What you smell may be a marker for their slow death.  After noticing that professional conservators smelled paper while doing their assessments, researchers from University College London's Centre for Sustainable Heritage used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to identify and quantify the substances released by old books.

Their report in the journal Analytical Chemistry identified acetic acid, furfural, and lipid peroxidation products in various proportions depending on the types of paper, binding and inks used, and they suggest that a "sniff test" may be useful to identify books in need of the attention of a conservator.

And how does one describe the smell of old books to a non-chemist?  The next time you attend a wine tasting, deftly switch the conversation to books and tell your friends that what you love is...

"...a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness."

Link.  Photo: Tom Woodward.

YouTube link

A crimson-crested woodpecker battles an olive whipsnake on Peru's Yarapa River.  One presumes that the snake was stealing eggs or attacking chicks in the woodpeckers' nest.  The battle ends by the 3:00 mark.

Mounted on a 9" marble base is a small brass cannon, and above that a magnifying glass.  The positioning and focal length of the lens would be designed to light the cannon's fuse.  The placement of the sundial suggests that the device was used to mark the arrival of the noon hour (on sunny days).

This intricate device was custom-made for someone living at a latitude of 59 degrees, 55 minutes, 20 seconds.  My guess would be that the recipient lived somewhere in St. Petersburg, but other locations are possible.

http://www.littlegun.be/curios%20et%20antiquites/a%20canon%20solaire%20gb.htm.

Addendum:  Some additional searching has revealed that devices such as these were known as "sundial cannons" or "noon cannons."  The best description/photos I've found is at this pdf by the British Sundial Society.

I guarantee you have never seen a "tear-down" house like this one.  A Minnesota company is disassembling an immense home in the prestigious Lake Minnetonka area west of Minneapolis.

This massive structure is filled with room after room of salvageable building materials in pristine condition, ranging from sprawling kitchens and custom cabinetry to a unique sauna and indoor pool slide.

At the company's link are several pages of photos and a walk-through video.

The company saves money by inviting the public to go directly to the home to harvest materials; what remains is transported to their warehouse and store for resale.

Link.

YouTube link

"Own goals" (kicking a ball into one's own net) are uncommon in soccer ("football") and ice hockey.  Because this one occurs in a youth sporting event, it is just indescribably cute.

Via BuzzFeed.

The National Trust is encouraging their gardeners to urinate on bales of straw.  A three-meter-long "pee bale" has been established at Wimpole Hall; gardeners visit the bale when nature calls (and when visitors are not present, because "we don't want to scare the public.")  The bales are later added to the compost heap.

Only male gardeners are participating, in part because of some dubious claims regarding gender-based differences in urine:  "There are obvious logistical benefits to limiting it to male members of the team, but also male pee is preferable to women's, as the male stuff is apparently less acidic."

A secondary benefit is anticipated in terms of water conservation:

“An average flush of the lavatory can use anything from four and a half to nine litres of water each time, but what people may not realise is that this water is treated to the same standard as drinking water and shouldn’t be wasted."  Urinating outdoors or in the shower is advocated by environmental activists, including Cameron Diaz, as a way of tacking climate change by saving water and energy.

They are tentatively encouraging the public to follow their lead: "“Adding a little pee just helps get it all going; it’s totally safe and a bit of fun too."

Links for the Telegraph and the BBC (where there is an explanatory video).

Tonight's event is predicted to be "strong" with a couple dozen meteors per hour visible in the United States, several hundred per hour in Asia.  This pales in comparison to some historic Leonid displays -

The meteor storm of 1833 was of truly superlative strength. One estimate is over one hundred thousand meteors an hour, but another, done as the storm abated, estimated in excess of two hundred thousand meteors an hour over the entire region of North America east of the Rocky Mountains.

One favorable factor tonight is that the moon is in its new phase, allowing better detection of the fainter meteors.  The best viewing will occur between 1 a.m. and daybreak.

Link.  Image credit.

Probably the nicest one you will see all day. This one, from Multan, Pakistan, was crafted in the mid-19th century and currently resides in the collections of the Museum of Leathercraft in Northampton, U.K.

Of note, the "camel bladder" term refers not to the shape, but to the material from which it was made.  Animal bladders have traditionally been used for fashioning drinking flasks, enema bags, and other liquid-containing vessels.  A dried, tanned, but unmoulded and unpainted one is depicted here.

http://www.museumofleathercraft.org/Leather-Objects/ethnographic.htm, via Scribal Terror

Earlier this year the Vatican issued a statement acknowledging that Darwin's theory of evolution was compatible with Christian theology.  Now the Vatican's chief astronomer has postulated that extraterrestrial life is possible.

Writing in the Vatican newspaper, the astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space.  Father Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome, is a respected scientist who collaborates with universities around the world.  The search for forms of extraterrestrial life, he says, does not contradict belief in God.

Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God. And some aliens could even be free from original sin, he speculates.

Link.  The photo does not depict an alien free from original sin - just a random chestbusting alien.

YouTube link.

