We read to kids, so why not let the kids read to to ... cats?! Here's the story of the Austin Humane Society's reading-to-cats program:

"It's just a fun, positive experience for the kids and great socialization for the cats," said Lisa Starr, the Austin Humane Society's director of marketing. She says Austin has the only reading-to-cats program there is (where else could be goofy enough?).

So how do the cats like being read to by kids?

"Some of them just look at 'em," Lisa said. "Some of them run away. Certainly each cat is going to have a different reaction. But the goal for the cat is that they'll have increased exposure to children. It's to help them to be more social and for them to be more adoptable."

When I was out there, Matt Leighty, 9, was reading a book called "So What's It Like to Be a Cat?" to a group of cats. So how'd that go, son? "They started fighting each other," Matt said. "Big tails and hissing. They don't appear to be doing it right now. I think they like this book better: 'Monkey for Sale.' "

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/08/29/0829kelso.html - Thanks Madalina Hinojosa!

(Photo: Lisa Starr/Austin Human Society)

Photo: lisascenic [Flickr]

For today's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game, you get to caption this cute photo of Lisa and Robb's cat Linguine:

Lisa and I have been having a chuckle over the thought that this picture of our dear little Linguine is, unbeknown to us, an internet meme – a fad, which becomes almost inexplicably popular on the web.

This picture was taken about two years ago. I remember at the time, it was a major achievement for me to stand and balance well enough to take a picture while holding a camera in one hand and a bamboo-skewered strawberry in another and convince a cat we like to call "Fidget" to cooperate.

Funniest caption wins an original Laugh-Out-Loud Cats cartoon by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford. Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please, but you can enter as many as you can think of.

For inspiration, don't forget to check out Adam's blog! Good luck!

The medical discipline of plastic surgery (a reconstructive surgery, not to be confused with cosmetic surgery) has its origins in the horrors of World War I. The massive use of heavy artilleries in the war resulted not only in greater number of deaths, but also of horrific facial injuries.

Artist Paddy Hartley of Project Façade uses photos and surgical notes from The Gillies Archive to create an art exhibition about the birth of plastic surgery, detailing the work of Sir Harold in putting back the lives of the injured servicemen by reconstructing their faces:

The First World War was a war dominated by high explosives and heavy artillery. Battlefield casualties included an unprecedented number with horrific facial injuries - injuries so severe the men were commonly unrecognizable to loved ones and friends. Often unable to see, hear, speak eat or drink, they struggled to re-assimilate back into civilian life. This secondary tragedy - the living unable to "live" - catalyzed Surgeon Sir Harold Gillies to transform the fledgling discipline of plastic surgery based on his unrivalled observation of the profoundly wounded and his ability to push the parameters of the profession beyond all known techniques.

Link: Project Façade | Article on Telegraph - via Look at This (BTW, Happy Birthday to webmaster ILuvNUFC)

Photo: In 1917, gunnery warrant officer Walter Yeo was presumably the first patient treated by Sir Harold Gillies, the "father of plastic surgery," to undergo a new skin graft procedure called a tubed pedicle. More on him here: http://www.projectfacade.com/index.php?/case/C125/

(Links open in a new browser window/tab)

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

Photo: Daniel Deutsch

That's a full-size and driveable replica of Luke Skywalker's Landspeeder from Star Wars, built by Daniel Deutsch in his own garage:

We built this fiberglass replica landspeeder last spring from the ground up on a custom aluminum chassis. The electric drive system is capable of a top speed around 25 mph. The speeder is the same size as the original, and can travel several miles on a single battery charge.

Check out the "damaged" paint job on the Landspeeder. Excellent! http://web.mac.com/danieldeutsch/landspeeder/Landspeeder.html - Thanks Richard Young!

The speeder was a collaborative effort. The body mold and windshield were produced in California, and then shipped here to Orlando. We then did the bodywork, chassis, and electronics. The side grills were waterjet cut from PVC, then spaced and stacked.

It has lighting effects in the engine pods that change with the sound during acceleration. I added a short video clip to my web gallery of the speeder being driven, there's also one of the engine pod lights. A few folks posted that they thought the pics were photoshopped, however it's most likely the fact that I use a fill-flash when taking outdoor shots. I am attaching an additional couple photos of the body mold, etc., for you to this email.

The entire speeder was built in six weeks, and was first revealed in Los Angeles at the Star Wars Celebration IV event (30th anniv.) in May 2007.

Rising food prices in Cambodia has a particularly strange consequence: it makes rat meat more popular as inflation has put the price of other meat out of the reach of poor people!

Spicy field rat dishes with garlic thrown in have become particularly popular at a time when beef costs 20,000 riel a kg.

Officials said rats were fleeing to higher ground from flooded areas of the lower Mekong Delta, making it easier for villagers to catch them.

