Law student Nick Kam has written a paper exploring a hypothetical legal scenario: from a set of conjoined twins, one commits a murder. Since justly punishing one requires unjustly punishing the other, would the guilty party escape punishment? In "Half Guilty", Kam writes:

To consider more extreme approaches to punishing the guilty twin, the Court could order the twins separated so that the guilty twin may be punished. Even if this Solomonic option were possible in this case, as physiologically it appears impossible, this action raises grave Constitutional concerns. The Supreme Court has held that the body to be inviolate, providing slim exceptions to this rule as in the testing blood alcohol content, chemical castration, and the death penalty. This punishment smacks of the Sharia law practice of chopping off a convicted thief’s hand. Furthermore, it is hard to argue that separation would only punish one of the twins as each would be left immobile, one half of a complete body. Separation surgeries have some success as in the case of Jodie and Mary Attard (although this surgery was undertaken knowing full well that it would and did kill the weaker twin). Modern scholars estimate the rate of successful separation surgery at around 5% (see also the Bijani twins). With such dismal rates, sentencing conjoined twins to separation surgery would be the equivalent of a death sentence.

Link via io9 | Photo: US Department of Health and Human Services

Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall created this map using the relative size of regions to express how many languages they have produced. Papua New Guinea is quite a linguistic superpower. Aaron Hotfelder explains why:

Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups' languages are not blended together but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five(!) people.

Link via Marginal Revolution

The picture above is a 3D image of some of the neural connections in an owl-monkey's brain. The Human Connectome Project of the US National Institutes for Health is currently engaged in a similar, but more ambitious project: to map every connection in the human brain. It's like a circuit map for neurologists:

The complexity of the brain and a lack of adequate imaging technology have hampered past research on human brain connectivity. The brain is estimated to contain more than 100 billion neurons that form trillions of connections with each other. Neurons can connect across distant regions of the brain by extending long, slender projections called axons — but the trajectories that axons take within the human brain are almost entirely uncharted.[...]

The field of neuroscience emerged in the late 19th century, when scientists observed individual brain cells for the first time. Since then, researchers have made breathtaking progress in understanding the anatomy, cell biology, physiology and chemistry of the brain in both health and disease. Yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered, including how brain function translates into mental function and why brain function declines with age. Advances in neuroimaging, genomics, computational neuroscience and engineering have put us on the brink of another great era in neuroscience, when we can expect to make unprecedented discoveries regarding normal brain activity, disorders of the brain and our very sense of self.

Press Release and Article Link via GearFuse | Image: Van Wadeen

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FlexibleLove is the creation of Chishen Chiu, a Taiwanese furniture designer. Its honeycomb structure made from recycled materials allows users to expand, shrink, and reshape it as needed. It's like a Slinky that you can sit on.

Official Website via Make

This map by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy is an attempt to demonstrate what areas of the world are comparatively accessible by land and water travel. The cartographers concluded that much of the world commonly thought of as inaccessible is not:

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks (see the maps). It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.

Map Link and Article Link via Volokh Conspiracy

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Construction workers rebuilding the World Trade Center in New York City often have to spend half of their lunch breaks riding elevators up and down to buy lunch. But soon, a sub shop will come to them. The Subway restaurant company built an outlet out of shipping containers. A crane will lift it high into the sky to provide meals to workers where they are:

Meals will be offered high in the sky for efficiency; to get food from street level, hundreds of ironworkers now use an elevator and must also climb.

"This amenity will save time by allowing construction workers to stay in the tower throughout their shift rather than having to go all the way up and down," said Candace McAdams, spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the World Trade Center site.

A full Subway menu will be served, including the trademark $5 foot-long hero.

Richard Schragger, who owns the Freedom Tower franchise, said he'll also offer extras no other Subway has: hot dogs, hamburgers and New York's famed pretzels.

Like other franchises of the Milford, Conn.-based company, this one will bake its own bread daily — higher and higher above ground zero. As the tower grows, the lift will "jump" to the next new floor along with the restaurant, at a rate of one story about every week or two, engineers estimate.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hv0Y-A0oQW2-B88x6cwNS_KSB9HgD9CP9M7O0 via Gizmodo

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Swiss artist Zimoun builds sound installations that create a unique audiovisual experience. This video is a compilation of many of his projects, including listening to woodworms at work using a microphone, an automat with selections representing different cities, and pvc hoses flopping about under the force of compressed air. You can see an archive of project-specific videos at the above video link.

