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Lauren McCarthy is the designer responsible for the Happiness Hat -- a hat that drives a painful spike into your head when you forget to smile. The Conversacube is one of her more recent projects. It's a little box that will prompt you on what to say during a first date when you're not sure what to talk about:

Each outward face of the box has a small screen and a microphone embedded just inside. As the conversation progresses, each person is personally prompted with directions or lines to keep the conversation running seamlessly with minimal awkward or uncomfortable moments. The microphones monitor audio levels of each participant and the cube responds accordingly, adjusting prompts to enliven, mediate conflict, or balance conversation as necessary.

Link via Make

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The next Transformers movie is currently being filmed in Washington, D.C. A police SUV found its way onto the closed set and was hit by the car representing Bumblebee:

The police SUV was not supposed to be there and the wreck itself was not scripted.

The police officer driving the SUV is a 25-year veteran senior explosive ordinance technician. He was taken to a local hospital and sustained minor injuries.

Law enforcement sources tell FOX 5 that he was driving to a call for a suspicious package incident nearby and was using a different radio channel than the police officers who were securing the perimeter for the movie.

Link via Geekologie | Previously: Transforming Transformer Costume

For years, a painting had been passed around the Kober family of Buffalo, New York. A family legend said that it was painted by Michelangelo. When Martin Kober retired in 2003, he decided to find out if this was true:

He found Antonio Forcellino, an Italian art restorer and historian and told him of the tennis ball, and something more horrifying.

"It wasn't the story that had scared me, but that it had been exposed to heating commonly found inside a middle-class home," Forcellino writes in his new book, "La Pieta Perduta," or "The Lost Pieta," published in Italy and due out in the United States next year.[...]

Forcellino said Herman Grimm, a noted Michelangelo biographer, saw the "Pieta" in 1868 and attributed it to the master. Additional evidence includes a letter in the Vatican library discussing a Pieta painting for Colonna, he said.

"I'm absolutely convinced that is a Michelangelo painting," Forcellino said.

Link via Geekosystem | Image: New York Post

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The lead role in the movie Back to the Future was originally played by actor Eric Stoltz. After five weeks of filming, director Robert Zemeckis decided that it wasn't working, and replaced him with Michael J. Fox. The above video shows Stoltz in scenes that will be familiar to fans of the movie.

via blastr

Three years ago, Alex mentioned that an artist created a replica of himself frozen in carbonite, like Han Solo was in The Empire Strikes Back. If you looked upon that image with envy, you can now get a similar sculpture featuring your own face and body shape. It's not a full-size replica, but one that measures about four and a quarter inches high.

http://www.paulpapedesigns.com/Store_GG.html via GearFuse | Photo: Paul Pape Designs

Estonian sculptor Mati Karmin makes furniture from old naval mines found off the coast of his homeland:

Northern coast of Estonia and especially the islands, wich during the years of occupation were an almost inaccessible border zone for the common including heaps of corroded mine shells, wich are basically spheres with holes, spireks and shackles.[...]

Karmin uses mines as modules. The entire furinture series is composed of only two existing basic forms of mines - the hemisphere and the cylinder. With great delight, he has concocted utility articles of diverse forms, resulting in armchairs, writing desk, bed, toilet, cupoard, bathtub, swing, fireplace...By the hand of the artist the militaristic metallic scrap has become the design furinture of remarkably modern appearance.

http://www.marinemine.com/#mainpage via Nerdcore | Photo: Marine Mine

There's a restaurant in Riga, Latvia, that looks like a hospital. The staff will even wrap you in a straight jacket, if that's what you'd like. It's called Hospitalis, and it combines the pleasures of eating out and medical examinations:

Ah, listening to a live band while eating a meal in a gynecologist’s exam room—now there’s a multi-orifice experience few other restaurants can match![...]

Hospitalis also has a small “crazy menu” with entrees like liver-filled quail that are prepared in such a way as to resemble something that might have been surgically extracted from a person. You have to sign an indemnity waiver before ordering anything from the “crazy menu” (no, that’s not a joke) so here’s to hoping that the liver they fill the quail with isn’t being removed from you.

Though you can order a “normal” meal at Hospitalis be prepared to eat it with syringes, scalpels and other surgical utensils. In that same vein (pun), drinks are served in the likes of test tube vials and I.V. bags. If you are the designated driver but can’t resist getting a drink then ordering a Corona beer in a urine sample jar should ensure that you’ll be sober for the trip home.