"Many children are happy making some money from selling the animals to the markets, but they keep some for their family," Ly Marong, an agriculture official, said by telephone from the Koh Thom district on the border with Vietnam.

Link

That's Neatorama's resident rock star, drummer Rober Birming of Eskobar (who also blogs at GeekAlerts) and his dubious cat Prosit (that's Swedish for "bless you," he told me). For today's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game, funniest caption will win the O RLY shirt from our Online Store (all shirts on sale now! Hurry and get your own!)

Contest rules are darned simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please, but you can submit as many as you'd like.

By the way, Eskobar released their 5th album Death in Athens earlier this year (covered here on Neatorama). For inspiration and Laugh-Out-Loud cat shenanigans, check out Adam "Ape Lad" Koford's Hobotopia.

Good luck and have fun!

Today's collaboration with the What is it? blog brings us this strange object. Is it a weapon? Or simply a tool? Can you guess what it is for?

Place your guess in the comment section - no prize this week, so you're playing for fame and glory only. But please post no URL - let others play.

For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog. Good luck, guys!

Today's collaboration with What is it? blog brings us this strange-looking object. Can you guess what it is for?

Place your guess in the comment section - no prize this week, you're playing for fame and glory only. Please post no URL to let others play.

Don't forget to check out What is it? blog for more clues!

Good luck!

Like I often said, there's everything for everyone on the web. Like those who happen to like "the perfect portrait." This blog, with a tongue-in-cheek name of Sexy People, is dedicated to finding and displaying portraits of some strange ...

(L) Policeman: something's wrong with the proportion there (R) Hunting Season: hmm.

... but mostly ordinary people who just so happen to take "perfect portrait."

(L) Cousins - looks just like certain famous plumber duo (R) Zack: business up front ...

Check out the rest of the "Sexy People" here: Link [despite the name, it's SFW]

Photo: Michael Melford

If you haven't discovered it yet, National Geographic magazine's Our Shot is one of the best daily photo gallery sites on the web. Their photos are always fantastic and cover a wide berth breadth of subjects.

Case in point, this photo of an aqueduct built by King Herod during the first century B.C. to carry water from a lake across 17 miles of desert into the ancient city of Caesarea (present day Israel). Michael Melford took this fantastic shot by moonlight.

Link

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart put up this cheeky billboard to welcome those "rich, white oligarchs" attending the Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities! Found at east-lake.net

What body parts do artists of various music genre most often sing about? As part of their Fleshmap art project, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg looked at the data from rock to jazz to hip-hop to find what body parts are most often mentioned.

Link [Tiny NSFW images]- via Buzzfeed (no surprise there, a lot of booty in hip-hop!)

A black bear at Woburn Safari Park in Bedforshire, UK, has a knack for stealing hubcaps. But when the bear saw that Azra Noonari's car had its hubcaps stolen some weeks ago, it offered her its hubcap!

"I saw it take a hubcap off the car then start walking towards us. I locked all the doors quickly, we didn't know what it would do.

"It put the hubcap down and then banged on the window, as if it was trying to get my attention. It was almost like it wanted to give me the wheel cap."

Mrs Noonari said the strange situation came only weeks after all four of her own hubcaps were taken. She added: "Maybe the bear thought I needed the hubcap.

Link

Water, good ol' H₂O, seems like a pretty simple substance to you and me. But in reality, water - the foundation of life and most common of liquid - is really weird and scientists actually don't completely understand how water works.

Here are 5 really weird things about water:

1. Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Water

Take two pails of water; fill one with hot water and the other one with cold water, and put them in the freezer. The hot one would be frozen before the cold one. But wait, you say, that's counterintuitive: wouldn't the hot water have to cool down to the temperature of the cold water before proceeding to freezing temperature, whereas the cold one has "less to go" before freezing?

In 1963, a Tanzanian high-school student named Erasto B. Mpemba was freezing hot ice cream mix in a cooking class when he noticed that a hot mix actually froze faster than a cold mix. When he asked his teacher about this phenomenon, his teacher ridiculed him by saying "All I can say is that is Mpemba's physics and not universal physics."

Thankfully, Mpemba didn't back down - he convinced a physics professor to conduct an experiment which eventually confirmed his observations: in certain conditions, hot water indeed freezes before cold water*.

Actually, Mpemba was in good company. The phenomenon of hot water freezing first, now called the "Mpemba effect" was noted by none other than Aristotle, Francis Bacon and René Descartes.

But how do scientists explain this strange phenomenon? It turns out that no one really knows but there are several possible explanations, including differences in supercooling (see below), evaporation, frost formation, convection, and effects of dissolved gasses between the hot and cold water.

