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Scientists at the University of Nottingham take a light-hearted look at traditional Easter treats.  In a parallel piece, physicists pound and pulverize them -

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David Neivandt, a professor at the University of Maine, and Alex Caddell, an undergraduate student there, have developed a golf ball made from the shells of lobsters.

Though biodegradable golf balls already exist, this is the first to be made with crushed lobster shells with a biodegradable binder and coating, creating value from waste material. “We’re using a byproduct of the lobster canning industry which is currently miserably underutilized — it ends up in a landfill,” Neivandt says. “We’re employing it in a value-added consumer product which hopefully has some cachet in the market.”

And that cachet doesn’t come with a higher price tag. Biodegradable golf balls that are now on the market retail for a little under $1 per ball. The raw materials for the lobster shell balls cost as little as 19 cents per ball.

So, will golf balls made of lobster shells be more likely to... end up in a trap?  Not in the envisioned scenario.  The balls were created specifically for use on cruise ships.  Thus the emphasis on biodegradability.

Link, via.

The elaborately-structured glass item on the right is a nineteenth-century fly catcher:

The fly catchers were used in the sickroom. They were baited with sugar and water, which was placed in the ring near the base. Flies which entered between the feet of the trap were unable to find their way out again and drowned in the sugar solution.

The basic structure is of course not fundamentally different from the plastic wasp traps available at modern hardware stores.

The "frog" on the left is actually a seventeenth-century purse:

It is made in two halves; the back is on a hard base with padding on top, the underside is on a more pliable base. The two are seamed together to just below the front legs and are lined with greenish-yellow silk with a gusset at each side to form a tiny purse with a drawstring fastening.

Both items come from the collections of the Museum of London, via Victorian and Edwardian Paintings.

Hipsters may consider dogboarding to be way cooler than horseboarding, but both pale in comparizon to "spider-boarding" - a technique that has been used by mantidfly larvae for millions of years.

The larvae of most mantidfly species are fussy diners – they only eat the eggs of spiders. That seems like a dangerous enough strategy, for spiders are formidable hunters. But it gets crazier – some mantidflies find spider egg sacs by hitching a ride on the backs of adults... The “spider-boarders” can’t chew through the egg sacs. Instead, they ensure that they get inside the sac as it is being built. They climb aboard passing females, wrapping themselves around the base of their abdomens so they can’t be caught.

The photo above, by Michael Ohl of Berlin's Museum of Natural History, shows a spider embedded in a 44 million year old piece of amber. "And there, latched onto its underside just as its modern relatives do, is a mantidfly larva... it’s facing to the right and you can clearly see the three legs on its right side."

Additional details (and a photo of an adult mantid-like mantidfly) available at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Card catalogues were once vital components of libraries; most were beautifully crafted of durable materials.  Now some enterprising librarians are finding ways to repurpose card catalogues as storage sites and charging stations for e-book readers.

It turns out that the drawers were just the right size for most of the common eReaders. All the case needed was a few holes drilled in the back, and then running some power cables.

The Bloomington Junior High School Media Center offers a brief how-to photoessay

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A computer security expert has recently reported finding keyloggers on two new Samsung laptop computers.

Mohamed Hassan wrote in Mich Kabay’s Security Strategies newsletter that as soon as he received his Samsung R525 laptop, he ran a full system scan and found a commercial keylogger called StarLogger. StarLogger claims it records every keystroke made on the computer, even on password-protected boxes, starting up whenever the computer starts up. The software emails results at intervals to a specified email address and will even include screen captures.

Hassan ended up buying a second Samsung laptop, a model R540, and found the same keylogger installed on that one "The fact that on both models the same files were found in the same location supported the suspicion that the hardware manufacturer, Samsung, must know about this software on its brand-new laptops," he writes.

According to CrunchGear, a supervisor at Samsung admitted that the keylogger was installed by the manufacturer: "He confirmed that yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to, as he put it, “monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.”

They advise that if you have a Samsung laptop, you should look in C:\Windows for a \SL directory.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/samsung-installs-keylogger-its-laptops.

