A quick update about the Mystery Sale: Thank you to everyone who has participated! Your purchase helped a great deal to support the blog.

As many of you know, right after we announced the Mystery Sale yesterday, our servers crashed because of the traffic. While it was a painful experience, this elucidated a weakness in the way we set up the servers which I didn't realize before. We've taken steps to solve the problem (which, of course, involves more and more hardware).

Looking back, we've had many of these growing pains - Neato started on a shared hosting platform in 2005 (which cost a few bucks a month). Since then, we've had to move to ever larger, more complicated and thus more expensive hosting platforms. Instead of fretting over outages and meltdowns, I choose to view them as milestones in the growth of the blog (and the shop too, now).

All this is because and for you, dear Neatoramanauts! So from all of us here on Neatorama, thank you! We couldn't have made it this far without the blog's loyal readers (and hopefully, loyal customers - or soon-to-be one - of the Neatorama Online Shop). I hope you will help spread words about the blog by telling your friends and family about it.

Because of the interruption, I'm extending the Mystery Sale a little while longer - if you haven't gotten yours, there's still time. Don't miss out: Link [Update 5/6/09 - Time's Up! Thank you for all of you who participated in this Mystery Sale! For those who missed it, maybe next time!]

W00t! I'm happy to tell you that we've just started a new partnership with BuzzFeed, one of the neatest websites on the Web about, well, things going 'round the Web.

I'm sure plenty of you have gone over to visit Buzzfeed, but for those who haven't, it is a website dedicated to things that have gone or will go viral (heck, it's tagline is "the viral Web in realtime." I don't know how they do it, but Buzzfeed is consistently in the leading edge of what's hot on the Intertubes.

You can see what's going on over at Buzzfeed on Neatorama with the widget on the blog's navigation sidebar. And in the near future, I hope you'll start seeing more on Neatorama's content on BuzzFeed, cuz we'd like to be BFFWBF (Best Friends Forever With BuzzFeed - see what I did there?)

Link - Thanks Eric!

I'm a big foe of multitasking: I find that I can't concentrate and actually get less things done when I try to do multiple things at once (i.e. parallel processing) rather than just doing 'em in series. Perhaps I'm old fashioned that way, but science appears to be on my side.

Here's a very interesting article by John Tierney of The New York Times about the science of concentration and how it may be possible in the future to have a gadget that actually boosts your concentration by using lasers:

“It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”

Now that neuroscientists have identified the brain’s synchronizing mechanism, they’ve started work on therapies to strengthen attention. In the current issue of Nature, researchers from M.I.T., Penn and Stanford report that they directly induced gamma waves in mice by shining pulses of laser light through tiny optical fibers onto genetically engineered neurons. In the current issue of Neuron, Dr. Desimone and colleagues report progress in using this “optogenetic” technique in monkeys.

Ultimately, Dr. Desimone said, it may be possible to improve your attention by using pulses of light to directly synchronize your neurons, a form of direct therapy that could help people with schizophrenia and attention-deficit problems (and might have fewer side effects than drugs). If it could be done with low-wavelength light that penetrates the skull, you could simply put on (or take off) a tiny wirelessly controlled device that would be a bit like a hearing aid.

Link (Photo from the always entertaining I Can Has Cheezburger)

Scientists are one step closer to finding the cause for autism. In a new study, Joseph Piven of University of North Carolina and colleagues found that children with autism have enlarged area of the brain called the amygdala:

"We believe that children with autism have normal-sized brains at birth but at some point, in the latter part of the first year of life, it [the amygdala] begins to grow in kids with autism. And this study gives us insight inside the underlying brain mechanism so we can design more rational interventions," said lead study author Dr. Joseph Piven.

A normal-sized amygdala helps a person process faces and emotions, behavior commonly known as joint attention.

"When you see a face, you scan it, identify if it's friend or foe and make a decision about whether to move forward or avoid it," said Dr. Barry Kosofsky, chief of neurology at Cornell Medical Center, who was not affiliated with the study.

UNC researchers conducted diagnostic assessments, in addition to the MRI scans, to monitor the children's behavior. They found toddlers with a large amygdala also had joint attention problems.

