Brittney Schneck, 23, converted her 1994 Dodge Caravan into the van driven by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. At Jalopnik, Justin Hyde writes:

Schneck hand-painted and stenciled the exterior colors and fabricated the ray gun, spoiler and other add-ons from scratch. It's not just cosmetic craft; Schneck has rebuilt and replaced most of the Caravan's mechanical parts, from a new radiator, brakes, axles and head gasket down to a clip for the hood prop rod, color-matched to the paint scheme that extends to the engine bay.

There are several more pictures at the link.

Link via Jalopnik

Andrew Dickerson of the Georgia Institute of Technology tested how a Labrador Retriever moves when it is trying to dry itself. They discovered that the dog oscillated its skin at 4.3 Hz and then extrapolated a mathematical model for furry animals in general:

They reasoned that the water is bound to the dog by surface tension between the liquid and the hair. When the dog shakes, centripetal forces pull the water away. So for the water to be ejected from the fur, the centripetal force has to exceed the surface tension.

This model leads to an interesting prediction. If the animal has a radius R, the shaking frequency must scale with R^0.5. That makes sense, smaller animals will need to oscillate faster to generate forces large enough to dry themselves.

To find out whether that applies in nature, Dickerson and pals studied films of various animals of different sizes. They found that a mouse shakes at 27 Hz, a cat at about 6 Hz while a bear shakes at 4Hz. "Shake frequencies asymptotically approach 4Hz as animals grow in size," they conclude.

Link via Geekosystem | Photo by Flickr user DrChumley1978 used under Creative Commons license

(Video Link)

Gordon Pinsent, an accomplished Canadian thespian, offers his voice to the words of Justin Bieber. Verily, he makes Bieber seem like a man of great stature.

via Urlesque

The hotel chain Best Western released a list of the oddest requests made by customers over the past year. Here's are a few examples:

Another customer, who had been tasked with arranging a lawnmower convention, enquired about the possibility of mowing the grounds of the hotel, so guests could try out the various models on display.

One group of animal-lovers requested reiki classes for their pets, and another asked for a host of twin rooms, so guests and their dogs could each have their own bed.

A support group for sex addicts, meanwhile, demanded a selection of single rooms, and a member of staff to ensure each delegate made it to bed alone.

Link | Photo via Flickr user beccapie used under Creative Commons license

Craftster user mamaedgar made a crocheted Yoda hat for her son. The ear hair is a nice detail. At the link, you can view more pictures as well as read detailed instructions on how to make your own.

Link via Great White Snark | Photo: Mamaedgar

Previously: Baby Yoda Hat

Here at Neatorama, we love the work of food artist Prudence Staite. We've featured her Snow White made out of apples, her Robert Pattinson made out of chocolate, and her Pope made out of pizza dough. One of her latest creations is a billboard made out of cheese. She and 13 assistants took 8 days to make this advertisement out of 10 types of British cheese.

Link | Photo: Jeff Moore

The Kocian Law Group in Manchester, Connecticut bought an old Kenny Rogers restaurant to use as an office. The building has been renovated to look like any other law office, except for the drive-through window:

"We have drive-thrus for ATMs and we have that customer convenience. Why not a law firm?" attorney Nick Kocian asked.

Kocian wanted to make things convenient for customers to easily drop off and pick up documents. He has been told this is the first drive-thru legal service in Connecticut and possibly the country.

"We represent a lot of injured people," Kocian said. "If you have somebody who's in a wheelchair or somebody who's hurt, it's convenient."

At the link, you can watch a news video about the firm.

Link via Jalopnik | Image: NBC Connecticut

Some physicists have proposed that the entire universe is not real, but a holographic illusion. Now astrophysicist Craig Hogan is building a machine to test that hypothesis:

Possible evidence for this model appeared last year in the unaccountable “noise” plaguing the GEO600 experiment in Germany, which searches for gravitational waves from black holes. To Hogan, the jitteriness suggested that the experiment had stumbled upon the lower limit of the spacetime pixels’ resolution.

Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed, provides a basis for math showing that the third dimension may not exist at all. In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth. If this is true, the illusion can only be maintained until equipment becomes sensitive enough to find its limits.[...]

“So we want to build a machine which will be the most sensitive measurement ever made of spacetime itself,” says Hogan. “That’s the holometer.”[...]

