Do you ever wish to go back to high school and have a "do over"? Well that's exactly what Wendy Brown did:

A 33-year-old woman was charged with stealing her daughter's identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading team.

Wendy Brown, of Green Bay, was charged with felony identity theft after enrolling in Ashwaubenon High School as her daughter, who lives in Nevada with Brown's mother.

The criminal complaint said Brown admitted to telling school officials she was 15 because she wanted to get her high school diploma and join the cheerleading squad.

She allegedly attended practices, received a cheerleader's locker and went to a pool party at the cheerleading coach's house.

Hey, if Drew Barrymore did it (in the 1999 Never Been Kissed movie), so could she! http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipppcZU-H4xC9lQiAOQFSF-cfrdAD935FLP00

Illustration: Mary Parrish / Smithsonian Institution

Mark D. Uhen, a paleontologist from Alabama Museum of Natural History found that prehistoric whales didn't have flukes - they had legs and tails!

After analyzing the fossils for almost three years, Uhen concluded the individual had a tail, but no fluke, and that Georgiacetus wiggled its hips and moved its entire trunk up and down through the water to move forward—a swim stroke whales no longer use.

Link - Thanks Marilyn!

Photo: Jorge Barrios [wikipedia]

Neatorama reader Jon Jason sent in this post from Scienceray titled Top 5 Animals with the Most Stunning Eyes - I was most fascinated with the cat with two different eye colors. It turns out, heterochromia (difference in coloration) of the eye is caused by the difference in concentration and distribution of the pigment melanin.

In cats, a form of heterochromia results in odd-eyed cats [wiki] - they are most commonly found in white cats and is due to the white spotting gene. In these cats, melanin granules are prevented from reaching one eye during development, resulting in a cat with one blue eye and one green, yellow, or brown eye.

What do you do with that tear-off flap from your NetFlix mailings? Rather than throwing them away, how about making ... a Netflix origami instead?

Link - Thanks FlapperT!

This font is Windlass

The annual Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up on September 19th - so to get your blog ready, here's a nifty collection of Pirate symbols and fonts: Link - via Matt Cutts

Did superstitions develop to help mankind survive? Evolutionary biologist Kevin Foster of Harvard University and Hanna Kokko of the University of Helsinki thought so:

Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

For instance, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but "if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around," Foster says.

Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine explains:

"Our brains are pattern-recognition machines, connecting the dots and creating meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B, and sometimes it is not," he says. "When it isn't, we err in thinking that it is, but for the most part this process isn't likely to remove us from the gene pool, and thus magical thinking will always be a part of the human condition."

Link - via Slashdot

Overuse of antibiotics had given rise to scary antibiotic-resistant microbes, and now, the same thing is happening to head lice:

As school begins, health officials and parents across the country are bracing for this year's bout of what some call "super lice," drug-resistant critters that fend off nearly all pesticides, even as experts say better treatments for the ancient, annoying condition may be waiting in the wings.

Researchers have been warning for years that head lice in the U.S. and around the world are developing immunity to the strong insecticides used in over-the-counter and prescription shampoos. It takes just three to five years for the bugs to adapt to a new product, despite claims to the contrary by the manufacturers, noted Shirley C. Gordon, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University who studies persistent head lice.

Link - via Fark

To bring a smile to passer-bys, the Glenn Group installed these guerilla street signs all over downtown Reno:

The Glenn Group wrote sign copy, created layouts for the printer, and hung the signs. The design team’s primary challenges were to make the signs as authentic looking as possible, and to duck police officers and city officials during “installation.”

In a city where street art and renegade postings are not common, the signs inspired surprise, delight, and good feelings about the city.

Their little guerilla art project won an award at the 2008 Society for Environmental Graphic Design Award: Link - via RuebenMiller

Gilly Delaney thought that her beloved cat was killed by a car nine years ago - so it was a pleasant surprise when one day, the cat turned up alive!

An overjoyed cat owner has been reunited with her missing moggy - nine years after she wandered off from her family home. Gilly Delaney was left distraught after hearing her beloved pet Dixie had been killed by a car in 1999.

So it came as a big surprise when RSPCA officers turned up on Mrs Delaney's doorstep - with her missing pet in tow. The officers, who scanned Dixie's microchip, returned her to her rightful owner after they found her wandering less than half a mile away from Mrs Delaney's home.

Link - Thanks Geekazoid!

Australia's Vert Design Shop made this CNC cut flat pack hammer cleverly called MC Mallet - At $40, it's way cheaper to go to a local hardware store. But then again, a real hammer is no where near as cool a conversational piece as this baby.

http://www.vertdesign.com.au/vert_glass.html - via Vector Vault, Thanks Adam!

With all the hullabaloo over how the Large Hadron Collider will spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth, do you think that scientists will leave it up to chance? Noooo, of course not. They have a secret emergency abort button.

Thanks to Skepchick blog, we now have secret photos from inside the CERN research center: Link - Thanks Rebecca Watson!

Don't miss: I Survived the Large Hadron Collider T-shirt

The folks at Trossen Robotics sent us this: Disney's latest pixar animation movie star WALL-E made from LEGO! Forum user bazmarc, who created it, wrote:

He is entirely made of Lego parts and Lego NXT Mindstorms Robotic System for brains, he is fully automated and animated and programed using Labview's NXT-G software. I have built many prototype before coming to this final revision (wall-e rev.3)

Technical specs:
1 Mindstorms NXT with rechargable pack,
3 Lego NXT Servo Motors,
4 Lego PowerFonctions motors,
2 PF IR receiver,
1 UltraSonic sensor,
1 Sound sensor,
1 InfraRed link sensor, (HiTechnic)
1 NXTservo module and
1 mini RC servo, (Mindsensors)
10 AA batteries
Lego parts mainly from the Bulldozer set #8275 and other parts from various technic sets.

Link: to Trossen Robotics Forum | Blog (with YouTube clip) - Thanks TR Team!

Photo: Edward Burtynsky

There is a particular industrial activity that is quite unique to the small town of Alang in Gujarat Province, India. It's not manufacturing - actually, it's the exact opposite: in Alang, container and cruise ships are taken apart piece by piece ... by hand!

When large container ships can contain or ship no more, they're sent halfway round the world to so-called "breaking yards," where they're dismantled (basically by hand), their metal is salvaged, and their intact structures, down to the doors and toilet seats, are put back onto the global marketplace.

Today, these yards tend to be in Bangladesh or India – but location is just a question of cheap labor and (nonexistent) environmental regulations.

It's toxic work.

BLDBLOG has more: Link | More photos of shipbreaking by Edward Burtynsky

Photo: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

That's "Controller of the Universe" by Damián Ortega, a sculpture consisting of dozens of tools suspended in the air as though in midexplosion. It's part of an exhibit on art as means of change: Link - via who killed bambi?

Photo: Library of Congress

Remember the scene in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987), where Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner, saved a baby-carriage that went down the stairs while in a shoot-out with Capone's henchmen?

The famous scene is actually a homage to a 1925 The Battleship Potyomkin movie:

The scene is well-known: the sequence of the baby falling down the Odessa Steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s movie The Battleship Potyomkin (1925) is one of the most influential films in movie history (many films pay homage to the scene like Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables).

Although, the massacre on the steps is fictional (it took place in the surrounding streets), the movie has made many people see in the “Odessa Steps” the alleged place of bloodbath. The "Odessa Steps" (now known as the “Potemkin Steps”, by architect Francesco Boffo) got a tourist attraction – the movie has exaggerate the place.

anArchitecture has the movie clip and more on the famous Steps: Link | Wikipedia entry on the Potempkin Stairs