Say hello to 2015 and say hello to big savings over at the NeatoShop! Save up to 50% off novelty items (over 550+ SKUs!) and 20% off all T-shirts. Get free worldwide shipping (yes, that's right: worldwide) on orders $75 and up. Hurry: Sale ends Sunday, Jan 18, 2015.

Twitter user @bonerman_inc (I know, I know) ordered an ice cream sundae from a local McDonald's restaurant but got something extra: souls of the damned, right there in the strawberry rivulets (or demon core, your pick) of his soft serve ice cream.

Naturally, he tweeted the ordeal to warn humankind of the impending apocalypse that the "souls of the damned ice cream" heralded. Either that or diabetes so repent, people, repent.

All aboard the beer train! These beer delivery men have got work and play all figured out. Take a look at how they combine both by sliding down a hilly street on a sled made out of beer crates:

via Digg

Dr. George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and researcher Dr. Lorenzo Leggio posing at the hospital bar. Photo: Cliff Owen/AP

... and that catch is that it's completely fake. Instead of booze, the liquid inside the bottles is colored water (but to be extra sneaky, the researchers hid real alcohol nearby so the place smells authentic).

The fake hospital bar is located inside the National Institutes of Health's hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. It's part of an experiment to test the safety of a new drug designed to help heavy alcohol drinkers to quit.

"The goal is to create almost a real-world environment, but to control it very strictly," said researcher Dr. Lorenzo Leggio to Lexington Herald-Leader. Leggio's team is testing how the hormone ghrelin, which creates the hungry signal, also affects alcoholics' desire for alcohol and whether blocking it helps drinkers quit.

Not really! Photo: Cliff Owen/AP

But if you're craving for drinks while at the hospital, there's hope: all you have to do is move to France.

2013 Small World in Motion Competition - Honorable Mention

In this neat video clip above, Daniele Soroldoni of MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London, United Kingdom, showed us a gorgeous glimpse into segmentation - that's fancy biology speak for the division of the body (in this particular case, a vertebrate's body) into a series of repetitive segments like ribs and back bones.

Vertebrae segmentation is difficult to see because it happens during embryo development. But thanks to the transparent zebrafish embryo, Dr. Soroldoni managed to capture this pattern formation by using green and red fluorescent proteins. The details, as you can imagine, is quite complicated (Interested? Read on) - but suffice it to say that we all can appreciate the beauty of the process as captured in this wide-field microscopy.

Thanks Nicole Hall!

Yesterday, President Obama proposed that community college should be free for all American students.

"Put simply, what I'd like to do is see the first two years of community college free for everyone who's willing to work for it," Obama said in a video clip posted to Facebook, "That's right. Free for everybody who's willing to work for it." President Obama maintained that higher education is a "the surest ticket" to the middle class.

The free community college plan, which the White House estimated would cost the federal government about $60 billion over 10 years, is open to students who'd attend community college at least halftime and maintain good grades.

Critics pointed out that the cost is likely to be much higher. If the White House estimates of 9 million students partaking in the program every year and saving $3,800 in annual tuition is correct, the cost would be over $34 billion per year. Congress, which is now controlled by conservative Republicans, is also cool to the idea, with prominent members of the Republican party asking where the money would come from.

But politics aside, I think there's a better plan than free community college. Instead, we should bring back vocational high schools.

"College isn't for everyone," New York mayor Michael Bloomberg noted in his 2008 State of the City address, "education is." And he might be on to something: Northwestern University professor James E. Rosenbaum argued in his book, "Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half," that the current educations system fails those who do not go to college and those who start college but do not finish by not adequately teaching practical skills that they'd need for getting jobs.

"Our friends in Germany know - as we should - that some students are bored by traditional studies," wrote Northwestern University Professor Harold Sirkin in Business Week, "Some don't have the aptitude for college; some would rather work with their hands; and some are unhappy at home and just need to get away. They realize that everyone won't benefit from college, but they can still be successful and contribute to society."

"Americans often see such students as victims," Sirkin added, "Germans see these students as potential assets who might one day shine if they're matched with the right vocation." Indeed, Germany has the system in place exactly for this reason: a dual education system where apprenticeship helps transition young people into full-time employment.

Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden channeled her inner M.C. Escher for this topsy-turvey art installation titled The Flat Side of the Knife, as displayed at MoMA/PS1. For the display, Golden converted a two-story space with common household things like couches, beds, staircases, tables and lamps. The mirrored floor finishes the optical illusion reminiscent of Escher's mind-bending 1953 artwork Relativity.

Four-year-old River holding a LEGO octopus that she and her father Robin found at Castle Beach, Cornwall, England.

In 1997, a huge rogue wave hit the container ship Tokio Express, knocking 62 containers overboard just 20 miles off Britain's southwest coast. One of those containers contained 4,756,940 pieces of LEGO (ironically, many of those pieces are for toy kits with nautical theme, including LEGO Pirates, 418,000 swimming flippers, 97,500 scuba tanks, 26,600 life preservers, 13,000 spear guns, and 4,200 octopuses.)

Shortly after, some of those pieces of LEGO toys started washing up on the beaches of Cornwall - and today, eighteen years later, they still kept on coming.

Discovering these LEGO pieces have become a hobby for British writer and beachcomber Tracey Williams, and she has created the Lego Lost At Sea Facebook page to chronicle the all the wonderful things that people have found:

"Whoop whoop, I found a Christmas Dragon!" writes Suki Honey, who sent in this picture an hour or so ago of a Lego dragon she has just discovered on the south coast of Cornwall. Suki is an experienced dragon whisperer having lured a fair few out of their nests in recent years and now has six living with her. She has also given a few away.

