We're not sure how the Water Map basin by Julia Kononenko is supposed to work (wouldn't all that water just spill over through the channels on the side?), but we're pretty sure that it's a nifty artwork.
Julia used a map of the central part of London and turned the city's streets into channels for the water to flow.
Did you have to walk to school back way back when? In the snow? Uphill? Both ways? Well, imagine what these children in China get to tell their own children one day:
Children from a remote village in southern China face a treacherous journey home from school, up 230-foot ladders that stand against a vertical cliff. [...]
The children are not the only ones who are forced to use the vertigo-inducing access route - anyone who wants to reach Zhangjiawan Village must undertake the hair-raising climb, and that includes pets.
"It makes my legs shiver, I dared not look down when I was climbing up stairs just now because I felt so frightened," said one woman.
What did you dream about last night? Don't lie - science can tell! Researchers from Kyoto, Japan, have built a dream-reading machine that can pluck images straight out of your slumbering, dreaming brain:
As the fMRI monitored blood flow to different parts of the subjects’ brains, they drifted off to sleep; then, once the scientists noticed that they’d had entered stage 1, they woke them up and asked them to describe what they were previously seeing while dreaming. They repeated this process nearly 200 times for each of the participants.
Afterward, they recorded the 20 most common classes of items seen by each participant (“building,” “person” or “letter,” for example) and searched for photos on the Web that roughly matched the objects. They showed these images to the participants while they were awake, also in the MRI scanner, then compared the readings to the MRI readouts from when the people had seen the same objects in their dreams. This allowed them to isolate the particular brain activity patterns truly associated with seeing a given object from unrelated patterns that simply correlated with being asleep.
They fed all this data—the 20 most common types of objects that each participant had seen in their dreams, as represented by thousands of images from the Web, along with the participants’ brain activity (from the MRI readouts) that occurred as a result of seeing them—into a learning algorithm, capable of improving and refining its model based on the data. When they invited the three sleepers back into the MRI to test the newly refined algorithm, it generated videos like the one below, producing groups of related images (taken from thousands on the web) and selecting which of the 20 groups of items (the words at bottom) it thought were most likely the person was seeing, based on his or her MRI readings
Joseph Stromberg of the Smithsonian's Suprising Science blog has more: Link - via PopSci
100 meter freestyle swimming in a nice, clean, piranha-free swimming pool? That's cute, Summer Olympics! REAL men swim at the brutal Amazon Olympics, where surviving the event itself is its own reward:
Poised on the starting blocks at the Olympics, the 15 swimmers had good reason to feel apprehensive. But the cause of their nervousness was not the race itself – it was the piranhas, anacondas and crocodiles lurking in the turbid waters below. [...]
The swimming events all take place in the murky waters of the Loretoyaco river, a tributary of the Amazon. Waiting for her 100m freestyle race, Lina Castro, a 20-year-old member of the Tikun indigenous community, gazed into the water and considered the hazards. "When the race is about to start I need to be calm and not think about all the things that live in the river," she said.
Toby Muse of The Guardian reports: Link (Photo: Paulo Santos)
What's that? Oh, just another day on the Interweb, folks, brought to you by the good people of China, where they have elevated dogshaming to a whole 'nother level: Behold, dog wearing pantyhose!
Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku wrote:
According to Chinese site Sina, "bored" people on Weibo started the meme. Apparently, Weibo user Ulatang, who noted that the pets rolled their eyes after getting dressed in pantyhose, uploaded the first "dogs wearing pantyhose" pic (above). That image has been commented on over 16,000 times in China.
Link | More pics at Sharp Daily
Meredith Placko over at Geeks Are Sexy wrote an eye-opener of a post about cosplayers (not just female cosplayers, mind you) who have to endure lewd and inappropriate behavior because of the costumes they wear:
Costumes are not consent. It’s a phrase you may be hearing a lot lately, and one we need to keep talking about. In the past few weeks, the internet has exploded with women speaking up about the treatment we receive at conventions and online. This isn’t a new problem that has suddenly presented itself. The issues have always been there. What is happening now is we finally feel we are allowed to speak up, that doing so will not result in us being ostracized from our community – because we are now acting as a community, a support structure, to create a safe environment for all costumers and convention goers.
A few weeks ago at PAX East an incident happened that would open the door for many costumers to come out and speak up. Meagan Marie, known for her amazing costumes as well as her presence within the gaming industry, encountered a situation that opened up many eyes to the way women are treated at conventions. During a press event, featuring several Lara Croft costumers, a journalist began asking some lewd questions of the ladies. When called out for his actions, he put the onus on the girls; saying that because they were dressed sexy, they were obviously okay with such questions being asked.
Read more about it over at Geeks Are Sexy, including what you can do to combat the growing problem: Link - Thanks Yan!
Coming up next week on NeatoMail is a brand new Choose Your Own Prize giveaway, a really easy contest where you get to choose what prize to get from the NeatoShop. It's open only to NeatoMail subscribers (so if you're not a subscriber, give it a try!) , but but there's a snag: what should it be?
We've run Funny T-Shirt, Star Wars, and Doctor Who Choose Your Own Prize giveaways - what should we do next? Bacon? Cupcake? Zombie?
Here's your chance to suggest what you'd like: Leave a comment and tell us which category you'd like to see in the next Choose Your Own Prize giveaway. If we pick you category, you may very well win a bonus surprise prize just for helping out!
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Do eyes have to be in the head for them to work? Not according to this strange research by Michael Levin of Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology! His team implanted an ectopic eye in the tail of a tadpole and found that it works just fine:
For the experiment, the team surgically grafted “eye primordia” from donor tadpole embryos onto host embryos, 95 percent of which grew eyes on their tails.
