Emma Jean Nolan is a midwife and photographer in Brisbane, Australia. Sometimes she gets to combine her trades. When Harper Hoani Spies was born, she took this photo of her along with her intact placenta. Nolan shaped the umbilical cord to spell "love."

Baby Harper is Maori--the indigenous people of New Zealand. In keeping with Maori tradition, her parents will take the placenta back to New Zealand and bury it. Nolan describes this tradition:

As a Maori baby his placenta will now be returned to the land. The word ‘whenua’ relates to the placenta and to the land. Whenua (placenta) is returned to the whenua (land) with the pito (umbilical cord) the link between the newborn and papatuanuku(mother earth). With this affinity established, each individual fulfils the role of curator, for papatuanuku (mother earth), which remains life long.

You can read more at BuzzFeed.

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The little koala has found the perfect tree. Unfortunately, a bigger koala wants it and has the muscle to take it by force.

Little koala cries and tries again. He loses the second scrap and cries some more.

But there's good news! Alicia Alexander, who recorded this video, reports that by nightfall, the little koala had successfully retaken his tree.

-via Nothing to Do with Aborath

(Photo: Frédérique Voisin-Demery)

Pictured above is Beaufort cheese. It's tasty, slices easily for crackers, and goes well with a Cabernet sauvignon. It's also a source of electrical power in Albertville, Savoie, France. Skimmed whey from the cheesemaking process is used as a biogas to generate electrical power for the town. The Daily Telegraph explains:

After full-fat milk is used to make Beaufort cheese, whey and cream are left over. The cream is taken to make ricotta cheese, butter and protein powder, which is used as a food supplement.

The residual skimmed whey is then placed in a tank with bacteria, where natural fermentation produces methane in the same way that the gas is produced in cows’ stomachs.

The gas is then fed through an engine that heats water to 90 degrees C and generates electricity. The plant will produce about 2.8 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, enough electricity to supply a community of 1,500 people, Mr Decker told Le Parisien newspaper.

-via VA Viper

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George Lucas didn't plan to have Darth Vader be Luke Skywalker's father when Episode IV came out. But he worked it in and the idea makes sense from a certain point of view--as Obi-Wan later tells Luke.

It gets more complicated when Episodes I-III describe the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker. Some fans think that it doesn't make any sense at all. But YouTube user Shahan Reviews edited Obi-Wan's remembrance of Luke's father so that he seems haunted by the past. Obi-Wan isn't lying to Luke. He's just trying to come to grips with what he lost those many years ago. 

-via Dorkly

With a brush, tape, and a can of decorative snow aerosol spray, Tom Baker can create amazing winter scenes that look like they're leaping out of old black and white films. He paints them on windows for friends, businesses, and charities. Baker paints these scenes on windows, which is why his business is called Snow Windows.

(Image: Toto USA)

Wait, let me rephrase that. Unfortunately, we have to be a bit more specific.

There are toilets that are cleaned only once a year. Many of them. Far too many of them. But the difference is that this toilet needs cleaning only once a year.

Toto is a Japanese manufacturer of the world's most advanced toilets. The company has revolutionized the pooping experience with toilets that check your health or travel to where you are. Sitting on a Toto toilet is like riding a time machine that takes you into a futuristic technological utopia.

Toto's latest development in toilet technology is a toilet bowl made with dirt-resistant materials, an internal spraying system, and ultraviolet light. This is presumably done by rerouting warp drive power through the main deflector dish. BBC News explains:

Its self-cleaning process uses a combination of a disinfectant and a glaze - made out of zirconium and titanium dioxide - which coats the bowl.

Once it flushes it sprays the interior of the bowl with electrolysed water," explained Toto spokeswoman Lenora Campos.

She said the "proprietary process" essentially turns the water into a weak bleach.

"This bleaches the interior, killing anything in the bowl," said Ms Campos.

Meanwhile an ultraviolet light in the lid charges the surface.

That makes it super-hydrophilic - or water-loving, so nothing can stick to it - and also photocatalytic, enabling oxygen ions to break down bacteria and viruses.

"You don't have to clean the toilet bowl for over a year," said Ms Campos.

-via Dave Barry

Nature is amazing.

Your uvula performs this ballet in your mouth daily. It gracefully flows back and forth in a fantastic display of coordination and power.

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The Slow-Mo Guys record unusual events with a slow motion camera, then display the results on YouTube. In the past, we've seen them slice through an egg with a katana, a show a face flapping in the wind, and a fire tornado.

For their latest video, Dan gargles water while Gav records the motion in his mouth. It's simply beautiful--from a certain point of view.

-via David Thompson

(Photo: Abdeljebbar Qninba)

Mogador is an island off the coast of Morocco. In 2014, Abdeljebbar Qninba, a biologist at Mohammed V University in Rabat observed falcons capturing smaller birds, plucking off their tail and wing feathers, then storing them in holes in rocks for later consumption.