Image: Nathalie Kalbach

You may have seen this photo of 85-year-old civic activist Doris Diether of West Village, New York City, feeding a squirrel with a marionette that looks like herself.

The story behind the old lady and her "mini me" marionette is actually an interesting one. It all started one day at the park, where puppeteer Ricky Syers was performing with his handmade marionette, according to Nina Golgowski of NY Daily News:

"One day she comes up to me and whispers, 'I have something for you,'" he recalled.

Opening a scrap book she revealed old newspaper clippings and articles she had written on marionettes back in 1974. Articles more recently added to her collection were ones she had seen on Syers' work, which she cut out and saved for him.

The gesture floored him.

Syers proceeded to build Diether her own marionette, made to look just like her "featuring Diether's short, white hair and rosy cheeks ... complete with handbag, cane and floral blouse and skirt."

"She's ... known as the woman who feeds the squirrels," Syers said to NY Daily News, "Now, her little marionette feeds the squirrels."

We've told you about Robert Franzese, a cosplayer who's famous for being the Real Life Peter Griffin, before on Neatorama, but we just can't get enough of him.

Thankfully, BOOM! Big Pants has just released an interview with Franzese, who revealed how he got started playing the patriarch of the Family Guy animated series:

So I slapped together stuff that I had ... I happened to have green pants from Saint Patrick's Day, I have a white button-down shirt as everybody has one, and I had a round glasses because I did Santa Claus for my company and I slapped it together ... and great! Peter Griffin! Just one stupid joke where I go to the ATM and the money came out and I was like [in Peter Griffin voice] "Oh my God, I won!" ... and from then on it's just been caught like wildfire.

Freakin' sweet, right?

Image: Reuters

What's the largest check you've ever received? We betcha it wasn't $974,790,317.77 - yep, nine hundred seventy four million seven hundred ninety thousand three hundred seventeen and, don't forget, 77 cents. It took two lines to write out the sum - as you can see above.

That's the check that Oklahoma oil magnate Harold Hamm wrote to his ex-wife Sue Ann Arnall, who promptly rejected her $1 billion dollar divorce settlement because it was "not fair." Arnall claimed that Hamm is worth an estimated $18 billion; Hamm countered that his net worth had taken significant beatings in the recent sharp fall in oil prices.

Well, while the rich people duke it out in divorce court, feast your eyes on what is probably the largest hand-written personal check you'll ever see in your lifetime.

Fruit Loops Landscape (2012) by Cirej and Lochman

Junk food has never looked so ... beautiful!

In "Processed Views: Surveying the Industrial Landscape," artists and photographers Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman collaborated to capture the beauty of junk food - or as the duo called it, "the frontier of industrial food production: the seductive and alarming intersection of nature and technology."

"As we move further away from the sources of our food, we head into uncharted territory replete with unintended consequences for the environment and for our health," wrote Ciurej and Lochman on their website.

The miniature landscapes in "Processed Views" are inspired by the works of 19th century photographer Carleton Watkins, whose photographs captured the majesty of the American West. Watkins' work of Yosemite, for instance, led to the valley's preservation as a National Park. At the same time, however, many of Watkins' photographs were commissioned by the corporate interests of the railroad, mining, lumber and milling companies. Ciurej and Lochman noted that "[Watkins'] commissions served as both documentation of and advertisement for the American West."

Ciurej and Lochman's Fruit Loops Landscape (L) Watkins Albion River (1863) (R)

In similar light, Ciurej and Lochman built their junk food landscapes as a commentary on what we can call as today's food-industrial complex.

Regardless of what you think highly processed junk food tastes like, we're sure that Ciurej and Lochman's "Processed Views" are highly enjoyable. Take a look:

Moonrise on Bologna (2014)

Cola Sea from the series Processed Views (2013)

Marshmallow Chasm from the series Processed Views (2013)

Flamin' Hot Monolith (2013)

Monoculture Plains from the series Processed Views (2013)

Saturated Fat Foothills from the series Processed Views (2013)

Vincent van Gogh

Self-portrait on canvas? That's a lot of work! What if the world's greatest painters discovered that taking selfies is much easier?

In this tongue in cheek ad campaign for Samsung NX Mini camera, photographer Fredrik Ödman and ad agency Leo Burnett teamed up to imagine what it would look like if Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, and Albrecht Dürer ditched their paintbrushes and opted to take selfies instead.

Now who said that selfies can't be high art?

Frida Kahlo

Albrecht Dürer

Via My Modern Met

New Year's Resolution #10: Get offline

New Year's Resolutions. Everyone's got them* ... for the next few weeks at least. But what if you could remind yourself every day of the promise that you made to yourself to do something (or not do something) this year?

Swedish graphic designer Viktor Hertz (previously on Neatorama) took the 12 most popular New Year's Resolutions into wonderful retro-styled posters. Now, we don't know whether staring at these gorgeous posters every day would make you stick better to your New Year's resolutions this year, but it can't hurt now, can it?

New Year's Resolution #1 Lose Weight and #2 Quit Smoking

New Year's Resolution #3 Recycle More and #4 No More Junk Food

New Year's Resolution #5 Drink Less Alcohol and #6 Explore The World

New Year's Resolution #7 Save More Money

via SutekhRising/reddit

A Jaws-inspired baby bed that looks like a shark eating a boat? Surely there is such a thing. What loving parents wouldn't want to keep their child save by instilling a healthy dose of fear of sharks and expensive hobbies such as boating?

By the look of that crying baby, we're going to need bigger diapers soon ... and in just a couple short months, they'll surely need a bigger bed. May we suggest the proud parents choose something completely different then, perhaps the clown bed from The Simpsons?