🐍 This newly discovered hammerhead flatworm looks like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie and it now has a name that befits its terrifying look: the predatory nematode was named after COVID-19. But don't be too afraid of this new species, it's only about a half-an-inch long.

🐔 Why did the chicken cross the road? To steal Pentagon's secrets.

🧱 Starting in 1979, prison authorities started painting the walls pink to make the inmates less aggressive and weaker. At least that's what the psychology of color purportedly show. But does it actually work?

We're revving up postings on our new sites - tons of new fresh content over at Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista and Supa Fluffy today. Please check 'em out!

🖱️ Build it from scratch: DIY wireless mouse built from an actual NES gamepad.

🧟 Finally! A jacket that is built to withstand black lava, flash fires, chemical erosion and perhaps even zombie attacks. Meet the Apocalypse Jacket (though at $1,295, the first victim of the financial apocalypse of buying the jacket would be my wallet).

🧯 News you can use: Practical ways to safeguard your house against wildfires.

🦜 Klepto parrot stole a family's GoPro and took it a on a its getaway flight while it was still filming.

🚗 New Orleans mom created a car magnet that reads "Don't Carjack Me, Kids Inside" (but she didn't say "pretty please" so we're not sure how effective this will be.)

🤣 The secret of plugging in a USB on the first try is gentle persuasion of your preferred caliber.

🧥 Dryrobe is a half-towel/half-jacket fashion phenom that is dividing society. Wear it with crocs or Uggs and a MAGA hat for maximum societal disruption effect.

Images: Pierre Gros, champx/Instructables, WGNO

🦝 Featured art: Ready for Another Trash Year by indie artist TechraNova. It's a more realistic New Year's resolution!

Don't miss: Anime Big & Tall Shirts

Current special: Save up to 20% on all T-shirts in NeatoShop's limited-time sitewide sale.

German artist Niclas Castello created a cube from pure 24-karat gold. The artwork was dropped in the middle of Central Park in New York City. While the special three-dimensional artwork is not for sale, it is valued at about $11.7 million. According to Axios, the cube was placed at the park to promote a digital coin, called Castello Coin that is trading at 0.39 euros. According to Castello, the cube is  “a conceptual work of art in all its facets.” The idea was to create an intangible object, he added. That’s certainly in theme with his digital coin. 

Image credit: Niclas Castello/ Sandra Mika 

Concept designer Amin Akhsi created the Hooded Crow, a conceptual flying machine that could help with reconnaissance and rescue missions. The robotic bird is part of the artist’s series of bionic birds. The crow is designed to be sleek and friendly, with the colors of black and light gray adorning the robot. 

This design for a more advanced drone adds flexibility in neck movement through fabric materials on its neck. In addition, Akhsi attached fabric inserts with soft cushioning in the bird’s wings to help maintain its aerodynamic stability. Read more about the concept here. 

Image credit: Bionic Birds via Yanko Design

Hawaiian residents Desha-Ann and Rashann Kealoha got charged with a whopping $18,000 electric bill from the Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO). According to HECO, the couple were the legal owners of the street they lived on. Therefore, they were responsible for paying the outstanding balance of $17,860.09.  "Because you own the street upon which the streetlights are located, Hawaiian Electric believes that you are responsible for the payment of electric energy supplied to these streetlights." The company wrote in the letter. 

The couple was shocked, overwhelmed, and confused after receiving the letter. However, they remain hopeful that a solution can be found for this issue. The company said that it doesn’t expect the couple to pay the balance. They are now working with the Kealohas and the city to track down whoever should be responsible for paying the huge sum.

Image credit: Karsten Winegeart

Apparently, it’s not your fault if you suddenly lose interest or focus on your schoolwork or… work in general. According to writer and journalist Johann Hari, our attention fraying is part of a systemic crisis that is happening to all of us. Hari further explains that an average college student spends 65 seconds on each task while an average office worker spends just three minutes. 

We should not blame ourselves for the lack of focus, Hari claimed. This problem requires systemic solutions. Hari shared five key insights from his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again. Check the full piece here to learn how to regain back your focus and attention! 

