Drake University is a private college in Iowa. Pictured above is a logo from its new ad campaign. Do you think that it sends a good message?

The college administration doesn't see any problem:

However, Drake officials are standing by the D+ campaign -- which college officials crafted with outside PR contractors. Defenders of the ad blitz described it as "edgy and intriguing" in a letter to faculty and staff this week. The letter explained that the campaign "was designed to catch the attention of high school students who are bombarded with college and university materials to the point that they are often in information overload and unable to differentiate among the many institutions that have contacted them."

Link | College Website | Screenshot: Yahoo

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Astronaut and educator Don Pettit recorded this time-lapse video from the International Space Station. It shows day turning into night as the Earth rotates beneath him.

via Radley Balko

At a 1997 soccer match, Roberto Carlos scored a goal against the French national team that seemed physically impossible. The ball seemed to curve around the French players. Physicists couldn't explain the ball's movement:

A group of French scientists, perhaps desperate to prove that at least the laws of physics weren’t actively rooting against their national team, have been able to figure out the trajectory of the ball and, with it, an equation to describe its unusual path.

It all comes down to the fact that, when a sphere spins, its trajectory is a spiral. Usually, gravity and the relatively short distance the ball travels cover up this spiral trajectory, but Carlos was a mere 115 feet away and kicked the ball hard enough to reveal its true spiral-like path. As you can see in the diagram above, the ball would have kept spiraling if gravity (and the netting) hadn’t gotten in the way.

At the link, you can see a video of the kick.

Link | Image: New Journal of Physics

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Tony Orrico is both a visual and a performance artist, and often combines the two approaches by creating works in front of audiences. Here, he created an elaborate geometric pattern in eight circles using the movements of his body as measuring tools. The result took precisely 1,000 body movements to complete.

via Make | Artist's Website

Students at the Columbus College of Art & Design (Columbus, Ohio) made an interactive mural that lets you put yourself into Super Mario Bros. Twelve students spent eight days making it. The mural measures sixteen feet tall and thirty-eight feet wide. You can view several full-size pictures at the link.

Link via Geekosystem | Photo: NBC4

Are you tired of your chickens pooping all over your nice carpets and grandmother's table cozies? Now there's a solution to your problem (well, one of them): chicken diapers. Ingrid Dimock of Australia invented and sells them for people who keep their chickens indoors:

The nappies she sells are bought by families who encourage their birds inside to interact or for people in apartments or townhouses who keep birds but have limited space.

"Chickens have become incredibly interactive with people," Ms Dimock said.

"When you come home they are looking for you and run up to you. They make really good pets and are really social creatures."

The leads were developed because Ms Dimock said people wanted to take their birds with them when they left the house.

"People were telling us that they wanted to take their chickens to the park to have a scratch around while they watched their kids playing soccer," she said.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Courier-Mail

The above map shows the border between the United Arab Emirates (yellow) and Oman (green). Inside the UAE is a tiny enclave of Omanese territory called Madha. It consists of about 29 square miles. Inside that enclave is another enclave of UAE territory called Nahwa, which is under a square mile in area. At the link, you can view pictures of this enclave within an enclave.

Link via Dan Lewis | Map: National Geographic Society

A group of miners in Chile have been trapped underground since August 5. Rescue workers are doing their best to dig them out. The story has attracted a lot of publicity and as a result, the wife and mistress of trapped miner Yonni Barrios met each other:

Yonni Barrios' wife, Marta Salinas, and Barrios' lover, Susana Valenzuela, were both holding vigils for him outside the mine.

Salinas was stunned when she heard Valenzuela shouting his name amid a crowd of miners' loved ones.

Salinas, 56, is said to be "horrified". However, she is determined not to give up her man to her love rival.

She told friends: "Barrios is my husband. He loves me and I am his devoted wife. This woman has no legitimacy."

