Amnesty International released satellite photos showing the destruction of an entire community of Porta Farm, Zimbabwe by government forces.
"These satellite images are irrefutable evidence -- if further evidence is even needed -- that the Zimbabwean government has obliterated entire communities -- completely erased them from the map, as if they never existed," said Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of Amnesty International's Africa programme.
The organization commissioned the satellite images to demonstrate the complete destruction of Porta Farm -- a large, informal settlement that was established 16 years ago and had schools, a children's centre and a mosque. The organization also released graphic video footage showing the forced evictions taking place prior to the demolitions.
While digging in a rock quarry, a team of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists discovered a massive 2.5 kilometer long and 100 meters deep cave, since dubbed the "Ayalon cave", complete with an underground lake.
In this cave, scientists already discovered 8 new species, who evolved in complete isolation from the outside world, perhaps for millions of years.
DIY Happy has this guide on how to make your own mosquito trap using a 2-liter soda bottle.
1. Cut the top of the bottle as shown
2. Put 200ml hot water in the bottle, stir with 50gram brown sugar. Put the sugar water in cold water to cool it down til 40C (temperature)....
3. After cooling down, put the sugar water in the bottle then add the yeast. No need to mix the yeast with the sugar water. When yeast ferments, it creates carbon dioxide.
4. When you cut the bottle, dont throw the top part away because that’d be needed for step 4 - you see they put the top upside down to fit into the bottle....
5. Put black paper around the bottle since mosquitos like dark places and carbon dioxide. This mosquito trap will then start working. Mosquitos fly around the corner, so the best place to place the trap is at some dark corner.
Read the full guide: Link - via Make, Thanks Yayo!
Apparently, zombies are not just for movies - the story of Clairvius Narcisse of Haiti is the only real-life documented case of someone being made into a zombie by use of poisons:
The story begins in 1962, in Haiti. A man called Clairvius Narcisse was sold to a zombie master by his brothers, because Clairvius refused to sell his share of the family land. Soon after Clairvius "officially" died, and was buried. However, he had been later secretly unburied, and was actually working as a zombie slave on a sugar plantation with many other zombies. In 1964, his zombie master died, and he wandered across the island in a psychotic daze for the next 16 years. The drugs that made him psychotic were gradually wearing off. In 1980, he accidentally stumbled across his long-lost sister in a market place, and recognized her. She didn't recognise him, but he identified himself to her by telling her early childhood experiences that only he could possibly know.
Links: Zombie, The Zombie Poison (via Cynical-C) - Thanks Myra!
UK Department of Health are asking the public to choose a series of graphic warnings that will appear on cigarette packets:
Evidence shows that images have a greater impact than written health warnings alone, and they have already been introduced in some countries.
Images include diseased lungs, a dying smoker and a foetus in the womb. ...
Launching the consultation, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, said: "We have already made a lot of progress with the stark written warnings on cigarette packs.
"However, these messages become less effective over time so we now need to refresh our approach by introducing new hard-hitting images.
"We know that these type of warnings have already been successful in other countries such as Canada, Singapore and Brazil.
Neatorama reader Bruno sent this neat photo of faces in drywall dust and said:
My dad came home from work today with his back smeared with drywall/dust. The dust has AT LEAST 3 faces in it. Two of them are very detailed. It's in the same vein as that picture that can be seen as an old lady or a young lady.
The color enhancement on the right really makes the image pops out!
Checkout this giant Lego version of USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, by Brickshelf user Weebleleezer. We've featured this one before, actually, but it's nice to see the Lego aircraft carrier in water!
Craig Conley took it on himself to create a semicolon's dream journal. This is one entry:
I dreamed I was blind and couldn't see if there was a conjunctive adverb.
Then I had a nightmare about tatty motel room in the middle of a brutal desert, where "the beds are cheap and occasionally feature little black periods and semicolons that reveal themselves to be hungry bedbugs," just as in THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY by Luis Alberto Urrea. I woke up scratching. I remember now that the room didn't have cable, either.
As part of the Sculpture in the Heights in Ohio, Carol Hummel crocheted a cozy for this tree in front of the Cleveland Heights City Hall. The "tree sweater" was made from brightly colored nylon and synthetic material that will survive the weather:
On the most obvious level, it is a piece of clothing, personifying the tree and keeping it cozy and colorful throughout the year, enhancing the beauty of nature as well as the landscape of Northern Ohio.
On another level, the brightly colored crocheted cozy wraps the tree in personal and cultural nostalgia evoking memories of bygone times and places when life was good.
On yet another level, the cozy softens the strong tree form while also emphasizing it. It is meant to simultaneously caress and encase the tree. The cozy covering the tree fluctuates between comforting blanket and suffocating cover-up; it conceals as much as it protects; it hides as much as it reveals.
This reminds me of Erika Barcott's tree sweater, as previously posted on Neatorama, just on a much, much grander scale!
A neat little bar trick - how to make a tower of three empty glasses, stacked on top of each other:
Firstly the glasses should be empty and indentical. Secret for successful trick: imagine a clock face when you look at the glasses from above, you must remember 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock! Place your first glass down onto the table or bar. Place the second glass on top of first glass in the position of 10 o'clock. Now place the third glass on top of second glass in the position of 2 o'clock.
Brad Borevitz created this neat little program to analyze the State of the Union addresses given by US Presidents from 1790 to 2006:
SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. SOTU focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. You are invited to try and understand from this information the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.
For each State of the Union Address, the analyzer also measures the Flesch-Kincaid score, a controversial yet popular readibility index to suggest at which grade level in an American school for which the text is appropriate. The lowest score (grade level 7.1) was George W. Bush's State of the Union address on February 27, 2001.
This cool overhead photo of the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the space high above the Caspian Sea, was taken by the Discovery Space Shuttle crew.
The ISS is the largest human-made object to orbit the earth and is the result of a joint cooperation of space agencies of many countries. Because the space station always has at least 2 crew members, there has been a continuous presence of mankind in space since November 2000.
Now, some fun stuff about the ISS:
The ISS has seen the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, who spent USD 20 million to fly aboard a Russian supply mission and the first space wedding when Yuri Malenchenko on the station married Ekaterina Dmitriev who was in Texas. Another planned curiosity will be a planned EVA by Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov in summer 2006 in order to hit a golf ball from the station, an event sponsored by a Canadian golf equipment manufacturer.
Chinese doctors are considering surgery for a two-month old boy named "Jie Jie" who has three arms:
Neither of the boy's two left arms is fully functional and tests have so far been unable to determine which was more developed, said Dr. Chen Bochang, head of the orthopedics department at Shanghai Children's Medical Center.
"His case is quite peculiar. We have no record of any child with such a complete third arm," Chen said in a telephone interview. "It's quite difficult to decide how to do the operation on him."
