Intervention by Naolito

He's on the 'shrooms again. His friends, tired of being pummeled during one of his episodes ("levels" as he calls it), are now staging an intervention and T-shirt designer extraordinaire Naolito is there to capture the moment.

Check out Naolito's official website and FB page, then visit his NeatoShop page to buy some of the neatest shirts you'll ever see! Link

View more designs by Naolito | More Funny T-shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop, earn generous royalties, and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

There's no need to get your shoes wet and dirty crossing the flooded street. Why don't you, y'know, take off your shoes?

Here's why: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Arbroath

A while back, we told you of that officials were mulling about a proposed amendment to China's elderly rights law that would require children to visit their parents more often. Well, that proposition is now law:

Grown children in China must visit their parents or potentially face fines or jail, a new law that came into effect on Monday says.

China's new "Elderly Rights Law" deals with the growing problem of lonely elderly people by ordering adult children to visit their ageing parents.

The law says adults should care about their parents "spiritual needs" and "never neglect or snub elderly people".

Link

The tradition of burying loved ones with grave flowers turns out to be quite an old one. Archaeologists Daniel Nadel and colleagues discovered the oldest example in a grave in Israel's Mount Carmel, dating back 12,000 years ago:

Ancient mourners lined four graves with the flowers, most notably one that holds the bodies of two people.

The pair—an adult male and an adolescent of undetermined sex—belonged to the primitive Natufian culture, which flourished between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago in an area that is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

The Natufian society was one of the first—possibly the first—to transition from a roaming hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent settlements, and was also the first to establish true graveyards, said study leader Daniel Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa in Israel. [...]

The new discovery indicates that the Natufians were also among the first to use flowers to honor their dead.

Link

Photos: AJ Pilkington/Manicks Productions Ltd.

The eight and final season of Dexter will premiere on FOX in the United Kingdom, and to commemorate that event, Miss Cakehead and Annabel de Vetten of Conjurer's Kitchen teamed up to create a life-sized Dexter Morgan out of cake ... then proceeded to cut and eat him up:

Inspired by the name of Dexter’s boat – A Slice of Life – the cake was 5ft 10” long, the same height as Michael C. Hall, the actor who has played Dexter for the past eight years. The entire cake took over 100 hours to make and weighed over 105 kilograms.  24 eggs, 25 kilograms of flour, 16 kilograms of buttercream, 18 kilograms of sugar, 20 kilograms of sugar paste and marzipan, and 15 kilograms of buttercream were used in the creation of the edible masterpiece. 20 blood oranges were also used, the cake flavour inspired by the iconic titles of the series.

A Dexter ‘kill room’ was created for the cutting of the cake, the kitchen walls covered in plastic sheeting. Replicating Dexter’s kill technique, the cake was initially cut by a knife being plunged into the chest area before being sliced up. The cake was also ‘dressed’ in clothes to give an authentic appearance, with hours spent on adding fine attention to detail such as stubble.

Photo: HeyItsWilliam/Flickr

French sculptor Auguste Rodin casted The Thinker in 1902, so it's time to update the iconic sculpture to reflect modern society's more ... um, bountiful image. Meet the Fat Thinker, for the Shanghai Sculpture Space exhibition in China.

I wonder what it's thinking about ...

Photo: HeyItsWilliam/Flickr

This Xenomorph, part of the H.R. Giger 2009 art exhibition in San Sebastian, Spain, is so awesome that the only way to be sure that we can keep humanity safe is to nuke it from orbit. Photo via Orange

Lathyrus odoratus blueprint by Macoto Murayama

How would an engineer or an architect go about and design a flower? With blueprints, of course!

When he was studying at Miyagi University in Japan a few years ago, Macoto Murayama was inspired to combine the worlds of architecture and scientific illustration and apply computer illustration techniques to diagram flowers in great details.

Murayama carefully dissected flowers, removed their anatomical parts with a scalpel to the individual parts - the petals, anther, stigma and so on - under a magnifying glass, and then sketched and photographed them. He then recreated the flowers, part by part, using computer graphic software - in essence, he has created botanical blueprints for some of nature's most beautiful flowers.

Frantic Gallery in Tokyo has fantastic images from Murayama's 2011 exhibition, titled "Inorganic Flora." Check it out: Link

Blueprint of Sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus)

When a courthouse in Bradford County, Florida, got a monument based on the Ten Commandments, American Atheists advocacy group sued to get it removed.

But during court-ordered mediation, all parties settled that the Ten Commandments monument could stay as long as the atheists get their own monument.

