Remember the experiment mugumogu did to see how small a hole Maru and Hana could get through? Octopuses are even more fluid than cats- the only rigid part of its body is the beak. How small a hole can an octopus squeeze through if he wanted to?

Arnold is an octopus who lives at Octolab. Arnold's favorite possession is his barrel, which gives him an incentive in this experiment. A transparent wall allows him to see the target, and a hole of decreasing size makes getting to it a challenge. Arnold eventually gives up, but we don't know if that was due to lack of ability or lack of motivation. After all, just because he can squeeze that soft brain through a small hole doesn't mean it's a healthy idea. -via Laughing Squid

Rutherford Chang, a 33-year-old artist has been collecting the Beatles’ iconic White Album for years. Over the next 45 years, each album acquired history – some were loved, some were discarded, some were sold, some were played at night clubs, and others went outside a teen’s living room.

"I noticed how personalized every copy of the White Album has become over the course of the last half century and wanted to compare different copies," he says.

Chang has his collection on display in his workplace in New York. Visitors are welcome to browse the collection and if they have any unwanted copies of the White Album, Chang buys them. Since the exhibit, he’s collected 697 varied copies!

"Each copy has become a unique object because of the physicality of vinyl records," says Chang, "It's a format that is impossible to keep pristine, unlike digital recordings, so this collection of artifacts, created by the individual journeys of each album, has become a document of an era that will never be replicated again."

Chang doesn’t just focus on the physical appearance of the albums but also on their audio quality which is affected by the disc’s quality over the years.

Image Credit: Wired.com

Twitter user @drive45music unknowingly started a pasta debate when he tweeted that his girlfriend makes pasta by adding uncooked pasta to cold water and then turning on the stove to boil water. This shocking method rattled the pasta community, where the majority do the traditional method of dumping the pasta into boiling water. Personalities such as Alton Brown and J.Kenji Lopez took the girlfriend’s side, weighing in on the rising debate, while Frankie Celenza explained that the cold water method can make the pasta noodles soggy. But what is the correct method for cooking pasta? The Huffington Post has the details: 

The traditional method seems to be the most foolproof, but if you’re still not sure which method is best, Celenza put the debate into perspective for us:

“Listen, you can do whatever you want, you will cook the pasta, it will cook. Heck, you could soak the pasta in water overnight like a bunch of shriveled chickpeas. But you could also get to work in the morning by hitching a ride on the outside of the last subway car of an express train and leaping off at the local stop that train doesn’t stop at. You’ll get there ― it just might not work consistently for you. That’s how I feel about the endless way people try to dream up how to cook pasta differently. It’s idiotic. We have too much time on our hands.”

The Size of Space is an interactive site by Neal Agarwal that takes us through the relative size of heavenly bodies from an astronaut to the observable universe. Considering some of the objects that fall in between, we can bet that the observable universe is a lot bigger than it was even 50 years ago ("observable" being the growth factor).

While you might not be amazed at the relative size of the planets, you will learn something new. There are moons in our solar system that are larger than some planets in our solar system. We know about at least one star that is smaller than Earth. And how astronomers have mapped out the larger universe is pretty impressive. -via Boing Boing

Food design studio Bompas & Parr has produced a meringue that is so light and airy that a serving weighs only one gram. The designers consulted with the makers of Aerogel in Germany to turn egg whites into air and fluff. Aerogel is made by removing the water from a gel and replacing it with a gas.

The process used to create the meringue begins with a hydrogel of egg white, which is cast in a mould before being submerged in a bath of calcium chloride and water.

The liquid in the jelly is then replaced with liquid carbon dioxide, which can be transformed into gas during a process known as super-critical drying.

The gas is removed by venting, leaving behind nothing but the skeleton of the original gel. This results in a meringue comprising 96 per cent air and weighing just one gram.

It looks nice and is probably easy to transport, but where's the sugar? It seems like a crucial ingredient if you are going to call something a "dessert." Unfortunately, my kitchen is missing some important equipment needed for this recipe. Boompas & Parr describes it as "a taste of the sky", but we have yet to hear from anyone who has eaten the Aerogel Meringue. Read more at Dezeen. -via Nag on the Lake

Is it a bird? No.

Is it a plane? Definitely not.

It’s just the Bloodhound LSR surpassing its 450 mph speed target and came close with its current target of 500 mph. Now that is speed!

Head over at New Atlas for more details about this.

(Video Credit: Bloodhound LSR/ YouTube)

I can appreciate Simon Fearnhamm's morbid sense of humor. This piece is titled "Full Throttle." Although it's only one of two items currently on sale in his Etsy shop, pictures of some of his other works are visible on Saatchi Art.

As it is priced at over $24,000, convincing my wife to acquire this table for our home will be a hard sell. If I don't ask her first, then I'll be the skeleton on the left side of the photo.

Jennifer Murphy, a collage artist in Toronto, is exhibiting a collection of pieces titled In the Shadow of Sirius. After reflecting on a landfill in that city that has gradually been reclaimed by wildlife, she felt inspired to create collages by cutting out images of plants and animals from nature magazines, then arranging them into larger plant and animal forms. Murphy explains that:

While making this new body of work I also discovered the American poet and ecologist W.S. Merwin, (1927 – 2019). Merwin’s poetry speaks of memory and of loss, the continuum of time, ecology and hope.Working on eighteen acres of wrecked earth at his home on the island of Maui, W.S. Merwin created a garden of palm trees that became The Merwin Conservatory. The most bio-diverse garden of palm species in the world, was grown on land that was once ruined by pineapple plantations.  

