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South Korean fans are getting excited about their national team's chances for winning the World Cup, so naturally they dressed penguins from a Seoul aquarium in team uniforms and put them on a model soccer field.

Link via Geekosystem

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And the video above is the result. Patrick Liddell, a musician, modeled his experiment on Alvin Lucier's 1969 composition I Am Sitting in a Room, which did something similar. Liddell says "I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a digital fact, but more as a way to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have." Here is his YouTube channel, which contains all 1,000 videos, and below is the original video (via Urlesque).


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Origami artist Joel Cooper made the above mask, entitled Delphus, out of one sheet of elephant hide paper. It's 16 cm tall and 5 cm deep. We last looked at his amazing works about four years ago, and he's only added greater precision and detail to his portfolio. At the link, you can see progress photos showing how Cooper does it.

Link via Make | Artist's Blog | Photo: Make

Artist Chase Black has unearthed fossils -- from the future! His series "Creatures from the Mechazoic Era" consists of sculptures of fossilized robots and cyborg animals. Pictured above is the long-extinct felis catus. You can view a gallery of his creations at the link.

Link via Geekologie | Image: Chase Black

Hiring lots of actors and building elaborate sets (and then blowing them up) is expensive. So the directors of Jackboots on Whitehall used 12-inch action figures to scale down the cost.

Above is the trailer for that movie, which is a comedic alternate history of World War II. After trapping the British Army at Dunkirk, the Germans drill a tunnel under the English Channel and send an invasion force through into the heart of London. "Never," as the movie's Churchill says, "in the field of human conflict was so much buggered up by so few." Naturally, the Scots, led by a farmer voiced by Ewan McGregor, save the day.

via Geek Tyrant

So you've met a nice girl online. Or rather, you've seen her profile on a dating website. But you're not sure how to impress her. Solution: hire Max Hartshorn, a professional online dating ghostwriter who will tell you what to write in order to impress her.

Hartshorn is a hired gun, ghostwriting correspondence on behalf of single men unwilling, too busy or too inept to do it themselves. His online dating is done on commission for Virtual Dating Assistants, one of the first full-scale Internet-dating outsourcing companies. For $600, Virtual Dating Assistants guarantees clients two dates a month; the "executive service" package promises five dates a month for $1,200.

"I get paid for each woman who writes back positively," explains the modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac. "It's very analogous to sales . . . like a cold-caller or a telemarketer."

Link via Volokh Conspiracy | Photo: US State Department

No one has ever seen a giraffe swim. But a computer simulation run by two researchers suggests that they probably can:

Creating a digital giraffe involved numerous calculations on weight, mass, size, shape, lung capacity and centre of gravity.

Calculations were made to discover rotation dynamics, flotation dynamics and the external surface area of both a giraffe and - for control purposes - a horse.

The authors found that a full-sized adult giraffe would become buoyant in 2.8metres of water. Giraffes can wade across bodies of water that are shallower.

Link via Geekosystem | Photo: NASA

If there's a profession that is almost certainly on its way out, it's that of the typewriter repairman. John Snyder of Wired, writing for Gizmodo, visited three San Francisco area typewriter repair shops to examine the end of a machine and a trade:

California Typewriter Company is the quintessential family business, employing proprietor Herb Permillion (above), his daughter Carmen, and his mother Nita. Although Carmen works in the business, her father believes that the craft of typewriter repair will not survive into the next generation.

"Once we go," he says, "we're taking it with us."[...]

California Typewriter Company works on both vintage and modern office equipment, but surprisingly, over the last 10 years, the sale and repair of manual typewriters has constituted an increasing share of their business. Most of the people buying the older machines are under 35, the company reports, and are mostly people looking for an interesting gift or a decorative conversation piece.

In addition, girls under 12 have become a significant market, following the example of the titular character of the recent movie Kit Kittredge: American Girl, who frequently uses a typewriter. California Typewriter Company also worked on machines for celebrity clients including Danielle Steele and Tom Hanks, and sold a replacement ribbon to Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong.

