| When you die, you can have Dean VandenBiesen of LifeGem turn your body (or your pet's) into a diamond. He uses a super-hot oven to turn the carbon in the ashes into graphite, then press it into blue and yellow diamonds (retail value $2,700 to $20,000!). Now, when someone approach you saying "why, that's a beautiful diamond ring you're wearing", you can reply "thank you, it's my mother!"... Link to LifeGem | Link to news article (thanks Nina!) |
Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
So, looters will be shot, then smacked with a claw hammer, bit by a big dog, and made to sleep with an ugly woman. Sign seen during Katrina's aftermath. |
| David McCarthy took this Vision of Science 2005 winning image of a grain of salt and a single peppercorn using a scanning electron microscope. For more great images of science see: http://www.visions-of-science.co.uk/f-2005winners.htm |
| The male nursery spider faces a dilemma - the female spider is much bigger and likes to eat male suitors while mating. So, it develops a clever strategy: it brings a dead insect to distract the female spider, then it plays dead. Then when the feame is busy munching on the gift, it revives, creeps under her and begins mating. Link(via Aberrant News) |
| In the Florida everglades, they found a dead carcass of a 13-foot Burmese python whose stomach had burst from trying to swallow a 6-foot alligator whole. Link |
Susie Lockheed's 15-year old dog Sam, a purebred Chinese Crested Hairless, has won the World's Ugliest Dog competition for 3 years in a row. Link |
| Blur Studio made this 2002 Academy Award-nominated short animation about an old lady who hears music all the time but can't figure out where it's coming from. http://www.blur.com/indexl.html (click on the Quicktime icon) |
| Japanese company Murata Manufacturing has created a robot that rides a bike without falling! The robot, tentatively named Murata Boy, has gyro sensors to detect velocity and inclination, an ultrasonic sensor to detect obstacles, and a shock sensor to detect rough surfaces. The picture shows the robot riding its bike down a thin balance beam. Link |
| Ron Grant chooses a canvas unlike any other artists - he paints on tooth! After establishing his own dental lab 25 years ago, he became interested in painting on dental crowns. His first design was a painted molar for his mom. Now he's famous. http://www.rongrant.com/artist.asp (via Aberrant News) |
Next year, for the first time in nearly 100 years of having presidents looking somber in coins, the US Mint is trying something different: a new nickel with Jefferson half-smiling (really? That's a half-smile?). From the website: "It isn't a silly smile or a smirk, but a sense of optimism that I was trying to convey with the expression," says Jamie Franki, an associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. His drawing was chosen out of 147 entries. |
| The Los Angeles Grim Society is an associaton of otherwise normal indiiduals who share the same morbid curiosity about the less savory aspects of the city of Los Angeles. Link One of their website's features is celebrity tombstones in local LA cemeteries. |
| Michael Brown (no, not the FEMA guy) and his team of astronomers who discovered the "10th" planet (yes, behind pluto) in our solar system said that the object has a moon. The new planet - if it is a planet, is dubbed Xena and the moon is now called Gabrielle after the popular TV series. Link |