Link via Stuff | Photo: AAP

If you think that modern athletes make a lot of money, they've got nothing on the ancients. Peter Struck, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, states that a particular Roman chariot driver far exceeded the earnings of today's top athletes:

The very best paid of these—in fact, the best paid athlete of all time—was a Lusitanian Spaniard named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who had short stints with the Whites and Greens, before settling in for a long career with the Reds. Twenty-four years of winnings brought Diocles—likely an illiterate man whose signature move was the strong final dash—the staggering sum of 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. The figure is recorded in a monumental inscription erected in Rome by his fellow charioteers and admirers in 146, which hails him fulsomely on his retirement at the age of “42 years, 7 months, and 23 days” as “champion of all charioteers.”

His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period—enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year. By today’s standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion. Even without his dalliances, it is doubtful Tiger could have matched it.

Link via Super Punch | Photo by Flickr user BBM Explorer used under Creative Commons license

Previously: Bizarro: Roman Chariot Bumper Sticker

Rebecca Crane matched the geography of US states with planets in Star Wars to create a composite map of the United States. Texas is Kessel, Oregon is Endor, and Maine is Naboo. Crane writes:

Planets were assigned based on partial terrain, landmarks that correlate with the planet and state, types of people in the state and planet, famous landmarks, or slightly randomly selected (but loosely based on facts) from my brother and myself.

Link via Geekologie

Artist Sarah Calvillo made a steampunk version of Mr. Potato Head. Calvillo works in a wide variety of media, so she also made a vintage-looking wanted poster, offering a reward for the capture of this ungentlemanly spud. At the link, you can view photos of it, as well process photos for the figurine.

Link via GearFuse | Artist's Website

Ascension Island, a British overseas territory in the south Atlantic, was originally a nearly-lifeless, uninhabited rock. It had no freshwater except for rainfall which quickly evaporated. But in an experiment, Charles Darwin and his friend Joseph Hooker introduced non-native plants that they hoped would encourage water retention. The result is that today Ascension Island has lush, vibrant forests:

Egged on by Darwin, in 1847 Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion an elaborate plan. With the help of Kew Gardens - where Hooker's father was director - shipments of trees were to be sent to Ascension.

The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden.

So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.

Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot.

Link via Radley Balko | Photo of Ascension Island by Flickr user Drew Avery used under Creative Commons license

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If you go into some Japanese stores, the clerks have fist-sized orange balls behind the counter. No, the are not for sale. They're balls of paint that clerks throw at robbers so that police can more easily identify them:

The orange orbs you observed are called bohan yo kara boru (anticrime color balls). Basically, they're paint balls — plastic spheres filled with brightly colored liquid pigment. But unlike the fun-and-games variety, these balls are kept on hand in case of a stickup. The idea is to lob one after a robber and mark him to improve the chance of an arrest.

Link via Urlesque

Make held a weird gadget contest, and Rick Prescott's modified Nerf Vulcan EBF-25TM machine gun came in first place. It uses heat sensors to track the movement of warm-bodied intruders and fire at them:

An idea sparked in my mind one day while walking the toy gun isle in a store with my kid and later that evening learning of the workings of a thermopile array while surfing the internet. The result is this infrared seeking sentinel which joins a realistically priced infrared sensor to a realistically operatable Nerf® machine gun to create a slightly less deadly yet still highly deterring automated machine. Personally I have grand plans to deploy the infrared seeking sentinel facing the entrance of my work cubical in order to speed interaction with less desirable visitors.

Link via Great White Snark

Researchers in Germany examined what news stories older people like to read. They found that grandma and grandpa tend to prefer stories that cast younger people in a negative light:

"Living in a youth centered culture, they may appreciate a boost in self-esteem. That's why they prefer the negative stories about younger people, who are seen as having a higher status in our society," said Dr. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, of Ohio State University.[...]

All the adults in the study were shown what they were led to believe was a test version of a new online news magazine. They were also given a limited time to look over either a negative and positive version of 10 pre-selected articles.

Each story was also paired with a photograph depicting someone of either the younger or the older age group.

The researchers found that older people were more likely to choose to read negative articles about those younger than themselves

Link via Slashdot | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user little sourire used under Creative Commons license