Jehv Maravilla and Christian Toledo saw a blank wall at their local McDonald's and decided to make a fake poster of themselves and hung it up. Nobody from the restaurant noticed for almost two months!
Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
Good Show Sir is a terrific website that collects terrible sci-fi and fantasy book covers. They've got a few simple rules:
Some of the things to look for in a cover:
1. So much going on it burns your eyes. We want covers with elves, dragons, space ships and large busty women, all on the same glorious cover!
2. Terrible art. Awful… just awful. Crazed monsters that are congenital disorders with no skeletal support, brush strokes that display a hilariously misinformed understanding of anatomical proportions, unreadable and/or multiple horrible fonts, magical light orbs that lack even the most basic digital imaging techniques. That sort of thing.
3. Epic things happening. Look for people doing crazy things, such as holding a staff to a dragons eye, firing a laser pistol with one hand whilst doing stunts on a a hover bike with the other, or summoning interdimensional beasts whilst surrounded by improbably-clad warrior priestesses who are fighting off invisible fairies on top of a mountain made of crystal and sand.
I dare say they succeed! Hours and hours of browsing over at Good Show Sir. You've been warned.
Meet the a.i.r. sofa, an inflatable sofa that IKEA's global design head Marcus Engman described as "one of the biggest mistakes in IKEA's history. An amazing fiasco."
It's such an amazing failure that IKEA actually created the product twice in its history, decades apart:
That idea became the a.i.r. sofa. It solved a conundrum for the company which prided itself on its flat pack products. But the complex design of sofas and chairs meant most were sold to customers full size.
So why not an inflatable sofa, Ikea thought, that would be sold flat and then inflated at home? Once blown up, a material cover could be draped over it to make it seem just like an average sofa.
Find out why the a.i.r. sofa turned out to be a horrible product over at this article by Benedict Brock of News.com
The next time your mom or dad complains that you're being lazy, just tell 'em that it's a good evolutionary strategy.
Turns out, creatures with high basal metabolic rate have higher likelihood of death:
Species of mollusks that are now extinct had higher metabolic rates than the species that exist today, scientists announced in a paper published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Metabolic rates are the amount of energy that organisms need to carry out their daily lives. Luke Strotz, a paleontologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Kansas who is lead author of the paper, says that a high basal metabolic rate has already been shown to lead to a higher likelihood of death at the individual level.
Image: Neogene Atlas of Ancient Life / University of Kansas
Hello everyone! I'm excited to tell you that we have a new feature on Neatorama: now you can submit your own post.
It's easy to get started: just click the "Submit" link in the navigation bar and write your first post. Drag and drop that funny LOL pic, link to an interesting find on the Internet or submit a YouTube/Vimeo link.
Submitting a post will earn you some NeatoPoints (that you can redeem for really neat stuff over at the NeatoShop). If your post garners enough votes to be frontpaged, you'll get even more points!
You can also vote for worthy submitted posts by clicking the "Upcoming" link. You can upvote posts that you like and get NeatoPoints for your upvotes as well.
This user submission and upcoming posts features are new, so there may be bugs. If you find any, please let us know in the comments.
Thank you for being a loyal Neatoramanaut!
It may have taken Han 12 parsecs to complete the Kessel Run with the Millennium Falcon, but it only took 3D printing enthusiast stonecoldfx nearly 10 days to print the starship in his giant 3D printer.
Tired of bad news? Take a look at South African artist Jaco Haasbroek's project "The Good News" where he puts a punny spin on the good things in life.
The South African artist was driving home one day when he noticed a poster for a lost dog stamped with the word "STOLEN."
"It's quite sad when someone loses a pet," Haasbroek told Mashable. "The idea popped into my head that by simply adding 'Our Hearts' at the bottom of the poster, it would completely change its meaning and turn into something positive."
Well, this puts a new spin on what a "worker" xenomorph would look like! Hey, all those facehugger don't come cheap and not everyone can be the queen ...
In "Alien in Office," Lego enthusiast Dvd imagined what a xenomorph working stiff would look like.
What’s a weird thing your family did that you thought was normal till you moved out? We kept birthday candles in the freezer.
