for its original purpose) and then attached a new 1-HP motor. Wright built a frame suitable to holding up the entire unit as well as make it practical to use. He then experimented with different adhesives for the belt and found that ordinary shellac was the most effective. Wright used the shellac to add sandpaper sand to the belt.

It sands quite effectively. I can see it being useful for very large projects.

You can watch this complete build process here.

What should we call this instrument? It is guitarrdion? An accoritar? The Ukrainian-language website provides us with no information, but the instrument appears to have the bellows and keys of an accordion bisecting an acoustic guitar. I'm not sure what that does to the sound of the strings, but it's quite functional as an accordion.

-via The Awesomer

Argentinian developer Max Comperatore built a website that tracks how many people are engaged in common activities round the world. What The Hell Are People Doing uses estimated statistics from a number of sources to calculate global activities. At the top you'll see how many people are being born, how many are dying, and how many people are watching the stats. Underneath is a list of the things they are doing right now. Sleeping is at the top, which makes sense because we all do it for multiple hours every day. Family care and paid work follow, with half the world's population doing one of these three things. Nice to know that 1.34% of the world is in the bathroom right now. While the activities may change up and down the list, at the bottom I see that more people are making love than are making war. There isn't a category for being online, but you can imagine a large part of entertainment, shopping, paid work, and socializing is done online. Watching these numbers change can be mesmerizing. -via Metafilter

Capuchin monkeys have been caught abducting baby howler monkeys — and no one knows exactly why. Scientists are baffled. See the first-time footage: https://t.co/DsmdRbMhOT

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) May 19, 2025

Scientists studying capuchin monkeys in Panama have discovered that they use stone tools to perform certain tasks. That's pretty amazing, but they also discovered a disturbing habit among young male capuchins -stealing babies from another species! Checking years of video, they found that this kidnapping goes back to January of 2022, when a capuchin named Joker took an infant howler monkey and walked around with it for days. Over time, other young males started taking howler monkey infants. These capuchins didn't interact with the babies much, and couldn't feed them, so some of the infants died, while others were abandoned after a few days and retrieved by their mothers.

It's not the first time social "trends" have been found spreading among juvenile male capuchin monkeys. There was a time when these monkeys found it cool to stick their fingers up another monkey's nose, and for a time they played a game of hiding things from each other in their mouths. Maybe the fad of kidnapping howler monkey infants will die out in time. Read about the discovery and the possible motivations behind it at Smithsonian.

Dante Brown's Saab broke down on Interstate 610 in Houston. Instead of calling a tow truck, he called his girlfriend to come and tow the car. She brought her Ford Expedition, but had no towing equipment outside of a single chain. They attached the chain to the rear axle of the Saab, which is the last thing you should do, and set off down the highway. The axle soon broke, and as Brown overcompensated in his steering, the car fishtailed wildly across several lanes! Brown was obviously not in communication with his girlfriend in the SUV, and she appeared to be oblivious to the mayhem going on behind her. Or was she? Some witnesses even reported she was laughing. 

Police eventually caught up with the pair. No tickets were issued for the traffic incident, but Brown was arrested on an outstanding warrant. Next time, call a tow truck.  -via Born in Space

Being an early adopter can come with a price. I once bought a used car that was from the first year of an exciting new model. I eventually realized that this fact explained why it was so cheap- the bugs hadn't been worked out. Around the year 1880, Mark Twain met a man who had built a machine that would set type automatically, replacing the time-consuming job of a compositor, who had to find and set every letter of a printed page. The machine was called the Paige Compositor, which is not a misspelling because it was named for inventor James W. Paige.

The machine resembled something out of The Jetsons, with mechanical arms that did the selecting and typesetting. Twain knew this could revolutionize publishing, and invested substantially in the machine's development. But history tells us that merely replacing a human worker's moves is not as revolutionary as finding a new way to get to the end product. The story of the Paige Compositor also shows us that the people behind a new technology must be evaluated as well as the product.

(Image credit: Scientific American)

Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond has been in the US for years, and is now an American citizen, but still recalls enough about Britain to compare and contrast the two countries. This video is about a grocery shopping trip and some American things that confused him until he got used to them. Why do American cashiers have to stand up all day? Why do Americans refrigerate eggs? (I have a friend with a chicken coop, and only keep eggs in the refrigerator so I remember where they are.) How can you compare the size of milk when the measurements are so different? And then there's the tax thing, which is a surprise to Europeans. Our taxes are added after the sale because each state has a different sales tax rate. Some cities also add another tax. And some states don't tax groceries at all. The video is not as long as it looks; there's a 95-second skippable ad at 2:40.

Who eats more pizza- Americans or Italians? You might guess that the US consumes the most pizza, simply because we have so many people, and you'd be right. But when you take the larger population out of the equation and figure pizza on a per capita basis, the most pizza-obsessed nation is neither the US nor Italy. It's Norway. The average person in Norway eats more than 25 pounds of pizza every year, while in the US, the average is only 23 pounds. Fugured that way, the US is second, and Italy comes in fifth.

