Piranhas are known to be notorious killers of both humans and animals. However, this peculiar species of fish is well-protected by its skin which acts as a natural "bulletproof vest":

The fish, also known as pirarucu, gets up to 10 feet (3 meters) long and weighs up to 440 pounds (200 kg). Arapaima, a fish that can breathe air and survive up to a day outside of the water, inhabits rivers in Brazil, Guyana and Peru infested with piranhas, known for razor-sharp teeth, incredible bite strength and deadly feeding frenzies.

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“It is true that the natural armour is similar to artificial body armour because of the similar scale overlapping system. However, the natural armour such as these fish scales is tough and much lighter, without impeding body flexibility and locomotion,” Yang added. “Remember that the fish scales were developed through hundreds of millions of years. They are very advanced.”

Scientists have been curious about the scales that this fish have, and upon conducting laboratory tests, they found a hard mineralized outer layer that is bound to a tough-but-flexible inner layer by collagen. This allows the fish to resist penetration when bitten by a piranha.

Image Credit: Reuters

This ad parody from The Kloons is what we used to call a shaggy dog story. Go ahead and laugh at it, when you finally get to the punch line. However, it does illustrate studies that show how acquiring possessions, no matter had coveted they are initially, tend to lose value over time and ultimately contribute little to our overall happiness. The alternative, experiences, bring happiness before, during, and after the actual experience. -via Digg

In most professional sports, the role of the team doctor is pretty sweet: besides performing regular checkups and giving health lectures, you get to attend all the games and only go to work when there's an emergency. Things are different for a team dentist in the NHL, as emergencies happen all too often, and you keep a dentist chair on hand to patch up player's mouths. Hockey players don't expect to finish a season, much less their career, with all their teeth intact. Their dentists all have tales to tell, each gorier than the last.

Or consider Game 4 of the 2010 Western Conference finals, when, after getting smashed in the mouth by a shot, Chicago Blackhawks defenseman Duncan Keith spit out seven teeth like sunflower seeds on his way back to the bench. "It sounds gross and bad," Keith says, "but it happens all the time to guys."

During a game, an NHL team dentist's main priorities are triage, improvisation and speed: Stop the bleeding, yank or file down any dangerous edges and numb the pain so the player can return to the ice as quickly as possible. Restorative oral surgery -- things like root canals, crowns, bridges or removable teeth the players call "flippers" -- is saved for the fully equipped dental office. So it was that Keith left a breadcrumb trail of bicuspids all the way to the Blackhawks' training room, where at one point he counted seven needles in his mouth. He missed just six and a half minutes of the game and returned to the ice, mumbling instructions through numb chipmunk cheeks while setting up the game-tying goal. (Two and a half weeks later, Keith was drinking out of the Cup, presumably through a straw.)

"Gotta leaf it all on the eyesh," he gummed to reporters after the Sharks game.

Read more stories about the dentists who care for hockey player's teeth and the pros that suffer for their sport at ESPN.  -via Metafilter

Yes, but only if you approach it from the right angle. Don't try a Riker Maneuver on this one.

This uniquely-designed chair, when placed correctly, looks impossible to sit on. I'm tempted to build one, although it looks even weirder when viewed normally.

-via Geekologie

The staff at MIT’s Biomimetics lab took their nine Mini Cheetah robots outside to play. Aren't they cute? They run around, play soccer, do some calisthenics, show off to each other, and have a great time on the grounds. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Sobański palace is a lovely French castle in the tiny Polish town of Guzów. That in itself implies there's quite a story behind it, which goes back to the 1700s. The same wealthy local family owns the palace now as back then, but it hasn't been continuous. At least three times, new generations of the family had to buy back their home after hard times or confiscation. Along the way, Sobański palace has undergone additions, renovations, plunder, and decay.

Hitler himself spent a lot of time there, and actually signed the orders for the final capture of Warsaw in the living room. “Until the end of the occupation,” wrote Gabriela, “the Reich came to Guzów to guard this salon. Hitler left a letter to my father saying that he was very ashamed that the army had destroyed the palace so much…and then left.”

