For a few days, people living in a remote area of Namibia heard strange explosions. Then they found this sphere, which is about 14 inches in diameter, in an impact crater about 12 feet across. What is it for? Who does it belong to? So far, it has yet to extinguish all life on earth, but puzzled authorities are investigating. In the comments, write your own hypotheses about the origins and purposes of this sphere.

Link -via Popular Science | Photo: National Forensic Science Institute

Eric Johnson's urban garden is so small that it lacks a single blade of grass. So he has to get creative to make the most of it. One change that he made was to embed glass marbles into his privacy fence. It's really simple: just drill holes into the wood and push the marbles in! Think of the creative patterns that one could make, like constellations or rainbows.

Link -via Offbeat Home

These gingerbread men are far more flexible than I am, and they've been baked! Patti Paige, who once made a completely edible typewriter out of gingerbread, makes gingerbread men in popular yoga poses. At the link, you can watch her tutorial video on how to make your own.

Link -via Bit Rebels | Patti Paige's Website

Like the proverb says, it's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog. And 80-year old Josefa Lopez, standing at 4'9", had a lot of fight in her. When she saw a man with a gun beating her daughter, she charged into action with her aluminum cane:

At one point, the man fired a shot but missed the enraged octogenarian, who turns 81 on Thursday. Speaking in Spanish from the porch of her home Wednesday, yards from the scene of the incident, Lopez said she blindly charged against the gunman after seeing her daughter lying on the circular driveway, bleeding from her face. [...]

"I thought she was dead," Lopez said. "I yelled at [the gunman], 'I am going to kill you, [son of a b----]!' I wasn't myself. To me, she was dead."

The robber prudently fled before getting thrashed.

Link -via Say Uncle | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user ken ratcliff

Book carving has really taken off as a medium in the past few years. Guy Laramee's impressive contributions show entire landscapes cut into the paper. You know what would be really neat? To see a Z-scale model railroad set on top of one of these landscapes.

Artist's Website -via Colossal

Booooooom! -- that's seven Os -- is a great if oddly-named art blog. For several months, it's hosted a project which invites readers to submit photos of themselves recreating famous works of art. Here's Sybille de Chavagnac's vision of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. Check out the rest at the link. Be warned: some of the submissions are nudes.

Link

These would be perfect toppers for children's Christmas presents! For a project dubbed "Ribbonesia", an artist named Baku Maeda arranged ribbons so that they look like different animals.

http://www.ribbonesia.com/top.html -via Dude Craft | Artist's Website | Photo: Kei Furuse

This idea by Flickr user psychojunglerat has so much potential! Earlier incarnations could be an audio cassette rack made from 8-track tapes or a disc record rack made out of wax cylinders.

Link -via Offbeat Home

(Video Link)

Marquese Scott, the dubstep master who wowed the Internet three months ago, is back. This time, he's defying the limits of human movement while on the Great Wall of China.

-via Blame It on the Voices | Scott's Website

At Christmas dinner this year, you may find yourself stuffed to capacity, unable to eat another bite...until you see a scrumptious dessert. Now, scientists know why. It's because your stomach gets bigger when you eat sugar:

The sugar in sweet foods stimulates a reflex that expands your stomach, writes senior researcher Arnold Berstad and assistant doctor Jørgen Valeur from Lovisenberg Diakonale Hospital in the latest issue of The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association.

“If you eat dessert after you’re actually feeling stuffed you’re tricking your normal sensation of being full,” they argue. [...]

Glucose – or sugar if you will – stimulates this relaxation reflex.

“In this way it can decrease the pressure on the stomach and reduce the sensation of being full. A sweet dessert allows the stomach to make room for more food,” the researchers write in the medical journal.

Link -via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Flickr user whitneyinchicago

(Video Link)

Although it has a long way to go from viral video to officially sanctioned Olympic sport, groin ball shows some promise. It's played by four people in two teams. One grapples with an opponent while the two remaining players try to strike their opponents in the groin with tennis balls. When one player collapses to the ground in agony, his/her team has lost.

For those of you not athletically inclined, there are fantasy leagues.

Link

No, not there, there! Some bibliophiles are really specific about how they arrange their treasures. Jane Dandy, a furniture maker in San Francisco, can make them one-of-a-kind bookcases to fit individual collections, and no others.

Etsy Shop -via Colossal

(Video Link)

The bearded dragon seemed resigned to accept that the ants he killed in a video game couldn't be eaten. But this African Bullfrog will not tolerate being an instrument of his human's amusement.

-via Geekosystem

Gerard Baker, a native of the UK, grew up playing and watching two different sports called football, or what Americans refer to as soccer and rugby. But since that time, his passion for the sports of his homeland has petered out in favor of the American game. Why? Baker explains:

It's none of the usual explanations: lots of scoring being better than endless nil-nil draws—I've been to cricket matches in which 1,000 runs were scored and you could hardly call them riveting. It's not the hoopla or the sport-as-family-entertainment thing either which soccer fans accustomed to English hooliganism are supposed to appreciate. (Have you ever been to an Eagles game?)

Baseball fans will have to forgive me here, but the answer, I think, is that football is the quintessential American sport. It's no accident it hasn't really caught on elsewhere (the annual NFL game in London notwithstanding) whereas baseball and basketball have at least a claim to a global following and participation.

In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don't mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework.

Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other's brains out. It doesn't get any more beautiful than that.

Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: AP

(Video Link)

Big Majors Spot, a tiny island in the Bahamas, is inhabited by a herd of feral pigs. The food supply on the island is limited, so the little porkers will gladly swim out to boaters off the shore to beg for scraps.

Link