Scientists and doctors the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are planning a clinical trial that cannot be scheduled, with subjects that cannot be selected or screened, nor can they give informed consent. They will be ten patients with normally fatal knife or gunshot wounds which leads to massive blood loss and subsequent heart failure. They call the technique “emergency preservation and resuscitation,” which we know from science fiction as suspended animation.

The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. "If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed," says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.

The technique has been used on pigs in experiments, with very encouraging results.

The pig's heart usually started beating again by itself, although some pigs needed a jump-start. There was no effect on physical or cognitive function.

The technique will be used on ten candidates who are brought to the emergency room, then the technique will be analyzed and tweaked, and then on ten more patients. Since informed consent will be impossible to obtain, there is a way to opt-out online. So far, nobody has. Read about what exactly will happen when the time comes at NewScientist. -via Metafilter

Oh look, a lovely cake made in the shape of a bicycle seat covered in flowers! And the inscription… what? Turns out this is supposed to be a tennis racket, and the inscription is supposed to say, “You’re an ACE.” Oops. Just another day at Cake Wrecks. What do you wanna bet that the guy's name is really Jermaine or something besides Jarman?

(Image Via Imgur)

(Image Via Kevin Dietrich)

There’s a reason they chose a bear to be the star of so many cartoon shows, from Yogi to Baloo to the Three Bears in those Looney Tunes shorts, because very few critters act as humanistic as bears.

When a bear stands up and gives you a wave you can almost see your big, hairy uncle doing the same thing, and when they hold a newspaper, sit at a picnic table waiting for a basket full of goodies to come their way, or simply stick their tongue out at the photographer we instantly imagine a friend or family member doing the same thing.

Enjoy this selection of images showing Bears Doing Human Things, put together by the animal loving folks at Bored Panda.

Photographer Ernest Goh brought us fish portraits a while back. Now he has a series of glamor photos of ornamental chickens, called Cocks. The photos are featured in his book COCKS: The Chicken Book. You can get a sneak peek at Goh’s website. -via Laughing Squid

The artist Vik Muniz is always pushing boundaries. We've previously seen his peanut butter and jelly Mona Lisas, his art reproductions made with torn-up magazines and his clown skull. Those projects push the boundaries of materials. But Muniz also pushes out space. He found that as his studio physically expanded, so did his projects. Eventually, he used earth moving equipment to create drawings hundreds of meters across.

Now, Muniz is going in the opposite direction. He had explored art at the gargantuan scale and was ready to create it at the microscopic level. So he sketched sandcastles and sent them to Marcelo Coelho, a designer who is skilled in the artistic use of a focused ion beam. With special equipment, Coelho can etch lines 50 nanometers wide. That's about one thousandth of the width of a human hair. They have made their work available in cooperation with The Creators Project, a partnership between Intel and VICE.

You results are beautiful sandcastles on grains of sand. You can read more about the project and see more images at Colossal.

(Video Link)

-via Lustik

A skilled excavator driver has the hands of a surgeon and the soul of a classical pianist. S/he can do amazing things, like pushing a stalled truck or lighting a cigarette. This video allegedly shows one destroying a bridge in Guangxi Province, China. All it takes is one touch in the right spot.

(Video Link)

Yes, it's possible that there was some preliminary work done by demolitions experts. But I wouldn't rule out the excavator driver.

-via Jalopnik

(Photo: University Medical Center Utrecht)

A Dutch woman had a rare bone disorder that caused her skull to grow from 1.5 centimeters thick to 5 centimeters thick. Among other problems, this disorder gave her terrible headaches and reduced her eyesight.  Eventually, it would kill her. So surgeons led by Dr. Bon Verweij at the University Medical Center Utrecht replaced her skull with a plastic one produced by a 3D printer.

Dr. Verweij had worked with skull implants before, but never as large as this one. The operation was nonetheless tremendously successful. The patient has regained her sight and recovered enough to return to work. You can read more about her case at Wired.

-via Popular Science

Animation has come a long way since the days of classic Disney animated features like 101 Dalmatians and The Sword In The Stone, and now that we use digital art and animation programs to make the whole process easier than ever before these classic films would have a very different look if they were made today.

Tyson Murphy is a lead character artist for Blizzard, and he decided to do a digital painting lighting study by painting over stills from old Disney films.

Tyson's versions look very painterly, and the characters definitely look more realistic, but for my money it's impossible to improve on the perfection of the original backgrounds. Tyson says he's planning to do more of these studies soon, may I suggest a scene from the Black Cauldron?

