From ForeignPolicy.com:

About 2 billion people live in countries that are in danger of collapse....

America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” That was the conclusion of the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy. For a country whose foreign policy in the 20th century was dominated by the struggles against powerful states such as Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, the U.S. assessment is striking. ...

The 10 most at-risk countries in the index have already shown clear signs of state failure. Ivory Coast, a country cut in half by civil war, is the most vulnerable to disintegration; it would probably collapse completely if U.N. peacekeeping forces pulled out. It is followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Yemen, Liberia, and Haiti. The index includes others whose instability is less widely acknowledged, including Bangladesh (17th), Guatemala (31st), Egypt (38th), Saudi Arabia (45th), and Russia (59th).

Link

Concreteloop has a set of photos of kids dressing up as celebs. Can you guess who they are dressing up as in the photo above?

Now, you may rail against the commercial celebrity-worship nature of our society, but you must admit that the kids are very cute and that the photos are well done ...

http://www.concreteloop.com/archives/2006/03/kids_posing_as_celebs.html

From the website:

A Mexican couple were recovering separately after a marital spat got out of control and saw them firing guns, throwing knives and hurling homemade bombs, Mexican daily Milenio said on Monday.

In scenes taken straight out of hit romantic comedy "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Juan Espinosa and Irma Contreras fought until their house blew up in a homemade gasoline bomb explosion, Milenio said. ...

Espinosa told reporters he was glad his wife had suffered burns, while Contreras said she was only sorry she had not "hacked off his manhood" during the fight.

http://www.sun2surf.com/article.cfm?id=13349

Bogotá street musician César López was inspired by a rifle-carrying soldier when he created the escopetarra, a gun made into a guitar.

The first escopetarra -- a combination of escopeta and guitarra, the Spanish words for rifle and guitar -- was born a few months later.

The model was part Winchester, part Stratocaster, and all López. The 32-year-old musician has long been involved in efforts to use music to ease the pain of violence in this war-ravaged country.

Link (via Boing Boing)

Designed by RIKEN Bio-Mimetic Control Research Center, this Japanese robot called RI-MAN is the world's first robot designed for lifting and carrying humans. It can also see, hear, and smell and is aimed at helping to care for the growing number of elderly in Japan.

Yahoo News, Pink Tentacle Articles | RI-MAN Website (in Japanese, with video clips)

This museum in Lima, Peru has a very unique collection: thousands of preserved diseases human brains!

Visitors can see brains of persons felled by
AIDS, Alzheimers, clots, hemorrhages, heart attacks and a myriad of tumors.

The museum is the proud owner of a brain that died of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, the human variant of "mad cow," which results in progressive dementia and loss of muscle control.

Also on exhibit: the brains of people who died of trichinosis, the most common brain disease in Peru, caused by eating undercooked meat, usually pork.

Link

From the website:

Art can neither be good or bad, only interesting or boring, says Eddie Breen, the leading practitioner of piggyback art. He takes paintings that he considers boring or incomplete, and inserts nuns, flying jesuses, flame people, or demons, changing the meaning of the composition in ways to suit his visions, to coopt the elements and create his own worlds.

Link (via Jaf Project)

(Thanks Kandra!)

Take a look at some amazing fractals made by petri-dish grown bacteria.

Link (via The Huge Entity)

Got a large family? You need this 18 foot Amish dining room table that can seat 22 people comfortably. Link (via Unique Daily)

See if you can tell whether these series of photos are of programming language inventors or serial killers....

Link (via Our Strange World)

Dennis paints a series of life-like images of flowers and sliced fruits.

From the website:

For the past two years, I have been working on a series of images featuring large-scale slices of fruit. When I began these paintings, I was interested in what the inside of the fruits revealed. The seeds and veins, and the translucent flesh and color changes, were intriguing. The more I focused on them, the more fascinating they became.

You should see the larger pics - they're pretty cool!

Link (via All about Nothing)

What do you get when you cross a metro bus and a tank? You get Rhino Runner, the toughest bus in the world.

The Rhino Runner, manufactured by Labock Technologies of Florida, is a hand-made bus built from the chassis up. Everything is custom made and Rhino Runners are built to withstand every caliber of bullet, including armour-piercing rounds. The composite armour is so light it floats on water, and a special one-way bulletproof glass prevents bullets from coming in but you can shoot out through the glass just fine. The bus comes in seating configurations of 17, 24 and 36 and has run-flat tires when you don’t want to go out and change one. It weighs 13 tons, has 12 gun ports and costs about $275,000.

Link | Labock Tech website (via Presurfer)

Flickr user minifig has a few Beatles album cover redone in Lego: Lego It Be, Abbey Road, and Sgt. Peppers Lego Hearts Club Band (via Bibi's Box)