In all honesty, I put up this post just for the title. But if your kids want their very own plush liver (and what kid doesn't? The liver - he's a good guy - he works in detox!), you can get one on sale at I Heart Guts: http://iheartguts.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=54&zenid=b765e3c2ad9c1d3c6e3a55c8c63d0961 - via Celebrating the Absurd

Richard Florida wrote an interesting editorial for The Atlantic about how the current economic crisis will shape the future for Americans:

The historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has noted that in some respects, today’s crisis most closely resembles the “Long Depression,” which stretched, by one definition, from 1873 to 1896. It began as a banking crisis brought on by insolvent mortgages and complex financial instruments, and quickly spread to the real economy, leading to mass unemployment that reached 25 percent in New York.

During that crisis, rising industries like railroads, petroleum, and steel were consolidated, old ones failed, and the way was paved for a period of remarkable innovation and industrial growth. In 1870, New England mill towns like Lowell, Lawrence, Manchester, and Springfield were among the country’s most productive industrial cities, and America’s population overwhelmingly lived in the countryside. By 1900, the economic geography had been transformed from a patchwork of farm plots and small mercantile towns to a landscape increasingly dominated by giant factory cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo.

How might various cities and regions fare as the crash of 2008 reverberates into 2009, 2010, and beyond? Which places will be spared the worst pain, and which left permanently scarred?

Will Detroit - currently the 11th largest city in the US - become a ghost town? Will homeownership continue its role as the keystone of the US economy? Read the rest here: Link - via 3 Quarks Daily (Illustration: Sean McCabe)

Forget the clunky and boxy prototypical robot we see in bad Sci-Fi movies all the time!

Behold The Rise of Discord, the sleek and sexy mechanical representation of Eris, the Greek goddess of strife and discord by Greg Brotherton of Brotron. Check out the rest of his sculptures here: Link - via Musecrack

I <3 Doug Savage's awesome cartoon series Savage Chickens (featured previously on Neatorama here). I particularly like this one - because my computer does the same thing, except it's probably thinking of ways to cause serious bodily harm.

Link - via Nag on the Lake

Electron micrograph: Claire J. Healy

That's Rhinebothrium sp., a species of tapeworm that parasitize stingrays. It was recently discovered by Claire J. Healy of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and her colleagues.

Attention hypochondriacs: the next time you suffer from abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite and malnutrition, it may just be one of this fellow's human-infecting cousins living in your intestines. They can grow up to 30 feet long, y'know.

Link

Hello, everybody! After writing about 100 articles for Neatorama in the past couple of years, I can't bear to write another Top 10 article - at least for a while (other Neatorama authors undoubtedly will pick up the slack). So, please let me try something new. In what I hope will be a regular feature, I'm going to take a regular object and try find the neatest nuggets of knowledge about it.

Let's start with the letter A ... say, apple. So without any further ado, here is Neatolicious Fun Facts: Apple.

1. The Wild Ancestor of All Apples: Malus sieversii

Today, there are some 7,500 different cultivars of apples that are derived from a single wild ancestor from Central Asia: Malus sieversii. In fact, that species still grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Xinjiang, China.

Photo: Malus sieversii, as collected by the 1996 Kazakhstan Apple Collection Mission of the USDA Agricultural Research Service

2. Apple: The Forbidden Fruit?

From The Fall of Man by Titian (c. 1570)

In the Bible, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. When they eat the fruit anyway, Adam and Even are expelled from the Garden of Eden.

But why apple? The Book of Genesis never mentioned the fruit as apple - in fact, early interpretations pointed to fig, grapes, citron (a lemonlike fruit), carob, and pomegranate (the most likely culprit), but never apple.

The bad rap for apple began when Christians translated the Bible into Latin. Malus, the Latin word for bad or evil is very similar to the word for apple (malum). It seems like the assignation of apple as the forbidden fruit was the result of a pun. Source

3. "An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away"

The first version of the proverb is actually from Pembrokeshire, Wales. The first recorded use was in the February 1866 edition of Notes and Queries magazine: "Eat an apple on going to bed, and you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread." (Source)

It became popular, however, when fruit specialist J.T. Stinson used it in his speech at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

Apples do have a lot of good nutrients and pythochemicals that may help reduce the risk of heart disease, colon cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, and even tooth decay. But don't eat the seeds; they are mildly poisonous.

4. The Big Apple

Why is New York City called The Big Apple? Parking ticket judge by day and amateur etymologist by night Barry Popik tracked down the first use of the term "The Big Apple" back to the 1920s by journalist John J. Fitz Gerald, a horse racing reporter for the New York Morning Telegraph.

Fitz Gerald overheard stable hands in New Orleans racetrack talk about the "Big Apple" racing circuit, meaning "the big time" where a lot of money could be won (Horses love apples, by the way). He liked the term, and wrote a column called "Around the Big Apple" on February 18, 1924:

The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There's only one Big Apple. That's New York. (Source)

5. Bobbing for Apples

The game bobbing for apples comes from Celtic festival of Samhain, the precursor of Halloween. As apple is associated with love or fertility, the winner of the game - the person who catch an apple with his or her teeth first - is supposed to be the first to marry. (Photo: calebdzahnd [Flickr])

On February 19, 2008, Ahrita Furman of Brooklyn, New York - who has set 216 official Guinness records - set the world record for bobbing for apples: He bobbed 33 apples in a minute.

Oh, and remember that tradition of throwing rice at weddings? Well, that came from the tradition of throwing apples at newlyweds (yikes!)

