Japanese tombstone maker Ishinokoe has begun offering memorials that feature QR codes. Want to know more about the person entombed there? Just whip out your smartphone and scan the code.
http://www.japantrends.com/qr-code-graves-give-a-memorial-window/ via Copyranter | Photo: Jcast
Here's a clever ad that UNICEF put out a few years ago to raise funds for people who have been maimed by landmines. Stickers, camouflaged to look like pavement, were left on sidewalks. When someone steps on one, it sticks to the bottom of his/her shoe. The underside informs the victim that if it had been a landmine, s/he would have been mutilated.
Geothermal energy is plentiful in Iceland, so that nation is considering running an electrical cable under the ocean to Europe to sell its excess electricity. If successful, it'll be the longest undersea electrical cable in the world:
Depending on the destination country, the cable would be between 1,200 and 1,900 kilometres (745-1,180 miles) long, making it "the longest sub-sea cable in the world."
The project aims for the exportation of some five terawatt-hours (or five billion kilowatt-hours) each year, Jonsdottir said.
At current power prices in Europe, that corresponds to between 250 and 320 million euros ($350-448 million) in exports annually, and is enough to cover the average annual consumption of 1.25 million European households.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i8DwT00oi-riUPoOpVqp2NRScSDA?docId=CNG.269669ec3457e631da554fe16c1e45a2.221 via Popular Science | Photo via Flickr user ThinkGeoEnergy used under Creative Commons license
Japanese artist Sagaki Keita creates pen and ink illustrations that are themselves composed of tiny figures inside, from people to anthropomorphic ice cream cones. The level of detail that he provides is really astounding. You can see several other examples at the link.
Link probably goes on so many adventures because he's trying to avoid long, awkward conversations with his mother. This is one of nine hilarious images by Andrew Bridgman.
Jessica Bethune, Aiswarya Kolisetty, Jessica Noglows, and Rob Sobecki are students at the Olin College of Engineering. For a class assignment, they built a machine that can figure out the combination to any Masterlock combination padlock. The LockCracker tries every possible combination, spinning the dial until it's successful.
Pink Tentacle has many pictures of some colorfully decorated gas tanks that can be found in Japan. Watermelon paint schemes are apparently common. You know, the shape would lend itself very well to a Pokémon ball.
An enormous snow sculpture of Batman was spotted in Ludlow, Vermont. As you can see from another photo at the link, it rises up to the second storey of an adjoining building.
http://www.comicsbeat.com/2011/03/09/majestic-snow-batman-towers-over-vermont/ via blastr | Photo: SkiDiva
You may have noticed that the human penis lacks spines protruding from the surface. This is in contrast to many animals, including other primates such as chimpanzees, which use the spines for sexual competition:
It has long been believed that humans evolved smooth penises as a result of adopting a more monogamous reproductive strategy than their early human ancestors. Those ancestors may have used penile spines to remove the sperm of competitors when they mated with females.
Researchers, while studying another topic, stumbled upon one explanation by comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes:
They first systematically identified 510 DNA sequences missing in humans and present in chimps, finding that those sequences were almost exclusively from the non-coding regions of the genome, between genes. They then homed in on two sequences whose absence in humans they thought might be interesting -- one from near the androgen receptor (AR) gene and one from near a gene involved in tumour suppression (GADD45G).
Inserting the chimpanzee sequences into mouse embryos revealed that the former sequence produced both the hard penile spines and sensory whiskers present in some animals. The latter sequence acted as a kind of brake on the growth of specific brain regions -- with the removal of its function appearing to have paved the way for the evolution of the larger human brain.
Link | Photo by Flickr user lightmatter used under Creative Commons license
In fact, the entire crew of the Enterprise does. YouTube user BlackMoonCGI did an excellent editing job and showed what's on Spock's Facebook feed. It appears that he and Christine Chapel have had a bit of a tiff. Content warning: foul language.
Artist Candy Chang has displayed an enormous chalkboard at 900 Marigny Street in New Orleans. On it, she's printed the phrase "Before I die I want to _______" several dozen times. Just walk up, grab a piece of chalk, which Chang provides, and fill in the blank.
Finally! I don't want to touch the inside handle of the door of a public restroom. Normally I'll grab it with some paper towel. But this is a good solution, especially for those restrooms that have hot air blowers instead of paper towel dispensers. The Toepender is a handle that attaches to the bottom of a door. Grab it with your foot.
Michael Blake assigned note values to numerals and played pi to the first 31 decimal places. He starts with a simply piano melody, but then he brings in an accordion, a xylophone, a ukulele, a banjo, and other instruments.
Artist Ward Shelley creates enormous, sprawling timelines that show the development of different ideas or cultural trends. Pictured above is a small selection from his chart illustrating the history of science fiction. One part that I find interesting at the very top of the diagram (see at link) is his notion that the genre was, during the 1940s, dominated by an emphasis on science, then sociology, and then forms.
http://scimaps.org/submissions/7-digital_libraries/maps/thumbs/024_LG.jpg via reddit | Artist's Website
In 1910, a French illustrator named Villemard created a series of postcards which imagined life in the year 2000. He speculated that we would use motorized roller skates, firefighters would fly on batwings, and machines would dress and powder ladies automatically. As for school, as you can see, information will be simply downloaded into our heads.
