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This video shows a wild bear with three legs. Presumably it was born without a front leg or lost it later in life. The bear gets up on his hind legs and walks like a human. Is it real or fake?

via Urlesque

Situs Inversus is a rare birth defect in which a person is born with organs facing backwards. A patient in India may be the only living person known to have the affliction:

In Mr Shivnani's case, they discovered the aorta and inferior vena cava, which pump clean blood in and impure blood from the heart were reversed. He also has two livers.

"While operating we were supposed to know the exact location of everything that we are going to touch. But in this case we were not sure which veins were entering where," Dr Prakash Sanzgiri told the Times of India.

Surgeons also found he had no small intestine and three vessels supplying blood to his infected kidney.

Link | Information about Situs Inversus | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services

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T-Shirt War is an impressive stop-motion film by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. It depicts two men using alternating images on their shirts to battle and irritate each other. Paul Overton of DudeCraft predicts "If this thing isn't a meme already, it will be soon." I think that that's a safe bet.

via DudeCraft | Official Website | Behind the Scenes Video

Three years ago, Gail blogged about a bra implanted inside human breast tissue to take the place of an external bra. Plastic surgeons have greatly developed this idea since that time. So far, 600 women have undergone the surgery:

Conceived by South African plastic surgeons and currently being performed in Europe, the Internal Bra System is a breast-lift operation that places a mesh-like material inside the breast to support the new shape.

The cone-shaped material, named Breform, is similar to what is used in hernia operations. It's meant to take the strain off the skin, which after a traditional breast lift can begin to stretch and sag in three years, according to The Daily Mail.

"Breform is like a bra cup without the straps," plastic surgeon Dalvi Humzah told The Daily Mail. "Over time, the mesh gets incorporated into the breast as the body produces a fibrous tissue that holds the structure in place - like a permanent bra under the skin."

Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Breform

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The Impossible Lamp is a work of craft and film by Jeeves Basu. It begins with a large wax candle sitting atop a clear plastic lampshade. Basu and his team had the difficult task of melting the wax so that it would drip over the mold, but cooling it before it could drip off. This time-lapse video shows how they did it.

Link via Urlesque

German photographer Josef Schulz traveled across the U.S., taking pictures of highway signs. He then photoshopped out the text, leaving only the shapes and colors. The series is called "Sign Out." Can you guess what company the sign represents? More at the link.

Link via Fast Company

Cartoonist Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal is back with another explanation of how the world works. In today's episode, he argues that the personality, lifestyle, and biological features of an octopus make it far awesomer than your mom. You'll just have to read it if you want to understand why babies equal nachos.

Link

British artist Rob Smith has some lovely wood carvings in his deviantART gallery. One of the most striking is this table that looks like it's melting. It's made of recycled oak and took him four weeks to make.

Link via DudeCraft | Gallery

The US division of the Boy Scouts turns 100 today. The movement began in Britain under the leadership of General Robert Baden-Powell. An American publisher, William Boyce, met a Boy Scout in London and was so impressed that he decided to bring scouting to the United States. It grew rapidly during World War I and reached its peak with 6.5 million members in the 1972:

Supporters say the scouting experience builds strong, confident leaders. They point with considerable pride to its roster of former Scouts who went on to great achievement, including President Kennedy, astronaut Neil Armstrong, baseball great Hank Aaron and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

"I think the Scouts have changed America profoundly, because as of now, 110 million people have worn the Scout uniform in one way or another. And the moral lesson and the experiences that have been imparted to them have obviously percolated through society as a whole just too profound to really enumerate," said Wills.

Link via Fast Company | Image: Norman Rockwell

Go get your protective tin foil hat, because you're going to need it. German scientists have been trying to understand why their equipment that measures gravitational waves has been picking up a particular sound. One possible answer that they've come up with is that the entire universe is a holographic illusion:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

Link via reddit | Photo: NASA

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I can't speak Russian, but I've read that this Russian-language commercial is about a man trying to report a claim to his insurance company. The employees vanish into their equipment the moment that the customer walks in the door.

via reddit

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In this instructional video, a safety expert at a drainage site stresses the importance of having a sturdy harness, properly attached. He demonstrates how a rope line connecting him to the guardrail will prevent an accident. You can guess what happened next.

via reddit

During the Cold War, Stalin and his successors built dozens of secret cities in the Soviet Union where thousands of people lived and worked, but did not exist on any map or gazetteer. One such town was Skrunda-1 in Latvia, which had originally been built to support radar installations. After Latvia became independent, the Russian government insisted on maintaining control of the town until 1998, when its last residents left, leaving it vacant. Now it's been sold to a Russian investor for $3.1 million:

The town formerly known as Skrunda-1 housed about 5,000 people during the Cold War. It was abandoned over a decade ago after the Russian military withdrew from Latvia following the Soviet collapse.[...]

It was not immediately clear what plans the buyer had for the 110-acre property, which is located in western Latvia about 95 miles from Riga. The town contains about 70 dilapidated buildings, including apartment blocks, a school, barracks, and an officers’ club.

Built in the 1980s, Skrunda-1 was a secret settlement not marked on Soviet maps because of the two enormous radar installations that listened to objects in space and monitored the skies for a US nuclear missile attack.

Like all clandestine towns in the Soviet Union, it was kept off maps and given a code name, which usually consisted of a number and the name of a nearby city.

Link via Hell in a Handbasket | Information about the Secret Cities Program | Photo: adevarul

Louise Hill of Love to Cake is a London-based graphic designer and visual effects artist. That is her trade, but her passion is making fancy cakes. This sea turtle cake won her the gold medal at Britain's 2009 Cake Show.

flickr photostream via reddit | Artist's Website

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This video is from the scene of a highway accident in Chile three weeks ago. A recovery crew managed to flip the overturned tractor trailer back upright, but didn't think about what would happen to the truck afterward.

via reddit