This video incorporates footage from 1935, in which Irish craftsmen build a coracle from willow and an ox hide, then use the craft to set their nets in the River Boyne.  One has to admire the skill and experience required to propel a keel-less craft in a reasonably straight line.  As the narrator notes, these river craft are related to the larger currachs that were capable of substantial ocean voyages.

Found at Scribal Terror.

A 22-year-old student in England is trying to survive on a diet of meat, potatoes, and cereals because she has an irrational fear of vegetables.

She suffers from a fear known as lachanophobia, which leaves her sweating and stricken with panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea...

"People might think it is a bit of a laughable affliction but I have a genuine fear of greens it's not just that I dislike the taste of sprouts or broccoli, but the actual sight of them fills me with dread and I could never touch them."

The unusual fear affects just a few thousand people in Britain...

The fact that she has gone public with her affliction shows that she does not have gelotophobia.  You can find your phobia here.

Link.  Image credit to 365 Halloween.  For a scarier creation see the "Vegetalien" of digital artist Till Nowak, and for a less frightening one, see Giuseppe Arcimboldo's work.

This embossed, etched, and gilded steel close helmet is attributed to German armourer Kolman Helmschmid.  It currently resides in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where there is a relevant essay on fashion in 16th century European armor.

Helmets fitted with masklike visors were a popular German and Austrian fashion about 1510 to 1540. With their visors forged and embossed as humorous or grotesque human masks, such helmets were often worn in tournaments held during the exuberant pre-Lenten (Shrovetide) festivals, celebrations somewhat akin to the modern Mardi Gras. Substitute visors of more conventional type were often provided for everyday use.

Interestingly, the postulated 1515 date for this helmet would make it contemporary with the "horned helmet" previously posted at Neatorama.

Link, via Titam et le Sirop d'Erable.  Photo credit Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Truck-based road trains are currently used for long-distance transport in rural Australia and in several other countries; they are created by physically connecting several trailers or semi-trailiers to the lead tractor unit.

The EU is proposing a different type of "train," which would be comprised of a mixture of trucks, buses, and passenger cars closely following one another in a slipstream, much as race cars do at professional tracks.  The project's acronym is SARTRE (SAfe Road TRains for the Environment).

The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle.

The idea, of course, is to improve fuel economy and to relieve congestion by allowing a greater number of vehicles to occupy a given area of the roadway.  But notice how this concept also solves the problem of texting-while-driving, by removing the "driving" component and allowing the driver to spend his/her entire time texting.  Sounds perfectly logical to me.  What could possibly go wrong?

Link

Addendum January 2011:  The BBC is reporting that field trials using real vehicles have now gotten underway in Sweden.

Once the lead vehicle is in charge, the driver of the car is seen taking his hands off the wheel, reading a newspaper and sipping coffee as the journey proceeds.

The V&A is, of course, one of the world's premier museums of design and decorative arts.  They have recently announced that over a million items from their collections are now accessible online.

People using Search the Collections... will find images of more than 100,000 objects... The online records vary from detailed studies written by curators to more basic inventory information which might include the maker, provenance, production technique and style... Users explore the site by clicking on images that scroll across the screen or by accessing the powerful search engine that identifies objects by type, maker, date, material or location in the V&A. Google maps show places of origin. Text mining technologies also allow searching of all the text associated with an object so for the first time researchers are able to move from one theme to another.

The example shown above is a board game from 1804 - "The New Game of Emulation Designed for The Amusement of Youth of both Sexes and calculated to inspire their Minds with an abhorrence of vice and a love of virtue."  It was marketed as a morality game designed to lead children "to admire and adopt the virtues of Obedience, Truth, Honesty, Gentleness, Industry, Frugality, Forgiveness, Carefulness, Mercy, and Humility; and to view in their real colours the opposite vices of Obstinacy, Falsehood, Robbery, Passion, Sloth, Intemperance, Malice, Neglect, Cruelty and Pride."  It is one of hundreds of games in the "games" category of the online collection.

Link, via.

The "autofill" feature of the Google search box was designed as a timesaver, but the suggested searches can also be entertaining.  Writing in Slate, Michael Agger compared the autofill of "less intelligent" and "more intelligent" queries, an exercise that has previously been conducted at Digg.

The image above is a screencap of two Google searches conducted tonight using less- and more sophisticated search terms.

A corollary question would be "What searches are most commonly conducted at Neatorama?"  The Lijit search engine doesn't have an autofill feature, but it does offer a list of the most popular recent searches at Neatorama, in descending order of frequency:

"world's smallest," mystery sale, halloween, what is it, disney, halloween costume, pumpkin, shop, stories, tattoo, cat, facebook, halloween costumes, pear, game, costume, movie trivia, photography, new species, zombie, bacon, lego, elena desserich, google, anvil cake, costumes, national day, notes left behind, origami, national geographic, videosift, wedding, what is it? game, 6 year old, albert einstein, brain, christmas, chum, hitler, logo, one take, pig, sex, animals, art, batman, brain shot, comic, einstein, shark.

Someone else may want to tackle the sociological implications of that list; I'm not going to touch it.

Link.