*In reality - of course - it's much more complex than that: hot water freezes first (it forms ice at a higher temperature than cold water), whereas cold water freezes faster (it takes less time to reach the supercooled state from which it forms ice) - see discussion on our previous blog post about this topic.

2. Supercooling and "Instant" Ice

Everybody knows that when you cool water to 0 °C (32 °F) it forms ice ... except that in some cases it doesn't! You can actually chill very pure water past its freezing point (at standard pressure, no cheating!) without it ever becoming solid.

Scientist know a lot about supercooling: it turns out that ice crystals need nucleation points to start forming. These nucleation points could be anything from gas bubbles to impurities to the rough surface of the container. Without these things, water would continue to be a "supercooled" liquid well below its freezing point.

When nucleation is triggered, then a supercooled water would "instantly" turn into ice, as this very cool video clip by Phil Medina of MrSciGuy shows:

Note: Similarly, superheated water remains liquid even when heated past its boiling point.

3. Glassy Water

Quick: how many phases of water are there? If you answer three (liquid, gas, and solid) you'd be wrong. There are at least 5 different phases of liquid water and 14 different phases (that scientists have found so far) of ice.

Remember the supercooling we talked about before? Well, it turns out that no matter what you do, at -38 °C even the purest supercooled water spontaneously turns into ice (with a little audible "bang" no less). But what happens if you continue to lower the temperature? Well, at -120 °C something strange starts to happen: the water becomes ultraviscous, or thick like molasses. And below -135 °C, it becomes "glassy water," a solid with no crystal structure. (Source)

4. Quantum Properties of Water

At a molecular level, water is even weirder. In 1995, a neutron scattering experiment got a weird result: physicists found that when neutrons were aimed at water molecules, they "saw" 25% fewer hydrogen protons than expected.

Long story short, at the level of attoseconds (10^-18 seconds) there is a weird quantum effect going on and the chemical formula for water isn't H₂O. It's actually H_1.5O! (Source)

5. Does Water Have Memory?

In the alternative medicine of homeopathy, a dilute solution of a compound can is purported to have healing effects, even if the dilution factor is so large that statistically there isn't a single molecule of anything in it except for water. Homeopathy proponents explain this paradox with a concept called "water memory" where water molecules "remember" what particles were once dissolved in it.

This made no sense to Madeleine Ennis, a pharmacologist and professor at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Ennis, who also happened to be a vocal critic of homeopathy, devised an experiment to disprove "water memory" once and for all - but discovered that her result was the exact opposite!

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains skeptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry. (Source)

So far, other scientists failed to reproduce Ennis' experimental findings (throughout, Ennis herself was skeptical of the result's interpretation that water has a "memory" but maintained that the phenomenon she saw was real).

See also Jacques Benveniste's Nature controversy | Louise Rey's thermoluminescence study

More recently, a team of scientists at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Max Born Institute in Germany, studying water dynamics using fancy multi-dimensional nonlinear infrared spectroscopy did find that water have a memory of sorts - in form of hydrogen bond network amongst water molecules. Problem for homeopathy was, this effect lasted only 50 femtoseconds (5 x 10^-14 seconds)!

Bonus: Ice Spikes

photo: SnowCrystals

Ice spikes are, well, spikes that grow out of ice cube trays. They look like stalagmites found in caves, and you can make 'em yourself using distilled water. Kenneth G. Libbrecht of SnowCrystals explains:

How do Ice Spikes Form?

Ice spikes grow as the water in an ice cube tray turns to ice. The water first freezes on the top surface, around the edges of what will become the ice cube. The ice slowly freezes in from the edges, until just a small hole is left unfrozen in the surface. At the same time, while the surface is freezing, more ice starts to form around the sides of the cube.

Since ice expands as it freezes, the ice freezing below the surface starts to push water up through the hole in the surface ice (see diagram). If the conditions are just right, then water will be forced out of the hole in the ice and it will freeze into an ice spike, a bit like lava pouring out of a hole in the ground to makes a volcano. But water does not flow down the sides of a thin spike, so in that way it is different from a volcano. Rather, the water freezes around the rim of the tube, and thus adds to its length. The spike can continue growing taller until all the water freezes, cutting off the supply, or until the tube freezes shut. The tallest spike we've seen growing in an ordinary ice cube tray was 56mm (2.2in) long. (Source)

Bonus 2: Make Instant Snow with Boiling Water

What do you get when you throw boiling water to the air in subzero weather? Instant snow. Interestingly, it only works with boiling hot water:

[YouTube clip]

These aren't the only things weird about water. We didn't talk about how water density changes with temperature (ice, for instance, is less dense than water so it floats - a key property of water that made life possible in the oceans and lakes). Nor did we talk about the weirdly strong surface tension of water, ordered clustering of liquid water, and so on. If you are interested, check out the Anomalous Properties of Water article by Martin Chaplin