The Nazis murdered nearly 200 people in the area before leaving, including the Sobański Countess. As the Red Army approached, they fled in such haste that some Nazi soldiers were allegedly found locked in the basement by Russian soldiers, who continued to plunder and destroy the palace. The rest is basically communist history: in light of the agricultural reform, the palace was forced to become a now derelict sugar factory.

But now Sobański Palace is once again on its way back to glory. Read about the mansion and see plenty of pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

Niffler Fantastic Beasts Hat

Do you have a penchant for shiny things? Do you have a nose for treasure? You need the Niffler Fantastic Beasts Hat from the NeatoShop. This striking chapeau is designed to look like your favorite long snouted magical creature. 

The Niffler Fantastic Beasts Hat is perfect for wizards, or muggles, looking to keep the winter chill away. The hat even has an internal hidden pocket for storing a prized possession or two. 

The Niffler Fantastic Beasts Hat is made of 100% polyester. No actual nifflers were harmed in the making of this enchanting headpiece. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Apparel & Accessories. New items arriving all the time. 

Don't forget to stop by the NeatoShop to see our large selection of customizable apparel and bags. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months all the way to adult 10 XL shirts. We know that fun, fabulous, and Harry Potter loving people come in every size. 

Caitlin Kirby strode into this great battle of her academic career wearing a skirt made of rejection letters for scholarships, publications, and academic conferences. To earn her doctorate in earth and environmental sciences at Michigan State University, Kirby had to press on through these defeats. To symbolize her determination, she sewed the rejections into a skirt. The Lansing State Journal reports:

“The whole process of revisiting those old letters and making that skirt sort of reminded me that you have to apply to a lot of things to succeed,” she said. “A natural part of the process is to get rejected along the way.” 

Those rejections and what she learned from them weighed heavy on her mind when the day of her dissertation defense came. Kirby wore the skirt to continue the work that she, her adviser and colleagues did to normalize rejection.

This very mature and striving attitude reminds me of a speech by Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Press on past defeat and onto victory.

-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Caitlin Kirby

Who said that only kids would make perfect flower girls? Well, if you did, these four grandmas will prove you wrong.

“I knew as soon as I was engaged I wanted to involve my grandmothers,” the bride, who tied the knot at Ocoee Crest in Benton, Tennessee, told HuffPost. “I felt so blessed to have them all here so I wanted them to be involved too.” 

When Raby asked her grandmas to take on the role of flower girls, she said they were “ecstatic.”

“I do believe they were more excited than my bridesmaids,” Raby said. 

For other engaged couples considering asking their grandparents to be part of the wedding party, Raby said do it. 

Do you consider doing the same thing when you tie the knot?

Image Credit: Natalie Caho 

This personal story is a bit different from what you'd usually find at Collectors Weekly. Twenty-five years ago, Ben Marks' young son inspired an interview with the creator of a fairly new game that was becoming popular. At the time, no one knew how popular or long-lasting it would be.

In June 1994, Richard Garfield was the rising superstar of hobby gaming. A Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics, Garfield had launched his wildly successful collectible card game, “Magic: The Gathering,” barely a year earlier, but it had already sold 170 million cards. From its “Alpha” release in August 1993, the game’s initial inventory of 295 individually named cards had swollen to 500, each featuring an original illustration on its face. Taken together, the cards painted a picture of a fantastical land filled with wizards, demons, sorcerers, and enchanted stones. Hobby-and-game shops routinely sold out of the meager inventories they received from Wizards of the Coast, the game’s publisher, which struggled to keep up with demand. And when my then-6-year-old son, Sam, was bitten by the Magic bug, I smelled a story.