Image credit: Avel Chuklanov

Ancient baobab trees are one of the most treasured foliage in Madagascar. Some of these trees in the area are about 1,400 years old and have provided food, fuel, and fiber to the people in the region for centuries. Now, however, a decline of these trees can be noticed, possibly due to old age and the current climate crisis damaging these trees. Bay Area photographer Beth Moon captures stunning, black-and-white photos showing the current state of the different baobab trees in the region. See more photos here and on her Instagram.  

Image credit: Beth Moon

In 1876, James McNeill Whistler designed and painted an entire room around the image of peacocks. The homeowner hated it. Peacocks adorn the classic chenille bedspreads of the mid-20th century. Louis Comfort Tiffany designed the Peacock Doors at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. Peacocks had legendary powers in the tales told of them, but it was simply their appearance that inspired the imagination. The image of a male peacock with those beautiful tail feathers has been a classic motif since the birds were first exported from India, but it was suddenly everywhere with the rise of Art Nouveau.

A true obsession with the peacock began in the British Arts and Crafts movement, then landed in France which birthed the Art Nouveaumovement. While the peacock left its mark on the gorgeous architecture, fabrics, jewelry, and furniture from that era, it never truly went away. Read about the Art Nouveau peacock and see lots of pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

I made holographic chocolate!

Way easier than I thought - and it’s 100% pure bittersweet, no coatings. When you catch the light at the right angle, it’s mesmerizing. pic.twitter.com/HFi0K5IGSG

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) February 9, 2022

AI design genius and Renaissance woman Janelle Shane describes it as "holographic." I'm not sure if that is the correct term. At a bare minimum, it's shiny. I'm going with iridescent because of the visual effect as you change your perspective.

Shane followed these Instructables instructions by jellmeister, which use diffraction grating sheets to add the visual impact to chocolate. Shane explains that the texture of tempered chocolate is so fine that it can hold the sheets and permit diffraction with good lighting. Read her whole Twitter thread to see optics experiments with it.

-via Danielle Baskin

If you live in Minnesota -or any northern state or Canada- the ultimate in backyard family fun is a skating rink. More and more people are dedicating an area of their yard to a winter rink. Still, that fun comes with maintenance concerns. Professional rinks use Zambonis to condition the ice, which are a bit expensive to use in a private backyard. But where there's a will, there's a way. Backyard rink owners are a creative bunch, and they've employed all sorts of methods to bring the ice on a homemade skating rink to pristine condition. These methods and gadgets are called "homebonis."

Rink-makers are famous for their homemade resurfacing contraptions, from PVC pipes and towels dragged behind buckets to tanks hauled on modified golf carts. Traff hooks three snow blowers together to clear his rink and invested in a military-grade water heater to make fresh coats of ice more robust.

But all home rinks share some universals: sun and warm temps are enemies; post-skate shoveling is a necessity, and late-night flooding is a mystical state.

"When you're out there at 10 o'clock and it's dark and the wind is still, you can hear everything from miles away," Greco said. "Then once you're done, you look at that perfect sheet for the morning and you're like, 'This is awesome.' "

Watch a homeboni in action.

Read more about backyard rinks and what folks go through to maintain them at the Star Tribune.   -via TYWKIWDBI

The famed Nineteenth Century British author Charles Dickens produced a vast volume of words preserved for posterity to endure in English literature classes. Some of those words have only recently become accessible thanks to a crowdsourced decoding project which has broken the cipher that Dickens used for his private notes.

The Dickens Code project, led by Dr. Claire Wood of the University of Leicester, has deciphered the shorthand system that Dickens called brachygraphy. It was a great challenge because Dickens expanded and changed the system over time.

BBC News reports that the crucial break came from a draft of Dickens's so-called "Tavistock letter". The team of over a thousand volunteers discovered that it was a letter to an advertising manager at The Times newspaper. The surviving response from that manager led the codebreakers to discover Dickens's symbols for "Ascension Day", "advertisement", "refused", and "sent back." Now Dickens's secret shorthand is beginning to reveal itself.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo via the James Gardiner Collection

What you see above is a small portion of the Great Miracle Wisteria, which had been growing at Ashikaga Flower Park in Japan for 140 years. A wisteria vine can grow awfully big in that time! It's only one of many wisteria vines of all colors that grow in the park. The best time to see wisteria is mid-April to mid-May, but other flowers worth seeing bloom in other months. Yet even in winter, Ashikaga Flower Park is quite popular, as they replace the blossoms with millions of festive lights. In fact, most of the Instagram pictures tagged with Ashikaga Flower Park show the winter lights.  

