Sandman Upcycling made this tripod mounted lamp (translation) that features an old LP record as a reflector. He doesn't say how he does it. Perhaps he softens the record with heat and then wraps it around a mold. What do you think? How would you build a reflector like this one?
-via Recyclart
Raising children is an art, a science, and exhausting. Melissa Sher, the blogger known as Mammalingo, has done a lot of hands-on research on the subject. She's here to lay down some knowledge on you in 17 charts that have undoubtedly been peer-reviewed and subjected to experimental replication.
Yes, the color of the cup is very important. And the earlier in the morning it is, the more important the color becomes. You may not understand why, but your toddler does.
(Photos: Agustín Nieto)
Let Anna Keville Joyce loose in your kitchen and you'll have not only a tasty meal, but also an international trip. We've previously seen her depictions of food birds. Now she's showing us four capitals of Eastern European nations. She made them for Foodie Backpacker, a blogger who is traveling the world to experience the best food everywhere.
-via Fubiz
Krystal Cantu, 24, of San Antonio, Texas, lost her right arm in a car accident. She had, at the time, been getting into CrossFit and loved it. Refinery 29 reports:
“I remember every single detail from that day. As soon as I saw my arm, the CrossFit competition was the first thing that ran through my mind,” Cantu tells us. “It killed me knowing I wouldn’t be able to compete, but I was so grateful to still have my life.”
So a month later, she was back at CrossFit. Two months after that, she was competing in the Working Wounded Games.
The unstoppable Cantu posts images and videos of her impressive strength on her Instagram account. Her right arm is gone, but her fighting spirit is not.
-via Huffington Post
Andrew takes a can of beer, opens it, and sticks it to his head. Then he pours it neatly into a glass (at an angle, of course). Can you do this? Please try, then report the results in the comments.
There's no indication that Andrew is a bartender. If he is, then he has a great talent--especially if he can wiggle a cocktail shaker in this position.
-via 22 Words
J.K. Rowling's recently released short story imagines Harry Potter as a 34-year old man. If she continues writing about the wizard's life, what subject matter must she inevitably address? In these imagined sequels by Jason Mustian and Cole Mitchell, Harry is hitting a mid-life crisis. Hopefully he won't buy a sports car or have an affair. You can view more titles here.
Retire by 65, Harry? No sorcery in the world can make that happen anymore.
-via BuzzFeed
You can print out designs in chocolate and pancake batter. The next great technological hurdle is ice cream!
To do this, MIT students Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim built an extruder that was chilled by liquid nitrogen. This kept the soft serve ice cream cold as it piled on the build plate.
This kind of project never goes right from the beginning. It's a new technology with unfamiliar challenges. So the team had to eat a lot of excess ice cream from failed projects, which presumably tastes better than PLA filament.
Much of the credit, though, should go to cartoonist Chris Hallbeck who first conceived of the idea of an ice cream 3D printer.
This is You are a Poser!, a sculpture by Matthew Attard. It's made of Plexiglas, wire, and black paint. From the side, it looks like a piece of junk. From the proper perspective, though, it's a nude figure. It was on display at the Canal 05 art gallery in Brussels earlier this year. It is a commentary on the divide between public life and private life in a social networking society:
In Matthew Attard’s work we can grab a sense of the contemporary phenomenon of externalised intimacy in a society dominated by the increased use of social networks, where each person posts intimate and narcissistic pictures. We live in the era of the Selfie favoured by technological and social advances, resulting in a widespread tendency to tell the story of one’s own life through intimate photos posted on social networks. The private sphere and the public sphere are no longer delimited, but merge into one, an era where one would question the existence of intimacy. The intimate photographs on social media refer to a constructed reality, an expression of one’s ego –oriented towards the public gaze. These ‘slices’ of life represented by the Selfie, are echoed in the young artist’s work in his ‘slicing’ of the human body in sculptures spread throughout the empty spaces.
-via Lustik
(Photo: unknown/Warner Bros.)