Yesterday, the atheists got just that: their own granite monument in shape of a bench with an accompanying pillar engraved with quotes:

The atheist monument includes quotes from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O'Hair and others. One side of the pillar lists the biblical punishments for breaking the Ten Commandments, which often call for execution. [...]

It may be the first public monument to atheism in the nation, but it is only the first of many, said American Atheists President David Silverman.

Silverman announced during the unveiling ceremony Saturday afternoon that the organization will erect up to 50 more monuments across the country in public places where religious structures like the Ten Commandments marker in Starke have been established.

Morgan Watkins of the Gainesville Sun reports: Link (Image: Matt Stamey/The Gainesville Sun)

Artist Odra Noel, who trained as a doctor, combines art and science in The Map of Health, where she draws the map of the world using the cellular structures of various human tissues (and how they relate to various diseases) to represent each continents. Link - via NewScientist

North America struggles with rising obesity, and this adipose tissue (fat) is more beautiful close up than you would imagine.

Europe, with its ageing population, suffers greatly from neurodegenerative diseases, including dementia (neurones, brain tissue).

Great swathes of the middle East and central Asia are shown here as cardiac muscle (heart), as these regions are afflicted with rising levels of hypertension and other causes of heart and cardiovascular failure.

The far East and the Pacific look beautiful in pancreatic acinar tissue; its failure causes diabetes, a major problem in this area, frequently described as a diabetes epidemic.

Central and South America are represented here by pulmonary tissue (lungs); smoking and respiratory infections are a leading cause of death.

And Africa is made of blood here. The only continent where the leading cause of death are transmittable diseases (infections), notably malaria and HIV.

The only artery of the whole map is in the middle of Amazonia.

Noel also cleverly hid 5 mitochondria in the map. See if you can find it at the larger pic over at her website: Link

You've been eating dinner all your life, but chances are, you've been doing it wrong. But don't worry, Joanna Goddard and Gemma Correll are here to rescue you with this nifty guide to how to eat dinner when you're a guest at a dinner party:

If you're a guest at a dinner party (pictured above), wait to start eating until the host or hostess takes his or her first bite (unless they absolutely insist that you start).

Your wine and water glasses are to the RIGHT of your plate. Your bread plate is to the LEFT of your plate. If you remember that, you'll never drink someone's water or eat their bread again! (A genius tip from readers: To remember the order of the placesetting, think "BMW" -- for bread, then meal, then water.)

Surprisingly, salt and pepper should be passed together, even if someone asks only for one. They're considered "married!"

Read the rest over at A Cup of Jo: Link

What happens if you toss a chain of beads down to the ground? Steve Mould of Britain's Brightest explains the weird behavior of the "self-siphoning beads" or "Newton's Beads."

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

This is probably not what the Worcester Regional Transportation Authority had in mind when they printed the side of this bus with the message "Drive Your Message Home with the WRTA."

CNN has the story: Link - via Arbroath

Photo: Daniel Gionnoni

Archaeologists have discovered something truly stunning, the first unlooted imperial tomb of the Wari, an ancient civilization in South America that existed between 700 and 1000 A.D. The tomb, located in modern day Peru, is filled with treasures, precious artefact and - cue the ominous music - human sacrifice:

Tomb robbers had long dumped rubble on the ridge. Digging through the rubble last September, Giersz and his team uncovered an ancient ceremonial room with a stone throne. Below this lay a large mysterious chamber sealed with 30 tons of loose stone fill. Giersz decided to keep digging. Inside the fill was a huge carved wooden mace. "It was a tomb marker," says Giersz, "and we knew then that we had the main mausoleum." [...]

As the archaeologists carefully removed the fill, they discovered rows of human bodies buried in a seated position and wrapped in poorly preserved textiles. Nearby, in three small side chambers, were the remains of three Wari queens and many of their prized possessions, including weaving tools made of gold. "So what were these first ladies doing at the imperial court? They were weaving cloth with gold instruments," says Makowski.

National Geographic Daily News has the scoop: Link

Photo: David Moore - more at David's gallery

In the 1991 Season 2, Episode 15 of The Simpsons, Homer came up with an idea for a new car he called "The Homer." Well, it took more than two decades for the engineers at Porcubimmer Motors to turn the idea into reality, but you can't rush a car that's "powerful like a gorilla, yet soft and yielding like a Nerf ball."

Behold, The Homer:

Find out more over at The Homer's official website: Link - via Techland