Oobject gathered pictures of dentistry from past and probably pain-filled generations. Despite the visceral horror one might feel by looking at some of them, one must also admire the ingenuity behind some of them, such as this clockwork drill from the Nineteenth Century.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So flip your restaurant placemat by artist Shane Parker over and keep yourself busy while watching The Shining.
Here's how the game works: stack plastic cups into a pyramid. Take a laser pointer and agitate a cat until he chases the red dot right into the stacked cups. If you knock over all of cups, that's a strike.
Fish in the Hudson River (US) have developed an immunity to polychlorinated biphenyls, a type of toxic chemicals developed in 1929. They've done so at an amazing speed:
"This is very, very rapid evolutionary change," said Isaac Wirgin, an environmental toxicologist at New York University’s School of Medicine, and the study's lead investigator. "Normally you think of evolution occurring in thousands to millions of years. You’re talking about all this occurring in 20 to 50 generations maybe.”
The fish in question is called the tomcod, and scientists have determined the specific gene which has changed:
It turns out the fish sport a handy modification to a gene encoding a protein known to regulate the toxic effects of PCBs and related chemicals, called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor2, or AHR2.
The fish are missing six base pairs of DNA of the AHR2 gene, and the two amino acids each triplet would code for. PCBs bind poorly to the mutated receptors, apparently blunting the chemicals' effects.
The adaptation occurs almost universally in Hudson River tomcod, but crops up only infrequently in two other tomcod populations—in Connecticut’s Niantic River and the Shinnecock Bay at Long Island’s south shore.
Link via reddit | Photo: Mark Mattson, Normandeau Associates
Sergei Khvalin made a propeller, attached it to a 200 cc lawnmower engine, and strapped the assembly to his back. This clever gadget can move him as fast as 25 MPH.
What was the purpose for Stonehenge? Was it a calendar, an observatory, or a sacrificial site? These suggestions by archaeologists assume that it was a completed design instead of a project left half-finished because the assembly instructions were provided by IKEA. Justin Pollard, John Lloyd and Stevyn Colgan composed a cartoon illustrating this explanation. This is the first panel; the latter stages seem to involve magic and heavy drinking.
http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/02/ikea-stonehenge/ via The Presurfer
A few days ago, a viral video surfaced which appeared to show a functional model of M.C. Escher's famous drawing "Waterfall". How does it work? Boing Boing reader David Goldman proposes the above explanation. Do you agree?
An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "The Game" told of a simple but addictive video game that captured the minds of Enterprise crewmen. It sent subliminal messages to them and nearly permitted pirates to capture the ship. Wesley Crusher and a young ensign played by Ashley Judd discerned the true, malevolent nature of the game and saved everyone. That game, Collin Cannaday proposes, was actually Angry Birds.
Artist Jason Freeny made this fully functional Rubik's Cube puzzle shaped like a brain. Presumably some knowledge of anatomy is essential to solving it.
In the past, we've looked at somewhat fanciful efforts to improve the ammunition capacity of revolvers, including the use of feeding chains, superimposed loads, and stacked chambers. There's not much information available about this solution except that it's a single-action .38 that can fire 24 rounds.
Charlton Heston starred in three post-apocalyptic films: Planet of the Apes (1968), Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973). As an art project, Anthony Discenza took the entire run of each film and spliced them together at every tenth of a second while playing their soundtracks simultaneously. The result is both trippy and coherent.
It is said that Alboin (d. 572), King of the Lombards, had the skull of his enemy, King Cunimind of the Gepids, turned into a drinking cup. It was the ultimate sign of triumph against a defeated foe. This tradition, however, whether for practical or emotional purposes, now appears to date back almost 15,000 years:
Ice Age folk who lived in what’s now southwestern England gruesomely went from heads off to bottoms up. Bones excavated at a cave there include the oldest known examples of drinking cups or containers made out of human skulls, says a team led by paleontologist Silvia Bello of the Natural History Museum in London.[...]
Prehistoric cave denizens cleaned the skulls before using stone tools to shape the upper parts of the brain cases into containers, the researchers say.
Bello suspects that Ice Age Britons hoisted hollowed-out crania in rituals of some kind. Other human bones found near the skull cups show signs of flesh and marrow removal, a result either of cannibalism or mortuary practices. The striking similarities between the cave finds and historical examples of drinking cups made out of skulls further support a ritual role for the Ice Age receptacles, Bello says.
Architect Didier Faustino made Double Happiness out of an old billboard in New York City:
Double Happiness responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seem to be prevailing over all. This nomad piece of urban furniture allows the reactivation of different public spaces and enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium. By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two persons can experience together a new perception of space and recover an awareness of the physical world.