In the holometer, this loss of sync looks like a shaking or vibrations that represent jitters in spacetime itself, like the fuzziness of radio coming over too little bandwidth.

The holometer’s precision means that it doesn’t have to be large; at 40 meters in length, it is only one hundredth of the size of current interferometers, which measure gravitational waves from black holes and supernovas. Yet because the spacetime frequencies it measures are so rapid, it will be more precise over very short time intervals by seven orders of magnitude than any atomic clock in existence.

Link via The Agitator | Image: Paramount

Two baby monkeys named Nehime and Rakan were appointed station masters at a train station in Hyoto prefecture, Japan:

The monkeys, aged seven months and three months, were dressed in blue uniforms made from traditional local fabrics complete with mini hats before being formally appointed station masters and "special city residents" by the local mayor.[...]

It is not the first time in Japan that animals have found themselves at the helm of a railway station: Tama, the tortoiseshell cat, is famous in Japan as a longstanding station master of Kishi station in Wakayama prefecture.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Kyodo

Jamie O'Shea is a conceptual artist. We've previously featured his bed, which is designed to be used standing up. More recently, he became interested in the role of knowledge in developing our technological civilization. Is knowledge alone enough, or are we dependent upon tools made by others? To find out, O'Shea decided to build a telegraph completely from scratch -- including the tools -- using only what he found in a New Jersey forest. At the link, you can watch a video of his attempt.

Link via Slashdot | Artist's Website

Viscount David Linley, a luxury furniture craftsman, made this custom writing desk topped with a model of the Monte Carlo casino:

The main body of the desk is constructed in American walnut with inlays of Santos rosewood and sycamore, while the surface of the desk is covered in dark red leather. On the underside of the domed lid of the architectural box is a marquetry depiction of the Monegasque flag in red sycamore and holly. Six hand-carved figurines surmount the rooftop,and six secret drawers are each opened by a different mechanism.

Link via Born Rich | Linley's Website | Photo: JustLuxe

Steve Eves is building a functional 1:9 scale Saturn 1B rocket. That was a type of rocket used in America's Apollo program. At the link, you can see an extensive gallery of process photos as Eves constructs the model.

http://www.rocketsmagazine.com/saturn-1b-projects/SteveEves/Gallery/BuildStatus/ via Make | Photo: Rockets Magazine

Mathery is a website that encourages people to think creatively, such as building a unicycle with training wheels. Here's the philosophical statement for the site:

An idea is a parasite. Once born, it settles.
If you have one you can make it come true
otherwise it will only leave an imprint.
As soon as we make it real we create a chain reaction.
One idea can generate another 100.
It represents the beginning.
The idea starts now,
It's up to you to give it a shape.

http://www.02mathery.com/project/monotricycle.html via DudeCraft

In other news: Paul Overton, the Dude behind DudeCraft and a friend of Neatorama, has launched a new website called Every Day is Awesome.

DARPA-funded research is developing batteries to power nano-scale machinery. The largest of these batteries will be the size of a grain of sand. UCLA researcher Jane Chang explained:

"We're trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller," says Chang.

To reach this goal, Chang is thinking in three dimensions in collaboration with Bruce Dunn other researchers at UCLA. She's coating well-ordered micro-pillars or nano-wires -- fabricated to maximize the surface-to-volume ratio, and thus the potential energy density -- with electrolyte, the conductive material that allows current to flow in a battery.

Using atomic layer deposition -- a slow but precise process that allows layers of material only an atom thick to be sprayed on a surface -- she has successfully applied the solid electrolyte lithium aluminosilicate to these nanomaterials.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20101020/2777/batteries-smaller-than-a-grain-of-salt.htm via GearFuse | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Anton Fomkin used under Creative Commons license

A man in Jiangsu Province, China, got stuck in a toilet when he dropped his phone inside and tried to get it back:

When rescue workers arrived on the scene in Jiangsu province in eastern China, they found the man crouched over the toilet in a bathroom stall, his entire arm submerged up to the shoulder in the drain.

Workers broke the porcelain bowl with crowbars and hammered the pipes, taking care not to injure the man, CCTV reported.

After 10 minutes of work, the man was able to slowly remove his cut and bruised arm from the bowl and retrieve his waterlogged phone.

Link via Geekologie (where there's a video)