It's the stuff of science fiction made into science facts: a team of Japanese scientists have managed to turn human blood cells into stem cells, and then into immature human eggs.

While the potential for medical benefits is vast, there's a dark side to this, as explained by Rob Stein of All Things Considered on NPR:

Theoretically, babies someday could be made from the blood, hair or skin cells of children, grandmothers, even deceased people. "So there are some very weird possibilities emerging," says Ronald Green, a Dartmouth bioethicist.

People could even potentially make babies from cells stolen from unwitting celebrities, such as skin cells left behind on a soda can or follicles from hair clipped at a salon.

"A woman might want to have George Clooney's baby," Green says. "And his hairdresser could start selling his hair follicles online. So we suddenly could see many, many progeny of George Clooney without his consent."

Photo: immature human cells (pink) created using stem cells derived from blood cells / Saitou Lab

If you're a neighbor of Keith Smith, you'll know that the grass is always greener and intricately maintained in his yard.

Smith, a groundsman at a golf club in Birmingham, England, sure mows a lot of grass. In fact, you can say that he's a bit obsessed with mowing:

A garden wizard has spent 273 hours mowing an amazing geometric pattern into his front lawn - using an antique lawnmower from the 1940s.

Keith Smith, 41, cut his grass three times a DAY for three months throughout the summer - spending 21 hours a week on his unique creation - to be crowned champion at this year's Creative Lawn Stripes Competition.

Photo: @AlletMowers - via Laughing Squid

Professional photographer and mother of two Samantha Bishop of Roaming Magnolias Photography wanted a nice family photo of her kids. Her son Levi, however, has autism and doesn't like having his photos taken.

So Bishop came up with a genius solution. She wrote:

My son, Levi, is autistic. He doesn't like having his photos taken because he gets uncomfortable with things like eye contact and smiling on command. So instead of begging and pleading for a few good photos, this year him and Lola went a different route. Why not let him wear a t-rex costume and make the best of it?

View the rest of the photoshoot over at RoamingMagnolias's imgur gallery - via Boing Boing.

Is this guy the reincarnation of Beethoven?

When pizza delivery driver Bryce Dudal saw a baby grand piano at the Varchetti house, he asked if he could play a little song. The Varchettis agreed, and Dudal played a little something from memory: Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata Third Movement.

Now, who doesn't like a side of Beethoven with your pizza?

Via VideoSift

Ecologist Leandro Moraes of the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil, noticed something strange in the Amazon forest. He spotted an erebid moth (Gorgone macarea) on the back of a bird, drinking tears straight from the sleeping bird's eye!

See the video clip over at Science.

If you love J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and LEGO, then The Brothers Brick blog has a feature that's perfect for you.

Behold The Third Age: Journey Through Middle Earth, a collaboration amongst 10 builders to create 13 iconic scenes from the the fantasy movies in LEGO.

Above is the Bag End, as built by Northern LEGO.

Goblin Town by Mountain Hobbit.

View the rest over at The Brothers Brick.

Remember the water bottle flipping craze that swept the Internet a couple of years ago?

The premise of bottle flipping seems simple: throw a plastic bottle filled with water, have it flip once in the air and then land upright. Turns out, it's not as easy as it sounds.

Enter physics! A team of first-year physics students from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have solved the secret of the perfect bottle flip:

"In physics, this is called conservation of angular momentum," [study co-author Mees Flapper] said.

With the right amount of fluid to slow the bottle's spin, the container loses rotational speed and appears to pause at a horizontal position. The maneuver culminates in a descent that is nearly vertical, "followed by a smooth landing," the study authors reported.

Read the rest of the study over at LiveScience

Or view the video clip above.

(Image: Alvaro Marin)

This is a never-ending elevator pic.twitter.com/zIg1gfrJeb

— INSIDER (@thisisinsider) September 23, 2018

In the Prague City Hall in Prague, Czech Republic, there's a paternoster elevator that's always running. All you have to do is hop on ... but don't miss. There's an obvious reason it's also called the "elevator of death!"

MUST-WATCH: 7-year-old @MaleaEmma delivers one of the best national anthem performances in @StubHubCenter history. pic.twitter.com/SPTY2naMDA

— LA Galaxy (@LAGalaxy) September 24, 2018

Seven-year-old Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja sure can sing! Watch her rock the national anthem before a soccer match in California.

