The US division of the Boy Scouts turns 100 today. The movement began in Britain under the leadership of General Robert Baden-Powell. An American publisher, William Boyce, met a Boy Scout in London and was so impressed that he decided to bring scouting to the United States. It grew rapidly during World War I and reached its peak with 6.5 million members in the 1972:

Supporters say the scouting experience builds strong, confident leaders. They point with considerable pride to its roster of former Scouts who went on to great achievement, including President Kennedy, astronaut Neil Armstrong, baseball great Hank Aaron and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

"I think the Scouts have changed America profoundly, because as of now, 110 million people have worn the Scout uniform in one way or another. And the moral lesson and the experiences that have been imparted to them have obviously percolated through society as a whole just too profound to really enumerate," said Wills.

Link via Fast Company | Image: Norman Rockwell

Go get your protective tin foil hat, because you're going to need it. German scientists have been trying to understand why their equipment that measures gravitational waves has been picking up a particular sound. One possible answer that they've come up with is that the entire universe is a holographic illusion:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

Link via reddit | Photo: NASA

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I can't speak Russian, but I've read that this Russian-language commercial is about a man trying to report a claim to his insurance company. The employees vanish into their equipment the moment that the customer walks in the door.

via reddit

(YouTube Link)

In this instructional video, a safety expert at a drainage site stresses the importance of having a sturdy harness, properly attached. He demonstrates how a rope line connecting him to the guardrail will prevent an accident. You can guess what happened next.

via reddit

During the Cold War, Stalin and his successors built dozens of secret cities in the Soviet Union where thousands of people lived and worked, but did not exist on any map or gazetteer. One such town was Skrunda-1 in Latvia, which had originally been built to support radar installations. After Latvia became independent, the Russian government insisted on maintaining control of the town until 1998, when its last residents left, leaving it vacant. Now it's been sold to a Russian investor for $3.1 million:

The town formerly known as Skrunda-1 housed about 5,000 people during the Cold War. It was abandoned over a decade ago after the Russian military withdrew from Latvia following the Soviet collapse.[...]

It was not immediately clear what plans the buyer had for the 110-acre property, which is located in western Latvia about 95 miles from Riga. The town contains about 70 dilapidated buildings, including apartment blocks, a school, barracks, and an officers’ club.

Built in the 1980s, Skrunda-1 was a secret settlement not marked on Soviet maps because of the two enormous radar installations that listened to objects in space and monitored the skies for a US nuclear missile attack.

Like all clandestine towns in the Soviet Union, it was kept off maps and given a code name, which usually consisted of a number and the name of a nearby city.

Link via Hell in a Handbasket | Information about the Secret Cities Program | Photo: adevarul

Louise Hill of Love to Cake is a London-based graphic designer and visual effects artist. That is her trade, but her passion is making fancy cakes. This sea turtle cake won her the gold medal at Britain's 2009 Cake Show.

flickr photostream via reddit | Artist's Website

(YouTube Link)

This video is from the scene of a highway accident in Chile three weeks ago. A recovery crew managed to flip the overturned tractor trailer back upright, but didn't think about what would happen to the truck afterward.

via reddit

Eugene Hsu, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, is looking for a job. So to impress prospective employers, he made his curriculum vitae with Microsoft Paint. Hsu also talks about his friend's overly-affectionate dog, his love for all drinks that are orange (except for carrot juice) and that he is a robot from the 2478 sent back in time to kill you. It's a trippy and fanciful work of job-hunting throughout.

Link via Digg

Scientists have built a clock that is 100,000 times more accurate than the atomic clock currently used for establishing the official time around the world. It was developed by a team led by Chin-wen Chou of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado:

The quantum-logic clock, which detects the energy state of a single aluminum ion, keeps time to within a second every 3.7 billion years. The new timekeeper could one day improve GPS or detect the slowing of time predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.[...]

Chou’s team is one of several racing to build an atomic clock that can replace the current international standard, the cesium fountain clock. The cesium clock loses one second every 100 million years. Chou’s is not the first quantum-logic clock, but his uses aluminum and magnesium ions, which makes it twice as precise as its predecessors that used aluminum and beryllium.

To keep time, quantum-logic clocks measure the vibration frequency of UV lasers. Unfortunately, the best lasers we can build veer off their normal frequency by about one tick every hour, Chou said. To keep the laser’s timekeeping precise, its vibration must be anchored to something much more stable.

Pictured above is Chou with his quantum logic clock.

Link | Photo: J. Burrus/NIST

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Sport Pong is an experimental game in which a pong board is projected onto a flat surface. Players use their hands and feet to move virtual pieces around the playing space, trying to score a goal against the opposing team's wall.

via DudeCraft | Official Website | Previously on Neatorama: Pong Prom

Sumedicina is a short story by Jana Lange and Kim Asendorf told with the modern medium of infographics. It's about a scientist who works for a biotech firm called Sumedicina, which secretly creates and unleashes viruses on the world -- and then sells the only cures. The caption for the above infographic reads:

John has worked for 17 years at Sumedicina. His salary rose steadily. But with the increasing responsibility, his hair became measurably less.

The easiest way to read the story is to go to the link, which is the flickr set for the story, and view the slides sequentially.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimasendorf/sets/72157623218822717/ via Fast Company | Official Website

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Pranksters Dan Podosek and Yuki Palermo like to pretend to hold a rope across walkways and roadways to see who will stop rather than break the invisible (and non-existent) rope. Here's their Christmas video, shot at a snowy road and a shopping mall. There are more videos at the link.

Link via Urlesque

A burglar in Palm Harbor, Florida was unable to escape from police, even though he cleverly hijacked a pedal boat:

Deputies said Schaumburger fled down a street with a dead end at Lake Tarpon. With nowhere to go, authorities said he hijacked a docked pedal boat and tried to escape across the lake.

A Sheriff's Office helicopter was called in. According to the arrest report, the helicopter crew reported that "there was a lone male pedaling the boat dressed only in boxer shorts, and the boat appeared to be taking on water."

Deputies enlisted the help of resident Robert Putnam, whose pontoon boat was docked at the lake, to intercept Schaumburger.

Link via Lowering the Bar | Photo: flickr user Joe Shlabotnik, used under Creative Commons license

Kaba Kick is a toy available in...well, somewhere in East Asia, presumably. It's like Russian roulette, but for kids:

The player points the gun at his or her own head and pulls the trigger. Instead of bullets, a pair of feet kick out from the barrel (which is shaped like a pink hippo). If the gun doesn’t fire, the player earns points.

What could possibly go wrong?

Link via GearFuse

When a conscious person answers a yes or no question, certain parts of the brain become active. A new medical study revealed that people thought to be in a vegetative state demonstrate the same brain response, even if they can't express themselves:

In the current experiment, the researchers found that three other patients identified as vegetative showed similar responses. To open a channel of communication, they instructed one of them, the 29-year-old man, to associate thoughts about tennis with “yes” and thoughts about being in his house with “no.”

They then asked questions, repeating the procedure numerous times, switching the associations — tennis with yes, then with no — to make sure the patient was in fact making conscious choices. The researchers had previously tested the technique in healthy volunteers.

“We asked basic biographical questions, like ‘Is your father’s name Thomas?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the United States?’ ” said Adrian M. Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, who developed the method and was a co-author of the paper. “We then checked whether the answers were correct. They were.”

Video at the link.

Link via Popular Science | Image: New York Times

Previously on Neatorama:
Man Actually Conscious Throughout Two Decades of "Coma"
Is This Man Fully Alert and Communicating - or Not?