Interspecies Friends is a photoblog all about animals of different species either being friends or at least not killing each other. Sometimes, even predator-prey relationships are nullified by sheer cuteness, as with this rat and cat.

Link via Urlesque

(YouTube Link)

Put that shotgun away. This Australian beer commercial proposes a new sport: skeet shooting with a tank.

Previously on Neatorama: skeet fishing.

via Wandering Goblin

Craftster user gorgaus, as an art installation, put on a fashion show in which the women participating wore enormous plastic sleepy-eye doll heads.

They are made from fibreglass. They are quite light, they have a stem at the back of the neck that leads down to the waist where there is a back brace so all the weight is on their hips. The wigs are heavier than the heads, especially the geisha style one. They used dancers instead of models cause they thought they might have more strength and balance.

More pictures at the link. And in the comment thread, gorgaus provides detailed technical descriptions.

Link via Matthew Caverhill

San Francisco is a city that has hosted and inspired many great writers. So artist Ian Huebert created an enormous map of that city filled with the words of novelists and poets who either wrote their works in those locations, or located their stories there. In the links, you'll find a larger image. And at Strange Maps, you'll find a list of every author and work mentioned.

Larger Image | News Story via Strange Maps | Artist's Website | Image: San Francisco Gate

The fastest human alive, Usain Bolt, can run 28 MPH. But a new study proposes a theoretical maximum of 40 MPH for the human body under ideal conditions:

This provides a new twist on the old school of thought that speed limits depended on how much force a runner could exert against the ground. Past studies showed that sprinters can apply up to 1,000 pounds of force with a single limb during each sprinting step, and so researchers thought that humans simply could not push beyond that point.[...]

One-legged hopping produced ground forces greater than those applied during normal running by 30 percent or more, and active leg muscles also generated about 1.5 to 2 times greater force during one-legged hopping. That shows how humans don't exert the maximum possible force during the act of forward sprinting, the researchers say.

Going one step farther, the researchers also found that the "critical biological limit" depends upon how quickly runners can exert ground force while sprinting. Elite runners have foot-ground contact times of less than one-tenth of a second, and max out ground forces within one-twentieth of one second when their foot first hits the ground.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/scientists-investigate-how-break-biological-speed-limits-humans | Photo: US Department of State

Lockheed Martin's Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) is an actuated exoskeleton that helps a soldier carry up to 200 pounds of weight on its frame. It senses the direction that the user wants to move, and then moves in it. In the links, you find a video from the company showing the HULC in action.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/robotic-super-soldier-suit-gets-more-juice |YouTube Video | Image: Lockheed Martin

Elephants at the Island Safari Centre on Koh Samui, Thailand have been trained to play basketball:

“It takes two or three months of intensive training to teach them basics, but fortunately their standards are improving with each passing day”, said organiser Ning.

The keepers begin by teaching the elephants basic ball control skills, and how to hold the ball in their trunk. The animals are then taught to stand on their hind legs, walk with the ball and finally shoot it through the hoop.

Link | Photo: Barcroft Media

Stonehenge and other historic monuments in the UK are now available on Google Street View as a result of a joint venture between Google and the National Trust:

The pictures were taken late last summer using the 'Google trike' – a three wheeled bike with a Street View camera mounted on it, suited to collecting images in places not easily accessible by car.

Other locations include Stonehenge in Wiltshire, Lindisfarne Castle in Northumberland, Lyme Park in Cheshire and Ham House just outside Richmond-upon-Thames near London.

Link via J-Walk Blog

Eyam is a small village in Derbyshire, UK. In 1665, the bubonic plague hit its population. Rather than flee, the villagers were persuaded that they had a moral obligation to isolate themselves from the outside world in order to prevent the spread of that disease:

They lined up stones to mark the village boundaries, and no one was allowed beyond them. Supplies of food and clothing brought to the village from the outside were left at the boundary stones and were paid for with coins placed in a disinfectant of vinegar and water.

The horror increased as the months passed. By the end of August 1666, two-thirds of the original population had perished. Format burial services were no longer held. When the cemetery became full, the dead were buried in gardens and fields.

Only a fourth of the population had survived when outsiders made contact a year later. Today, although the village was subsequently resettled, much of it is a museum and a memorial to its inhabitants.

http://healthmad.com/health/the-plague-of-eyam-the-village-that-died-to-save-its-neighbors/ via The Presurfer | Official Website | Photo: Cressbrook Multimedia

(Video Link)

This video shows a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) chasing a staphylococcus aureus bacterium. The video was recorded by biochemistry professor David Rogers of Vanderbilt University in the 1950s. Notes on the movement by med school professor Thomas P. Stossel:

Contraction waves are visible along the surface of the moving cell as it moves forward in a gliding fashion. As the neutrophil relentlessly pursues the microbe it ignores the red cells and platelets. However, its leading edge is sufficiently stiff (elastic) to deform and displace the red cells it bumps into. The internal contents of the neutrophil also move, and granule motion is particularly dynamic near the leading edge. These granules only approach the cell surface membrane when the cell changes direction and redistributes its peripheral "gel." After the neutrophil has engulfed the bacterium, note that the cell's movements become somewhat more jerky, and that it begins to extend more spherical surface projections.

http://www.biochemweb.org/neutrophil.shtml via Geekologie

Danish artist Kristine Suhr creates images that move when tabs -- like those on children's pop-up books -- are pulled. Since they're brief Flash videos, there's no way to demonstrate them in motion here at Neatorama, but at the link, you can view a whole gallery of them moving. Warning: sound effects.

http://www.pop-up.dk/VideoPlayer2008/index.htm?p=1&v=11 via DudeCraft

Olivia Putnal of Woman's Day has pictures and descriptions of eight unusual chocolate-covered foods, including crickets, Fritos, beef jerky, and squid. Pictured above is a chocolate-covered onion, which photographer Jean-Paul de Guzman described as eating a raw onion "followed by a bite off of a Hershey's chocolate bar."

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Food/8-Curious-Chocolate-Covered-Creations.html via The Presurfer

Charting The Beatles is a project by graphic designer Michael Deal to express the history of that band through quantitative infographics. Pictured above is one describing their working activities, divided into touring, filming, and recording. Deal invites anyone to participate by contributing their own infographics to a flickr set.

Link via J-Walk Blog | flickr set

Los Angeles-based artist Ramon Coronado made furniture from shopping carts. He calls the project "Mercado Negro" and his ambition lies in "reclaiming an ordinary, everyday object and transforming it into a whole new object." At the link, you can see many more pictures, as well as photographs from his workshop as Coronado constructed these pieces.

http://www.ramoncoronado.info/_archive/2009/mercado_negro/2009_mercado_negro.html via Fast Company | Photo: Ramon Coronado

Why are humans mostly free of body hair, in comparison to other primates? Losing body hair was an evolutionary advantage in that it allowed early hominids to forage over a greater distance in harsher climates. In Scientific American, Mariette DiChristina writes:

Our forebears abandoned their easier foraging habits, traveling longer distances through a tropical landscape to acquire sufficient food to survive. Adding meat to their diets meant more calories, but finding prey also took more work. Their activity level increased and with it their need to dissipate body heat to avoid tissue damage. By 1.6 mya, protohumans had long legs for sustained walking and running. Along with that trait came naked skin and a large number of eccrine sweat glands, which produce moisture that removes body heat through evaporative cooling. The hairs on our head also help to combat overheating, by shielding our big brain from direct sun.

Link | Photo: US Department of Energy