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Tom Baynham and Ben Tyers, graduate students in mechanical engineering at Cambridge, created this enormous Rube Goldberg machine that stretches over an entire residence. They call it "The Contraption II."

via DVICE | Official Website

Popular Mechanics has a photo gallery of eighteen unusual airports around the world, including the above airport of Courchevel, a town in the French Alps. The runway has a hill the middle with a 18.5% grade. Landing on this airstrip is so difficult that it requires a special pilot's certification.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4346192.html?page=1 via Glenn Reynolds| Photo: Popular Mechanics

It looks like a painting, right? It's not. Makeup Girl is actually a photograph of a model in bodypaint. Peter Kun Frary, art music professor at the University of Hawaii, spotted this model in a stage display window at a mall:

Recently I walked by the Ala Moana Mac cosmetic store and noticed a crowd of Japanese tourists gawking and snapping pics. Amazingly, a model in full body paint was posing against a set. She was a darn good simulation of a late 19th century oil painting. At first I though she was nekid--wearing only makeup--but she sported a few scrapes of cloth in the right places. Also, she hardly ever blinked...

http://emedia.leeward.hawaii.edu/Frary/pic290.htm via Urlesque

UPDATE: The photographer has kindly visited us in the comments.

Pictured above is a section of a large infographic circulating reddit. It claims to show the full depth of the ocean at the Mariana Trench, scaled to the size of a human. The tiny dot in the upper-left corner represents a person.

Link via reddit | More Information about Mariana Trench Exploration

In Scientific American, Jesse Bering writes at length about the cultural origins and significance of the handshake, what controlled experiments have determined about the personalities reflected in different handshakes, and the gesture's evolutionary similarities with those of other primates:

In chimpanzees, he points out, dominant apes will oftentimes extend an open hand to distressed subordinates as a sort of calming gesture; and in some chimp communities, individuals will clasp hands overhead as they manually groom each other. In humans, in contrast, it’s most often the subordinate who initiates the handshake, particularly toward dominant people they wish to impress.

Link | Photo: US House of Representatives

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On February 11, NASA launched a Atlas V rocket. The rocket went supersonic (1:53 in the video) at an altitude where ice crystals in the sky made the sonic boom visible.

via Geekologie

Utilities like TinyURL are handy for compressing long URLs into short ones. ShadyURL by Wonder-Tonic functions the same way, except that it's more likely to freak out people about your websurfing habits.

Link via reddit

Three years ago, someone robbed the home of the Fronterotta family in Gallup, New Mexico, taking money and jewelry. Then last week, the family received a package from the anonymous thief, containing the jewelry, an apologetic letter, and a promise to pay back the money:

The letter from the burglar that read in part, "Please forgive me, I so sorry I steal from you…so many bad things happen because I steal from you, I so sorry."[...]

While some pieces were more expensive, Fronterotta said she is grateful for the return of sentimental pieces like a nearly 30-year-old pearl necklace and a bracelet given to her by a family member shortly before his death.

“I wish him well, he did the right thing by returning my stuff and I wish him well. I hope his life gets better,” she said.

Video at the link.

Link via Digg | Photo: flickr user DRB62, used under Creative Commons license

Now that sounds like a terribly criminal thing to do, but the creators of this website hope to warn people about the dangers of exposing too much personal information on the Internet:

Please Rob Me consists exclusively of an aggregation of public Twitter messages that have been pushed through fast-growing location-based networking site Foursquare, one of a handful of services that encourages people to share their whereabouts with their friends. You can filter by geographic location, too.

"On one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home," the Please Rob Me site says to explain its rationale. "The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz, etc."

Link via reddit | Pleaserobme.com | Photo: City of Goodyear, Arizona

Are you ready to rock? Well the Vatican's official newspaper, L' Osservatore Romano, is now the source for the latest in the greatest rock music:

The list included The Beatles’ “Revolver,” which was given the top slot, Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of The Moon”, Oasis’ 1995 bestseller “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” and Michael Jackson’s blockbuster “Thriller.”

“Some songs seem to have been written yesterday…. while others still send shivers down the spine for their illuminating simplicity and musical thrust” the writers of the article said about “Thriller.” Of Oasis’ record, L’Osservatore Romano said “the album was never equaled” in part because of the disruptive in-fighting by the Gallagher brothers, the leaders of the group.

Link via Digg | Image: Brooklyn Vegan

Photographer Adam Voorhes has a series of sharp pictures showing the internal components of an Etch-a-Sketch, a Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol, a frog, and a telephone.

Here at Neatorama, we've previously featured his alphabet-shaped furniture.

http://www.voorhes.com/load-exploded.html via DVICE

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Ted Ingram of Dorset, UK, may be the oldest paperboy in the world at the age of 90. He's been on the job for 68 years and is estimated to have delivered half a million copies of the newspaper over the length of his career:

He said he has only twice cancelled his deliveries - both times when snow prevented the papers getting to him.[...]

The 90-year-old moved to the village in 1938 and worked as a tractor driver on a farm.

But he decide to boost his income by taking up a paper round aged 22.

Link

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On Feb. 5th, 1,200 students, staff, and faculty at the University of Alberta played the world's largest game of dodgeball:

Although it will be several months before officials from the Guinness World Records verify the accomplishment, organizers say the noon-hour dodgeball game in the Butterdome was the largest the world has ever seen.

The group shattered the former record of a 450-person game and easily reached its goal of attracting more than 1,000 players.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/news/edmonton/2010/02/05/12763776.html via Urlesque

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Animator Rob Carter made this short film which shows the development of Charlotte, North Carolina over two and a half centuries, compressed into nine minutes of papercraft. Buildings appear and move around in a style reminiscent of a pop-up book.

via Fast Company | Carter's Website

UPDATE: The YouTube video was yanked, so I've put up another one. This is only the last three minutes of the presentation, but it's still quite good.

Photographer and scientist Miloslav Druckmüller and his team specialize in capturing images of solar eclipses. Pictured above is one photograph that compiles nine images, taken on July 22, 2009 from the Marshall Islands. Of this craft, Druckmüller writes:

Solar eclipse photography if one of the most difficult tasks of astronomical photography. There are at least three reasons for that. The first and main one is the extreme contrast which makes impossible to record the phenomenon on a single image. Neither classical nor digital photography have the ability to master the brightness ratio which is necessary for successful eclipse photography. The second reason is little chance for making experiments. If anything gets wrong it may take years to get an opportunity for a new experiment. The last but not the least reason is the fact that processing of images taken during total eclipse is very complicated and time consuming work with needs of one purpose software being developed specially for this aim.

Link via Geekologie