Photo: Tamas Ladanyi (TWAN)

Photographer Tamas Ladanyi took this fantastic composite series of the Full Moon over the springtime landscape of Tihany, Hungary. The small pic above doesn't do it justice, so head on over to APOD for the larger photo:

As it climbed into the clear sky, the Moon just grazed the dark, umbral shadow of planet Earth in the year's first partial lunar eclipse. The partial phase, seen near the top of this frame where the lunar disk is darkened along the upper limb, lasted for less than 27 minutes. Composited from consecutive exposures, the picture presents the scene's range of natural colors and subtle shading apparent to the eye.

Link

For a series on the brain for Men's Health magazine, UK designer Kyle Bean (previously) decided to recreate the ol' noggin with a few interesting stuff like toothpaste, newspapers, and fruits.

Link - via Design Stories

Photo: Garry Nolan

Ten years ago, a six-inch skeleton was found in a pouch in a ghost town in the Atacama Desert of Chile. It ended up in private collection and the UFO community was abuzz that we've finally found physical evidence of alien life.

When immunologist Garry Nolan of Stanford University heard about the skeleton, since named the "Atacama humanoid" or "Ata" for short, he decided to lend his scientific expertise to find out what exactly is the mysterious being:

Among the apparent abnormalities, Ata sports 10 ribs instead of the usual 12 and a severely misshapen skull. "I asked our neonatal care unit how you would go about analyzing it. Had they seen this kind of syndrome before?" Nolan says. He was directed to pediatric radiologist Ralph Lachman, co-director of the International Skeletal Dysplasia Registry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. "He literally wrote the book on pediatric bone disorders," Nolan says. Lachman was blown away, Nolan recalls: "He said, 'Wow, this is like nothing I've ever seen before.' "

To study the specimen, Nolan sought clues in Ata's genome. He initially presumed the specimen was tens or hundreds of thousands of years old—the Atacama Desert may be the driest spot on the planet, so Ata could have been preserved for eons. He consulted experts who had extracted DNA from bones of the Denisovans, an Asian relative of European Stone Age Neandertals.

Find out what the researchers concluded about the mysterious Ata, over at this post by Richard Stone of Science: Link

I've always found the Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant, as a bit owlish. And apparently so did deviantArtist EatToast, who created this adorable Doctor Whoo sculpture: Link

Doctor Who items are on sale over at the NeatoShop. Hurry, while supplies last!

Filmmaker Joe Nicolosi's mom saw The Matrix for the first time and lived to tell the tale. Here's her account of what the movie is all about: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Boing Boing

In Wuxi, in east China's Jiangsu Province, suspects made fake mutton from fox, mink and rat by adding chemicals. The products were sold to markets and the suspects made more than 10 million yuan (1.62 million U.S. dollars) from the illegal activities. [...]

According to an initial investigation, the suspects had been using hydrogen peroxide solution to process chicken claws since July 2011. With an output of 300 kg per day, suspects made more than 4 million yuan in profits.

Link

A. Grab the sponge and wash the dishes in the name of love. They'll notice and be thankful

B. Do nothing, not because you're lazy, but because it won't do any good

If you answer A, you'd be wrong, at least according to a new study by University of Arizona researchers:

Researchers found that individuals who made sacrifices for their significant others generally reported feeling more committed to their partners when they performed those nice behaviors. But when they made sacrifices on days when they had experienced a lot of hassles, they did not feel more committed.

"On days when people were really stressed, when they were really hassled, those sacrifices weren't really beneficial anymore, because it was just one more thing on the plate at that point," Totenhagen said. "If you've already had a really stressful day, and then you come home and you're sacrificing for your partner, it's just one more thing."
"You need to be mindful of the resources that you have to do those sacrifices at the end of the day," she added. "Maybe trying to pile on more sacrifices at the end of a really stressful day isn't the best time."

Read more over at UANews: Link

Image: Grap/Wikimedia

The next time your mom complains that you don't throw junk away, tell her that you're in good company: nearly 15 million people suffer from varying degrees of hoarding disorder. But what causes hoarding?

A few years ago, Samson (not his real name) unplugged his refrigerator. It had, he says, “got out of hand.” He didn’t empty it, and he hasn’t opened it since.