I pitched an article about Magic to a magazine in New York. Somehow, I convinced this well-funded monthly to fly Sam and I from San Francisco to Seattle so I could interview Garfield. My plan was to get the game’s inventor to explain his creation to a general-interest readership, cherry-pick a few details to give my story color (“Garfield appears slightly dazed as he sits cross-legged and shoeless on an office chair, his feet warmed by a pair of rainbow-hued tabi socks … ”), and then write up the play-by-play of a game of Magic between my child and the gaming Goliath.

The interview came off better for Sam than it did for Ben. All these years later, Ben tells of the many connections discovered between his family, Garfield, and one unique piece of art, sometimes bordering on the eerie.

SO cute.

András Arató, an electrical engineer in Hungary, never expected to become an internet meme. But then a photographer asked him to pose for a set of stock photos. That image became an internet sensation as "Hide the Pain Harold" as people interpreted his expression as one of hiding inner torment beneath a banal smile.

When Arató discovered that he was internet famous, he embraced this identity, even though it was not particularly complimentary. He writes in The Guardian:

People noticed that I had taken ownership of the meme and got in contact to offer me work. I was given a role in a television commercial for a Hungarian car dealer. In one of the adverts, I travelled to Germany to buy a used car and it broke down halfway home; if I had bought the same car through their company, the brand claimed, it wouldn’t have happened. The fee for that commercial changed my wife’s mind about the meme.

Now my life has changed dramatically. People ask me to talk about my story, to demonstrate the power of memes. A football website flew me to England to make a video about Manchester City; I got to tour the ground and watch them play a Champions League game. The German mail-order giant Otto flew me out to make commercials for them. The Hungarian hard rock band Cloud 9+ have a song called Hide The Pain, with me in the video. I’m the face of Totum, the British discount card run by the National Union of Students – they got me to wear a bucket hat. I’ve even given a TED talk.

The board of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District unanimously voted in favor of the installation of steel-cable nets 20 feet beneath the east and west edges of the bridge that are "intended to deter people from leaping to their deaths or catch them if they do."

The net, suspended from posts, will have a slightly upward slope, and will collapse a bit if someone lands in it, making it difficult for the jumper to climb out. The bridge district will deploy a retrieval device to pluck jumpers from the net.

This decision opened up the discussion about the first time a net was installed beneath the Golden Gate.

When building the Golden Gate Bridge, the lead structural engineer insisted on the installation of a safety net even though its $130,000 cost was deemed exorbitant. Over the four years of its construction, the net saved 19 men, who named themselves the “Halfway to Hell Club.”

Image Credit: Web Urbanist

One of the least engaging aspects of modern economy is the mania to quantify and rank the performance of individuals and groups of people.

“Rankings send out powerful signals, which lead to identify the actions of top performers as the ‘best practices’ that others should also adopt,” says Giacomo Livan, the author of a study in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Many of us have given in to “adopt and adapt” at some point in our careers, and not always comfortably.

You’re sitting in front of a manager for an annual review, thinking: well, how’s this going to work? The manager in question is universally regarded as average, but he’s the one that gets to rate you, and the shortest path to a better ranking is probably to follow his advice.

Such thoughts have finally been given voice by Livan, whose research suggests that ranking performance reduces meritocracy.

Check out Cosmos Magazine to know more about Livan’s research.

(Image Credit: mohamed_hassan/ Pixabay)

“Poulanka is the center of Finland,” says Tommi Rajala, a Poulanka pessimist. “Here,” he continues, as he gestures his hand toward a rock with inscriptions. He looks back to the camera and says, “Poulanka is also the center of the world — the center of pessimism in the world.

Poulanka is a city in Finland which has become famous for its branding of pessimism.

It all began, according to long-time pessimist Riitta Nykänen, when they got jealous that all other places had their own respective events, but in Poulanka they had none.

“One man said, ‘nothing works out in Poulanka. Not even pessimism. What’s the use?’ So then we said, let’s do that. A pessimism event,” narrates Nykänen.

The pessimism association is still going strong after ten years ever since its foundation.

But what was the goal of the association? Find out over at BBC Reel.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: BBC Reel)