Two years ago, Peggielene Bartels, a US citizen and resident of Maryland, received an early morning phone call. Her uncle, the king of a village in Ghana, had died. Bartels was the next in the line of succession, and so she became king of Otuam:

Nana Amuah-Afenyi VI is Bartels' new title, but she is better known as King Peggy. This straight-talking, 57-year-old is the first woman in her fishing community of 7,000 people in Ghana's Central Region to be anointed a king, or "nana."

She now juggles two lives — from the palace in Otuam and from a modest condo outside Washington, D.C. Since the 1970s, Bartels, a naturalized U.S. citizen, has been a secretary at Ghana's Embassy in Washington where she still spends most of her time, running royal affairs back home in Otuam over the phone and on trips to Ghana.

"So, when they told me, I was a little bit reluctant to accept it, because it comes with responsibilities. And here is a secretary in the United States, I have my own obligations, bills and stuff and becoming a king, you have to be really rich," she says.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130902212 via View From The Porch | Photo: Eric Don-Arthur/NPR

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During the Cold War, the Swedish Air Force wanted to be able to land its fighter jets on roads and short airstrips throughout the country. The Saab Viggen fighter was therefore designed to land and take off from very short runways. As you can see from this video, this fighter can land, turn around backwards, and take off in under a minute.

via reddit

Her name is Sparkles, and she (he?) will bring hearts and other metal objects together at 370°F. This My Little Pony mod was created by Matt Pinner.

Link via Make | Photo: Crash Space

Luxury home furnishings designer Windisch Nameek made a toilet brush and holder that's plated with 24-carat gold. The vendor suggests that the advantage to gold is that it won't pit, tarnish, or corrode. So it's a practical choice.

Link via J-Walk Blog | Photo: Pioneer Linens

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Filmmaker François Vautier put an ant colony inside a scanner and took a picture once a week every week for five years. This time-lapse video shows the colony gradually filling and eroding the machine.

via GearFuse

Harvard University's Putnam Gallery has a collection of historical scientific instruments. Pictured above is Benjamin Martin's cometarium, which dates back to about 1766. Here's what it did:

This apparatus was designed to demonstrate how the speed of a comet varies in its orbit according to Kepler's law of equal areas. The comet Benjamin Martin chose for this instrument is Halley's Comet, which goes around the Sun every 75 1/2 years. Martin began producing cometaria before Halley's Comet made its predicted return, and so was betting that Halley would prove correct in his theory.

http://dssmhi1.fas.harvard.edu/emuseumdev/code/emuseum.asp?collection=120&collectionname=CHSI%27s%20Putnam%20Gallery&style=single¤trecord=67&page=collection&profile=objects&searchdesc=CHSI%27s%20Putnam%20Gallery&sessionid=C2E2B76B-E06A-4F9D-8DD1-8AECE2978F18&action=collection¤trecord=68 via CrunchGear | Photo: Harvard University

deviantART user wolkentanzer split two apples and stapled sections together. Presumably this was part of some junior mad scientist research.

Link via Geekosystem

GoPet, a company that manufactures dog exercise equipment, makes a dog-sized hamster wheel. The company stresses that this design is both healthy for the dog and environmentally-friendly. There's a video at the link of several dogs using them.

http://www.gopetusa.com/cs.php via OhGizmo!

On September 4th, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck New Zealand. Pictured above is a railroad track that crossed the fault line near Rolleston. Geographer Dave Petley of the American Geophysical Union writes:

The second image is particularly interesting. Note how the rails show high levels of deformation whilst the surrounding ground shows comparatively little. Notice also how the big kink on the left side has pushed the ballast aside and into the track side ditch This has happened on the right side too, but to a lesser extent. The right side bend nearest the camera has pushed the ballast towards the camera.

My initial hypothesis here (I am no expert on railway track deformation) in order to stimulate discussion is that the buckling may be the result of compressional deformation across a broad zone. The compression on the very strong railway line was accommodated when a weak point was found, leading to a comparatively rapid deformation to form the main buckle on the left. This then concentrated stress on both sides of the buckle, allowing the other (right side) bends to form.

Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Malcolm Teasdale

It's possible to make real money in virtual worlds, as one user of the MMOG Entropia Universe recently experienced. He sold a set of virtual real estate properties for $335,000:

Jacobs, who goes by the in-game name of Neverdie, has made a number of high-profile transactions over the past few years, from the $25,000 sale of his in-game items, to his purchase of a virtual asteroid for $100,000. The purchase of the asteroid, in 2005, was believed to be the most expensive virtual item sale in history. That record was broken by the 2009 sale of the Crystal Palace Space Station for $330,000.

The recent sale, confirmed by Jacobs to the fansite, amounts to a value of $335,000. Jacobs sold a number of bio domes, a mall, stadium and a club to Kalun.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/virtual-property-sale-record-broken via Geekologie | Image: MindArk

Relative to bodyweight, the male tuberous bushcricket has the largest testicles of any animal on Earth:

The sperm-producing organs account for 14 percent of the body mass of males of this bushcricket species. The previous record holder's testicles—belonging to the fruit fly Drosophila bifurca—tipped the scales at about 11 percent of its body mass.

"I was amazed by the size of the testes—they seemed to take up the entire abdomen," said study leader Karim Vahed, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Derby in the U.K.

Link | Photo: Richard Richards/University of Derby

Perry Watkins makes custom cars, such as one that looks like a dining room set. His latest project was to build the world's smallest street legal car, and the result has been certified as such by Guinness World Records. The "Wind Up" car is 41 inches high and 26 inches high. It can drive 37 miles an hour and has a seat belt:

Watkins set out to break the world record before he started building it. He researched details of the current record holder as well as the legal requirements that apply to the construction of motor vehicles.

Watkins used a coin-operated children's ride, which he repainted, for the body and repurposed a chassis from a Shanghai Shenke quad bike. He used rear tires and wheels from a Honda Monkey motorcycle. The front wheels were custom-made to fit tires from a 1939 Brockhouse Corgi paratrooper’s mini motorcycle.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: AP/Martin Meissner

In Korawan, a remote area of India, there's a bank that allows people to deposit goats as savings, or borrow goats on credit. Local coordinator Subedar Singh explained how it works:

"Wives of these people help them in crushing stones and breed two-three goats for additional income," Singh said.

"Though the area is best suited for goat breeding, no effort was made to establish it as a full fledged business activity," he said.

"We provide goats to women having interest in taking up breeding as a full-time activity as loan. When a goat gives birth to kids, generally two to three in numbers, one of them is deposited with the bank again," Prema explained.

Goats in the bank are medically examined every week.

"In case a goat dies, then it is either replaced from the market or from the bank depending upon the availability," Prema said.

Link via J-Walk Blog | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Pete Markham used under Creative Commons license

A housing development in Zaragoza, Spain, will name its streets after classic video games. Last Saturday, residents dubbed one road "Avenida de Super Mario Bros.":

Other planned roads in the neighborhood include streets named for "Sonic the Hedgehog," "Space Invaders" and "The Legend of Zelda."

Video games won out over more traditional options in an online poll that residents used to pick their street names, said Antonio Almudi Miranda, president of the Arcosur neighborhood association.

"We are people who grew up living with video games. We know them very well," he said. "I'm 25. I'm the same age as Mario."

Link via Nerd Bastards | Photo: CNN

A study using CT scans suggests that Neanderthal brains, like that of modern humans, grew steadily into adulthood. But unlike modern human brains, Neanderthal brains did not change shape as they grew. This may explain why Neanderthals had a similar brain size, but less intelligence:

Scientists have shown that Neandertal brains are about the same size as ours. Yet our Paleolithic brethren are not known for having been great scholars. To probe this cognitive conundrum, researchers took CT scans of 11 Neandertal brains, including one newborn. And they compared these images to those of modern humans.

They found that baby braincases are similar in size and shape, regardless of their parentage. All are elongated, most likely to smooth passage through the birth canal. But modern human baby brains grow more globular in the first year of life, changes that reflect a massive wave of neural development. That phase change is absent in Neandertals, whose brains retain that extended newborn shape throughout their lives.

Link | Photo by Flickr user Matt Seleskey used under Creative Commons license