I <3 this knitted burger by Etsy seller nillakitty (she's selling the pattern, not the burger itself).
Our very own Jill Harness found this and other fun burger-related items, as posted on her neat article at InventorSpot: http://inventorspot.com/articles/food_trends_2009_hop_burger_bandwagon_23726
Hard work never hurt anyone, or so the adage goes, or did it? According to the latest research by Marianna Virtanen from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, long hours at work can harm your brain:
Long working hours may raise the risk of mental decline and possibly dementia, research suggests.
The Finnish-led study was based on analysis of 2,214 middle-aged British civil servants.
It found that those working more than 55 hours a week had poorer mental skills than those who worked a standard working week.
The American Journal of Epidemiology study found hard workers had problems with short-term memory and word recall.
For homeowners caught in the nation's housing collapse, having their homes foreclosed is like a nightmare that they can't fight ... or can they?
Chris Hoyer, a Tampa, Florida, lawyer told homeowners that there are three simple words that they can say to stop the foreclosure process, or at least delay it for a while: produce the note.
Kathy Lovelace lost her job and was about to lose her house, too. But then she made a seemingly simple request of the bank: Show me the original mortgage paperwork.
And just like that, the foreclosure proceedings came to a standstill.
Lovelace and other homeowners around the country are managing to stave off foreclosure by employing a strategy that goes to the heart of the whole nationwide mess.
During the real estate frenzy of the past decade, mortgages were sold and resold, bundled into securities and peddled to investors. In many cases, the original note signed by the homeowner was lost, stored away in a distant warehouse or destroyed.
Persuading a judge to compel production of hard-to-find or nonexistent documents can, at the very least, delay foreclosure, buying the homeowner some time and turning up the pressure on the lender to renegotiate the mortgage.
(Photo: Chris O'Meara/AP)
The miracle liquid can clean your toilet and is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores and oh, you can drink it because it's just ... water.
Here's the skinny on the miracle liquid known as electrolyzed water:
It turns out that zapping salt water with low-voltage electricity creates a couple of powerful yet nontoxic cleaning agents. Sodium ions are converted into sodium hydroxide, an alkaline liquid that cleans and degreases like detergent, but without the scrubbing bubbles. Chloride ions become hypochlorous acid, a potent disinfectant known as acid water.
"It's 10 times more effective than bleach in killing bacteria," said Yen-Con Hung, a professor of food science at the University of Georgia-Griffin, who has been researching electrolyzed water for more than a decade. "And it's safe."
Remember the post about Micropinna microstoma, the fish with a transparent head? In that post, Neatorama reader sniggitysnags told us about the existence of the video clip by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute researchers:
MBARI researchers Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler used video taken by unmanned, undersea robots called remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study barreleye fish in the deep waters just offshore of Central California. At depths of 600 to 800 meters (2,000 to 2,600 feet) below the surface, the ROV cameras typically showed these fish hanging motionless in the water, their eyes glowing a vivid green in the ROV's bright lights. The ROV video also revealed a previously undescribed feature of these fish--its eyes are surrounded by a transparent, fluid-filled shield that covers the top of the fish's head.
This animal is so awesome that we just have to put it on Neatorama's front page again: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks sniggitysnags!
More info at the MBARI website.
Photo from: Black is the New Black blog (I won't pretend to know my Japanese monster, so can someone point out what it is?)
Oops - I've been so busy that little did I notice we haven't posted a Caption Monkey game in a while (sorry, Adam!). So here it is!
The game is simple: come up with the funniest caption, and win an original Laugh Out Loud Cat comic by artist extraordinaire Adam Koford. One entry per comment, but you can enter as many captions as you'd like.
For inspiration, check out Adam's blog (and new Kitteh and Pip wallpaper!)
Update 2/28/09 - Adam has picked the winner: congratulations to MadMolecule who came up with this gem: “Family reunions were always tense after cousin Toshiro married an illegal alien.”Hello everyone! Just a little update on the going ons in the world of Neatorama:
Mystery Sale: Thank you to everybody who participated! This was our third and best Mystery Sale ever! Due to the high volume of orders, it'll take our warehouse about two to three weeks to ship out the Mystery sale orders - regular orders won't be affected and will ship out in just about one business day.