Update:  An anonymous commenter at the NetworkWorld link above said "what this Network Security Expert found was a legitimate language file installed by Window's live...the software installed
was in fact Vipre, not the commerical keylogger called StarLogger. The confusion arose because Microsoft's Live Application multi-language support folder, "SL" folder, was mistaken for StarLogger."  A commenter at Crunchgear offered a link to a ZDNet post offering the same rebuttal.

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Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to determine what they are talking about.

The missing sock?  Or something more profound?

Via Reddit, where it is speculated that they are Italian (because of all the hand gestures).

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Although it's not as bizarre as yak skiing or horse boarding, residents in several Scandinavian countries race reindeer for fun.  The video above shows the Inari Reindeer Race in Lapland, Finland.

Previously in Neatorama:  Running of the Reindeers (in Alaska).

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This two-minute video, from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection of the British Film Institute, does not show any historically important or humorous events.  Instead, what one sees is a view from a horse-drawn tramcar on Royal Street in Belfast at the beginning of the last century.

If you find this interesting, there are three companion videos posted at the Ptak Science Books link: Manchester, Bradford, and Wigan, all in 1902

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Theft from such suitcases is astonishingly easy; the locks on the zippers are irrelevant.

And, as the audio commentary indicates, sometimes the problem is not theft of items from your suitcase, but material placed surreptitiously inside in order to have you inadvertently serve as the "mule" at the border.

Via Metafilter.

I'm glad that someone has done this, though I wish they had used names rather than flags; I would never be able to identify three of the entities on the outer part of the orange circle as Andorra, San Marino and Monaco.  Fortunately some of the names and additional explanation is available at the Strange Maps blog at Big Think.*

This diagram is a particularly instructive map, too: it neatly visualises the gaps and overlaps between all kinds of supranational institutions in Europe – differences which for the most part are too subtle for any but the most attentive observer. All will be aware of the ‘Europe’ that is a less than homogenous conglomerate of nation states, with an unwieldy Brussels bureaucracy at its centre. This European Union, which consists of 27 member states, is merely the most visible of several European unions, all committed to different versions of the same goal: European integration.

The diagram also includes one statelet whose euros are much sought after by collectors.

Previously on Neatorama:  The Great British Venn Diagram.

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*Addendum:  A hat tip to Feodor for noting that Strange Maps got the diagram from Wikipedia's "Supranational European Bodies," where the flags are clickable to the corresponding country entries. (It is also described there as a Euler diagram, not a Venn diagram).

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Some Neatorama readers will have seen a recent video of an art installation created by placing a group of fans in such a way as to create a vortex of air which causes a red silken fabric to twirl in the air.  Here is nature doing the same thing, as a whirlwind in Austria lifts plastic sheeting from a field of strawberries.  It's really quite beautiful.

This specimen comes from the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian.

When the Depression and resulting banking crisis hit their community, the residents of the coastal town of Pismo Beach, California picked an unusual but logical medium of exchange... The Chamber of Commerce and no fewer than eleven merchants issued clamshell scrip.

Each piece was numbered, and each piece was signed on the front and on the back. As with the stamp notes of the Midwest, it was necessary to sign each clamshell on the back in order to keep it in circulation. No formal requirements may have existed, but informal pressure certainly would have endorsed the practice.

Restwell Cabins issued "notes" in three denominations: twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and one dollar. The larger the amount, the larger the shell. The issue may have been partly intended as a spoof, or for sale to tourists, in the manner of German notgeld around 1920. Redemption would never be a problem because collectors would want to keep these pieces in their cabinets or trade them with their friends.

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Neatorama has recently featured Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, played on floppy disk drives.  Several years ago we showed the piece played on an accordion.  But we somehow missed this version, played on a glass harp.  The instrumentalist is Robert Tiso.

The photo above shows a drawing of a specimen retrieved from a quarry near Oxford in 1676.  It is the end of the femur, and was named by British naturalist Richard Brookes after what he thought it looked like.

It was given the name Scrotum humanum in 1763 but it didn't catch on; it was renamed Megalosaurus by Reverand Buckland in 1824. The word dinosaur wasn't coined until sixteen years later.

Found in the "Nutty Nomenclature" subsection of the link at Null Hypothesis, which also includes a small brown moth whose official scientific name is "Eubetia bigaulae."

It's pronounced "you betcha, by golly."  Honest.

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