Link

Google Maps: Link

You'd walk your pet dog, so why not a pet boa constrictor? That's exactly what Leon Kidd, 25, did when he got his pic snapped by Google Street View. Thank goodness, Telegraph was there:

Leon Kidd, 25, who has five snakes, was photographed with his 10ft red-tailed boa Nibblez as he carried her along Clarkson Road in North Earlham, Norwich, last summer.

Mr Kidd, who lives in nearby Gentry Place, said he goes out for walks with the female boa almost every day in the summer.

Despite her size and appearance Nibblez loves the outdoors and sliding around in the grass at Earlham Park.

Link

Tired of getting burglarized regularly, a bakery in Split, Croatia, decided to solicit the protection of a certain Hollywood action star. At least in spirit:

The posh bakery shop in Split, Croatia, had often been broken until they put up the poster of the karate champ with a sign saying: "This shop is under the protection of Chuck Norris."

Now the bakery hasn't had a single burglary for more than a month. "People seem to respect him," said a sales assistant.

http://www.croatiantimes.com/index.php?id=3713 (Photo: Europics.at)

Best Chuck Norris Fact in the comment about this post gets a Free Neatorama T-shirt. Ready, Set, Chuckify!

Photo: Dave Bullock

Dave Bullock, one of our favorite photographers here on Neatorama, has just sent us his latest photos from his visit to the innards of the National Ignition Facility. Wired has the story:

It may look like one of Michael Bay's Transformers, but this mass of machinery could soon be the birthplace of a baby star right here on Earth.

Using 192 separate lasers and a 400-foot-long series of amplifiers and filters, scientists at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility (NIF) hope to create a self-sustaining fusion reaction like the ones in the sun or the explosion of a nuclear bomb — only on a much smaller scale.

Sci-fi-inspired End of Days jokes may follow this historic undertaking like they did for CERN's Large Hadron Collider, but the science behind this advanced laser system is profoundly serious.

"Completion of the NIF construction project is a major milestone for the NIF team, for the nation and the world," said Edward Moses, the facility's principal associate director for NIF and photon science. "We are well on our way to achieving what we set out to do — controlled nuclear fusion and energy gain for the first time ever in a laboratory setting."

The hope is that this reaction will release more energy than the lasers put into the target isotopes and perhaps redefine the global energy crisis in the process.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2009/05/gallery_nif - Thanks Dave!

W00t! It's time for our collaboration with the always-fun What is It? blog. Can you guess what this strange contraption pictured to the left is for?

Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please - though you can enter as many as you'd like. Please post no URL or weblinks - let others play (you'll be disqualified if you do so).

The first person who guessed right will get a Free Neatorama T-shirt. If no one gets it right, then the funniest guess will win.

Is it a prototype Dalek? Find more clues at the What is It? Blog. Good luck!

Native Names, the Interactive Map. Graphic: Oliver Uberti, National Geographic

A lot of places in the United States have their names derived from Native American words (I'm looking at you, Punxsutawney!). But do you know what they actually mean?

Our friends over at National Geographic have put together this really spiffy interactive map of the United States, with the translated meaning of the towns, lakes, and other localities.

Here are my personal favorites:

- Malibu, CA: It makes a loud noise all the time over there
- Topeka, KS: Good place to dig potatoes
- Chicago, IL: At the skunk place
- Yosemite, CA: They are killers

But the strangest one has got to be Loleta, a small town in Northern California. It means "let's have intercourse."

Of course, the town founders claimed that the name means "pleasant place at the end of the tide water" but not according to William Bright, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology at UCLA, who wrote in his book Native American Placenames of the United States:

LOLETA (Calif., Humboldt Co.). In 1893, a resident, Mrs. Rufus F. Herrick, chose the present name, supposed to be from the local Wiyot Indian language. The Indian name was in fact katawóio't, but an elderly Indian played a joke on Mrs. Herrick by telling her that the name was hós wiwítak 'let's have intercourse!' - the latter part of which she interpreted in baby-talk fashion as Loleta (Teeter 1958).

Ouch! Link: Blog post | Interactive Map - Thanks Marilyn!

What are your favorites?

Tired of getting those "Your car warranty is about to expire" robo-call? I get those several times a week, even though I'm on the do not call list.

Well, thanks to some clever people over at reddit (oh, how I love reddit - can't beat the sophisticated level of snark there ...), we now have the identity of one of the spammers ... and their phone number! http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8i1u7/want_the_phone_number_to_the_your_cars_warranty/

Will this stop them? Probably not - according to the Arizona Daily Star, it's not just a one company operation.

