The cephalopods, formless, tentacled animals, are a significant incarnation of the monsters that tend to symbolize the spirits of the infernal regions. Their ink represents darkness. But used as a culinary ingredient, the fluid also makes for a magnificent sauce used in flavouring paellas and other rice dishes. The Nootka Indians of Vancouver believe that the squid was the first to possess the secret of fire. As the lore goes, several Nootka warriors stole this secret from the creature; the squid subsequently took legal action, but the judicial system was exasperatingly slow and the squid turned into a jellyfish, or medusa. In all known cosmogonies the medusa has bared a negative reputation; it is antisocial, aggressive, and goes hysterical whenever someone enters its den. With its head ringed of serpents, the mere sight of the Gorgon was enough to turn an enemy to stone. The jellyfish provided H. R. Geiger with the inspiration for his Alien, and Vilém Flusser for his Vampiroteutus Infernalis.
Michael Kurtzer designed an "ionic" shoe deodorizer that keep your shoes dry and clean, thus preventing odor-causing bacteria from growing - he called it the Shumidor. We like the name!
Remember a previous post on Neatorama on mobile gallows in Africa? Well, China took it one step further. Executions there are carried out in a more modern fashion: in a mobile execution chamber inside a "death van" that shuttles from town to town.
Makers of the death vans say the vehicles and injections are a civilized alternative to the firing squad, ending the life of the condemned more quickly, clinically and safely. The switch from gunshots to injections is a sign that China "promotes human rights now," says Kang Zhongwen, who designed the Jinguan Automobile death van ...
From the outside, the vans resemble the police vehicles seen daily on China's roads. A look inside reveals their function.
"I'm most proud of the bed. It's very humane, like an ambulance," Kang says. He points to the power-driven metal stretcher that glides out at an incline. "It's too brutal to haul a person aboard," he says. "This makes it convenient for the criminal and the guards."
For the past three years during mating seasons, a peacock named Mr. P has been strutting his stuff at a gas station in Brierly, southwest England, courting a gas pump!
Ornithologists reckon he is attracted by the clicking sound of the pumps, which resemble the mating calls of a broody peahen, The Times said.
His owner Shirley Horsman said: "In spring he gets his tail feathers and he gets frisky. Then he goes looking for love.
"He gets very amorous and the clicking of the petrol pumps makes the same noise as a peahen crying, 'Come on, I'm ready!'. Every time he hears someone filling up, he thinks he's on to a good thing.
"It must be so hard for him listening to these pumps giving him the come-on all day long but with no way of relieving that pent-up frustration."
His two brothers are similarly dim-witted when it comes to love. One appears to have a crush on a cat while the other has been spotted attempting to mate with a garden light.
David Hensel's laughing head sculpture was supposed to be displayed at the UK Royal Academy of Arts. When he went to the display, however, he only found a piece of wood used to support the head:
Mr Hensel assumed staff had accidentally left the sculpture in the basement where it was being stored.
But, it turns out that:
The Academy said the judging panel assumed the two pieces were separate and decided the support was better.
In what's got to be one of the funniest ironies of nature, the world's biggest sperm belongs to a teeny, tiny fruit fly named Drosophila bifurca.
That's 1,000 times longer than an average human sperm.
"To put that into perspective, if humans made sperm that long and you took a six-foot man and stood him on the goal line of a football field, his sperm would stretch out to the 40-yard line," said Adam Bjork, a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University in New York.
Why? Turns out that it's the female fly's fault:
Even after a male has successfully inseminated a female, there's still a long way to go before fertilization can take place. That's because the female bodies of many species are not passive arenas within which sperm compete, but more like obstacle courses, with hurdles and defenses in place to weed out weakling sperm.
In D. bifurca, the female reproductive tract is just slightly longer than the sperm that swim through it.
"It looks like a giant slinky filling her abdomen," Bjork told LiveScience.
The researchers think that it is this exceptionally long reproductive tract that drives the evolution of the giant sperm.
Molli's Choice non-carbonated water is pure, free of fluoride and chlorine, and is fortified with vitamin and nutrients for your pets. OK, so far, nothing special.
Here's the kicker: the water is flavored like bacon, chicken, beef tenderloin or turkey!
Norman Wagner at the University of Delaware and Eric Wetzel at the US Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, MD, have invented a liquid armor that may soon lead to light, flexible full-body armor.
The liquid - called shear thickening fluid is actually a mixture of hard nanoparticles and nonevaporating liquid. It flows normally under low-energy conditions, but when agitated or hit with an impact it stiffens and behaves like a solid. This temporary stiffening occurs less than a millisecond after impact, and is caused by the nanoparticles forming tiny clusters inside the fluid. "The particles jam up forming a log jam structure that prevents things from penetrating through them," Wagner explains.
Luke P. Lee at UC Berkeley (my alma mater, yay!) built an artificial compound eye with 8,700 hexagonal microlenses. He modeled it after the eyes of dragonflies and regular flies.
They are the first hemispherical, three-dimensional optical systems to integrate microlens arrays - thousands of tiny lenses packed side by side - with self-aligned, self-written waveguides, that is, light-conducting channels that themselves have been created by beams of light, said Lee, the Lloyd Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley.