Mr. Freeze* now has an equally icy opponent. This iceberg looks just like the Dark Knight spawned on a cold night in Crime Alley.
-via Dave Barry
*I cannot determine if Victor Fries ever completed his doctorate and should therefore be addressed as "Doctor." He wrote a dissertation, but I find no evidence that he defended it successfully.
Gritta Goetz takes her dogs out to a field to play. 5 of the 8 dogs have wheeled carts for back legs. This slows them down a little bit, but they still have fun. They're a happy pack.
-via 22 Words
This is coprolite--fossilized excrement. It dates back to between the Oligocene and Minocene Epochs, which makes it somewhere around 5.3 to 33.9 million years old. The poop was found in Lewis County, Washington State. The I.M. Chait auction house is selling it, estimating the price at between $8,000-10,000.
According to the auction house, it is a truly outstanding poop. It "boasts a wonderfully even, pale brown-yellow coloring" throughout its full "eye-watering 40 inches." It is a "truly spectacular specimen."
You can see from the picture that this is clearly true. This isn't just an impressive specimen, but a natural work of art.
-via Wunderkammer
Wearable technologies are all the rage these days. And it's not just Google Glass. There's the iWatch, the airbag suit, the birdcage dress, and more.
Gemma Correll is a cartoonist and, clearly, an innovative thinker. We need all of these wearable devices, especially the self-destructing fedora. I would suggest also building a top hat that self-destructs when worn in public with a t-shirt. That fashion trend really should end.
-via Tastefully Offensive
Today is World Snake Day. To mark the occasion, Jason G. Goldman of io9 describes how different animals respond to the microgravity that they experience on Vomit Comet aircraft. We've already seen spiders and cats respond to a situation that must be inexplicable to them. What about other species? Goldman writes:
Most animals perceive the weightlessness of microgravity as if they were falling upside down. If you drop a cat from a great height, for example, it will roll over to attempt to land on its feet. This is called the "righting response." In microgravity, this leads to repeated rolling-over.
Scientists have interpreted the repeated rolling-over as a repetitive righting response, since the animal never gets any feedback that the action was successfully executed. This behavioral pattern is common and has been observed for various mammals, frogs, and turtles in microgravity.
Snakes, however, often attack themselves or bunch up. This may be because a snake in microgravity has trouble distinguishing its own body from its surrounding environment:
In this study, the researchers loaded a bunch of snakes onto a Vomit Comet. These are planes that fly in parabolas: as the plane moves over the top of the curve, everything inside is temporarily weightless. At the bottom of the curve, it the pull of gravity actually feels a bit stronger.
Here's a video of one snake, Elaphe obsoleta, in microgravity. In the first parabola, the snake eventually knotted its tail and ceased all other body movements. In the second parabola the snake knotted its whole body and once again ceased moving while in microgravity. This posture was held through the next parabola and in the intervening time between the parabolas.
While the researchers didn't observe the self-attack behaviors seen previously, the knotting behavior that they did observe in many of their snakes still reflects a basic loss of proprioception. When snakes become stressed out, they sometimes bunch together in a group in order to relax. Which, in a way, is exactly what that airborne snake did in microgravity.
In the absence of gravity, it appears as if snakes have a difficulty distinguishing self from non-self.
[Emphasis added.]
American Ninja Warrior is a television show that airs on NBC and the Esquire Network. The center of the show is a demanding obstacle course that requires phenomenal strength and agility. For six seasons, athletes have come to the show in search of fame and recognition of their abilities. This past week, for the first time, a woman completed the this brutal obstacle course.
Kacy Catanzaro if a 5-foot tall gymnast. Her height posed particular challenges, as many of the obstacles require a lot of reach. But Catanzaro, a former NCAA Southeast Regional Gymnast of the Year, had all of the strength and skill necessary to prevail.
-via Joe Carter
The sun loves you. Unless you're driving east in the morning. Then it wants to kill you and everyone else on the road.
Pro tip: navigate by echolocation. It takes a bit of practice, but then the sun can't hurt you.