That's how Bonnie Tsui's journey to understanding the science of hoarding began:

In a National Public Radio interview a couple of years ago, Frost talked about the reasons hoarders might collect certain items: a decades-old newspaper because it could be useful in the future; an array of bottle caps purely for their fascinating physical characteristics; a seemingly insignificant postcard because it reminded the owner of a loved one or a specific event. Frost saw universality in the way the beliefs seem to be tied to information processing. “There are some problems with attention—that is, distractibility and sometimes a hyper focus, problems with categorization, the ability to organize things,” he explained. “People who hoard tend to live their lives visually and spatially instead of categorically, like the rest of us do.” One of his patients, Irene, would put an electricity bill on top of a pile; if she needed it again, she would remember where it was in space, rather than filing it away—mentally and physically—in a “bills” category.
“We don’t know the nature of the emotional attachments that people who hoard have to objects,” Frost told me. “How do they form, and why are they so? What are the vulnerabilities that lead up to it?”

Read the rest of Bonnie's article over at Pacific Standard Magazine: Link

The USDA uses national food intake data and grocery price information to calculate different costs for a healthy diet at home. The latest numbers for a four-member family: a thrifty food plan, $146 a week; a low-cost food plan, $191 a week; a moderate-cost plan, $239; a liberal plan, $289 a week. Some food waste is built into these costs.

"We constantly hear the claim that you can't eat healthy on a budget, and to us that's a myth because a family can eat a healthy diet with fruits and vegetables that meets the Dietary Guidelines for Americans," says Robert Post, associate executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.

Find out more over at this USA Today article by Nanci Hellmich: Link (Image: Supermodel Meal in a Box Gum)

$146 to $289 a week for a family of four. Does that sound right to you?

If one lens is good, then hundreds have got to be better! A team of researchers have created the world's first digital camera that mimic the compound eyes of bugs:

Taking cues from Mother Nature, the cameras exploit large arrays of tiny focusing lenses and miniaturized detectors in hemispherical layouts, just like eyes found in arthropods. The devices combine soft, rubbery optics with high performance silicon electronics and detectors, using ideas first established in research on skin and brain monitoring systems by John A. Rogers, a Swanlund Chair Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his collaborators.

“Full 180 degree fields of view with zero aberrations can only be accomplished with image sensors that adopt hemispherical layouts – much different than the planar CCD chips found in commercial cameras,” Rogers explained. “When implemented with large arrays of microlenses, each of which couples to an individual photodiode, this type of hemispherical design provides unmatched field of view and other powerful capabilities in imaging. Nature has developed and refined these concepts over the course of billions of years of evolution.”

Link - via The Verge

Pets may be the hidden victim of the sluggish economy. While humans can get food stamps to help them through a rough patch, but what about pets?

Enter Marc Okon, an entrepreneur who started a privately funded nonprofit called Pet Food Stamps that aims to help those already on government assistance to get free pet food:

The group has been swamped with more applications than his staff of a dozen people can readily process. Most applicants send letters detailing how they lost their jobs to outsourcing, their homes to foreclosure or their health to disease or accident.

"I just heard from a lady in North Carolina who has an autistic son whose only companion is a Jack Russell Terrier," he said. "It's cookie-cutter sadness. … Little details change but the gist of each story is the same."

Despite nominal improvements in the unemployment rate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture counts more than 47 million people in its food stamp program—nearly one out of every seven Americans.

Link (Photo: Shutterstock)

They're not only gorgeous, but these colorful microscopic minerals from a slice of a meteorite, may even reveal whether Mars once had sustained life:

... the team found mineral and chemical signatures on the rocks that indicated terrestrial weathering – changes that took place on Earth. The identification of these types of changes will provide valuable clues as scientists continue to examine the meteorites.

“Our contribution is to provide additional depth and a little broader view than some work has done before in sorting out those two kinds of water-related alterations – the ones that happened on Earth and the ones that happened on Mars,” Velbel said.

Link

Photo: World of Tanks

Armored trains - a symbol of military might of the turn of the 20th century - are impractical, easily sabotaged, and expensive to operate. But they sure look menacingly cool! Take, for example, this humongous railway gun TM-3-12 which used a gun from a battleship mounted on a train chassis.

Dark Roasted Blend has a nifty gallery of this and many other examples of armored train: Link - Thanks Avi!

w00t! We ran a Choose Your Own Hello Kitty Prize last week, open exclusively to NeatoMail subscribers. Congratulations to the three random winners (using the random number generator over at random.org), who won really neat Hello Kitty items of their choice.

The winners have been contacted via Neatorama's private message system. They have 3 days to claim their prize.

You, too, can win neat stuff from the NeatoShop - simply sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter NeatoMail. We don't share your info with any third party, so you won't get spam. You can unsubscribe at any time.

If you love Lost, you'll get a kick out of Darin Shock's latest sculpture: Charlie's hand message from the end of season 3. The 20x20" mixed media sculpture is part of Gallery 1988's Bad Robot Art Exhibit that opened this past Friday: Link - Thanks Darin!

Don't forget to check out Darin's T-Shirt over at the NeatoShop: Tatooinian Gothic