In the mood for some dark humor? Too bad, you're getting it anyway. In a wonderfully paced short film, Graham Annable tells the tale of a remarkable dog. I won't say anything else, lest I give away the ending. Or, for that matter, the beginning.
To promote its new Chevrolet Orlando, General Motors had artists sculpt a full-size model of its new car. The company then placed it on a street in London:
The company crafted a full-scale Play-Doh model of the MPV and parked it in downtown London. The instillation weighs in at a staggering 1.5 tons and measures 15 feet long by almost six feet wide. If you're trying to work out the connection between Play-Doh and the Orlando, don't stretch your gray matter too hard. As it turns out, the connection has less to do with any correlation between the vehicle and the malleable goo than it does with some research conducted by the minds at Chevrolet.
The automaker pinged 1,000 UK adults in an attempt to discern the most popular toy of yesteryear. Play-Doh handily took that title with 19 percent of the vote.
Ordinary LEGO bricks just aren't heavy enough to hold back a door (although you can wedge them in between the door and the floor). So Instructables user lizzyastro knitted a cover for a brick, using bottle caps to form the knobs.
Chris McMahon calls them "involuntary collaborations". He buys fairly dull landscapes at yardsales and then adds monsters to them. To give credit to the first artist, he just adds his own name in the bottom right corners. You can view two others at the link.
Graham Waspe had been aided by his guide dog Edward for six years. When Edward himself began to lose his sight, Mr. Waspe acquired a new guide dog, Opal, who helps not only him, but Edward as well:
Mr Waspe's new dog is not just aiding his owner to carry out everyday tasks, but also helping Edward to get around.
Mr Waspe, of Stowmarket, Suffolk, received his new dog last November after Edward developed the inoperable problem which resulted in him needing both eyes removed.
And the two-year-old bitch has stepped in where Edward left off as they tour their old haunts together.
Japanese tombstone maker Ishinokoe has begun offering memorials that feature QR codes. Want to know more about the person entombed there? Just whip out your smartphone and scan the code.
http://www.japantrends.com/qr-code-graves-give-a-memorial-window/ via Copyranter | Photo: Jcast
Here's a clever ad that UNICEF put out a few years ago to raise funds for people who have been maimed by landmines. Stickers, camouflaged to look like pavement, were left on sidewalks. When someone steps on one, it sticks to the bottom of his/her shoe. The underside informs the victim that if it had been a landmine, s/he would have been mutilated.
Geothermal energy is plentiful in Iceland, so that nation is considering running an electrical cable under the ocean to Europe to sell its excess electricity. If successful, it'll be the longest undersea electrical cable in the world:
Depending on the destination country, the cable would be between 1,200 and 1,900 kilometres (745-1,180 miles) long, making it "the longest sub-sea cable in the world."
The project aims for the exportation of some five terawatt-hours (or five billion kilowatt-hours) each year, Jonsdottir said.
At current power prices in Europe, that corresponds to between 250 and 320 million euros ($350-448 million) in exports annually, and is enough to cover the average annual consumption of 1.25 million European households.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i8DwT00oi-riUPoOpVqp2NRScSDA?docId=CNG.269669ec3457e631da554fe16c1e45a2.221 via Popular Science | Photo via Flickr user ThinkGeoEnergy used under Creative Commons license
Japanese artist Sagaki Keita creates pen and ink illustrations that are themselves composed of tiny figures inside, from people to anthropomorphic ice cream cones. The level of detail that he provides is really astounding. You can see several other examples at the link.
Link probably goes on so many adventures because he's trying to avoid long, awkward conversations with his mother. This is one of nine hilarious images by Andrew Bridgman.
Jessica Bethune, Aiswarya Kolisetty, Jessica Noglows, and Rob Sobecki are students at the Olin College of Engineering. For a class assignment, they built a machine that can figure out the combination to any Masterlock combination padlock. The LockCracker tries every possible combination, spinning the dial until it's successful.
Pink Tentacle has many pictures of some colorfully decorated gas tanks that can be found in Japan. Watermelon paint schemes are apparently common. You know, the shape would lend itself very well to a Pokémon ball.
An enormous snow sculpture of Batman was spotted in Ludlow, Vermont. As you can see from another photo at the link, it rises up to the second storey of an adjoining building.
http://www.comicsbeat.com/2011/03/09/majestic-snow-batman-towers-over-vermont/ via blastr | Photo: SkiDiva
You may have noticed that the human penis lacks spines protruding from the surface. This is in contrast to many animals, including other primates such as chimpanzees, which use the spines for sexual competition:
It has long been believed that humans evolved smooth penises as a result of adopting a more monogamous reproductive strategy than their early human ancestors. Those ancestors may have used penile spines to remove the sperm of competitors when they mated with females.
Researchers, while studying another topic, stumbled upon one explanation by comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes:
They first systematically identified 510 DNA sequences missing in humans and present in chimps, finding that those sequences were almost exclusively from the non-coding regions of the genome, between genes. They then homed in on two sequences whose absence in humans they thought might be interesting -- one from near the androgen receptor (AR) gene and one from near a gene involved in tumour suppression (GADD45G).
Inserting the chimpanzee sequences into mouse embryos revealed that the former sequence produced both the hard penile spines and sensory whiskers present in some animals. The latter sequence acted as a kind of brake on the growth of specific brain regions -- with the removal of its function appearing to have paved the way for the evolution of the larger human brain.
Link | Photo by Flickr user lightmatter used under Creative Commons license
In fact, the entire crew of the Enterprise does. YouTube user BlackMoonCGI did an excellent editing job and showed what's on Spock's Facebook feed. It appears that he and Christine Chapel have had a bit of a tiff. Content warning: foul language.