As you might guess, frozen pizza is particularly popular in Norway, but they also like homemade pizza and pizzerias. Norwegian pizza isn't like the standard American pizza, though, because the toppings reflect a Scandinavian taste. It's possible they could be heavier, too, which would explain the higher consumption in pounds. Read about Norwegian pizzas at Tasting Table. -via Fark

(Image credit: Kjetil Ree)

One thing we've always heard about the United States' national anthem is that it is hard to sing, what with that one high note near the end. We've hear it all our lives, from beautiful performances to versions that are laughably awful. What would Dustin Ballard do with the song? A mashup of course. There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) gave "The Star Spangled Banner" a completely new but familiar tune, setting the words we all know to the tune of "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden. The meter of the lyrics fits pretty well. It might seem a little weird to you, but "the land of the free" would be a whole lot easier to sing this way. And, as one commenter pointed out, if we adopted this version, both the lyrics and the tune would have an American writing credit, instead of relying on an old British drinking song. -via The Awesomer

How often do you think about the cuisine of the Roman Empire? For most men, at least once a day is common. Vocatio Romae in corde cuiusque hominis latet. Now the glory of Rome can be consumed at a pop-up restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Eater reports that chef Caraway Alexander offers meals taken directly from preserved Roman recipes.

Solana, as the program is named, is not Italian cuisine. Alexander found that ancient Roman foods are very different from what their modern descendants consume. Eggplant and tomato are absent, but authentic Roman dishes include pork belly and spelt porridge, celery, and lovage seeds.  These and other Roman foods are available today from 2-6 PM at the Mayfly.

-via Daily Roman Updates

The town of Anahuac on Galveston Bay is called the "Alligator Capital of Texas." The waters near it are filled with these dangerous predators. But you can still visit and prove that you're at the top of the food chain.

Culture Map reports that the Republic Boot Company will take you gator hunting in Anahuac. Once you've bagged your alligator, the company takes the skin of your kill and turns it into a pair of luxurious boots, thus giving you bragging rights about not only your sense of style, but also your effectiveness as a predator. The cost is $5,000 and the adventure is available during alligator hunting season, which is September 11 through 30.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Republic Boot Company

Orange cats, also called ginger cats, have a reputation as being male, large, very food-motivated, and kind of goofy. Scientists at Kyushu University in Japan and Stanford University, working on a crowdfunded project, have located the gene that causes a cat to be orange. The culprit is a mutation on the ARHGAP36 gene. A missing inhibitor section in that gene causes more activity, and the result is that the cat's melanocytes -cells that control color- are ordered to produce a lighter pigment, meaning orange.

The reason that orange cats are overwhelmingly male is because the ARHGAP36 gene is carried on the X chromosome. Male cats only have one X chromosome, so if a male cat inherits the mutation, it will be orange. Female cats have two X chromosomes, so they must inherit both X chromosomes with the orange mutation to appear orange, as only one such chromosome will likely produce mixed colors, like tortoiseshell or calico. The kicker is that the ARHGAP36 gene also controls other parts of a cat's anatomy, such as the brain and hormone production. The missing inhibitor DNA in a mutated ARHGAP36 gene may explain why orange cats have other similarities that give them the stereotype. Read more about this research at BBC.  -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Mike Lehmann)

Great Big Story introduces us to the NYO Games. Young people across Alaska's native communities come together to compete in twelve sports. These events are developed from the practical needs of natives engaging in hunting and fishing activities.

For example, the two foot kick, which requires kicking a ball suspended from a cord, was originally a visual signal sent across the tundra. The two-person stick pull reflects a need to hold on to a spear after impaling a seal.

This video shows a state-level competition for teenagers in these games. They demonstrate extraordinary athletic skills and describe how these sports help participants connect with their heritages.

Warning: gory animation. Lee Hardcastle (previously at Neatorama) is a claymation animator with a penchant for violence. Where can he go for the inspiration to outdo his previous videos? Video games, of course, since they are the most violent media we come across in our everyday lives. This video recreates scenes from the new game DOOM: The Dark Ages, in which his character Claycat goes all HAM on his demon opponents. But this is claymation, where the mayhem is both scary and silly. You know how it is with clay- give a little kid a Play-Doh figure you've just spent an hour perfecting, and their first instinct is to tear and smash it. If you can handle DOOM, you can handle the stop-motion clay version. If you really like it, see Claycat in previous versions of DOOM here and here.

You really have to admire Hardcastle's work ethis. Doom: The Dark Ages was only released one day before this video was posted. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The space probe Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and is currently 25 billion kilometers (15.6 billion miles) away from earth. The fact that it's still sending signals to earth after 48 years is amazing enough, but a recent communications exchange hints that the probe may be functional for a long time to come.

Voyager 1's backup thrusters have not been used since 2004, when a malfunction occurred and NASA considered them defunct. They were okay with that at the time, since the probe had already long outlasted its life expectancy. But lately Voyager's primary thrusters have been degrading due to a buildup of residue. Without thrusters, the probe wouldn't be able to orient its antenna toward earth, and communication would be lost. Could NASA engineers activate the long-unused backup thrusters? They also had to activate the thruster's heaters that had been deactivated to save energy. The mission was frustrating, as each message to Voyager takes 23 hours to get there, and another 23 hours to hear back. But once again, Voyage 1 surprised us. They don't build them like they used to.  -via Slashdot

(Image credit: NASA/JPL)