When a local bakery got in economic trouble, the brave officers of the Michigan police department swooped in to protect it: they bought their favorite doughnut shop and re-named it Cops & Doughnuts!

"To Protect and Serve" has taken on a new meaning for the Clare Police Department.

When officers heard that the Clare City Bakery was closing its doors, they protected the business from certain demise.

Now, they're serving up doughnuts. [...]

In addition to doughnuts, cookies, muffins, brownies, bread, fruit turnovers and other baked goods, the bakery sells mugs and T-shirts bearing the "Cops & Doughtnuts, 100 Percent Cop-Owned" logo on the backs, and "You Have the Right to Remain Glazed," and "Handcuffs and Cream Puffs" on the fronts.

Link | Cops & Doughnuts website

The British Library has just put Codex Sinaiticus online. The world's oldest bible, handwritten over 1,600 years ago, is now available for the general public to peruse. Just don't expect to find the familiar biblical stories you learned at Sunday school:

Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.

The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections -- some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.

And some familiar -- very important -- passages are missing, including verses dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, they said.

Richard Allen Greene of CNN has more: Link | Codex Sinaiticus [wikipedia]

w00t! It's time for this week's collaboration with the always fascinating What is it? Blog. Can you guess what the strange object above is for?

Place your guess in the comment section - no prize this week, so you're playing for fame and glory (and fun, of course). Be sure to check the What is it? Blog for more clues! Good luck!

You know the honeymoon is over when this happened: when the husband found out that his new wife took too long in the airport restroom, he decided to get on the plane without her!

The woman in question, a teacher, had gone to use the facilities at the airport before boarding a flight back in Saudi Arabia.

Quite how long she stayed in the toilet remains unclear. What is certain is she emerged to discover her husband had vanished without trace. The woman, who had paid for the holiday, began a desperate search of the airport and grew increasingly concerned that something terrible had happened to him. [...]

When he arrived at his destination, he calmly told relatives his new wife was still in Malaysia. His bride was not so calm about his behaviour. She has demanded an immediate divorce.

Link

Daily Affirmation may have worked for Stuart Smalley, but psychologist Joanne Wood and colleagues found that repeating positive statements about themselves don't work for people with low self-esteem. In fact, they actually feel worse:

The researchers, from the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick, asked people with high and low self-esteem to say "I am a lovable person."

They then measured the participants' moods and their feelings about themselves. In the low self-esteem group, those who repeated the mantra felt worse afterwards compared with others who did not. However people with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive self-statement - but only slightly.

The psychologists then asked the study participants to list negative and positive thoughts about themselves. They found that, paradoxically, those with low self-esteem were in a better mood when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts.

Writing in the journal, the researchers suggest that, like overly positive praise, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as "I accept myself completely," can provoke contradictory thoughts in individuals with low self-esteem. Such negative thoughts can overwhelm the positive thoughts.

Link

To remind drivers to drive carefully during the rain in Papakura, New Zealand, the local government put out a rather disturbing billboard that bleeds when it rains. The billboard may be terrifying, but apparently it's effective: there hasn't been a fatality since.

BuzzFeed has the video clip: Link [embedded YouTube]

Image: xenonofarcticus [Flickr], modified from bacon photo by Yogma

Just in time for Fourth of July, here's American Bacon by Chris Hanson of Pocket Bacon. Who says that pork products can't be patriotic?

If the American Bacon above isn't for you, then perhaps this is more your alley: a collection of Fourth of July covers of The Saturday Evening Post throughout the decades: Link

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

You may not have the psionic power of X-Men's Professor X, but Carmaker Toyota and research lab RIKEN have created the closest thing in real life: a wheelchair that can be controlled by thought.

The device scans brain waves through sensors in a cap. In 125 thousandths of a second, the brain-controlled wheelchair can turn a thought into a command to turn the chair left or right or to move it forward. To stop, however, the user must puff out his or her cheek, activating a sensor placed there. [...]

To best pilot the wheelchair, don't try too hard, suggested RIKEN scientist Andrzej Cichocki, leader of the project.

"It works best if you imagine playing the piano with either hand while turning the wheelchair or, for instance, jogging, to [make the chair] move forward," Cichocki said. "After two to four weeks of training, the accuracy is nearly perfect and it becomes effortless."

Link

Photo: Thomas Birke

Photographer Thomas Birke went to Japan in 2008 to take photos of "the future" - and he didn't go away disappointed. Thomas' large format photography reveals how much Tokyo resembles the dystopian future city in Blade Runner.

Dark Roasted Blend has the exclusive: Link

The Standard Grill in the Standard Hotel in New York has a very unusual floor: it's made of pennies! I guess if you're a couple of pennies short on tips, just pry them off the floor!

Link

Photo: Eric Long / Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

It goes without saying that the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has some of the neatest collection of planes in the world, but this one is particularly intriguing: fly-powered aircrafts built by famed aircraft modelered Frank Ehling in the 1970s.

The AirSpace Blog has more:

Designed and built by famed aircraft modeler Frank Ehling in the 1970s, they are the smallest flying models the Museum owns. But more unusual than their size is that they are powered by flies – yes, you heard right, houseflies, the insect. Constructed from balsa wood and red tissue paper, the one-fly design has a wingspan of two inches, and the two-fly version, which features a delta-wing design, is four inches wide. In both cases, contact cement was used to attach the live powerplant to the fuselage.

If you're skeptical, there's a video clip of another fly-powered airplane, this time by inventor Thomas Fetterman (oh, you can also buy the kit from his website)

This week's collaboration with the What is it? Blog is super easy (maybe) - can you guess what the object above is used for?

Two prizes this week: a free Neatorama T-shirt for the first correct guess and another one for the funniest, but incorrect one. Place your guess in the comment section - one guess per comment, though you can enter as many as you can think of. Post no URLs or weblinks - let others play (if you do, you'll forfeit the prize).

For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog - Have fun and good luck!

With the passing of musical legend Michael Jackson, the game of comparative history can begin: who do you think is the biggest musical icon of the past century - Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, or Frank Sinatra?

Asylum blog has the low down comparing The King, The King of Pop, and the Chairman: Link

We've featured pen spinning before on Neatorama, but this activity is virtually a popular sport in Asia. There's even a club of pen spinners [warning: self-starting audio] in Thailand made up of (all young males, as far as I can tell) pen spinning enthusiasts.

Urlesque blog has a selection of some of the neatest pen spinning tricks ever posted to YouTube. And to think that all I can do to my pen now is chew its end! Link