Remember that centipede
crab that John posted yesterday? When it needs to go somewhere fast,
it doesn't crawl ... it rides this motorcycle made out of lobster shell (previously on Neatorama).
The lobster shell bikes were created back in 2011 by Taiwanese food carving
artist Huang Mingbo. The lobstercycles - which come complete with mirrors,
kickstands and their own license plates - were displayed at a cooking
art festival in Fuzhou, China.
According
to the Daily Mail, Huang got the idea after he got tired of throwing
away the shells when cooking lobster.
A lot of what we know about genetics come from studies using lab mice, so scientists at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, came up with this tribute: a monument featuring a cute bespectacled mouse knitting a strand of DNA.
Prof. Nikolai Kolchanov of the institute said to Sib.fm, that the monument "symbolizes gratitude for the animal that humanity has used to study genetics, molecular and physical mechanisms of diseases, as well as for the development of new drugs."
The mouse was sculpted by local artist Andrew Kharkevich, who said, "It combines the image of the laboratory mouse and a scientists ... [The] mouse is captured in the moment of scientific discovery. If you look into her eyes, you can see that this little mouse has come up with something. But the whole symphony of scientific discovery, joy, "Eureka" have not yet been voiced"
Ah, school. The hormones, the drama, the young love ... But not in China!
Recently, a few Chinese middle and high schools have gone to great lengths to discourage romance in the student body. They want to nip young love in the bud.
According to the BBC, a school in Hangzhou has decreed that boys and girls should maintain a minimum distance of half a meter (about one and half foot) from each other at all times. Boys and girls are also not allowed to walk in pairs. Another school has banned "close interaction" - whatever that means, since the school didn't define it - and threatened students with "severe" discliplinary action for violating the ban.
The Chinese regard teenage romance as something undesirable, calling it Zao Lian, which literally means "early love" but in essence it denotes immature love.
Schools and education authorities are increasingly bombarding young people with information on the "undesirable effects" of Zao Lian.
There are entire websites dedicated to the issue of how to avoid the lure of the opposite sex and focus attention on study. Schools in China also run sex education courses.
Both teachers and parents believe that young people in schools must not deviate from learning and must concentrate on studies to lay a good foundation for building a future.
Well, China didn't get to be 1.35 billion people without a little love, so the reaction to the schools' ban on young love has been swift and brutal. Some are outraged whereas others poked fun at the ban on China's social media and blogs. They've also pointed out that the banning teenage romance is probably futile anyhow.
But the central question remains: Should school try to discourage romance in its student body?
The political circus that is the United States Government shutdown continues ... and since urgent exhortations by everyone don't seem to have an effect, employees of the National Weather Service in Anchorage, Alaska, decided to go the subtle subliminal route, as reported by the Washington Post (Thanks Tiffany!)
In the weather forecast released on October 4, 2013, the currently furloughed employees encoded a secret message: the first letter of the lines spelled out "Please pay us."
The technique is not new, of course. You all probably still remember when then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger utilized this technique to send a message to the state legislature for vetoing his proposed legislation.
In Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, a zombie-like creature bewildered by cheap vodka and loneliness might jump out from behind a bush. But here in Fukushima everything was in almost perfect order. In abandoned towns, traffic lights worked and a rare car would stop on red. Near the train station of a ghost town called Namie, sitting outside a shop whose window was stacked with undistributed copies of March 12, 2011 newspapers, a vending machine blinked. I dropped in a coin. The thing made the usual sound and gave me back a hot can of coffee! I tried to calculate how much energy the machine had consumed over these two and half years to heat my coffee in a ghost town with a population of zero.
But amidst the towns and villages that had been abandoned since the nuclear disaster in 2011, Sagolj met one man who refused to leave his house.
That man, Keigo Sakamoto, a farmer and former caregiver to the mentally disabled, is considered a lunatic by some and a hero by others. Sakamoto defied orders by the Japanese government to leave, and made it his mission to rescue abandoned animals instead.
Sagolj wrote:
Sakamoto said no to evacuation, stayed inside the zone and made animals his mission. He ventured into empty towns and villages and collected all the dogs and cats and rabbits and chocolate marmots abandoned by former owners when they left carrying sometimes as little as their wallets.
Now, Sakamoto lives with more than 500 animals in his mountain ranch near Naraha town in a scene reminiscent of experimental theater rather than modern Japan. It’s a very noisy theater too, because many of his dogs have gone wild from the time they spent alone before Sakamoto rescued them. As if to confirm this observation, one dog bit me hard as I passed his little house.
“There are no neighbors,” said Sakamoto. “I’m the only one here but I’m here to stay.” Of his more than 20 dogs, only two are friendly to man. One is called Atom, a super-cute white mutt, named because it was born just before the disaster at Fukushima.
