We got the Wonky Donkey post upvoted to front page on Neatorama, but I feel that this needs its own post.

We dare you to watch The Scottish Granny read Wonky Donkey and not laugh!

Books are great for reading ... and for making awesome art.

Elizabeth Sagan shows us how she turns her book collection into intricate scenes straight out of our favorite fictions.

Now that's what we call "literary art"!

Check out more book art over at Sagan's Instagram.

If you love solving a maze puzzle, then you should check out Damien Soskin's Amazing Mazes webpage. This one above, titled Perspective Maze, is definitely one of my favorites!

Links here: Soskin's Digital Mazes | Hand-drawn Mazes

Things are just different in Silicon Valley.

In rural America, keeping chickens is a good way to get free fresh eggs, but in Silicon Valley, having them is a status symbol!

Peter Holley has the scoop overa at The Washington Post:

It’s not uncommon here to see chickens roaming in their owners’ homes or even roosting in bedrooms, often with diapers on, according to Leslie Citroen, 54, one of the Bay Area’s most sought after “chicken whisperers,” who does everything from selling upscale chickens and building coops to providing consultation to backyard bird owners. Her services cost $225 an hour. ...

At least one of Citroen’s clients has a personal chef who cooks for her chickens. Because they eat their birds’ eggs — if not the birds — chicken health is a top priority, Citroen said. Her clients spend “thousands” for surgeries and X-rays to keep them alive after predator attacks and illnesses.

(Photo: Christie Hemm Klok)

What do Disney princesses look like if they were modern day millennials?

Kiev-based illustrator Daria Artemieva shows us over at her Instagram page.

Check out this video of a forest in Sacre-Coeur, Quebec, Canada, that shows how heavy winds make the forest floor looks like it's breathing.

The Weather Network interviewed arborist Mark Vanderwouw who explained:

"During a rain and windstorm event the ground becomes saturated, 'loosening' the soil's cohesion with the roots as the wind is blowing on a tree's crown," he said.

"The wind is trying to 'push' the trees over, and as the force is transferred to the roots, the ground begins to 'heave'. If the winds were strong enough and lasted long enough more roots would start to break and eventually some of the trees would topple."

At 560 lb, Darren "Dibsy" McClintock so severely overweight that doctor told the 27-year-old man that he was "eating himself to death."

When Dibsy started working with trainer Mike Hind to lose weight, the personal trainer decided to do something a bit unusual: he printed and distributed posters to local restaurants, telling them not to serve Dibsy!

The strategy is working - coupled with diet and exercise, Dibsy has lost 10% of his body weight so far.

Read the rest of the story over at The Sun and follow Dibsy's weight loss progress over at his Instagram.

The Sun has the video clip "The 40-Stone Man Banned From Takeaways."

Photo: This Morning TV Show/video capture

Owl be darned! This incredible sculpture of an owl is made out of pumpkins!

Brad Goldpaint won the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018 with this amazing photo above. Titled "Transport the Soul," Goldpaint captured the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way and the canyons of the Moab, Utah all in one shot.

Check out these fantastic rubber band ball/sphere sculptures by Joshua Hudson. This one above is titled "Radial Eminence" and is 10-inch in diameter.

"Phaup's Legacy" rubber band sphere, 18 inch diameter.

via Rusty's Electric Dreams

This painting is called Edmond de Belamy and despite being a bit blurry, it's actually remarkable because it's the first painting produced by Artificial Intelligence that's going up for sale at a major auction house.

From Christie's:

This portrait, however, is not the product of a human mind. It was created by an artificial intelligence, an algorithm defined by that algebraic formula with its many parentheses.

The painting, if that is the right term, is one of a group of portraits of the fictional Belamy family created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier. They are engaged in exploring the interface between art and artificial intelligence, and their method goes by the acronym GAN, which stands for ‘generative adversarial network’.

Photo: Christie's

After spending 2,400 years at the bottom of the Black Sea, a Greek vessel that looks just like Odysseus's ship has been discovered:

A remote-controlled submarine piloted by British scientists spotted the ship lying on its side about 50 miles off the coast of Bulgaria.

The ship lies in over 1.3miles of water, deep in the Black Sea where the water is anoxic (oxygen free) which can preserve organic material for thousands of years.

A small piece of the vessel has been carbon dated and it is confirmed as coming from 400BC - making the ship the oldest intact shipwreck known to mankind.

The Daily Mail has the story.

A new photo released by NASA revealed something a bit strange off the

Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula: a rectangular iceberg!

Iceberg of unusual geometric shapes are actually not unknown.

Edges of tabular icebergs, long and flat, are formed by splitting from an ice shelf.

NASA research plane took the photo above last week.

Such a phenomenon surely has nothing to do with anything unnatural. No sirree!

Doesn't it look like a headless chicken?

That's actually the sea cucumber Enypniastes eximia that was filmed in the Southern Ocean off East Antarctica.

View a neat clip of the sea cucumber and other weird deep sea creatures over at the BBC.

Chemists at the University of Science and Technology of China have created synthetic wood using materials derived from the shells of shrimps and crabs:

To create the synthetic wood, scientists took a solution of polymer resin and added a pinch of chitosan, a sugar polymer derived from the shells of shrimp and crabs. They freeze-dried the solution, yielding a structure filled with tiny pores and channels supported by the chitosan. Then they heated the resin to temperatures as high as 200 degrees Celsius to cure it, forging strong chemical bonds. ...

Unlike natural wood, the new material does not require years to grow. Moreover, it readily repels water—samples soaked in water and in a strong acid bath for 30 days scarcely weakened, whereas samples of balsa wood tested under similar conditions lost two thirds of their strength and 40 percent of their crush resistance. The new material was also difficult to ignite and stopped burning when it was removed from the flame.

Read the rest over at Scientific American.

Image: Zhi-Long Yu et al., Science Advances vol 4. no. 8, Aug 10, 2018