Link via The Agitator | Photo: Spot Cool Stuff

The longest time between conception and birth of a human embryo has been thirteen years. That record has now been blown away by the recent live birth of a boy who was conceived twenty years ago:

The 42-year-old mother of the boy, who is not named in the study, began trying to get pregnant using IVF ten years ago. At the time, she and her husband received embryos from a heterosexual couple who had themselves undergone IVF.

That couple had anonymously donated their leftover embryos after the woman successfully gave birth. Thing was, they did so in 1990 – meaning that the boy just born to the woman in the study has a sibling out there somewhere who was conceived at the same time but is 20 years younger.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/baby-born-20-year-old-frozen-embryo | Image: RWJMS IVF Program

Russia has devised a way to enlarge its army while saving money. It's begun making large numbers of inflatable -- and fake -- tanks, radar stations, and trucks:

What they lack in firepower, they make up for in flexibility: they are light and can be deployed quickly to deceive the enemy.

They are also very realistic. They are made of a special material that tricks enemy radar and thermal imaging into thinking they are real weapons.

The inflatables are stitched together at a former hot-air balloon factory.

Link via Slashdot | Photo: BBC News

The blog Overthinking It created an enormous infographic classifying female characters in movies, anime, literature, comics, and television. The author writes:

Some of the listed tropes might be considered crazy-sexist, and others represent more positive stereotypes. The tropes are subjective, and they exist on a continuum of sexism. Consider Family Guy’s Lois Griffin (who falls under the category of “Perfect Wife”). Lois isn’t a particularly complex female character, and the idea of a fun-loving sexpot wife who stands by her man no matter what he does is kinda-sorta sexist, in that this character is a fantasy fetish figure tailor-made for adolescent male audiences. But as far as sitcom housewives go, I’d much prefer to watch a Lois-type character than a classic sitcom shrew like Debra from Everybody Loves Raymond. At least Lois represents a more positive (and sex-positive) stereotype.

Link via Buzzfeed

The title character in Doctor Who has gone through eleven incarnations during the nearly half century the series has endured. All of them have been male. But apparently a female doctor was considered by the BBC in the 1980s:

Sydney Newman, who devised the long-running science-fiction show when he was head of BBC drama in the 1960s, was asked to help after the show suffered a slump in ratings in the 1980s and was taken off air temporarily.

He told Michael Grade, then the controller of BBC One, that the ailing series could only be saved by regenerating the Time Lord into a Time Lady.

Mr Newman criticised the direction the show had taken, but insisted that it could be revived by turning the lead character into a heroine.

Had the advice been accepted, actresses who could have been considered for the role include Frances de la Tour, Joanna Lumley and Dawn French.

What actress do you think would make a good Doctor?

Link via blastr | Image: BBC

Previously on Neatorama: Doctor Who

The good people of Teh Internet are writing funny travel reviews for Mount Everest. Here's my favorite so far:

No valet service and the sherpas barely spoke any English.

At the link, click on "reviews" to see them all.

Link via reddit

Mark Nixon, a professor at the University of Southampton (UK), believes that the unique shape of each person's ears may provide a way of identifying dangerous people in airport security processes:

Professor Nixon and his team tested 252 images of different ears and found the system was able to match each ear to a separate image held in its database with 99 per cent accuracy.[...]

"Fingerprints are one of the best ways we have of identifying an individual at the moment," said Professor Nixon. "But on some people, even they are not so effective. Bakers and brick layers tend not to have obvious fingerprints as the distinctive whirls rub off.

"It is harder to do that with your ears, but there is one thing that can get in the way of the ears and that is hair. In reality, I expect there won't be a single approach, but in fact a combination of different biometrics that can be taken simultaneously to identify an individual."

Link via GearFuse | Photo by Flickr user AdamSelwood used under Creative Commons license

Previously: The REAL Reason Behind Silly Airport Rules

American psychologist Joseph Jastrow published the optical illusion on the right in 1899. He used it to express how unconscious preferences help create a constructed reality. It's either a rabbit or a duck, depending on your point of view. The image on the left is going around the Internet today, and appears to be a sculpture inspired by Jastrow's illusion.

Link via Geekosystem

This man won the Marvel comics cosplay competition at the New York Comic Con. Speaking of which, here's an interesting line: "Steampunk is when goths discover brown." (via) Do you agree?

Link via DVICE | Photo: Judy Stephens