6. Record-Breaking Apples

In 2005, Chisato Iwasaki of Hirosaki City, Japan, grew the world's heaviest apple. At 4 lb 1 oz (1.849 kg), it's the size of a small pumpkin!

The world's longest single continuous apple peel was created in 1976 by Kathy Wafler Madison at the tender age of 16. It measured 172 feet, 4 inches long. Kathy grew up to run her own apple tree nursery!

7. Newton's Apple

Legend has it that Isaac Newton was inspired to formulate his theory of universal gravitation when an apple fell on his head. Though that was apocryphal, the part that the physicist was inspired by the apple was actually real. Newton himself wrote that he witnessed the falling apple while staring out the window of his house at Woolsthorpe Manor.

Purported offspring of the Newton’s Apple Tree in Woolsthorpe Manor (Image Source: Mathematical Association of America)

What happened to the apple tree? Various places claim that they have the tree. The King's School in Grantham claims that they bought the tree, uprooted it and transported it to the headmaster's garden. The staff of Woolsthorpe Manor, of course, disagreed: they claim that the tree is still present in their garden. Trinity College in Cambridge claimed that they have a descendant of the original tree growing outside the room Newton lived when he studied there.

Oh, and what kind of apple was it? It's a green cooking apple called the Flower of Kent: a pear-shaped, mealy, and generally of poor quality of an apple by today's standard.

See also: Neatorama's 10 Strange Facts About Newton

8. How Did Apple the Computer Company Get Its Name?

Steve Jobs worked summer jobs at an apple farm and liked the Beatles' record label, Apple. So, when he and Steve Wozniak was trying to figure out a name for their new computer company, they decided that if they couldn't think of a better name, they'd name it Apple. Apparently, they couldn't! (Source)

... and talking about Newton, would you know it that Apple's first logo was of Sir Isaac sitting underneath an apple tree?

See also: Neatorama's Evolution of Tech Logos

Do you know more apple fun facts? Please add them to the comment ... and while you're at it, what should we do for "B"?

Clifford Stoll, astronomer, scientist and author of Silicon Snake Oil, is undoubtedly a smart man (he once caught KGB hacker back in the infancy of the Internet). But did you know that he has a very ... unique form of public speaking? Great Scott!

Here's Clifford giving a talk at TED 2006 ... wait till he pulls out a slide rule! Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Fazed

Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous wrote an interesting post about that on-again, off-again idea of micropayments (when the economy is bad and ad revenues are down, proponents of micropayments pop up like mushrooms after a rainy day).

Whether you agree with him or not, some of the things he proposed are intriguing:

And here's how it works...

1) When you click a link to a story -- from Google, from a blog, from NYTimes.com, from whatever -- the article appears as it normally does, except the Subscription Center lightbox appears over it, with the text opaquely visible in the background.

2) You are given a few options to quickly choose from: pay for the single article or buy a weekly/monthly pass.

3) If you already have an account (and if you're a NYTimes.com user, you do), clicking "Buy" will cause the lightbox to disappear. You can begin reading the story. Instantly.

4) You will not be charged for anything until you accumulate $5 of charges. At that point, you will be asked to enter your credit card or PayPal information, if you haven't already.

Link

Dark Roasted Blend has a really neat post about some of the strangest medieval suit of armors ever made. This one is the the Armet of Henry VIII or better known as the Horned Helmet, made by Austrian goldsmith Konrad Seusenhofer as part of armor presented by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I to King of England Henry VIII in 1514 - via Royal Armouries

If you're wondering why the glasses, it's because Henry VIII was near-sighted.

Link

The Purchase Brothers (David and Ian) are commercial directors who created this fan-film adaptation of the uber-popular video game Half-Life called Escape from City 17. As you watch this, keep in mind that it is filmed guerilla-style with "no money, no time, no crew, no script." The first two episodes were done on a budget of $500. Imagine what they could do with a Hollywood-sized budget!

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Blue's News

Joel Watson of Hijinks Ensue made this printable Valentine's Day card that is oh-so-wrong if you think about it. If you don't get this, then it's obvious that you've never watched Star Wars before ...

Link

Corner Forest by Yuken Teruya

Yuken Teruya sees art in everyday objects. Things like pizza boxes and toilet paper rolls. It takes a certain kind of genius to find beauty in something ordinary, but Yuken has done exactly that: http://www.yukenteruyastudio.com/en/projects/ - via Booooooom!

Our pal What is it? Blog just put together a whatchamacallit quiz of farm tools. We've seen many of these strange tools before on our What is it? feature on Neatorama - but many are new (not to mention strange!)

If you like the Hammer Quiz, check this one out: Link - Thanks Rob!

Ah, the Pringles can. Is there anything it can't do? It works as a container that keeps not-potato chips crispy for years (yes, a court has ruled that Pringles aren't potato chips for tax purposes), act as a Yagi antenna (the infamous Pringles WiFi antenna), and even as a coffin.

Now, thanks to Neatorama reader Nick M., an empty Pringles can also doubles as an iPod dock:

I made this project for a friend in about an hour. It is al made from found parts laying around our apartment. I uses a set of speakers, and an ipod charging cable. The entire project cost around 5 dollars and was quite fun. The project requires nothing but the can itself, a set of speakers, hot glue, ipod cable (if you want), and an exacto knife. The can holds itself up.

Thanks Nick M.!

(Links open in a new browser window/tab)

For more the web's most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.