A newfound frog species in the Boophis genus, photo: Miguel Vences

After finding more than a hundred new frog species in Madagascar over the past 15 years, scientists thought that they'd found everything - but a new study done by a team of international scientists had found up to 221 new species in the island country:

The work suggests that tropical amphibian diversity has been underestimated at an "unprecedented level" worldwide, the study authors write in the May 4 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"People think that we know which plant and animal species live on this planet," team member Miguel Vences, of the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, said in a statement.

"But the century of discoveries has only just begun—the majority of life-forms on Earth is still awaiting scientific recognition."

Link

Which brings us to the obligatory statement from the President of Madagascar:

With apologies to the scientists ;)

Psst, moms! Want to know the secret of having your husbands pick up some of the workload at home? Here's the secret:

New research into the idea of "maternal gatekeeping" shows how attitudes and actions by the mother may promote or impede father involvement.

"For women who insist they have the gold standard around parenting and housework, men just tend to walk away," says Joshua Coleman, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco and Oakland. "They feel their own ideas about how the house should look or … how the children should be raised aren't given equal share."

Kenney presented research she co-wrote at a meeting of the Population Association of America over the weekend. The study of 1,023 couples from 20 large cities in the USA found mothers were protective of their caregiving and educational engagement with the child but were less so for playtime activities that "were not considered threats to the mother's caregiving identity," the paper says.

"Maybe he's not more involved because mom is holding him back," Kenney says.

Link

Sin Chew Daily (coincidence? I. Don't. Think. So) and China Press reported a bizarre car accident that led to a man being Bobbitized in Singapore:

The daily reported that the incident occurred in a Singapore park where the couple met after work. To make matters worse for the woman, her husband had sent a private investigator to spy on her after suspecting that she was being unfaithful. The investigator said he had followed the woman and her boss to the park.

“On reaching the park, they did not alight from the car. Not long after, the car started to shake violently. After the car was hit by the van, there was a loud scream from the woman whose mouth was covered with blood,” he said. The woman later followed her lover to the hospital with part of the sexual organ.

Link - via Arbroath

The real estate market may be bad everywhere, but it is particularly bad in Victorville, California, where the real estate crash has turned quite literal. There, failed developments are being torn down because the cost of demolishing the houses are cheaper than completing and selling them.

Peter Y. Hong of the Los Angeles Times has more:

The Victorville demolition is one of the most dramatic ends to a bad bet made during the housing boom, but abandoned developments have become an all-too-common sight in California. Nearly 250 residential developments totaling 9,389 homes have been halted across the state, according to one research firm.

The developer of the Victorville project had hoped to sell the houses for more than $300,000 as they were being built last year, Forrester said. But reality quickly diverged from that vision. Home prices have tanked faster in San Bernardino County than any other Southern California county during the downturn. In March, the median home sale price for the county was $160,000, down 43% in a year, according to the San Diego-based research firm MDA DataQuick.

Officials of Guaranty Bank of Austin, Texas, which took over the development last year, were unavailable for comment. But Victorville city spokeswoman Yvonne Hester said the bank decided not to throw good money after bad.

"It just didn't pencil out for them," she said. "They'd have to spend a lot of money to turn around and sell the houses. They just made a financial decision to just demolish them."

Link (Photo: Christina House / LA Times)

It's often difficult to help children cope with crises and disasters, so FEMA came up with this idea (brilliant or silly? Your call): a children's coloring book of disasters. Now, the coloring book has been yanked from FEMA's website after some people complained:

The coloring book, titled “A Scary Thing Happened,” was created after the tornadoes in Glenville as a tool for children to use with a responsible parent or adult to help cope with the disaster, said Rose Olmsted, coordinator of the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team, on Wednesday. It has since been widely distributed across the country to aid children in other disasters.

Olmsted said she has not received a clear explanation from FEMA about why the coloring book is being taken down from the FEMA Web site, other than that the organization is redesigning its Web site and that there was a complaint from a parent about some of the images in the book. The cover features an image of the Twin Towers, with one tower already on fire and a plane approaching the other tower. A similar image is inside the book for children to color.

Sarah Stultz of Abert Lea Tribune has the story: http://www.albertleatribune.com/news/2009/apr/30/coloring-book-created-freeborn-county-center-natio/ - via On Deadline