Jackie was moving away to Oregon. So her cousin, reddit user thetwaddler, made this cake in reference to the classic computer game The Oregon Trail.

Link via Kotaku

Previously:
Oregon Trail: The Movie
The Alderaan Trail

(Video Link)

Otis the cat is overweight, so his human put him on an elliptical trainer. The cat was fascinated with it. As Otis explored the machine, he hopped from step to step, operating it.

via Urlesque

(Video Link)

It's a rare weather event, but a fire tornado was recently caught on camera in a drought-stricken region of Brazil. The tornado started fires in nearby fields, which were contained overnight.

The vortex of fire resulted from months of drought in the region, combined with brush fires and strong, dry winds.

Though a rare phenomenon, the formation of a fire tornado, or fire whirl, is quite simple.

When there is a warm updraft of air and convergence of fire, say from a wildfire, a vortex of flame can occur. As the heated air from the fire rises, strong air currents cause flame to spin, shaping it into a tornado.

At the link, you can read about how to make your own fire tornado at home.

Link via Sci Fi Wire

(Video Link)

CERN -- the European Center for Nuclear Research -- has a choir. Here's their performance of "The Particle Physicists' Song", set to the tune of a Flanders and Swann song.

via GearFuse | Flanders and Swann Information

A man who wanted to renew his driver's license crashed into the Department of Licensing office in Spokane Valley, Washington on July 1:

The crash happened around 1:00 p.m. Authorities say the driver was arriving at the DOL to renew his license. While pulling into a parking spot his foot slipped off the brake and onto the gas. Authorities say that's when the driver jumped the curb and went about 3/4 of the way through the building.

Link via Lowering the Bar | Photo: KREM

Microhyla nepenthicola frogs may be small, but they have a loud mating call. That's how scientists on Borneo discovered them:

Adult males of the new micro-species range in size from 10.6 and 12.8 millimetres and the pea-sized amphibian has been named Microhyla nepenthicola after the plant on Borneo on which it lives, according to taxonomy magazine Zootaxa.[...]

The scientists said they tracked the frogs by their call, a series of "harsh rasping notes" that started at sundown.

They then made the frogs jump onto a piece of white cloth to study them.

Link via io9 | Photo: Indraneil Das

NMap.org created an infographic that shows the 300,000 most popular websites in the world, represented by their icons, in relative size to each other:

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its "www." counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons--those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach--are scaled to 16x16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

It has a search function, and Neatorama's big N icon is in there.

Link via Geekosystem

Competitive horseback riding can be a dangerous sport, killing or maiming athletes. Some riders have begun wearing jackets that inflate when they are thrown off their mounts:

The two-pound vest is attached by a cord to a rider’s saddle and is worn over a traditional protective vest made of high-density foam. When a rider is thrown from a horse, the cord is yanked, puncturing a cartridge of carbon dioxide and inflating the vest. The vest can be reused after the cartridge is replaced. Point Two said its vest inflates in one-tenth of a second; Hit Air said its average rate is one-quarter of a second.

Link via DVICE | Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Police in Bochum, Germany, say that a man was shot in the head with a .22 caliber bullet at a New Year's Eve party in 2004 or 2005 (the victim was unsure because he was drunk at the time). He didn't notice until he recently went to a doctor to get treated for head pain:

Presented with the 5.6mm projectile, the man recalled he had received a blow to the head around midnight at a New Year’s party “in 2004 or 2005”, but had forgotten about it because he had been “very drunk”, a police spokesman said.

“He told us he remembered having a sore head, but that he wasn’t really one for going to the doctor,” the spokesman said.

At the link, you can see an x-ray image of the man's head.

Link | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user JinglyJon used under Creative Commons license

Social psychologists at Washington State University found that better workers in a group are the least popular because they make everyone else look bad in comparison:

Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they "raise the bar" for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

It doesn't matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone's unselfish behavior, Parks said.

"What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad," he said.

The do-gooders are also seen as deviant rule breakers. It's as if they're giving away Monopoly money so someone can stay in the game, irking other players to no end.

Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user schopie1 used under Creative Commons license

Binary solar systems -- systems consisting of two stars orbiting each other -- are quite common. Astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope have observed that many of them have a lot of dust and debris, leading to the hypothesis that the dust clouds were originally planets that collided with each other.

Geophysically, what would it be like if two planets hit each other? Phil Plait of Discover writes:

The energy in such a collision would dwarf the sweatiest nightmares of any Hollywood writer — or religiously-motivated apocalyptic preacher, for that matter. The two planets, each massing sextillions of tons, would ram each other at speeds of 20 or more kilometers per second. The energy released would be trillions of times that of all our nuclear weapons combined.

Link via Sci Fi Wire | Image: NASA

A couple of years ago, we mentioned that a Danish start-up company was planning to launch a person into space in a cramped capsule. It all seemed rather fanciful, but Copenhagen Suborbitals is really going to do it this weekend:

Over the last year-and-a-half they have led a team of volunteers to create the HEAT1X rocket and the micro spacecraft it will launch, called Tycho Brahe-1.

Tycho Brahe-1 will carry one human passenger, in a half-seated position, into space and back down again.

The seat is designed to minimise the gravitational pull on the passenger's spine.

Whoever is on board will also have to wear a pressure suit, like those worn by fighter pilots, to make sure they don't pass out.

At the top of the module is a see-through polymer plexiglass dome, giving the astronaut a once-in-a-lifetime view of their journey.

It's planned that the spacecraft will travel in an arc, jettisoning the rocket about halfway up and eventually peaking more than 100km above the Earth before coming down.

After it re-enters the atmosphere, parachutes will be deployed to slow it before it hits the water.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/copenhagen-suborbitals-prepare-to-launch-first-private-rocket-astronaut-into-space/story-e6frfro0-1225909270286 via DVICE | Official Website | Photo: Copenhagen Suborbitals

Perhaps 100 millions birds die every year in the United States due to collisions with glass. Ornilux, a new type of glass made by the German company Arnold Glas, may provide a solution. It has an ultraviolet coating that birds can see, but humans can't under normal conditions.

The latest version of the glass, called Ornilux Mikado, received the "red dot" award this year from the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen, Germany. Judges noted that the glass uses the same techniques that spiders use to keep birds from flying through and destroying their webs.

Link via Geekosystem | Photos: Arnold Glas

In a series called "Wallflowers", artist Laura Jacobs made a series of bras decorated in different themes, often nautical ones.

The surreal circus-like atmosphere in which we live, make the bras of Laura Jacobs no less startling. Incorporating everything from crab claws and fish heads to antique glass and mother of pearl, their wall-borne, gravity-defying flight gives voice to the shapes that lie behind, concealed like soft pills of great potency...

We are here, you want to look at us. Breasts are symbols of -- and vehicles for -- power.. Like the twinned temples of Angkor Wat or any ancient shrine, Jacobs has made temples to befit them, define them and sometimes hold them, in ridicule.

Link via The Presurfer

According to the blog Your Mind Blown, the first documented use of the word 'nerd' was in the 1950 Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo. Here is a synopsis:

[...] a boy named Gerald McGrew made a large number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do, if he were in charge at the zoo. Among these was that he would bring a creature known as a Nerd from the land of Ka-Troo.

http://yourmindblown.com/post/993403657/dr-suess-coined-the-word-nerd via Glenn Reynolds | Amazon Link | Image: Random House