Graham Short managed to engrave three words on the edge of a razor blade. You can only see it at 400x magnification (or by going to the link to see a larger picture). The 64-year-old Short, who admits he is obsessed with miniature engraving, made about 150 attempts before he got the engraving right.
He was only able to work at night, when traffic vibrations are at a minimum, with his right arm bound to the arm of his chair with a luggage strap to minimise unwanted movement. He uses a stethoscope to monitor his heart, attempting a stroke of the letter only between beats, when his body is perfectly still. He swims 10,000 metres a day and can slow his heart rate to 30 beats a minute.
He worked from midnight to 5.30am most nights of the week, for seven months on his razor blade. On a good night he’d manage three minuscule letters.
The Wilkinson’s Sword blade is now available to buy, with a £47,500 price tag.
Oh, nothing special, just a duck walking through Beijing showing off its shoes. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/picturesoftheday/8445313/Pictures-of-the-day-12-April-2011.html?image=5 -via Buzzfeed
Are you still looking for the perfect Easter gift for your favorite 18-months to 3-year-old? Well, look no further! You need the adorable Rabbit Feet slippers from the NeatoShop!
The Rabbit Feet appear both cute and menacing just like a typical toddler. Roar! Hop! Hop! Roar!
Doug Forbis is in a graduate education program and has done some student teaching. He aspires to be a physical education teacher for children with special needs. Forbis believe he can offer encouragement because he's an athlete -despite having no legs.
"It's so rare for kids with special needs to have a teacher with special needs -- that almost never happens," he said. "I think it would help a lot for these special need kids to say, 'Look, Mr. Forbis is a teacher, I can do that, too. He lives by himself, gets around town, goes shopping, I can do that, too.' A lot of kids don't know that's an option. They just depend on the system their whole lives."
Forbis has participated in swimming, basketball, and track in leagues for disabled people. His professors say he has a talent for talking to children. Link -via Fortean Times
Sheriff's deputies in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma noticed damaged wiring in their cruisers for weeks before finding out who the perpetrator is. Spokesman Mark Myer said the culprit is a squirrel who approaches the vehicles by a tree that hangs over the parked cars. Animal control officers have set traps, but so far the suspect has not been captured. http://www.kztv10.com/news/squirrel-wanted-for-damaging-police-cars/ -via Arbroath
Brabant is a province of Belgium. The Brabant Chronicle is a 14th-century manuscript by Jan Van Boendale. The chronicle was published in several updated versions and covers events of the area from around the year 600 to 1350, and is composed of 16,000 rhyming lines and illustrations. The volumes are owned by the Royal Library of Belgium, but 15 marvelous illustrations are posted at BibliOdyssey. Link
Jonathon Keats is opening a restaurant in San Francisco, Sacramento but it doesn't serve food. It doesn't even serve humans. The Photosynthetic Restaurant caters to plants! He filters sunlight in various combinations to make the rays appetizing and nutritious for the plants. Humans are welcome to come and watch, and to contemplate how much we take plants for granted.
“My recipes are all based on the scientific study of plant physiology, applied to the fine art of cuisine,” Keats told Wired.com. “I’m publishing the recipe book so gardeners everywhere can prepare gourmet sunlight for their plants at home. For people who are lazier, or keep only a few plants indoors, I packaged my signature recipes for easy consumption by videotaping select wavelengths of natural sunlight and editing them into a quick and convenient TV dinner.
“I tried it out on my plants at home, and as far as I can tell, they responded well to my delectable mixtures of orange, violet and yellow, although I can’t be certain,” he added. “Cuisine is a form of communication, and mine won’t be complete until plants evolve a mechanism for food criticism.”
It's what they call concept art. The Photosynthetic Restaurant will be open April 16-July 17 at the Crocker Art Museum. Read all about it at Underwire. Link
If you are famous, people are always trying to get something out of you. From Frank Stallone to Jim Belushi, we’ve seen how even your own family will try to ride your coattails. Here are some of the infamous and almost famous that are following in their relatives more famous footsteps.
Tom Hanks Son is a Rapper How many rappers do you know named Chester? Well now you know one: Chester Hanks AKA “Chet Haze” the son of Oscar winning actor Tom Hanks is an aspiring rapper and frat boy college student. Having released the song “Purple and White” in an effort to stir up school spirit at his college, North Western University Hanks throws down his street cred of growing up on “the west side” AKA Los Angeles. The video of his rap song which you can watch below has gone viral. Hanks raps about his frat boy lifestyle including keg parties, bagging freshmen and rolling blunts. I’m sure his dad is proud.
Overall he sounds like any other not-so-talented amateur rapper trying to make it and no one outside of North Western would give him a second listen if his last name wasn’t Hanks. Remember when Kevin Federline came out with an album? Hanks and Federline should grab Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton and go on the “Just Because I’m Rich I’m going to Record an Album” tour. I guess having children is kind of like that old Forrest Gump quote; “Sometimes life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
When you think of prop comedy, one name comes to mind amongst all the rest: Gallagher. Gallagher is a comedian who was big in the 1980’s and early 90’s who stole the show smashing huge watermelons and showering his audiences with loads of goop. This may or may not be your thing, but Gallagher proved to have a successful act during this period with countless TV specials released. Unfortunately his brother Ron Gallagher wasn’t having the same amount of success in life and around this time was unemployed and down on his luck. At first, like a good brother Leo Gallaher (the famous one) gave Ron permission to perform his water melon smashing “Sledge-O-Matic” shtick under one condition; Ron must promote these live appearances in a way that would make it clear that fans were getting the brother and not THE Gallagher.
