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When Puerto Rican man David Morales Colón died, he wasn't displayed in a casket at his wake, but astride his motorcycle:

Yesterday and today, callers who stopped to pay their final respects to the late Mr. Colón got a bit of a surprise. Instead of the traditional presentation of the body in a casket, Mr. Colón's corpse, dressed in casual duds and sunglasses, was instead posed in a very lifelike position atop his Repsol-liveried Honda CBR600 F4. According to Puerto Rico's Primera Hora newspaper, the motorcycle was given to the victim by his uncle, and upon Mr. Colón's untimely demise, family members delivered the bike to the funeral home specifically for this unusual wake.

Link via Geekologie

The Poseidon 37 is a floating wind farm under construction by the Danish company Floating Power Plant. It will generate 40 to 50 gigawatt hours of energy a year. The facility will be about 230 meters long and weigh over 30,000 tons, making it sturdy enough to withstand the roughest seas. The final product will also be able to acquire energy from turbines powered by the ocean's waves:

Topping a wave system with wind turbines takes out some of the risk. Offshore turbines are a proven, stable technology. Thus, even if the wave generators don't produce as much energy as planned, at least the investors will see revenue from wind energy. In a sense, this model could be viewed as an offshore wind turbine with wave energy thrown in as a bonus.

The risk is further diminished by the design of the wave power platform. It's big. The company borrowed heavily from the engineering techniques behind the floating platforms that have been built by the oil industry for years. The platform's sheer size insulates it from hazards posed by rogue waves and 100-year storms.

Link via Gizmodo | Image: Floating Power Plant

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For its 50th anniversary, the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam has created an interactive 3D model of the attic that Anne Frank and her companions hid in for two years during World War II. The above video is a sample of that model.

Link via Fast Company | Previously on Neatorama: The Only Known Video of Anne Frank

Japan's space agency plans to launch the first deep space vehicle to be use solar sail propulsion:

"Ikaros is a 'space yacht' that gets propulsion from the pressure of sunlight particles bouncing off its sail," Yuichi Tsuda, space systems expert at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), told journalists.

The flexible sails, which are thinner than a human hair, are also equipped with thin-film solar cells to generate electricity to create "a hybrid technology of electricity and pressure", Tsuda said.

"Solar sails are the technology that realises space travel without fuel as long as we have sunlight. The availability of electricity would enable us to navigate farther and more effectively in the solar system."

The Ikaros will be launched from Tanegashima space center on May 18. It cost $16 million to develop.

Link via Popular Science | Image: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

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Taco the pet tortoise lives in an outdoor burrow. When his humans call him, he (she?) comes out and crawls into their hands. That's a well-trained tortoise!

via Ace of Spades HQ

Scientists have studied chimpanzees and other primates in captivity when long-time companions died. In Scientific American, Katherine Harmon examines the tentative answers of scientists to this question:

Another paper appearing in the same issue of Current Biology describes two mother chimpanzees carrying their dead infants in the Bossou colony in Guinea. Although this behavior has been observed in chimps and other primates before, the researchers, led by Dora Biro, a research fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, documented the carrying behavior for 68 days in one of the instances—far longer than had been previously described.

Of note, Biro's group reported, is that documented deaths of infants in that particular colony (of which there were three) always resulted in "extended carrying," though it is not universal that mothers carry infant corpses for weeks—or months—after death. This difference "raises questions about the potential role of observational learning in promoting chimpanzee mothers' prolonged transport of deceased young," Biro and colleagues wrote.

These differences in handling death might also be a part of demonstrated cultural differences among chimpanzee groups, Anderson says.

Link | Image: NIH

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Rob Klinkey built this remote-controlled snowplow. Roboplow has a 50 inch blade, six powered wheels, and 660 amps of power. The blade can be pneumatically controlled in four directions. Lights and a mounted camera allow the Roboplow to be driven while out of sight and at night.

via Make

The Sony Corporation, which created the 3.5 inch floppy disk in 1981, will cease production of the format next year:

With the advent of CDs and later, DVDs, the use of the plastic floppys and its limited storage capacity were quickly deserted.

After the Apple G3, along with PCs, began shipping without the drives pre-installed the disks became virtually obsolete. However, the death of the format has only now become official with Sony's decision. [...]

The 3.5 inch floppy was first introduced in 1981, and hit the height of its sales in 2000.

