That's a tiny sea mollusk called a chiton, that lives about 50 feet below the water's surface. It's a pretty darned weird animal, but scientists have found something that makes it even more remarkable: it has eyes made of rocks.
"Turns out they can see objects, though probably not well," said study researcher Daniel Speiser, who recently became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. [...]
The team realized in a lab experiment that the animal's lenses were made of aragonite (calcium carbonate), rather than proteins like other biological lenses.
This little Pig Matryoshka went to the NeatoShop! That little piggy, that little piggy, that little piggy, that piggy, that little piggy, and that piggy went to the NeatoShop too! This was all so that you could shop from home in your underwear. Yippee, yippee, yippee! Isn't online shopping grand!
We showed you 13 Hilarious Peeps Candy Easter Dioramas and led you to Sci-Fi Peeps Dioramas, but since it's the season for Peeps, there are always more! Check out a roundup of Peeps dioramas that aspire to what we call high culture: scenes of artists, art galleries, famous artworks, and literary references, and a symphony as well, in this collection of pictures from the Chicago Tribune's competitions at mental_floss. Shown here is a marshmallow version of Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles. Link
Ever wondered what bears consider worth their hard-earned money? You probably could have guessed this one, but Pleated Jeans has also charted how bats, cats, kangaroos, snails, rabbits, bluejays, anteaters, and more animals are spending their tax refunds. Link to part one. Link to part two.
Billed as "the ultimate stiletto," this pair of shoes is made of gold or platinum (your choice) and encrusted with 2,200 handset diamonds, over 30 karats total. It also features "the exquisite Stamen Fluted Heal" (sic). It also comes with extra soles, so it will never wear out. The price? £100,000. That's $163,500 US. Got that in a size 6E? Link -via J-Walk Blog
U.S. income tax returns must be in the mail by Monday, but most people who did not have to pay more into the system have already filed. Many folks who expect refunds got the money faster by getting refund anticipation loans, or RALs. Mother Jones explains how refund anticipation loans work, by looking how John Hewitt, founder of Jackson-Hewitt, got into the loan business. The RAL was invented by Ross Longfield in 1987.
Ultimately, Longfield persuaded H&R Block to sign up. But no one was as smitten as John Hewitt—who understood that people earning $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 a year live in a perpetual state of financial turmoil. Hewitt began opening outposts in the inner cities, Rust Belt towns, depressed rural areas—anywhere the misery index was high. "That was the low-hanging fruit," he says. "Going into lower-income areas and delivering refunds quicker was where the opportunity was."
Customers wanting a RAL paid Jackson Hewitt a $24 application fee, a $25 processing fee, and a $2 electronic-filing fee, plus 4 percent of the loan amount. On a $2,000 refund, that meant $131 in charges—equivalent to an annual interest rate of about 170 percent—not to mention the few hundred bucks you might spend for tax preparation. "Essentially, they're charging people triple-digit interest rates to borrow their own money," says Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.
A few hundred bucks for tax preparation? Really?
"These businesses are in this neighborhood for one reason: They see they can make a killing here," says Ramon Dalmasi, an accountant with a front-row seat on the growth of the instant tax business. Dalmasi opened a bookkeeping business in the Bronx in 1997 and watched as chain after tax-prep chain popped up on commercial strips in his community. A few years ago, he relocated to Yonkers, an aging suburb just north of New York City, and found the same chains there as well. "They don't see people struggling to put food on the table," he says. "They just see people who can make them millions." Even without a RAL, a working parent who qualifies for the EITC often pays $300 or more at a tax mill. Dalmasi, a CPA who teaches accounting at nearby Lehman College, charges that same client $75 or $100. "Why should I charge anything more than that," he asks, "when it's taking me 20 minutes?"
I have four different types of income from many small sources and a family of six, but my CPA only charges $100. The article points out how the poor are being taken advantage of, but as some have said elsewhere, this type of loan is still preferable to organized crime loans. Link -via Metafilter, where there's a lively discussion on this article.