Link | Photo: NIH

Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic have developed a protein that makes laboratory mice highly resistant to breast cancer:

Cancer vaccines, unlike traditional vaccines, are generally designed to arm the immune system with the tools to fight a certain existing disease or cancer-causing virus, rather than directly prevent cancer from developing. But researchers have found a protein manufactured in cancerous breast cells that primes the immune system to attack tumor cells themselves and prevent the growth of tumors altogether.

In mice that had been pre-engineered to develop breast cancer, an injection of the protein stopped the cancer from ever forming. Healthy lactating cells produce the protein as well, and as such it could one day provide a vaccine that prevents breast cancer in non-lactating women.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-06/breast-cancer-vaccine-mice-could-help-researchers-prevent-tumors-humans | Photo: USDA | Previously: DNA Vaccine Tattoo

Wild Ammo photoshopped seventeen movie posters to reflect original casting preferences. O.J. Simpson as the Terminator? Yes:

"The head of Orion, who were going to release the film, called me up and said, 'Are you sitting down? I've cast this movie. ... It's O.J. Simpson for The Terminator,'" Cameron said.

Luckily for Schwarzenegger -- and perhaps the public -- this sounded like a recipe for titanic failure to the director.

"I said, 'This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard,'" Cameron said. "I didn't know O.J. Simpson, I had nothing against him personally. I didn't know he was going to go murder his wife later and become a real Terminator."

Yup, Simpson was almost the Terminator. Who knows how the course of human history would have been affected if this had become a reality.

Link via Sci Fi Wire - Original WildAmmo post here.

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Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man is the best short film I've ever seen. It's simply outstanding storytelling. Brandon McCormick took L. Frank Baum's backstory for the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and told it in twenty-three minutes of film. The Tin Man was once a young man of flesh and blood, in love with a young maiden, until he lost both his humanity and his love.

via Nerdcore | Previously: A Filmmaker's Reflections

Maurizio Porfiri, a professor at NYU Polytechnic University, is designing robotic fish that he hopes will be able to infiltrate schools of fish and lead them away from dangers, such as water turbines. He thinks that certain movements by fish establish them as school leaders and that he can mechanically duplicate these behaviors:

Since fish of different sizes and species school together, Porfiri correctly hypothesized that they would not only accept a robotic peer that was larger than themselves but also welcome it as a group leader.

To engage live shoal mates, Porfiri wanted to give the robot other fish qualities. Foremost, it would have to swim silently, and its locomotion would have to closely match that of live fish. To achieve these goals, he employed ionic polymers that swell and shrink in response to electrical stimulation from a battery, propelling the robot.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: NYU-Polytechnic | Previously on Neatorama: RoboSalmon Spies on Fish

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials in Germany have developed a bicycle helmet that emits a foul stench after an impact. This would inform users that the shock absorbing material inside is no longer effective and it's time to get a new helmet:

The polymer materials or plastics produced by the process start to smell if they develop small cracks. Large cracks really cause a stink. The smell comes from odoriferous oils enclosed in microcapsules. "Cyclists often replace their helmets unnecessarily after dropping them on the ground, because they cannot tell whether they are damaged or not. The capsules eliminate this problem. If cracks form, smelly substances are released," explains Dr.-Ing. Christof Koplin, research scientist at the IWM.

Link via DVICE | Image: Fraunhofer IWM

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A cat belonging to YouTube user soccerduck1189 peed on a beanbag chair. So before he threw it out, he dumped its contents into a bathtub and let the cat play in it. He notes that, despite appearances, the cat did not actually eat any stuffing and didn't get sick.

via Urlesque

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YouTube user horseattack made a functional printer from LEGOs and a felt tip marker. It prints 75 dots per square inch in the Helvetica font. He programed the entire system from scratch and plans to make his schematics available to the public.

via Geekosystem