Every year, the Nikon Small World showcases the best in microscopy. This year is no different. Here are the selection of photographs from the 2008 Nikon Small World: http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/vote-launch.php?showall=true - via Super Punch
This one above is a fluorescence micrograph of 5 days old squid (Loligo pealei) embryos, magnified 80x, by Dr. Rachel Fink of Mount Holyoke College.
Previously on Neatorama: Nikon Small World 2006, 2007 winners | Runner up from 2007 contest and my personal favorite: Zooplankton in a Drop of Water by Peter Parks
Heh! How awesome is this: the "Mechanical Aural Communication Device," a steampunk ear piece (pre-Blue Tooth era, I suppose) made by Flickr user nicrosin. Too bad it's just a prop.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicrosin/2825085895/in/set-72157603710825786/ - via GeekAlerts
The War in Darfur, Western Sudan, Africa, is now in its fifth year and its increasingly unlikely - despite their rhetorics - that major world powers will do anything to prevent the killings.
Some people are now calling for a free market/private sector solution to the conflict: if governments are unwilling to send soldiers to the area, how about the private sector hiring Blackwater mercenaries instead?
John of Locust & Honey wrote:
Several years into the Darfur genocide, it's getting increasingly unlikely that any of the major powers will do anything to prevent the extermination of these people. This problem has led some people to propose a freemarketsolution: mercenaries.
Let us say, hypothetically, that a group of churches or denominations came together and hired a mercenary army to protect the people of Darfur from their Sudanese oppressors. Would their actions be consistent with Christian principles?
Photo caption: A Darfur survivor at the site of a mass grave on the outskirts of the West Darfur town of Mukjar. Photo by: Nasser Nasser and Alfred de Montesquiou - via AP
Web Urbanist blog has a really neat post about 7 abandoned cities and places in Asia. This photo above is of the lawless Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong:
In the rogue ungoverned Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong things were so tightly packed that trash blocked off parts of buildings and many occupied apartments literally never saw the light of day.
Like something straight from a William Gibson novel, there were no police or building codes - there was no law. For nearly 50 years this slice of Hong Kong was allowed to exist and grow independently due to a legal technicality.
After the Japanese left following the second World War squatters swarmed to fill the space, with the population at 10,000 people (living on seven acres) by the early 1970s - a combination of dissidents, outlaws and both organized and disorganized criminals. Professionals who couldn’t get a license set up shop, criminals hiding from the law thrived, and the self-organized community grew to 35,000.
Then in 1993 everything changed - no one wants to deal with this lawless place anymore and it is promptly destroyed and turned into a park.
Tom and Kerry Watts love burgers. So when they got married, it was only natural that their wedding cake was shaped like a huge burger!
Firefighter Tom, 36, said: "Not only did I get to marry the woman of my dreams but I also got to have the burger of my dreams in the same day.
"I could not believe the size of the burger. It was just incredible. Everything has just been amazing. It was the best day ever."
Kerry, also 36, added: "We love burgers and thought it would be a bit of fun. It made the day even more special. We love chocolate too so we also had a chocolate cake."
For an unlucky man, Robert Evans is incredibly lucky: the homeless man was hit by a car in a hit-and-run accident, and when he walking from a hospital to his camp for that, he was hit by a train and survived!
"He got two ambulance rides last night," MacPherson said. "It's an extreme oddity that someone is hit by a car and a train on the same night. I can't imagine that this has ever happened before in Boulder."
Le Mans is a prestigious French endurance car race lasting 24 hours, which is "nasty, brutish, and not short enough," according to Jay Lamm. So he created LeMons as an homage:
Conceived in 2006 in mock homage to the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, the LeMons is likewise a marathon of man and machine. But unlike the gentlemanly Gallic race, LeMons is a 24-hour brawl and, more defining, nice cars are not welcome. The rules say that teams can spend no more than $500 on their vehicles before adding safety gear.
So this is a race of junkers, and the one that lasts from Saturday to Sunday while turning the most laps is the winner, rewarded with a prize of $1,500 — all of it in nickels.