We've posted about the tiny Australian Peacock Spider before, but now you can see its amazing mating dance. A couple of minutes into this video, you'll understand how it got its name. Read more about this spider at Catalyst. Link -via The Daily What
While houses may look entirely different on the outside, most of them contain very similar products on the inside. Sink cleaners, microwaves, dishwashers, air fresheners and hand soaps can be found in all kinds of homes across the world. But just because something is a household name doesn’t mean it is boring. Here are some fascinating histories behind a few common household products. Of course, if you don’t have any of these products or brand names in your house, then you’re probably either a hardcore hippie or you’re living in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
20 Mule Team Borax
Admittedly, many homes find themselves without borax these days, but there was a time where it was one of the most common cleaning products around. Of all borax brands, 20 Mule Team Borax is most certainly the best known, in part due to their distinctive packaging depicting a mule team carrying a number of cargo containers. The name was created all the way back in 1890 and the distinctive logo was created in 1891. In that time period, twenty-mule teams were actually used to carry borax from the desert where it was collected to the closest rail station. To help promote their brand image, the company even sponsored a radio and television program called Death Valley Days. The program, which was broadcast on the radio between 1930 and 1945 and on television between 1952 and 1975, dramatized real stories of the Old West. Source, Image via dok1 [Flickr]
Air Fresheners
I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn that people have been covering up odors with pleasant fragrances since the beginning of time, but our modern concept of an air freshener is much more modern than that. In fact, the sprayable air fresheners we’re all familiar with weren’t introduced to the public until 1948. The original spray bottles used were based on military developments that were originally designed for dispensing insecticides. Of course, this major technological advance used a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) propellant, which was later discovered to wreak havoc on the ozone layer. Modern air fresheners all use different technology, but the concept is still the same. Source, Image via Roadsidepictures [Flickr]
Colgate
These days, Colgate is known for making toothpaste, which is why it just might surprise you that during the first 67 years the company was open, they didn’t touch the stuff. Instead, they sold soaps. It wasn’t until 1873 that the company introduced their first toothpaste, which was originally sold in jars. Tubes of Colgate weren’t released until 1908. Source, Image via thelampnyc [Flickr]
Not quite a smooth as Czech President snatching a pen and much, much dumber: here's a videotape of an Ohio man stealing a gavel from a magistrate's bench. Ooh, the nerve!
“That’s a motivated thief to steal from a courtroom,” Cook said, although he added that Collins probably didn’t realize there were video cameras in the courtroom.
Cook said he didn’t notice the gavel was missing until Monday when he was having a hearing and reached for it. The last time he recalled having it was during a hearing on March 29, the day before the theft.
Cook and his staff reviewed the video and recognized the man who was with the 39-year-old Collins and police then began checking the other man’s criminal history and linked him to Collins, according to a Lorain police report.
Police arrested Collins, who confessed to stealing the gavel, the report said.
Crystal Smith of The Achilles Effect blog looked at the words from TV commercials for toys and used Wordle to present the stark gender bias in toy advertising in graphic form.
I'm not surprised at the presence of "battle" or "heroes" in boys' toys, but am quite suprised to find that "fun" is missing ("fun" is there for the girls' though.)
Designer Kelli Anderson made this wedding invitation for her friends, Mike Tarantino and Karen Sandler. Although it's made of paper, it folds into a semi-functional record player which plays a song composed by the couple. Anderson writes:
The resulting booklet is comprised of a cover, two inner pages, a letterpressed band (with instructions and a tear-off RSVP postcard), and a flexdisc on a screwpost. The recipient bends the second page of the booklet back to create a tented “arm.” With the needle placed, they then carefully spin the flexidisc at 45 RPM (ish) to hear the song. The sewing needle travels the length of the song and produces the sound. Its vibrations are amplified by the thin, snappy paper to which it is adhered. To keep the needle down on the record, we reinforced the back of the “tent” with a spray-mounted half page of heavier cardstock. To reduce friction between the acetate flexidisc and the backing cover, we had the inside of the booklet laminated to be slick and conducive to hand-spinning.
Chris Parks painted and arranged twelve skateboards that depict Jesus and his disciples from Da Vinci's The Last Supper as Mexican wrestlers. Naturally, the Eucharistic elements are a taco and a Corona beer. You can see several detailed photos at the link.
For unambitious people like you and me, it might be enough to drive one bumper car down the streets of a city. But not for this fellow. No, he insisted on driving two bumper cars at the same time. That's a resume builder if I ever saw one.
Craftster user Omega Chicken made this sampler as a simple way to remember her WiFi password:
My housemate got the idea from when friends come over with laptops and mobile devices and always need to connect to her wifi. It was a hassle looking at the router every time and she doesn't know how to change the password to something memorable and whenever she wrote it down on something, it'd get lost. So here it is to be framed and hung on the wall.