Although scientists have seen birds storing dead animals for later meals, this is the first time that anyone has seen birds stocking live animals. New Scientist consulted other biologists on the reported behavior:

“I haven’t heard of anything like it in [non-human] vertebrates,” says Theodore Stankowich at California State University in Long Beach. “Perhaps this innovation of simply immobilising prey prior to caching has caught on and spread through the population.”

“Given the right circumstances – prey availability and habitat for storing the prey – it is reasonable to see how this behaviour could evolve,” says Michael Steele at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

-via Adam Koford

(Photo of cosplayer Ashlyn Brooke)

Snow Leia and the Seven Droids ended abruptly when the princess turned aside the Evil Queen's proffered apple and instead shot her with a blaster. Then she rescued the Prince, who was sleeping inside a block of carbonite.

Sebastian Errazuriz is an inventive artist and designer whose work we've featured extensively. He's always got a new, usually surreal take on the objects that should fill our lives. In the past, we've seen his coffin that is a functional boat, a coat made of teddy bears, and his seemingly magical wave cabinet.

Errazuriz also made this outright funny piece. He found a taxidermied duck with a broken neck at a museum. It was going to be thrown away, but Errazuriz has instead turned it into a great conversation piece.

-via The Contemporist

(Photo: Ismennt)

Flateyri is a fishing village of 300 people in northwestern Iceland. In 1995, it was devastated by an avalanche from the neighboring mountain of Kollahvilft that killed 20 people. This was the second deadly avalanche that year in Iceland. Another one in a different village killed 16 people. That's a lot for a nation of 300,000 people.

So the Icelanders decided to do something about the avalanche menace. For Flateyri, the country built an enormous earthen wall to shield it from snow. The wedge cuts into a flood of snow, driving it away from the village and into the ocean. Amusing Planet describes it:

In 1998, a special A-shaped earthen dam was built up the mountain to protect Flateyri from future avalanches. The structure consist of two deflecting dams that form a wedge or A-shaped structure in the mountain side. There is a small catching dam that extends between the two deflecting dams in the lowermost part. The walls are 600 meters long and 15-20 meters tall, while the catching dam is 10 meters high and 350 meters long.

The design worked, saving the village from another avalanche the next year:

Only a year after the dam was completed, in February of 1999, a large avalanche from the mountain came crashing down into the eastern side of the dam and went into the sea. The village was saved. The next winter, in March, another huge avalanche from the mountain slammed into the western wall and the village was protected again. Other smaller avalanches have occurred regularly, and each time the protection wall has deflected the snow safely away from the village.

(Photo: Beth Evans)

It's winter, so it's time for some heavy Ugg boots. Ugh at weather and, since this fashion appears to be so widely hated, ugh at these boots, as well.

Cartoonist Beth Evans ughed for this photo. You can read our interview about her work here.

When Deepak Singh was growing up in India, his father would sometimes take him and his siblings to the village where he grew up. He wanted his kids to understand how rural poor people lived in order to appreciate the everyday luxuries they enjoyed.

One of Singh's strongest memories of those experiences is how his grandmother's village made extensive use of unprocessed cowpats as a fuel. Villagers carefully collected them, patted them by hand into circular forms, then dried them on ovens. The smell of burning cowpats was pervasive and Singh still remembers it vividly.

Would you like to experience this primitive form of fuel used by the desperately poor? You can, thanks to the very modern information processing and product distribution services of Amazon.com. Singh writes at NPR that it's a popular product in Indian cities:

I learned that cow dung cakes can now be ordered on the Indian Amazon website. Out of curiosity, I ordered 6 pieces. It cost me 236 rupees, about $4. I called the local office of Amazon and spoke to Jaideep, who was very courteous and happy to answer my questions. He said, "Sir, this is a new product that Amazon is selling and they are getting a lot of orders from folks in urban areas where it is not so easy to find cow dung cakes." When I asked him what people wanted it for, he said, "They use it for religious purposes only."

I had never imagined one day I would order cow poop online — poop that I had once seen my grandma collect from her barn and dry on her wall. I am eagerly waiting to receive my six pieces of round-shaped cow dung cakes in the mail. I wonder what would my grandma think of it if she were still alive.

There are several Amazon.com purchasing options for cowpats. The reviews for the one pictured above are a hoot:

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In the hands of a master, an excavator is a sight to behold. An expert driver can do amazing things with a digger, such as lighting a cigarette, loading the digger on a truck without a lift, and extracting himself from a deep ditch. These pilots have skills worthy of great respect.

But not this guy.

Short of someone dying--which thankfully did not appear to happen--it would have been impossible for this stunt to have a worse outcome.

-via Geekologie

(Photo: Adam Wiseman)

Mexican artist Pedro Reyes and his wife, fashion designer Carla Fernández, are renovating and redesigning their home in Mexico City. Among the features that they're putting in place in the old Brutalist house are Reyes's own Mano-Sillas chairs. Each one looks like a hand opening up to offer you a place to sit.

(Photos: Labor Gallery)

My favorite part about these unique chairs is that the fingers and thumbs are articulated. You can move them around to express particular gestures fit for different occasions.

-via Khool