In the battle of sci-fi weapons, where you can use any weapon you'd like from any sci-fi and fantasy franchise, which reigns supreme? A Jedi Lightsaber? Thor's Hammer? The Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver?

The crew of Sneaky Zebra put it to the test in their latest video. Watch it over at Geeks Are Sexy: Link - Thanks Yan!

Photo: Fat Tony 1138/Flickr

Utinni! Hide your valuables lest this cake is just a decoy. You never know with Jawas - like perhaps how they could've persuaded Flickr user Fat Tony's wife to bake him this Jawa birthday cake as part of a nefarious plot by these wily scavengers.

Phasers ain't just a weapon in Star Trek! Researchers at the NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Japan have created a "sound laser" using a nanoscale drum:

Because laser is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” these new contraptions – which exploit particles of sound called phonons – should properly be called phasers. Such devices could one day be used in ultrasound medical imaging, computer parts, high-precision measurements, and many other places.

A laser is created when a bunch of light particles, known as photons, are emitted at a specific and very narrow wavelength. The photons all travel in the same direction at the same time, allowing them to efficiently carry energy from one place to another. Since their invention more than 50 years ago, almost all lasers have used light waves. Early on, scientists speculated that sound waves be used instead, but this has proved tricky to actually achieve.

It wasn’t until 2010 that researchers built the very first sound lasers, coaxing a collection of phonons to travel together. But those first devices were hybrid models that used the light from a traditional laser to create a coherent sound emission.

Adam Mann of Wired has the story: Link

Shannon Larratt, the founder of body modification website BMEzine and a long-time Neatoramanaut (his first comment was back in 2009), has died in an apparent suicide. Shannon has left a note explaining his medical condition and the situation that led up to his death.

Shannon Larratt (1973 - 2013), RIP.

First, China decided to become a manufacturing giant, then an economic and military superpower. So you shouldn't be surprised that their next plan is to improve the actual Chinese people themselves.

They're doing this two ways: the first is not controversial. China is massively investing in education.

Keith Bradsher of The New York Times wrote:

China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they move from farms to cities.

Source: UNESCO (degrees, enrollment); China finance ministry via CEIC Data (Spending)
Chart: The New York Times

And it seems to be working (though as some people pointed out, quantity isn't the same as quality - and that, similar to United States and Europe, China is already facing a glut of educated college graduates who can't find jobs). Again, from Bradsher's article:

Sheer numbers make the educational push by China, a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, potentially breathtaking. In the last decade, China doubled the number of colleges and universities, to 2,409.

As recently as 1996, only one in six Chinese 17-year-olds graduated from high school. That was the same proportion as in the United States in 1919. Now, three in five young Chinese graduate from high school, matching the United States in the mid-1950s.

China is on track to match within seven years the United States’ current high school graduation rate for 18-year-olds of 75 percent — although a higher proportion of Americans than Chinese later go back and finish high school.

By quadrupling its output of college graduates in the past decade, China now produces eight million graduates a year from universities and community colleges. [...] By the end of the decade, China expects to have nearly 195 million community college and university graduates — compared with no more than 120 million in the United States then.

The second method is more controversial. According to this article by Aleks Eror published in VICE, China is working on making its people more intelligent by genetic-engineering:

At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.

Eror interviewed evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller who said that smart people were being recruited, through scientific conference and word of mouth, to contribute their genetic material to be sequenced so the genes for intelligence can be identified (and later on, used to determine the intelligence potential of embryos).

What does that mean in human language?
Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.

And over the course of several generations you’re able to exponentially multiply the population’s intelligence.
Right. Even if it only boosts the average kid by five IQ points, that’s a huge difference in terms of economic productivity, the competitiveness of the country, how many patents they get, how their businesses are run, and how innovative their economy is.

(Top image: Shutterstock)

Like the T-shirt on NeatoShop said, Inside Every Older Person Is a Younger Person Wondering What The Hell Happened.

In his art series L'Enfant Exterieur (The Outer Child), Paris-based photo retoucher extraordinaire Cristian Girotto took photographs of models and re-imagined them as grown up children. Or is it childish grown ups? Any way you look at it, the results are all sorts of fantastic:

Picasso famously said once that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. We don't know how long it took Spanish photographer Eugenio Recuenco to recreate Picasso's painting of women in real life, but we do know that the results are magnificent.