Some of you didn't get the automatic email receipts from the store: for some reason it seems like sbcglobal.net as well as a couple other ISPs decided that our emails are spam and nuked it en route. This is a problem we've discussed before on Neatorama, so if you have one of these emails, perhaps it's time to switch to Gmail.
Neatorama Upcoming Queue: A few naughty submitters were caught gaming the system - so we've instituted a few safeguards. For instance, now the submitter's info is anonymized during the voting period. This ensures that the focus of the vote is the post, and not the poster.
Rogue Ads: I've gotten an email saying that there's been a rogue banner ad on Neatorama. I spent all morning hunting for it, and it seems that we've located and banned the guilty party, but if you do see a NSFW ad on the blog, please let me know!
Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt Winner: Last week, we had our 8th Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt. The winner has been announced in the answer page.
Evan Booth created this awesome "gaping hole" costume for Halloween using a travel DVD player with video feed from a digital camera strapped to his back.
I don't know what is more awesome, Evan's wig or the gaping hole costume! Link - via Unique Daily
Xander of Colaplaza is an avid collector of Coca-Cola cans. He now has over 8,000 different Coke cans. Check out his Wall of Coke Cans here: http://colaplaza.com/index.aspx?PageID=7
Previously on Neatorama: 25 Strangest Collection on the Web
LiveJournal user Makzer posted a fantastic set of photos from a 1:500 scale model of the Russian capital of Moscow. Every year since 1986, workers wipe dust from each building and keep the model updated whenever new buildings sprung up.
Link - via Oddity Central
Previously on Neatorama:
Design studio Go Media has just released "the most usable sticker for real-life FAILS". Behold, the Fail Sticker.
Oh, I can think of many uses for this little puppy!
Link - via Zoomdoggle and Urlesque
Photo: chipzdarsky [Flickr]
Chip Zdarsky created this set of illustrations of every hipster's favorite political deity figure: Look out, it's Li'l Che! (Shouldn't it be chequito?) Link - via Warren Ellis
The Linden Hill United Methodist Cemetery, located between Bushwick, Brooklyn and Ridgewood, Queens, take themselves very seriously. They've got strict rules regulating ... well, everything!
It seems that about the only thing you can do at the cemetery is be dead. Oh, wait - they've probably got a rule against that too.
Here's another reason not to use Facebook: social networking websites may actually harm brains of its young users!
Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred.
The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favourite websites each day. [...]
'We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist,' she told the Mail yesterday.
'My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.'
Her comments echoed those she made during a House of Lords debate earlier this month. Then she argued that exposure to computer games, instant messaging, chat rooms and social networking sites could leave a generation with poor attention spans.
If you're one of the millions of people practicing yoga for mental and physical health, you may soon run into legal trouble: a lot of the traditional poses are being patented and trademarked by Western yoga teachers.
So, India is fighting back: it has set up a team of yoga gurus and scientists to identify and patent all ancient yoga positions or asanas to stop "patent pirates."
... as the number of Western yoga teachers has grown, there has been a steady increase in patent applications claiming each pose in their class is not part of the ancient discipline of mind and body, but their own unique invention. In the United States alone, there have been more than 130 yoga-related patents, 150 copyrights and 2,300 trademarks. Now India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is being made available to patents offices throughout the world so they can establish whether the claim is a genuine innovation or "prior art" from Indian systems of medicine.
[...] The attempt by US teachers to patent traditional poses has caused disbelief and anger in India, where it has been practiced for around 6,000 years.
"Copyrights over yoga postures and trademarks on yoga tools have become rampant in the West. Till now, we have traced 130 yoga-related patents in the US. We hope to finish putting on record at least 1500 yoga postures by the end of 2009," said Dr V.P Gupta, of the CSIR, who created the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library.