At first Ron adhered to these restrictions, but then slowly started to make the distinction less clear. He billed the shows as “Gallagher Too” or even “Gallagher II” and made no mention that he was not the mustached, long haired but balding man millions loved to watch smash watermelons on TV. He just really, really looked like him. Eventually Leo Gallagher sued his brother Ron in 2000 for trademark violations and false advertising. Leo won the lawsuit and Ron can no longer perform his brother’s routine or even intentionally try and look like his brother. Check out Ron Gallagher impersonating his brother’s act.
Leo Gallagher is on the left; Ron Gallagher is at right.
Dane Cook’s Half Brother Embezzled Millions from Him
Working as his business manager for years, Dane Cook’s half brother Darryl McCauley stole millions from the comedian and is now serving jail time for what Dane told Larry King was a total “betrayal.” Having used the money to buy a home and make investments in a hotel and restaurant, McCauley was sentenced to five to six years hard time for 27 counts of larceny and three counts of forgery and embezzlement. The dubious brother who wanted his chunk of the comic star’s wealth will have to repay 12 million dollars to Cook. What’s with all the drama from comedians’ families? Also, Dane Cook is making enough money not to notice twelve million dollars missing? Instead of stealing the money, Darryl should have taken a page out of the playbook of Gallagher II and we could have all ironically enjoyed a second rate rendition of “who's in my mouth” (supposing that there is a first rate rendition).
Marvin Bush 9/11 Conspiracy
Marvin Bush has a lot of big famous family shoes to fill as the son of former President George H.W. Bush and former first lady Barbra Bush, the brother of former President George W. Bush and the brother of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. While Marvin never ran for political office, he, like his well known relatives, was successful in business, sitting on the board of directors for a company called Securacom. Because of this, Marvin Bush is famous or rather infamous to people in the 9/11 Truth Movement, those who believe that the terrorist attacks were an “inside job” perpetrated by the US government (let the trolling begin).
If you do a quick Google search for Marvin Bush, a good number of links will be regarding his involvement in this 9/11 conspiracy claiming that Securacom was in charge of security for the World Trade Center and that the company’s contract ran out on September 10th 2001. From this, they speculate that Marvin’s company was responsible for what they deem strange security lapses in the days leading up to the attack and even setting up the explosive charges that they believe were the true cause of the trade center’s collapse. Others have pointed out that Marvin actually left the company in 2000, but this hasn’t dissuaded conspiracy theorists from asserting his involvement.
What are some of your favorite almost famous relatives of famous people?
In
1688, Irish scientist William Molyneux asked philosopher John Locke "if
a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres
and cubes, could he similarly distinguish those objects by sight if given
the ability to see?"
That philosophical thought experiment, called Molyneux's Problem, stood
for centuries until MIT researchers Richard Held and Pawan Sinha collaborated
with Indian surgeons to operate to restore sight in children who'd been
blind from curable causes:
Held, Sinha, and colleagues recruited five children, ages 8 to
17, from Project Prakash to tackle Molyneux's question. The researchers
built 20 pairs of simple shapes from toy blocks and tested the children
within 48 hours of the surgery to restore their sight. The children
had not encountered these unusual shapes before. [...] After feeling
a shape, the children did only slightly better than chance at identifying
it by sight alone, the team reports online today in Nature Neuroscience.
That result suggests a negative answer to Molyneux's question.
Because many children travel long distances for the operations, most
go home with their families before the researchers can do follow-up
experiments, Sinha says. However, when the researchers retested two
of the boys with a new set of shapes a few days later, their accuracy
on the touch-to-vision experiment jumped to above 80%. That suggests
a more nuanced answer of "initially no but subsequently yes,"
Sinha says.
"It's a great story," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist
and neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The change in
the children's ability to integrate touch and vision happens too fast
to be explained by major rewiring in the brain, Pascual-Leone says.
Even though they grew up recognizing objects by touch, they needed only
a little bit of visual experience to learn to translate between the
two senses. "They're not starting from zero," he says.
Want to get a parole? Have your attorney schedule your parole hearing after lunch. A new study revealed that the timing of a parole hearing is quite crucial in determining the outcome.
As a case study, one of the judges started in the morning by granting parole to about 65 percent of the prisoners; that percentage dropped to near zero by the end of the first session, then rebounded to about 65 percent after the snack break. The same pattern repeated in the second and third sessions.
The researchers suggest that as the number of rulings in a session increase, the judges become mentally fatigued. Once their mental resources are depleted, the judges are more likely to simplify their decisions. Ruling in favor of the status quo—denying parole—is the "easier" decision, the authors argue, since these rulings take generally take less time and require shorter written verdicts. After taking a break, their faculties are restored, and they are more likely to make "harder" decisions and grant parole requests again.
MSNBC's PhotoBlog has this intriguing photo by Sivaram V of Reuters of a family floating down the Periyar River in Kerala, India, in a home-made basket boat. Reminds me of the woven bamboo basekt boats of Vietnam: Link - via Cherry Coloured
Goethe University chemistry professor Alexander Heckel was working on DNA nanotechnology when he got married, so naturally he made something fitting: the world's smallest wedding rings, made from interlocking loops of DNA molecules!
Prof. Alexander Heckel and his doctoral student Thorsten Schmidt of Goethe University were able to create two rings of DNA only 18 nanometers in size, and to interlock them like two links in a chain. Such a structure is called catenan, a term derived from the Latin word catena (chain). [...]
From a scientific perspective, the structure is a milestone in the field of DNA nanotechnology, since the two rings of the catenan are, as opposed to the majority of the DNA nano-architectures that have already been realized, not fixed formations, but -- depending on the environmental conditions -- freely pivotable. They are therefore suitable as components of molecular machines or of a molecular motor.