I find hope in making my work and in places of ruin where wildflowers grow, and in the poetry of those who have felt immense loss but continue to create.

You can see more images of her work on Colossal.

There's always so much going on in New York City--so many intersecting people and places--that there are a lot of coincidental juxtapositions. Photographer Jonathan Higbee captured these moments, often waiting for four months for a single shot to line up just right.

In an interview with My Modern Met about his new book, Coincidences, Higbee explains that he hopes that people will find ordinary joy through the serendipity of his pictures:

It’s inescapable these days, this focus on politics and polarization and differences over similarities that’s penetrated every inch of our culture. So I hope people take a few things away from Coincidences: firstly, I hope this book provides an escape, however brief, from our current anxiety-fueled reality. There are so many little fascinating details in every image and word found on its pages, so many mind-breaking moments and scenes that can really surprise people, and plenty of opportunities to sit back and just soak in. If these elements of the book manage to whisk people away to another world, then I’ll be thrilled.

-via Flavorwire

This is Bishop’s Avenue in North London. It is dubbed as the “Billionaire’s Row” and is one of the richest streets in the whole world. The average property on this avenue is about £5 million, not to mention that more grander mansions cost many times more. Take for example the Toprak Mansion. Originally owned by Turkish tycoon Halis Toprak, it was bought by the President of Kazakhstan in 2008 for £50 million; it is one of the most expensive houses in the world. There’s a catch to this place, however.

The entire neighbourhood is owned by the super-rich, ranging from Saudi princes to East European arms dealers to Indian business magnates. Yet, no one ever lives here for more than a few weeks each year. Most have been left to the staff who looks after the properties while the owners are away. Others have never been occupied. Several huge properties have fallen into ruins after lying vacant for more than 25 years. These once expensive homes are in a terribly bad shape with peeling paint, rotting carpets, water streaming down bedroom walls, collapsed ceilings, and ferns growing between broken floor tiles.

One property owner, the developer Anil Varma, describes the place bluntly. He calls it “one of the most expensive wastelands in the world.”

Know more about this over at the Amusing Planet.

Would you buy a house on this avenue?

(Video Credit: Beyond the Point/ YouTube)

Thor is the most awkward of the Avengers. And that totally make sense. I mean, look at him. He's also a deity. The writers had to do something to make him seem at least a little human, so they gave him plenty of weird faux pas to make the character somewhat relatable. Of course, the awkwardness comes across as cute, because... well, look at him, in this supercut of those awkward moments. -via Geeks Are Sexy  

Lauren Boutz fosters kittens for the City of Albuquerque Animal Welfare Department. She calls this litter of kittens her "Powerpurr Girls," and named them Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. Above you see Gary Sanchez taking a portrait of Blossom as she poses and smiles! Click to the right on the image above to see a closer look and the iPhone picture. The pictures turned out to be so cute they went viral. Blossom has become famous, but she hasn't let it go to her head. She's still her cute, playful self. See more pictures of Blossom as well as Bubbles and Buttercup at Bored Panda.

Varonya, a custom plush maker in Germany, elongated Fluttershy from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic to an astonishing 9 feet! Once she has wrapped herself around you with love, a built-in magnet helps keep her in place.

Don't worry so much! The Fluttersnake isn't venomous. Let her share her kindness with you.

It's been a joke ever since the advent of modern art- if this painting were hung upside down, would anyone know the difference? Alex Boese looked up cases in which that actually happened. Yes, museums and galleries have been known to hang pictures upside down, or even sideways. While most could be classified as modern art, they are not all abstracts. The image at the top is a case in which critics assumed the painting was abstract, but it was only upside-down.

At a 1915 art exhibition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, "The Blue Pool," by George Bellows, was hung in a conspicuous location. Several artists gave talks at the event in which they referenced it, describing it as "modern in treatment." It was only after three weeks that the exhibitors realized they had hung the painting upside-down. When righted, the seemingly abstract swatches of color transformed into a more familiar scene of a pool of water surrounded by rocks.

Read 13 stories of art displayed the wrong way, and even more examples of people making that joke about it, at Weird Universe.

You've seen memes about getting drunk and buying something ridiculous online, like a goat for one's apartment. In this case, the buyer was not drunk, but mistakenly bought 1,000 chickens anyway. Steve Morrow of Hamilton, New Zealand, saw an auction on the online site Trade Me for "one 1000" chickens.   

Morrow said he thought the highest bidder could take as many birds as they wanted and the seller would continue to auction the rest of them off until they were all gone.

He said he put in an auto bid for $20, thinking he could at least get two hens.

"When the auction closed, I thought 'this is great', I could take as many birds as I wanted," Morrow said.

"But when I spoke to the man and he said it was for 1000 hens ... holy moly, I was stunned, I can tell you that."

When the automatic auction ended, Morrow had gotten all those chickens for a mere $1.50. After processing the shock, Morrow went to work trying to find takers for the birds. The online response was good, and he has already found homes for 700 of them. Read the full story at Stuff. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Amity Beane)