Photo: Greg Hume/Wikipedia

It's a scene straight out of a sci-fi movie: a lair of ants with huge, swollen abdomen used as living food storage. But that, Neatoramanauts, is not science fiction. It's science fact!

Meet the honeypot ant, which belly can expand to the size of grapes as worker ants keep on feeding it "honey" (such as sugary extracts from oak galls, nectaror even liquids from the body of preys). During tough times, the honeypot ant will regurgitate honey to feed its colony.

These honeypot ants are so valuable that rival ant colonies often try to kidnap them, and they're so tasty that Australian Aboriginal people like to eat them like candies! Yum!

Photo via National Geographic Photography Facebook page

(Vimeo Link)

This beautiful animated short is called A Fox Tale, and it was created by four students from the French animation school Supinfocom Arles.

The story is loosely based on Asian mythology, and features vibrant colors, gorgeous visual effects and charming character designs.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this short become a feature length film some day, and needless to say the students who created A Fox Tale are definitely going places!

--via Cartoon Brew

You probably noticed and have been wondering why so many Olympians from numerous events have masses of tape adhered across various body parts. It's called Kinesio Tape and was developed by a Japanese chiropractor to help heal injuries and and boost performance.

ABC News' Nightline photographer Meredith Frost snapped this photo of a cat all made up to look like Carol from Where The Wild Things Are, over at the Pet Stylist Super Show in Knoxville, Tennessee, in July 2012.

Check out the YouTube clip (the cat made a brief appearance at 0.54) or go to ABC News for the pic: Link

Photo: Hannah Stonehouse/Stonehouse Photography

Photographer Hannah Stonehouse took this marvelous photo of her friend John Unger swimming with his dog Schoep, who at 19 years old, now has arthritis and has trouble sleeping. Unger found that the water helps the dog's pain and takes the dog to Lake Superior to lull him to sleep. The photo has gone viral on Facebook, and it's easy to see why.

John Lundy of Duluth News Tribune has the back story of the man and his best friend: Link - via Huffington Post and PetaPixel

There have been many, many covers and parodies of Call Me Maybe, but this one takes the cake. Maybe. Behold, a Batman and Carly Rae Jepsen mash-up called "Batman Maybe" by Wesley Freitas.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Metafilter

Lyrics below:

Actor and frequent Neatorama contributor Eddie Deezen has an action figure! Can you tell which is which? Sadly, this is not for sale, but is a one-of-a-kind gift made by one of his fans. Link

Earlier, Alex posted that Amtrack's burgers cost $16 -and from what I can tell, they aren't even very good. If you want to shell out $16 for a burger that's actually worth the cost (and happen to live in Japan), then you might want to head over to Wendy's.

Sure, their stateside burgers might not be all that great (at least, the ones near me certainly aren't), but the chain's Japanese offerings are totally classy. Take, for example, the surf and turf burger that features lobster or the caviar and lobster sandwich served without beef.

Would you pay $16 for a Wendy's sandwich if it had lobster on it?

Link Via The Consumerist

This Erie Steam Shovel Type B was built in 1925. It's not ready to retire yet. Here it is moving dirt at the International Plowing Match in Teeswater, Ontario in 2008.

Link -via New Jovian Thunderbolt

It's not uncommon for fishermen to catch 30 to 100 pound white sturgeon in British Columbia's Fraser River. But this one, caught on a rod and reel, weighed about 1,100 pounds and was more than 12 feet long. It may be over a hundred years old:

It could also be 35 years older than the angler, Michael Snell, 65, of Salisbury, England. Snell, who was fishing with his wife, Margaret, called the catch a fish of a lifetime.

"It is the most excitement I've ever had with a fish," said Snell, who took 1 1/2 hours to eventually land the fish along the shoreline. "It all happened so quickly. When we picked her head up out of the water, it was almost three-feet wide. I never knew a fish could be that large."

By comparison, the world-record swordfish is 1,182 pounds. The world record for a white sturgeon? It is 468 pounds taken in Benicia, Calif., according to the 2012 International Game Fish Association book of World Record Game Fishes.

The Snells and their professional guide took photos of the fish, tagged it and released it back into the river.

News Story and Video -via Neo-Neocon | Photo: Great River Fishing Adventures

(YouTube link)

I used to do a great Julia Child impression on the radio, but now half the audience wouldn't recognize her voice. If you remember the delightful and entertaining French Chef, you'll enjoy this tribute Twin Cities Public Television created for the 100th anniversary of her birth on August 15th. -via mental_floss

Photo: Hoarders/A&E

You've probably watched A&E's series Hoarders, which feature homes of suffer from compulsive hoarding. It's a fascinating show, probably because we all can relate to being messy, but these people just take it to a whole 'nother level.

To find out how their brains are different, David Tolin of Yale University School of Medicine subjected hoarders to fMRI brain scans. He found something quite interesting: hoarders don't particularly love stuff, instead they're deathly anxious of making the wrong decision to throw things out, so they keep them all instead.

As Tolin and his co-authors noted, hoarders are not necessarily eager to keep everything they possess, but rather “the disorder is characterized by a marked avoidance of decision-making about possessions.” And the extra activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and insula while evaluating what to do with their own items “may hamper the decision-making process by leading to a greater sense of outcome uncertainty,” the researchers noted. In other words, hoarders might often feel that they are at risk of making a wrong decision—and that that decision could bring with it greater risk than it actually would. “The slower decision-making may be a central feature of impaired decision making in hoarding,” the researchers noted.

Katherine Harmon of Scientific American's Observations blog has more: Link