The team then used red and blue LEDs to condition the tadpoles to associate red light with a mild electric shock.
Consequently, both tadpoles with normal eyes and those with ectopic eyes developed an aversion to red light and learned to avoid red-lit areas—meaning that the tadpoles with tail “eyes” could see. In contrast, a control group of eyeless tadpoles did not learn to avoid red light.
The spine is known to transmit all kinds of sensory information throughout the body, but the 64,000-eyeball question is how the brain recognizes the signals from the far-flung ectopic eyes for what they are. [...]
“What is really interesting is how the brain knows it is visual data,” said Levin
NatGeo's Weird & Wild Blog has the story: Link
After a cat named Disaster disappeared from his home two years ago, its owners never guessed who'd find and bring him back: a zombie!
Jeremy Zelkowitz, who dresses in character as a zombie for a year-round haunted house in Times Square, holds a cat named Disaster which he found crossing 42nd Street in Manhattan on March 30, 2013.
Link (Photo: BluePearl Veterinary Partners)
Suzy Lee Weiss is a high school student with stellar academic records. A GPA of 4.5, an SAT score of 2120, and even an experience as a page for the US Senate. You'd think she'd be a shoo-in for colleges.
Well, she didn't get accepted to any of the Ivy League school that she applied to. But instead of being bitter in private like many of us would, Suzy Lee decided to pen a scathing op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, titled To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me:
Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.
Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.
What could I have done differently over the past years?
For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would've happily come out of it. "Diversity!" I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, I salute you and your 1/32 Cherokee heritage.
I also probably should have started a fake charity. Providing veterinary services for homeless people's pets. Collecting donations for the underprivileged chimpanzees of the Congo. Raising awareness for Chapped-Lips-in-the-Winter Syndrome. Fun-runs, dance-a-thons, bake sales—as long as you're using someone else's misfortunes to try to propel yourself into the Ivy League, you're golden.
Having a tiger mom helps, too. As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me. It has been great in certain ways: Instead of "Be home by 11," it's "Don't wake us up when you come through the door, we're trying to sleep." But my parents also left me with a dearth of hobbies that make admissions committees salivate. I've never sat down at a piano, never plucked a violin. Karate lasted about a week and the swim team didn't last past the first lap. Why couldn't Amy Chua have adopted me as one of her cubs?
The reaction was swift: many people accused her of being a whiny, petulant child (and perhaps a racist). Others applauded her describing the brutal college admissions procedure and calling a spade a spade.
Link - via TODAY News
What do you think? Do you agree with Suzy Lee Weiss? Does the college admissions process unfairly penalize good students for being born with the (in this case) wrong skin color?
Origin
of Species - Litographs
What's better than posters made from actual text from books? Getting them on sale, of course! If you've been eyeing to these neat Litographs and Postertext posters, you're in luck: they're on sale over at the NeatoShop. Save 20% on all of the posters in stock:
Alice
in Wonderland - Litographs
But you must hurry, sale is limited to stock at hand: Link
Space tourists just can't help themselves! We love, love, love this and other new designs by Naolito over at the NeatoShop. Check out his blog and website, then head on over to Naolito's design page over at the NeatoShop: Link | More Funny T-shirts
Your purchase helps support the blog and indie artists! Thank you!
Morphology of Cthulhu macrofasciculumque by differential interference
contrast light microscopy (LM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM)
In his house at the gut of termites, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque waits dreaming. Until its slumber is disturbed by researchers at University of British Columbia identified the microorganism and unleashed the horror:
UBC researchers have discovered two new symbionts living in the gut of termites, and taken the unusual step of naming them after fictional monsters created by American horror author HP Lovecraft.
The single-cell protists, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque, help termites digest wood. The researchers decided to name them after monstrous cosmic entities featured in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos as an ode to the sometimes strange and fascinating world of the microbe.
“When we first saw them under the microscope they had this unique motion, it looked almost like an octopus swimming,” says UBC researcher Erick James, lead author of the paper describing the new protists, published in the online journal PLoS ONE.
The octopus-like movements and appearance of both protists reminded James of the horrid Cthulhu and Cthylla, and the little protists were baptized after the two monsters. Cthulhu is often depicted as a giant, octopus-like entity with wings. Cthylla is his daughter, and has a similar appearance.
Here's how Cthulhu macrofasciculumque swims:
Link to Press Release | Paper at PLoS ONE
If you love all things Cthulhu, check out the NeatoShop for neat Cthulhu stuff!
Squee! The cuteness! It burns! @CuteOverload tweeted this pic of a micro piglet wearing grippy dot socks and a sweater vest. If that doesn't make your day a bit better, I don't know what would.
Sweet sweetness! Los Angeles-based artist Josh Lange mashed up Star Wars with Little Miss Sunshine to create this poster for Star Wars VII.
Josh wrote:
The moment I tried to capture was the main characters getting ready to hop into the Millenium Falcon and head out into the next movie (of course, the story for Ep VII will most likely not have them all in it, but I picked them in the absence of any real story details). I wanted to stay as true to the iconic LMS poster as I could, and adjusted the Millienium Falcon’s dimensions to better match the VW van. Picking which character would replace which was fun, and certain subtleties were serendipitous, like the similarity of vests between the characters of Alan Arkin and Harrison Ford. Although I included official logos and crew names at the bottom for a more realistic touch, this is of course just fan art and was not made for commercial purposes.
Link - via Geek Tyrant and Laughing Squid