— Georgia Hardstark (@GHardstark) April 19, 2018
It all started with this tweet by podcaster Georgia Hardstark, who asked her Twitter followers what weird thing their family did that they thought were completely normal, until they learned otherwise. "We kept birthday candles in the freezer," Hardstark added.
More than 2,000 tweets answered her questions, including these gems:
When I was 4 my Mum convinced me that every so often fish and birds would change colour. So whenever a pet died and she replaced it she didn't have to tell me.
— JadeSmith (@smithy_jade) April 22, 2018
Our family had a metal gong with a padded mallet that we banged to alert the many siblings that dinner was ready. Ringing the dinner gong was a privilege and guests always freaked out when they heard it. I thought everyone used a dinner gong...
— Christina Roger (@christina_r2013) May 4, 2018
My mum used to randomly declare that we were having a “gross dinner” which meant that we didn’t have to use forks or be polite. My lil bro loved it & would spend the whole meal burping & farting & eating with his mouth open. I hated it.
— Rachael Dean (@rachaelispoetry) April 26, 2018
Ever seen an insulated vest and thought to yourself, there has to be a pants-equivalent to that thing? Well, wonder no more: insulated shorts do exist. But ... why? Are they meant to keep only the upper half of your legs warm?
Via Gear Patrol
If you're in Anchorage, Alaska, here's a neat art event that you should check out: NeatoShop artist Raven Amos and her husband Scott Elyard are having an art show called Gallimaufric Science.
Info for the opening day (May 4, 2018 - today!) and the rest of the month, as well as the fundraiser.
Thanks Raven!
Image: @aJackieLarsen
Psst, college students - are you stressed out? The University of Utah has the solution that is just in time for final exams. Behold, the "Cry Closet," a safe space where you can cry out the stress of college life in convenient privacy.
Titled "A Safe Place for Stressed Out Students Otherwise known as The Cry Closet," the whole thing is actually an art installation by senior Nemo Miller (@Nemosanartist) who made it as part of an assignment for a woodshop techniques class.
Written in front of the closet are the five rules of using the closet:
A human bone dagger (top) and a cassowary bone dagger (bottom). Image: Hood Museum of Art/Dartmouth College, Dominy NJ et al. Royal Society Open Science, 2018.
Forget your puny pocket knives - the people of Papua New Guinea know that if you want your friends and foes to take you seriously, you need a bone dagger.
Bone daggers are often carved with decorative patterns and used for hunting, fighting and for ceremonial purposes, as well as to signify social status - and even though most are made from the thigh bones of cassowary birds, the Sepik tribesmen of Papua New Guinea know that the best are made from human bones. And not just from any humans. "Human bone daggers have to be sourced from a really important person," said study author Nathaniel Dominy to LiveScience, "You can't just take the bone of any ordinary person. It has to be your father or someone who was respected in the community."
Now, science has discovered the technical reason why human bones make for better bone daggers. Dominy wrote in a paper published in Royal Society Open Science:
"We found that human and cassowary bones have similar material properties and that the geometry of human bone daggers results in higher moments of inertia and a greater resistance to bending.
"Data from finite-element models corroborated the superior mechanical performance of human bone daggers, revealing greater resistance to larger loads with fewer failed elements."
All in all, human bone daggers are twice as strong as cassowary daggers.
Image: Jiayi Jin
With a name like the "assassin bug," this little insect better has something really awesome to live up to the badass moniker.
And it does: in a research paper recently published in Nature Communications, entomologist Andrew Walker and colleagues at the University of Queensland, Australia, discovered that the assassin bug Pristhesancus plagipennis has not only one venom, but two distinct ones stored in separate glands.
“We wanted to see if assassin bugs had venom that was similar in composition to other venomous animals due to convergent evolution, or if the different feeding physiology would result in a different composition,” [Walker] said. And when their research began, essentially no one has looked at their venoms—”almost nothing was known about them.”
But what they found was much more surprising: the animals are equipped with two different venoms, which are made and stored in distinct compartments—a first for any venomous animal.
Christine Wilcox of Science Sushi has the intriguing story of the dual-venomed assassin bug.
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