Biologist Toshihisa Yashiro of the University of Sydney and colleagues have discovered the first-known asexual termite colony in the world. But why get rid of the males?

So why did all-female populations evolve at all? To puzzle out the answer, Yashiro and his colleagues pitted the asexual and sexual termites head-to-head—literally. When they measured the noggins of soldier termites from the all-female and mixed-sex colonies, the researchers found that, unsurprisingly, those in female-only colonies looked a lot more alike. But in this case, uniformity wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

With their relatively unarmored bodies, termites aren’t built for the offensive. Instead, when the colony is under attack, the insect’s main mode of defense often involves plugging the entrances to their nests with their own heads. A variety of head sizes could actually be a burden rather than a boon, meaning the loss of males may have actually empowered these female fighters to survive an assault.

Read the rest over at this article by Katherine Wu over at the Smithsonian

Photo: Mature termite queen surrounded by workers and soldiers. (CSIRO/CC BY 3.0)

Eighteen-year-old teen Aldi Novel Adilang's job was to keep the lamps aboard a fishing hut lit to attract fish - but when heavy winds knocked the floating hut off its mooring, he was swept out to sea:

Aldi had what the Jakarta Post described as "one of the loneliest jobs in the world," as a lamp keeper for a floating fish aggregator called a "rompong." The vessel is compromised of a modest hut on top of a raft of logs. Aldi's job was to keep the lamps lit at night to attract fish for a period of six months.

Stationed 125 kilometers (77 miles) out to sea off the coast of Indonesia's North Sulawesi region, Aldi's only human contact was a weekly delivery of supplies or via a walkie-talkie.

But on July 14, strong winds unmoored the small vessel, which had no engine and no paddle on board, and blew it thousands of miles away from home toward the remote US island territory of Guam.

After his supplies ran out, Aldi began catching fish from the sea and burning small portions of the rompong's wooden base to cook them on.

Read the rest over at DW

We've featured Adam Hillman before on Neatorama, but the self-described "object arranger" is back with many more creations. This one above is "TicStack", which I wish we could get for real at the supermarket.

DAREDEVIL RACCOON: Incredible video shows a raccoon climbing roughly nine stories up a building off the Ocean City Boardwalk. It then appears to turn around and jump from the building, spiraling toward the ground. Then it gets up and walks away…

MORE: https://t.co/a7MU4FnFDT pic.twitter.com/njbzrFcWTF

— FOX 29 (@FOX29philly) September 21, 2018

South Carolina resident Micha Rea was walking on the boardwalk of Ocean City, New Jersey, when he spotted a raccoon scaling a building.  When the animal reached the ninth story ... it JUMPED down!

Click on the embedded video to see what happened next.

It's like a scene straight out of a sci-fi movie: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 asteroid mission has successfully landed two rovers on an asteroid called Ryugu.

The photo above was taken by Minerva-II 1A rover during a hop after it landed on the asteroid. The rovers are designed to hop along the asteroid's surface, and take photos and data, as well as collect samples.

This photo was taken by the second rover, shortly after separating from the spacecraft, on its way down to the asteroid.

Photo: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

Scientists from Yale-NUS College and the University of Fribourg have discovered a novel color-generating mechanism used by the iridescent rainbow weevil to create a spectrum of colors:

... the researchers determined that the scales of the insect were composed of a 3D photonic crystalline structure made from chitin, the main ingredient in insect exoskeletons. They further discovered that the vibrant rainbow colors on this weevil’s scales are caused by two factors: the size of the crystal structure that makes up each scale, and the volume of chitin used to form the crystal structure. Larger scales have a larger crystalline structure and use a larger volume of chitin to reflect red light; smaller scales have a smaller crystalline structure and use a smaller volume of chitin to reflect blue light.

“The ability to produce these structures, which are able to provide a high color fidelity regardless of the angle you view it from, will have applications in any industry which deals with color production,” said Yale-NUS professor Vinodkumar Saranathan. "We can use these structures in cosmetics and other pigmentations to ensure high-fidelity hues, or in digital displays in your phone or tablet, which will allow you to view it from any angle and see the same true image without any color distortion. We can even use them to make reflective cladding for optical fibers to minimize signal loss during transmission."

(Image: Dr. Bodo D. Wilts)