Official Website via Make

Jessica Cox was born without arms, but that hasn't prevented her from becoming the first licensed pilot to fly with only her feet:

With one foot manning the controls and the other delicately guiding the steering column, Cox, 25, soared to achieve a Sport Pilot certificate. Her certificate qualifies her to fly a light-sport aircraft to altitudes of 10,000 feet.

“She’s a good pilot. She’s rock solid,” said Parrish Traweek, 42, the flying instructor at San Manuel’s Ray Blair Airport.

At the link, you can find many amazing pictures of all of the things that Cox can do, like wield nunchucks with her toes.

http://ansblog.com/2009/12/could-you-believe-of-being-a-pilot-without-hands-see-jessica-cox/ via Ace of Spades HQ | Cox's Website | Photo: Nitin Singh

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Jared Lyon is engaged in an ongoing project to find innovative ways of using falling dominoes. The project is called "Dominoes Everywhere", and for the Christmas holidays, he performed the "Carol of the Bells" by placing bells at particular intervals between falling dominoes.

via Ace of Spades HQ | Lyon's Blog

Vespa's South African division had this stretch scooter made as a promotional gimmick. They refer to it as a family-sized vehicle:

According to Vespa, here's a list of uses for the stretched scooter: it's a sensible family car on two wheels and kids will look forward to going to school on it. You can be the designated driver and still park outside the front door of the party. When you make new buddies, you can take them home with you - and you save money on fuel.

It's a custom job, so don't rush down to a dealership expecting to find one.

Link via CrunchGear

Christmas is all about awkward moments at family gatherings. Le Trung, inventor of the robotic woman substitute Aiko, took that principle to a whole new level when he decided that he should celebrate Christmas with both his parents and his fembot:

The science genius enjoyed a festive dinner with his mum, dad and his £30,000 fembot which he designed and built by hand.

Le, 34, from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, even bought gifts for his dream girl, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese, helped cook the turkey and hang up decorations.

'Aiko is like any woman, she enjoys getting new clothes,' he said.

'I loved buying them for her too.'

Link via Nerdcore | Photo: Bancroft Media | Previously on Neatorama: Man Weds Virtual Girlfriend

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AdFreak has a list of the thirty strangest commercials of 2009. The above video is a Swedish commercial for McDonald's featuring children who express their impatience with a long car trip in a particularly creepy way.

Link via TigerHawk

Jeremy Barker of The Ampersand gives us the run-down on saints, demons, and other mythical figures associated with Christmas throughout Western history. Pictured above is "The Lord of Misrule":

In medieval England a low-ranking servant was appointed Master of Ceremonies for the midwinter revelries. This tradition originates in the Roman festival of Saturnalia, where the social order was turned on its head for a week.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2009/12/24/christmas-folklore-saints-and-demons.aspx | Image: Dean Tweed

A simple, but unusual and elegant design: a bridge in the city of Leeuwarden in the Netherlands uses two arms to swing a section of road in and out of place. It's called the "Slauerhoffbrug" and was built in 2000.

Image Gallery and Aerial View via The Presurfer | Photo: Frozenly

In the Star Trek universe, synthehol is a substance that simulates the taste of alcohol without its inebriating effects. Three and a half years ago, Alex mentioned that a British pharmacologist named David Nutt claimed that such a substance was hypothetically possible. Now Nutt is leading a research team at Imperial College London to develop this drug:

Prof Nutt and his team are concentrating their efforts on benzodiazepines, of which diazepam, the chief ingredient of Valium is one.

Thousands of candidate benzos are already known to science. He said it is just a matter of identifying the closest match and then, if necessary, tailoring it to fit society’s needs.[...]

“I’ve been in experiments where I’ve taken benzos,” said Professor Nutt. “One minute I was sedated and nearly asleep, five minutes later I was giving a lecture.

“No one’s ever tried targeting this before, possibly because it will be so hard to get it past the regulators.

“Most of the benzos are controlled under the Medicines Act. The law gives a privileged position to alcohol, which has been around for 3,000 years. But why not use advances in pharmacology to find something safer and better?”

Link via io9 | Image: Paramount