Link via Nerd Bastards | Photo: flickr user matsuyuki used under Creative Commons license

Previously on Neatorama: Floppy Disks at Art Medium

At some universities, students can design their own majors. Jordan Goldklang of Indiana University is an illusionist, and is majoring in magic:

Known as The Great Jordini to some, Jordan Goldklang is a senior from the San Francisco area. He is the only student at IU, and the only one in the U.S., who is majoring in magic — a major he created through IU’s Individualized Major Program.

Since then, he has devoted his time at IU to the major.

Tonight Jordan will present a magic show in Alumni Hall for his final project as an undergraduate. He’s hoping to sell out the venue, which holds 600 people. So far, he’s handed out 1,000 flyers, put up 3,000 posters and invited more than 1,000 people to the event on Facebook.

Link via Geekologie | Photo: Sevil Mahfoozi, Indiana Daily Student

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This is a video for Football Made in Africa, a film about the roles of soccer/football in African societies. It shows a boy inflating a condom and wrapping it in yarn to create a functional soccer ball. Here's a description of the project:

Every episode offers an original angle on a story, a slice of everyday life, where football is present everywhere. From the production of goals in the outskirts of Maputo to the atmosphere in bars where matches are aired on tiny TV screens, the harvesting of rubber tree waste to make balls or the beaches of Cameroon where fishermen use their nets to play.

via CrunchGear | Project Website

Graphic designer David McCandless made an infographic that describes connotations associated with different colors in different cultures. It serves as the cover illustration for Information is Beautiful, a book of infographics that McCandless and other designers have composed. Pictured above is one small part of the much larger whole.

Link via Fast Company

Do you wear your emotions on your sleeve? Well, with Vanessa Sorenson's Tweet Sleeve, you can do that a bit more literally. This gadget searches for keywords in your most recent tweets to gauge your mood and then displays that mood on the sleeve of a hoodie.

Link via technabob | Video | Designer's Blog | Image: Fashioning Tech

New Scientist has a list of attempts to discern the limits of human endurance and survival. It answers (or tries to) these questions:

1. What's the human speed limit?
2. How long can we concentrate for?
3. How long could you survive in a vacuum?
4. How much can we remember?
5. How cold can you get and live?
6. How long could you survive without food and drink?
7. How long could you go without sleep?
8. How many gs can you pull?
9. How high can you go?
10. How much can a human lift?
11. How much radiation can we take?
12. How long could you hold your breath?

In response to the third question "How long could you survive in a vacuum, Valerie Jamieson writes:

It is possible to recover from shorter spells in a vacuum, however. In 1966 a NASA technician was testing a spacesuit in a vacuum chamber when the pressure dropped to the level you would experience at an altitude of 36,500 metres. He passed out after 12 to 15 seconds. The last thing he recalled was the saliva boiling off his tongue; that's because water vaporises at low pressure. He regained consciousness within 27 seconds when the chamber was repressurised to the equivalent of an altitude of 4200 metres. Although he was pale, he suffered no adverse health effects.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: NASA

Ludger Sylbaris of St. Pierre, Martinique was lucky enough to be arrested for getting into a drunken brawl. The prison cell that he was placed into saved his life when a volcanic eruption destroyed the city on May 8, 1902:

Mt. Pelee exploded and a cloud of smoke darkened the sky for fifty miles around. A cloud of superheated volcanic gas and dust rolled out of the volcano at hundreds of miles per hour destroying everything in an eight mile radius. Within a single minute the 1,075 degree pressure wave had flattened every building in the city of St. Pierre and anyone unlucky enough to be in its way instantly caught fire and burned to death. Even those in shelter were suffocated as the wave of gas, hotter than fire, burned up the oxygen and replaced it was deadly gases. People lungs were burnt to a crisp form taking a single breath, and after the eruption the city burned for day. The explosion instantly killed the over 30,000 residents of the island.

A few people made it out to sea in time to survive, but Sylbaris was the only person confirmed to be in the city at the time of the eruption and live through the experience.

Link via io9 | Photo: image by flickr user Gaël Chardon used under Creative Commons license

Artist Kuba Czerniak created this typographical portrait of Jimi Hendrix that is composed of a quotation by Hendrix:

When I was a little boy, I believed that if you put a tooth under your pillow, a fairy would come in the night and take away the tooth and leave a dime. Now, I believed in myself more than anything.

Link | Previously on Neatorama: Jimi Hendrix in Machetes