Would you rather see a murmuration of starlings in Denmark? Frozen lake bubbles in Alberta? Glow worms in Alabama? A moonbow in Zimbabwe? Smithsonian has a rundown of natural phenomena worth traveling for all over the world, for a vacation that will help you commune with nature. Although I might save you some money by reminding you that you can also see a moonbow at Cumberland Falls State Park in Kentucky.

🚀 If you need a lair fit for a supervillain, then check this out: a decommissioned Atlas F missile silo complex is for sale in Abilene, Kansas, and you can buy it cheap! Missiles not included, sadly.

🎨 This is fantastic: The endless art of Pablo Andrés Pozo where you get to zoom out and out and out. It's as if the artwork never ends.

🎹 Live Midi Art: Man draws the Dragon Quest logo using a piano keyboard. Color us impressed (and the music sounds pretty good, too).

🦓 ❤️ 🦏 Aww: Young zebra and one-day-old baby rhino are BFF.

💰 Artist Shay Rose turned 2,652 pennies into a chainmail dress. Money ($26.52) well spent!

🩺 LEGO is making a model of MRI Scanner to help reduce kids anxiety before radiology procedure.

🌵 Musician Tone Trumpet leads the one and only Cactus Choir. Get ready to giggle uncontrollably.

🏠 Did you ever find anything cool during your home renovation? This couple discovered a 115-year-old hidden mural!

🌩️ Nature is metal: 477-mile long lightning bolt crossed 3 states to set a new world record. The "megaflash" spanned across Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Image: Zillow, Care for Wild Rhino Sanctuary, @cactuschoir/Instagram

More neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista and Supa Fluffy.

Featured art: Good is Dumb by indie artist DAObiwan.

Limited time special: Save up to 20% on all tees sitewide on the NeatoShop (every shirt is included!)

Daniel Solis created a whole new order of birds with the help of artificial intelligence. He fed images from old public domain bird illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library into the program called LookingGlassAI 1.1. The results range from "you might believe this is a real bird" to "what kind of mess am I looking at?"

Only some of these images are named. Maybe Solis should consult with the weird Twitter account semi-plausible birds, which actually names birds that do not exist.

Illegal Eagle, seen here in its natural environment under witness protection pic.twitter.com/hovlrgrODH

— Daniel Solis, birds suddenly appear (@DanielSolis) January 31, 2022

See them all in this extensive, image-heavy Twitter Thread. The pictures will be easier to see at Threadreader. Don't stop scrolling when he says "That's it for tonight, y'all." The thread takes up the next day for quite a few more birds. Solis says he has hundreds of them! -via Metafilter

The earth exerts gravitational force on the moon all the time; otherwise, it would fly off into space. But if something were to go wrong with our moon's orbit, what would be the effect on earth? Kurzgesagt gives us the rundown, but starts off assuaging our fears over this by insisting that it's not going to happen. As if they know for sure. Okay, the moon's been there a long time already, so let's assume that it's not going to fall anytime soon.

The good news in this theoretical scenario is that it takes a year for the moon to fall. The bad news is that conditions on earth get horribly bad really fast. This fantasy is truly apocalyptic, but stay with it; there's a surprise ending. And the video isn't quite as long as it seems, because the last two minutes are an ad. -via Digg

Bored Panda unearthed an AskReddit post about the "most interesting, bizarre, offensive, surprising" things contains in wills. The original thread contained many stories about petty and vindictive wills and family secrets revealed, but also some rather funny bequests that are worth sharing. I got a laugh out of this one:

Not a Lawyer, but an aging woman my family knew left her house(large, and in a very affluent neighborhood) and estate to family friends for so long as her cats were alive and taken care of in said house. After they died, the house was to be sold and the remaining estate donated.

The weird thing is, it's been like 20 years and the cats are still alive.

Also, they've changed color.

Ahem. While there are still some entries that smack of revenge beyond the grave or just don't make any sense at all, the funniest replies managed to float to the top in a ranked list of weird bequests you'll surely get a kick out of.