Sonic the Hedgehog and Miles "Tails" Prower ... in meat
Who needs clay to sculpt when you've got meat? Seattle's Uwajimaya grocery store meat manager Kieran Gormley is the food artist behind the Tumblr Epic Grinds. He uses ground beef and pork to create sculptures of iconic characters from video games and science-fiction movies.
'Tis nourishment for the belly and the mind!
It's dangerous to go alone. Take this ... meat, Link. Or is it Link meat? Perhaps Link is saying to Gannondorf: "So ... we meat again!"
"Meat"roid?
Samus has never looked this delicious!
Do you remember the story of the blind men and the elephant? In that story, a group of blind men felt various parts of an elephant to describe the animal. The man who touched the tusk insisted that the elephant is like a spear, whereas the man who touched the body said that the animal is like a wall and the man who felt the leg said that it's like a tree trunk.
Well, add a shovel to that story and you'll get this absurd version of the elephant: Platybelodonfrom the Miocene Epoch (about 15 million to 4 million years ago), an ancestor of the modern elephant with a giant spork the size of a shovel in its mouth.
The "spork" is actually a second pair of flattened tusks or teeth (indeed, Platybelodon means "flat tooth.") They're related to other genera like Archaebelodon and Ambelodon, which are commonly known as "shovel tuskers."
So, why did the Platybelodon have such an unusual mouth? When the species was first identified in the 1920s, paleontologists thought that the animals used its mouth to shovel up aquatic and semi-aquatic vegetation. "... recent analysis of tusk wear surfaces show that they were used more as scythes to cut tough vegetation," stated vertebrate paleontologist William Sanders of the University of Michigan to WIRED.
Images: Margret Flinsch, under direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn. Biodiversity Heritage Library/American Museum of Natural History Library
Luke, I'm your father ... now join the dark side, turn off the light
and go to bed! Etsy seller KeepCalmandTurnItOn has this custom Star
Wars light switch plate that is perfect in any wretched hive of scum
and villainy. Via Incredible
Things and Technabob
For four hours a day, every day, in July 2005, Bennett holed up in her home recording booth. Hour after hour, she read nonsensical phrases and sentences so that the "ubergeeks" -- as she affectionately calls them; they leave her awestruck -- could work their magic by pulling out vowels, consonants, syllables and diphthongs, and playing with her pitch and speed.
These snippets were then synthesized in a process called concatenation that builds words, sentences, paragraphs. And that is how voices like hers find their way into GPS and telephone systems.
"There are some people that just can read hour upon hour upon hour, and it's not a problem. For me, I get extremely bored ... So I just take breaks. That's one of the reasons why Siri might sometimes sound like she has a bit of an attitude," Bennett said with a laugh. "Those sounds might have been recorded the last 15 minutes of those four hours."
Apple, as expected, won't comment, but professionals who have worked with her vouched for her claim and an audio forensics expert who studied her voice is "100%" certain that she's Siri. Bennet said that she decided to come clean after The Verge posted an article that identified a different woman as the real voice behind Siri.
Read the rest of the article and view the video clip over at CNN.
When Reggie Theus of East Texas checked his bank account online, he was pleasantly surprised to find himself the world's first trillionaire - well, at least for a few hours. Yes, trillionaire - that's a number with 12 zeroes. Man, that's a lot of zeroes.
Theus handily beat Carlos Slim of Mexico (net worth $73 billion) and Bill Gates ($67 billion).
Jamey Boyum of KLTV interviewed Theus, an area director for Newk's restaurant in East Texas, who still went to work after discovering his, uh, imagined windfall. "I obviously wished it would have been real but it was great to see. I logged out and logged back in eight times just to see if it wsa still there, and every time it was still there."
And what would the four trillion dollar man do with all that money? Theus said that he'd spend 3 trillion to pay off the national debt.
Happy Virus Appreciation Day, Neatoramanauts! What? You didn't know that today, October 3, 2013, is Virus Appreciation Day? Why, it's the perfect occassion to have a sale on virus plushies over at the NeatoShop!
Well, the holiday may be fake and made up, but the savings are real: save 20% on all Giant Microbes plushies by Drew Oliver over at the NeatoShop. Giant Microbes are plush toys inspired by viruses, bacteria, and human cells. They're the perfect gift for your favorite scientists!
The Netherlands-based artist Mike Frederiqo has recreated the logos of haute couture using cartoon images of their founders. Chanel, Yves Saint-Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs and fashion mag Vogue got the treatment.
Arr! Avast, landlubber! Scuttlebutt has it that our pal Today I Found Out has created a new video clip explaining the origins and meanings of 9 pirate words and expression. If you don't view it, you're a bilge rat and not worthy of sharing grog with the rest of us - maybe we'll keel haul you instead.
