Archeologist Zahi Hawass and his team have discovered a 4,000-year-old "missing pyramid" built by King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh who once ruled ancient Egypt:

In 1842, German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius mentioned it among his finds at Saqqara, referring to it as number 29 and calling it the "Headless Pyramid" because only its base remains. But the desert sands covered the discovery, and no archaeologist since has been able to find Menkauhor's resting place. [...]

Although archaeologists have been exploring Egypt for some 200
years, Hawass says only a third of what lies underground in Saqqara has been discovered.

"You never know what secrets the sands of Egypt hide," he said. "I always believe there will be more pyramids to discover."

Link (Photo: Nasser Nasser/AP)

From Miss Cellania, here's a post titled You know you're from California if ...

2. You make over $300,000 and still can't afford a house.

10. Gas costs $1.00 per gallon more than anywhere else in the U.S.

14. It's barely sprinkling rain and there's a report on every news station: "STORM WATCH."

20. If you drive illegally, they take your driver's license. If you're here illegally, they’ll give you one.

See the entire list: Link

Johnny Jackson went swimming for the first, and sadly the last, time. The 10-year-old boy drowned ... about an hour after he left the pool. Here's something every parent should know: the strange case of secondary drowning (also called dry drowning).

"I noticed nothing out of the ordinary, other than him taking a little bit of water in and coughing and then calming down."

Jackson estimated that Johnny had been in the pool for 45 minutes and had been wearing floatation devices on each arm, in addition to being monitored by an adult in the pool, as well as herself and a friend watching from pool chairs nearby.

But less than two hours after getting out of the pool, Johnny had defecated in his pants twice and was complaining of being tired.

After being bathed and dressing himself, Johnny walked to his bed unaided, leading his mother to believe that he was simply tired from playing in the water. But shortly after leaving him to nap, Jackson discovered her son unconscious and his face covered in a foam-like substance.

Link

Puzzle: using 4 straight lines, connect all nine dots without breaking the line (i.e. lifting your pen off the paper. Don't do write on your computer monitor, mmkay?). Easy? Can you do it with 3 straight lines?

Display solution: click for the solution - but give it a try first!

This YouTube clip shows you what definitely is the most-awesomest-est water slide EVAR! Check out this AquaLOOP water slide in Morvci, Slovenia, which comes complete with a trap door that drops you on an almost vertical slide ... followed by a complete loop!

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Another video clip | Manufacturer's website: Aquarena | - via Random Good Stuff and Gizmodo

And now, a plot that is worthy of a Hollywood movie: Hours before a daring heist at the University of British Columbia, surveillance cameras mysteriously went off-line ... then came a phone call:

Around the same time, a caller claiming to be from the alarm company phoned campus security, telling them there was a problem with the system and to ignore any alarms that might go off.

Campus security fell for the ruse and ignored an automated computer alert sent to them, police sources told CBC News.

Meanwhile surveillance cameras that were still operating captured poor pictures of what was going on inside the museum because of a policy to turn the lights off at night.

Then, as the lone guard working overnight in the museum that night left for a smoke break, the thief or thieves broke in, wearing gas masks and spraying bear spray to slow down anyone who might stumble across them.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/06/04/bc-ubc-security-ruse.html (Photo: gold box by Bill Reid with a sculpted eagle on top, stolen from the museum)

When the race for the Democratic nomination for president, Hillary Clinton was well ahead of everyone else in pretty much all metrics. So what happened? How did Obama win - and win handily - at the end?

Karen Tumulty wrote this interesting behind-the-scenes of the Obama campaign for TIME magazine:

How did he do it? How did Obama become the first Democratic insurgent in a generation or more to knock off the party's Establishment front runner? Facing an operation as formidable as Clinton's, Obama says in an interview, "was liberating ... What I'd felt was that we could try some things in a different way and build an organization that reflected my personality and what I thought the country was looking for. We didn't have to unlearn a bunch of bad habits."

When Betsy Myers first met with Obama in his Senate office on Jan. 3, 2007, about two weeks before he announced he was forming an exploratory committee to run for President, Obama laid down three ruling principles for his future chief operating officer: Run the campaign with respect; build it from the bottom up; and finally, no drama. Myers was struck by how closely Obama had studied the two campaigns of George W. Bush. "He said he wanted to run our campaign like a business," says Myers. And in a good business, the customer is king. Early on, before it had the resources to do much else, the campaign outsourced a "customer-service center" so that anyone who called, at any hour of the day or night, would find a human voice on the other end of the line.

