Dutch designer Mieke Meijer compresses and bonds old newspapers so that the print is still legible, but the resulting product has the grain and feel of original wood:

Every day, piles of newspapers are discarded and recycled into new paper. Mieke Meijer has come up with a solution to use this surplus of paper into a renewed material. When a NewspaperWood log is cut, the layers of paper appear like lines of a wood grain or the rings of a tree and therefore resembles the asethetic of real wood. The material can be cut, milled and sanded and generally treated like any other type of wood.

Link via Make | Designer's Website | Photo: Atelier 29

The Chikyu research vessel is a ship with a drill that can reach deeper under the earth's surface than any other drill system in the world. At a cost of $540 million, it's capable of reaching 2,890 23,000 feet below the seabed. Popular Science has an overview of how it works:

In 2007, off the coast of Japan, it became the first mission to study subduction zones, the area between tectonic plates that is the birthplace of many earthquakes. Over the next three years, scientists will tack on at least an extra mile of drill and attempt the most ambitious mission ever: piercing the Earth’s mantle. There, scientists expect to find the same conditions as those in the early Earth—and perhaps the same life-forms that thrived then.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/deepest-drill | Image: Coherent Images

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an office within the US government that develops military technology. One of their current projects is to design a nuclear reactor that can be sustained with human and animal waste:

The military’s already working on using seawater to create fuel, but that’s more of an option for maritime operations. Without an endless supply of seawater, they’d need an alternative carbon source. Enter the massive quantities of sludge that inevitably accumulate around troop outposts. It’s been a problem for decades, according to environmental management expert Dr. James Lee. In an article for the Army’s Engineer School, he writes that the military spent upwards of $65,000 in annual fuel costs just to burn off human refuse at base camp in the Balkans.

So Darpa’s proposal would offer two major benefits: Less waste to treat and dispose of at bases, and fewer financial and tactical burdens around sourcing adequate fuel — whether to power jets and facilities or burn off heaps of odorous fecal matter. And with a single trooper stationed in Afghanistan using 22 gallons of fuel a day, that’d add up to major savings.

Link via Fast Company | Photo: US Department of Agriculture

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Sculptor Keith Newstead made this lovely brass pegasus automaton. He writes of its metal work:

As they had been cut from 1mm brass they were quite heavy and I was worried that the whole brass horse would be too heavy for the crank to lift it.

I made up the base , fitted all the parts of Pegasus together, fitted Pegasus to the base and joined up all the connecting wires.

As soon as I connected the wings I realised that because of the way they were set up they were actualy lifting the rest of Pegasus, in effect making it lighter.

http://www.keithnewsteadautomata.com/forsale/brass-pegasus and Link via Make

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We've heard the Muppets sing "Ode to Joy", "Dust in the Wind", and "Bohemian Rhapsody". In the most recent Muppet music video, a monstrous bunny rabbit and his smaller friends sing the Ben E. King song "Stand By Me".

via Nerdist | Previously on Neatorama: Stand By Me

Mark of the blog Life Support has pictures and descriptions of ten unusual medical inventions that were either pointless or dangerous to anyone who would use them. Among them is the 1935 Old Age Rejuvenator Centrifuge, which claims to reverse the effects of aging by counteracting the effects of gravity on the human body.

Link via The Corner

Brandon Bird's "Two Warriors Come Out of the Sky" presents The Dukes of Hazzard as a cave painting. It was created with acrylic paint and dirt on canvas. We've previously featured his Seinfeld/Bruce Lee remix and and his depiction of the death of Jennifer Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Link via Popped Culture

When Icelandic chef Fridgeir Eiriksson learned that the Fimmvorduhals volcano was erupting, he decided to use the opportunity to cook a luxurious meal using the volcano's heat:

On Tuesday, Eiriksson and three mates at the cafi of Reykjavik's luxury hotel Holt drove supplies and "lots of champagne" up to the foot of the mountain in two trucks.

The chefs set up a make-shift dining area near a lava field with a red carpet, a small table and two bolstered chairs for a customers who were to be flown up by helicopter.[...]

With mercury dipping to as low as minus 30 degrees at the mountain over the last few days and the glowing fresh lava around them the diners were offered: lobster soup, flaming lobster and monkfish and lava-cooked shallot onions and Veuve Clicquot champagne.

Link via The Daily Telegraph (larger images available) | Photo: Kristjan Jogason/Demotix Images

The biotech company Sensimed has developed a contact lens that monitors the user's glaucoma:

The Triggerfish lens is made of the same silicon hydrogel as many of the soft contact lenses currently on the market, but embedded within it is a microprocessor and a strain gauge that encircles its outer edge. When fluid accumulates in the eye, the diameter of the cornea changes, and that change is picked up by the strain gauge. Data is processed and then transmitted via radio frequency to a receiver.

This data can then be used by doctors to provide specific and timely treatments, as well as give researchers a continuous stream of data about the progress of the disease in the same patient.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: Sensimed | Previously on Neatorama: Contact Lenses that Change Color to Alert Diabetics of Glucose Levels

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Two men fleeing from police in Cleveland, Ohio tried to climb a barbed wire fence. One made it over the top (getting cut in the process), only to find himself in a prison yard. He was then arrested.

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Food artist Jojo Krang of the blog Eye Candy provides step-by-step instructions on how to paint a picture with chocolate. First you create a reverse image, then apply dark tones, midtones, and light tones, in that order, and then flip the product over.

Link via DudeCraft | Photo: Jojo Krang | Previously on Neatorama: Too Cute to Eat

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NASA worked with Braille experts to create a tactile representation of the Carina Nebula:

The 17-by-11-inch color image is embossed with lines, slashes, and other markings that correspond to objects in the giant cloud, allowing visually impaired people to feel what they cannot see and form a picture of the nebula in their minds. The image's design is also useful and intriguing for sighted people who have different learning styles.

"The Hubble image of the Carina Nebula is so beautiful, and it illustrates the entire life cycle of stars," says Mutchler, who, along with Grice, unveiled the tactile Carina image in January 2010, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. "I thought that people who are visually impaired should be able to explore it and learn from it, too."

Link via Fanboy

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Here at Neatorama, we love Rube Goldberg machines! So enjoy Wired's gallery of nine such setups, including "The Falling Water" -- a cocktail-making Rube Goldberg machine by Joseph Herscher. It mixes vodka, lemonade, ice, and a slice of cucumber.

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Fifty years ago this month, Xerox shipped out the first commercial document copying machine. This technical innovation began with Chester Carlson, a New York attorney, who discovered in the 1950s that photoconductivity could be used to create a mirror image of a document. From CNN's historical overview:

Carlson spent more than a decade trying to design a working model of his copier -- an obsessive and mostly fruitless quest that cost him his first marriage -- until the Haloid company finally showed an interest.

By the mid-1950s, Haloid had devoted a team of engineers to the project. It was a huge gamble. The team toiled seven days a week in a Rochester warehouse, but progress was slow. One early version of the machine stood almost 12 feet tall. Another could only make copies in the dark. Engineers improvised by cobbling together crude prototypes out of spare parts, such as aluminum pipes and rabbit-fur brushes.

Link via Gizmodo | Photo: 1940s era industrial photocopier, courtesy of the US Social Security Administration

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Dondurma -- Turkish ice cream -- is apparently made differently from ice cream in the United States, and has stickier consistency. Jordan Breindel of Urlesque informs us that in Turkey, streetside vendors of the substance often engage in a performance art as they serve portions to customers. More videos at the link.

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