Take a look over at Eugenio's website: Link [Warning: some artistic nudity] - via io9

California Sea Cucumber (Parastichopus californicus), California, USA, Pacific Ocean. Photograph by Gerald and Buff Corsi, Visuals Unlimited/Getty Images

Remember the turtle that pees through its mouth we told you on Neatorama last year? Well, here's a kindred spirit: the giant California sea cucumber (Parastichopus californicus) that eats using its anus as a second mouth. Oh, as if that's not enough, it also breathes through its butt.

You read that right:

Their first hint that the sea cucumber anus was doing triple duty came from a structure called the rete mirabile, a set of blood vessels that connect the sea cucumber’s respiratory trees with its gut.

Initially, Jaeckle, of Illinois Wesleyan University, and Strathmann, of the University of Washington, thought that the rete mirabile was used to transfer oxygen from the respiratory trees to the gut. But if P. californicus were obtaining food via its anus, it would likely use the rete mirabile to transfer the food to the gut.

To test their idea, the team fed several sea cucumbers radioactive algae, which also contained iron particles. [...]

Not surprisingly, the results showed that the sea cucumbers ate the algae through their actual mouths, which then traveled through their gut.

However, the researchers also found a high level of radioactivity when they looked at the rete mirabile. The only way that those blood vessels could have such a high concentration of radioactivity is if the animal was transferring food from the respiratory trees to the gut via the rete mirabile.

Carrie Arnold of National Geographic News has the story: Link - Thanks Megan!

Photo: Stiff + Trevillion

Most company's cafeteria doesn't look like this, but if you're a hip juice and fruit smoothie company like Innocent in London, UK, you better have a delicious quad for your employees to hang out. (How hip is hip? Their office is called "Fruit Towers")

Thank goodness that architectural firm Stiff + Trevillion came up with this picnic park-inspired office: Link - via designboom

If you like that, check out more at 20 of the Most Playful Offices on the Planet - Thanks Dave!

Last month, Miss Cellania told us how Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield makes himself a sandwich in space. Today, let's take a look at how he gets a haircut aboard the ISS (International Space "Salon").

One word for all of you: Flowbee.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

The Challenge: Create something between London's Great Ormond Street Hospital and a neighboring building that is magical for sick kids while they're in the children's hospital.

Difficulty level: 10 stories of near unusable space in an alley.

Well, Studio Weave (featured previously on Neatorama) rose to the challenge with this marvelous creation: Lullaby Factory, a whimsical sculpture that plays "secret" music.

Studio Weave has transformed an awkward exterior space landlocked by buildings into the Lullaby Factory – a secret world that cannot be seen except from inside the hospital and cannot be heard by the naked ear, only by tuning in to its radio frequency or from a few special listening pipes.

We have designed a fantasy landscape reaching ten storeys in height and 32 metres in length, which can engage the imagination of everyone, from patients and parents to hospital staff, by providing an interesting and curious world to peer out onto. Aesthetically the Lullaby Factory is a mix of an exciting and romantic vision of industry, and the highly crafted beauty and complexity of musical instruments.

The Lullaby Factory consists of two complimentary elements: the physical factory that appears to carry out the processes of making lullabies and the soundscape. Composer and sound artist Jessica Curry has composed a brand new lullaby especially for the project, which children can engage with through listening pipes next to the canteen or from the wards by tuning into a special radio station.

It does not do to leave a LEGO dragon out of your calculation, if you live near him. And especially if it's as awesome as this creation by Flickr user Fat Tony 1138: Link - via brick [something]

She may not look like much, but she got where it counts, kid. Artist David Canavese of Otherlife has made a lot special modification himself.

Behold the half-inch papecraft model of the Millennium Falcon, which took about 8 hours to complete and a lifetime to admire: Link - via Kotaku (Don't miss David's other amazing papercrafts)

If the reason isn't obvious to you, here's videographic evidence:

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] (Warning: NSFW language and general assholery)