Eddie Alterman of The New York Times has the story: Link - via digg
In the State of Texas, homeowners have the right to use deadly force to protect their lives and property. But the case of Jose Luis Gonzalez sparked a controversy when the jury found him not guilty for shooting a teenage intruder over snacks and soda:
Gonzalez had endured several break-ins at his trailer when the four boys, ranging in age from 11 to 15, broke in. Gonzalez, who was in a nearby building at the time, went into the trailer and confronted the boys with a 16-gauge shotgun. Then he forced the boys, who were unarmed, to their knees, attorneys on both sides say.
The boys say they were begging for forgiveness when Gonzalez hit them with the barrel of the shotgun and kicked them repeatedly. Then, the medical examiner testified, Anguiano was shot in the back at close range. Two mashed Twinkies and some cookies were stuffed in the pockets of his shorts.
Another boy, Jesus Soto Jr., now 16, testified that Gonzalez ordered them at gunpoint to take Anguiano's body outside.
Gonzalez said he thought Anguiano was lunging at him when he fired the shotgun.
Many people in Laredo — a town just across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where drug violence runs rampant — defended Gonzalez's actions. In online responses to articles published by the Morning Times, comments included statements such as "The kid got what he deserved" and calls to "stop the unfair prosecution."
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gQaQF39EbtehzlGgDJF34yEYviEwD93F8OD00 | (Photo from this FOXNews article)
Previously on Neatorama: Was It Self Defense or Murder?
One minute you're eating fried fish in your favorite restaurant, and the next you're spitting out worms.
Now, is that a health code violation? If you say yes, you'd be wrong:
Kelly McCoy, a representative with the Sacramento County Health Department said as long as the worm was dead, there was no health code violation committed. McCoy said the discovery is more of a customer service issue.
On average, the Sacramento County Health Department receives about one complaint a month from restaurant patrons who find dead worms in fish, McCoy said.
Problems can arise if the fish is not properly cooked and the worms are still alive. If a person eats a live worm, he can become a host to the parasite. Finding a live worm in cooked fish would show that the fish was not properly cooked, and that would also be considered a violation, McCoy said.
Psst, needlephobics! (You know who you are!) Are you afraid of shots? Investor Yoshio Oyama has invented something for you: a convenient needle-free syringe that use air pressure to deliver drugs.
Yoshio's system is called Mother's Kiss, and National Geographic News has the video clip: Link
Congress is burning the midnight oil negotiating over the bailout package, and I bet you dollar to donuts it'll happen soon. But have you ever wonder how they arrived at the magic number of $700 billion figure for the bailout? The answer may surprise you:
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."
Whaaaa? Not based on any particular data point? Then why not make it $888 billion - it's catchier and plus 8 is a lucky number.
Belly dancer Amira Sa'id has both beauty and brains (her college degree is in physics). And now, she also has a following of geeks who are enthralled by her rendition of Princess Leia belly dancing!
When she returned to performing following college and discovered a new affinity for Middle Eastern dance, it soon occurred to her that her various interests met within the gilded beauty of Princess Leia's slave girl get-up.
"I danced in the outfit for the very first time at a Halloween show at the restaurant I perform at here in Orlando," Amira said. "I then wore the costume to dance at a 2006 sci-fi convention in Connecticut. It was hit."
As Amira continued performing for ever-growing crowds of Star Wars and Star Trek fans at her beloved cons, YouTube videos of her performances (like this one from Megacon 2007, embedded) began to circulate -- building a little nerd buzz for the scantily clad nouveau celebrity. She was in demand.
The Underwire blog has more: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/09/amiri----leia-s.html (with video clips, of course!) - via The Official Star Wars Blog
UCLA mathematician Edson Smith and colleagues have found a really, really large prime number: it's 13 million digits long!
The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm. [...]
Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th-century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.
Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a cooperative system in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.
To visualize how large the prime number 243,112,609 - 1 really is, if you print out the number at 75 digits per line and 50 lines per page, it would be almost 3,500 pages long!