-Via Bored Panda

The illustrated fairy tales my grandmother read in her classroom (and to me) didn’t have simple shapes and bright colors, but we liked them anyway. The intricate artworks were elegant and sumptuous and transported us to another world. Buzzfeed has collected a few of those beautiful illustrations for our enjoyment. You’ll know what stories they go to, even without the text.

(Image credit: Harry Clarke, 1922)

There are so many survival tools that you can find on an iPhone, such as a compass, a map, a flashlight, and first aid instructions. But none of these things will let you cut an object. That’s why Instructables member Mike Warren’s invention is so handy. His iStab is an iPhone case that has a built-in folding knife blade. He made this piece of cutting edge technology with a 3D printer and a cheap paring knife.

First, Warren found pre-existing designs for folding knifes and iPhone cases on Thingiverse. He mixed them together in Meshmixer, a 3D design editor. He then used an Objet500 Connex to print the case.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the King of Prussia asked loyal citizens to give up their gold and silver jewelry to finance the war effort. They did, but they also got something in exchange: jewelry made of iron. The black forged jewelry was not as valuable on the surface, but it made a statement in that the person wearing it was obviously a patriot who made a sacrifice to defeat Napoleon. Collectors Weekly talked to jewelry collector Agram.m about Berlin iron, its history, and what distinguishes it from other antique jewelry.

(Image credit: the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Centuries ago, before photography or mass transit, travelers would come back to Europe from Africa or Asia with tales of strange animals. Artists depicted these animals, but rarely were the travelers and the artists the same person. Medieval artists, many who could barely render a cat or chicken realistically, tried their best to draw these exotic species only from what they heard. The results weren’t accurate, but who knew that at the time? The picture of an elephant above is from the 13th century, and looks more like Snufflupagus than any real elephant. See a collection of such images, including a crocodile with long chicken legs and a panther with colorful stripes, at io9. -via Everlasting Blort   

Forensic artists can’t come across a skull, or skull shaped decanter, without wondering what that person’s fleshy face looked like when they were among the living, and there’s no better testament to your artistic skills than creating a skull sculpture from scratch that actually looks like a human being when clay skin is added.

Some hitherto unnamed forensic scientists couldn’t help themselves when they saw a bottle of Crystal Skull Vodka sitting on the shelf at their local liquor store, they just had to see what that laughing face would look like properly skinned.

So they bought a bottle and went to work properly replacing layers of muscle and flesh until they revealed the face of a drunken fool, very appropriate for the spokesskull of a popular alcoholic beverage!

If anyone knows the name(s) of the forensic scientists behind this project please share in the comments below!

-Via Cheezburger

Update: These photos came from Crystal Head Vodka’s Facebook page. The forensic artist who did this is Nigel Cockerton.  -Thanks, kdub!

Time was you could buy a Burmese python in Florida, but the cute little snakes sold at carnivals eventually became 20-foot-long eating machines, so a lot of them were freed into the Everglades. Now they are an invasive species that has all but wiped out rabbits, raccoons, bobcats, and other small mammals from the park. It has been estimated that there are around 100,000 Burmese pythons in Florida -a place where they do not naturally exist. In 2008, the Nature Conservancy began training citizens to spot and report pythons, and training wildlife professionals to capture them. This is the Python Patrol.

The Python Patrol program has since trained more than 450 responders and 2,625 detectors, including field scientists, state wildlife commission staff, state park service personnel, utility workers for the city of Miami—anyone likely to encounter non-native snakes in the field—and even a group of war veterans known as the Swamp Apes. One trainee, 70-year-old Eric Raits, has now caught three pythons while working as a tour guide at Shark Valley Tram Tours in Everglades. Once, lacking a bag into which to deposit the snake, he simply held on to the 9-foot python for the remaining half of the two-hour tour. “I was sitting in the backwards-facing seat with the snake coiled up around my arm,” he says. “Unsurprisingly, no one sat in the two rows closest to me. They were all in the back, sitting on each other’s laps.”

The aim of the Python Patrol is to limit the spread of the pythons, so scientists are still working on the problem of eradicating them. But the program has had some success, and the volunteers are also being trained in spotting other invasive species that threaten Florida’s ecology. Read about Florida’s invasive species problem and the Python Patrol’s efforts at The Nature Conservancy. -via Metafilter

Icy pavement makes everyone a breakdancer! Pretty soon, he’s going to break something! Or maybe he’s just the real-life incarnation of the game QWOP. If his hat falls off, people are liable to come by and drop coins into it. -via I Have Seen The Whole Of The Internet