[...]

Even Obama admits he did not expect the Internet to be such a good friend. "What I didn't anticipate was how effectively we could use the Internet to harness that grass-roots base, both on the financial side and the organizing side," Obama says. "That, I think, was probably one of the biggest surprises of the campaign, just how powerfully our message merged with the social networking and the power of the Internet."

Link (Photo: Callie Shell/Aurora for TIME)

LAist featured photographer Marshall Astor took this photo of a not-so-thrifty gas (4.76 for unleaded plus!) at a "Thrifty" gas station in San Pedro, near Los Angeles harbor:

This gas station's prices have gone nuts, but every time I drive by, there's some moron at the pump getting gouged.

For reference, I paid $4.01 at a nearby station last week, and most other nearby stations are in the low $4.10-20 range.

I'm expecting this pump to hit $5.00 soon. I have no idea what's going on at this place.

Link to Marshall's photo - via LAist

Humans are hopeless when it comes to earthquakes, right? Not so, according to Christian Klose, a geohazard researcher (who knew there's such a thing?) at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He is arguing that human activities can cause earthquakes:

"In the past, people never thought that human activity could have such a big impact, but it can" [...] It turns out, actually, that the human production of earthquakes is hardly supervillain-worthy. It's downright commonplace: Klose estimates that 25 percent of Britain's recorded seismic events were caused by people.

Most of these human-caused quakes are tiny, registering less than four on geologist's seismic scales. These window-rattlers don't occur along natural faults, and wouldn't have happened without human activity -- like mining tons of coal or potash. They occur when a mine's roof collapses, for example, as in the Crandall Canyon collapse in Utah that killed a half-dozen miners last year.

But some human actions can trigger much larger quakes along natural fault lines. That's because humans, with the aid of our massive machines, can sling enough mass around to shift the pattern of stresses in the Earth's crust. Faults that might not have caused an earthquake for a million years can suddenly be pushed to failure, as Klose argues occurred during Australia's only fatal earthquake in 1989.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/top-5-ways-that.html

WebUrbanist blog has a neat post about artists who create art from trash. This one to the left is HA Schult's "trash people":

HA Schult’s haunting ‘trash people’ have graced the streets of many of the world’s most major cities … silently open to interpretation as they travel the world and sit everywhere from the parks of New York City to the Great Wall of China. It took Schult 6 months and 30 assistants to create these strange sculptures from crushed cans, computer parts and virtually anything else he could appropriate to assemble them. What is their purpose and meaning? It is difficult to say, but they are certainly trans-cultural and intended to engage, inspire and engender reflection in those who see them and are a foil to see the reactions of different nations and groups of people.

Link

Google asked US students in grades K-12 to re-design its logo around the theme "What if ..." This one above is titled "What if we met aliens?" by Shanna Schacher, Oregon. NBC11 has a gallery of the finalists in grades 10 to 12: Link - via digg

Previously on Neatorama: Evolution of Tech Companies' Logos

A big congrats to our pal Adam "Ape Lad" Koford, the fantastic artist behind the weekly Caption Monkey game as well as the Neatoramanaut, Neatoramabot and other t-shirt designs: he has a new book coming out titled The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out.

The book will be available in Spring 2009 from Harry N. Abrams and will feature comics from the archive as well as brand new installments.

If you're a fan like I am, please go there and say hello/congrats: Link

Ooh - a bug in the game. There are two watches that fit the last answer (Someone just told me about it). Mea culpa - you're very close. Your first two answers are correct, now for the last one: it's the OTHER watch by Nekura. ;)

If you got this page before we call the game, then don't worry - go to the right answer page and you're still in the running for the prize.

When Nicolas Nova of Pasta&Vinegar blog was doing an ethnographical research about game controllers, he ran into this beauty: a redneck contraption for racing simulations!

How to turn a chair into a speedy car-simulation seat where the player seats on the back, spread the leg and pump pedals to the maximum.

A very intriguing made-up controller for car simulation that reveals how people tend to modify devices to their convenience. The creative use of duct-tape to enhance the digital experience is interesting to document as a way to find out opportunities to design both physical peripherals and digital counterparts.

http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/06/03/tweaked-alternative-game-controller/ - via Make

This has got to be the best Mario cake ever! Created by Su Yin of The Journal of a Girl who Loves to Cook blog. It took her two weeks to brainstorm and 3 days to make the cake.

Link (including photos from the various stages of the cake making process) - via 13 Geeky Baked Goods post from Geek Crafts