Michael used 16,000 toys (all made in China) bought at flea markets to create this art installation. It took 3 people working 10 hours daily for 3 days to attach all of the toys to the walls. Link (via Stuff on Fire)
Shaun takes very interesting photos of abandoned hospitals, industrial yards, and other modern day ruins. The one above is of an abandoned Bethlehem Steel yard. Link
Yes, ladies - that's a life-size statue of Brad Pitt made from chocolate. It is on display as a part of Valentine's Day celebration in a Seoul department store. http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,18049973%255E912,00.html (via Grow-a-Brain)
Ron Eglash used cornrow hairstyle to teach fractals in a math class:
Our first design tool was developed for the "African Fractals" project (Eglash 1999). Mathematics teachers with large African American student populations reported that they could not use fractals -- there was too much pressure to conform to the standard curriculum -- and that they felt that many of the examples were too culturally distant from the students. They all felt that the examples of hairstyles would work well however. Thus our first tool focused on the hairstyles, and used the term "iterative transformational geometry" rather than "fractals." The graphic above shows the result, called "Cornrow Curves."
Police caught a Des Moines, Iowa woman who faked her own death to avoid paying her traffic tickets.
Court documents show that Du tried to avoid paying several tickets by sending a letter to the courthouse. The letter is allegedly signed by Du's mother and said Du died on Dec. 5, according to court documents.
Investigators said the information submitted include a phony obituary made to look like a page from The Des Moines Register's Web site that said Du died in car accident, and her mother's signature was forged.
The case began to unravel when investigators said Du was stopped for another traffic ticket in January, which was a month after the obituary was dated.
Now, she goes from just having to pay $500 in fine to facing a 5-year prison term for committing a felony.
Police busted a ring of body-snatching funeral homes thieves who harvested body parts for transplant from over 1,000 corpses without knowledge of family members.
It's one of more than one thousand cases of what's being called medical terrorism. X-rays depict the disturbing findings. People's deceased loved ones filled with PVC piping where bones and tissue were allegedly illegally harvested and sold for transplants.
A 12-year-old boy visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his school stuck a wad of gum to a $1.5 million abstract painting "The Bay" by Helen Frankenthaler.
Holly Academy director Julie Kildee said the boy had been suspended from the charter school and says his parents also have disciplined him.
"Even though we give very strict guidelines on proper behavior and we hold students to high standards, he is only 12 and I don't think he understood the ramifications of what he did before it happened, but he certainly understands the severity of it now," said Kildee.
Haraldur Sigurdsson of the University of Rhode Island discovered the lost kingdom of Tambora, which was wiped out by a giant volcanic eruption in 1815.
Records suggest that the eruption of Mount Tambora was one of the most violent in human history.
Some 10,000 local people were killed by flows of hot gas, ash and rock. As many as 117,000 died in total as disease epidemics and starvation due to crop failures contributed to the death toll.
The year 1816 became known as "the Year Without a Summer" because of the global cooling that followed the eruption due to the release of huge amounts of volcanic ash into the atmosphere.
