This picture looks like some tube-shaped creatures caressing a ball. They are caressing, alright, but they aren’t even living things!

An electron microscope photograph shows self-assembling hair-like polymers around a polystyrene sphere, about two micrometers in diameter. It won first place in the National Science Foundation's 2009 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Self-assembling plastic is a pretty far out concept, but the detail and color in a microscopic image is amazing in itself. This is just one of a collection of fascianting scientific images, one for each year going back to 2005, covering a wide variety of disciplines, at HuffPo. Some you' ve seen here before, but are worth a sescond look.

(Image credit: Sung Hoon Kang, Joanna Aizenberg and Boaz Pokroy; Harvard University)

It was 146 years ago today, May 10, 1869, that the ceremonial spike (actually more than one) was driven into the meeting point of the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad. That’s when it became the transcontinental railroad, and traveling across the country no longer meant months in a wagon or on a ship sailing around South America. The transcontinental railroad was a great idea, but making it into a competition had some unintended consequences.  

Congress made the fool's mistake of assuming some motivating rationality on the part of the railroad companies, and not just base greed, so they didn't dictate just how, when, or where the rails must meet. When Central and Union crews ran into each other in northern Utah, instead of merging the lines right away, they set off building miles of parallel grading, with each company hoping to acquire more mileage and thus more of the reward money. With a kind of paternal exasperation, then, Congress had to set a junction point; and they chose Promontory, Utah—a little tent town of railroad workers and prostitutes just north of the Great Salt Lake.

The ceremonial joining of the railroads didn't go as smoothly as you might have heard. It was a publicity stunt, and it also meant the end of a job for those who built the railroad. Read about what really happened on that day at mental_floss.

We don’t know what year or grade this is, but in a class of 56 students, 18 guys wore the same Hawaiian pineapple shirt for picture day. It wasn’t a club with uniforms; it was one shirt passed from student to student before they had their photo taken. That’s not the kind of thing anyone would notice (outside of the photographer) until the yearbook came out months later.

My husband’s senior yearbook (class of 1973) was a little like this. Seniors were supposed to dress up, meaning a jacket and tie for the guys. But he and five of his friends all forgot, and ended up wearing the same borrowed shirt, jacket, and tie. No one thought anything of it at the time, because they looked good, but forty years later, anyone who sees the yearbook has to comment that every longhair in the class dressed alike.

-via reddit 

Lost Lake, near Bend, Oregon, is really only a part-time lake. In the summer, it’s a meadow! Lost Lake is connected to a lava tube that drains the lake annually, but not the same time every year, and not at the same rate. This year, the drainage happened in April and went pretty fast, as you can see in this video from The Bulletin.

(YouTube link)

The drainage stops when the lake is iced up, and the rest of the year, the state of the lake depends on the rate of inflow vs. the rate of drainage. You can read a more comprehensive explanation at mental_floss.

I made @KimKardashian's #MetGala2015 dress with a beige curtain and lots of paint #YasQueen

A photo posted by Mina Gerges (@keepingupwithmina) on May 7, 2015 at 3:37pm PDT

After seeing the dress that Kim Kardashian wore to the Met gala, Canadian actor Mina Gerges thought. “I can do that!” So he recreated the gown using an old technique we learned from Scarlet O’Hara (or better yet, Carol Burnett): he made it out of a curtain, paint, and feathers. The outcome was fabulous! See Gerges recreating other celebrity photographs (some NSFW) at his Instagram gallery. -via Time Newsfeed

Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer inside Big Bird, did a reddit AMA and was asked what was his most meaningful interaction with a child. Spinney’s reply was heartbreaking.

This is a very sad story, but it's real.

I got a letter from a fan who said his little boy, who was 5 years old, his name was Joey, he was dying of cancer.

And he was so ill, the little boy knew he was dying.

So the man, in his letter, asked if I would call the little boy. He said the only thing that cheered him at all in his fading state was to see Big Bird on television.

You’ll have to go to the link to read the whole account -I can’t bear to read it again. And take your hankie when you go. -via The Daily Dot

Is your Mom more like Lorraine McFly or Sarah Conner? Chloe Cole and Tristan Cooper of Dorkly plotted movie Moms on a graph according to how good a mother they were and how dangerous they were. Let’s just hope that mothers like those at the bottom of the graph are few and far between. I bet you can think of a whole lot of other movie mothers that could go on here, if the graph were much bigger.  

You don’t really notice how movie trailers evolve over time until a lot of time has passed and then you see the old ones again. Seeing the original Star Wars trailer from 1977 is a shock to the system, and then you remember that was 38 years ago. And Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered only two years later.

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SonOfSpork gives us a Star Trek/Star Wars mashup that feels right for 1985. See Captain Kirk and his crew encounter Darth Vader and his Imperial forces! Watch the USS Enterprise do the trench run on the Death Star! A cosmic spectacle unlike anything you’ve seen before! -via Uproxx

Mothers Day is a time for us to reflect on the sacrifices our mothers made to care for us and give us the best life possible. If you really want to reflect on self-sacrifice, let’s talk about spiders. If you were a female spider of the Stegodyphus lineatus species, you started your life out cannibalizing your mother. And if you live long enough, you’ll end your life dissolving your own organs to feed your children. The spider mates, lays eggs, and then eats as many insects as she can to grow as big as she can. But she stops eating at the point she tears open the egg sac to free her progeny. Her life stops as theirs begins.

It isn’t that she’s just not very hungry, though: Her intestines already have begun dissolving. By the time the eggs hatch, she already has a meal for her young, in the form of a thin, clear liquid dribbling out of her mouth. They gather around and lap it up for two weeks, and indeed, they’re absolutely dependent on her for food, as their mouthparts aren’t yet developed enough to take on prey. The dissolving of their mother’s intestines intensifies, and toward the end her other organs, save for the heart (which she kinda needs, thank you very much), go as well, until most of her abdomen is filled with sludge. 

If you think that’s gross, go to Wired and read the rest of the process by which Stegodyphus lineatus gives her all to her children until she is completely gone and they have grown big enough to catch their own insects. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Mor Salomon)

Touch Pianist is a web toy that let’s you play famous piano pieces on your computer keyboard. No musical skill needed! The notes are there in visual form; all you have to do is hit any keys to make them play. It’s a little like Guitar Hero, except the controls don’t matter, you set the tempo, and you can’t “lose.” The only skill you need is to keep the tempo going in a way that makes it sound pleasant to you. The default screen is "Moonlight Sonata," but you can pull down other choices. -via b3ta

Ekant Veer noticed that the cat treats were going missing, although they were in a closed drawer, and the family never noticed the drawer open. They knew it must be the cat Anfield taking them, but how? So they set up a camera inside the drawer to capture the caper.  

(YouTube link)

We know cats are liquid, because they take the shape of their container. Anfield managed to snag the cat treats by oozing into the furniture without ever opening the drawer. He escaped the same way. -via Tastefully Offensive

You might be surprised to find out how many carnivores love an occasional juicy, sweet  watermelon. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised -because we love them, too! Alligators, crocodiles, big cats, hippos- they all have their unique style in eating. And does it really matter which one is ranked “best” when we get to see videos of them all eating watermelons? No, just enjoy them at The Concourse. -via Everlasting Blort

Remember Kevin Blandford, the guy who had Not a Single Second of Fun in Puerto Rico? After his photo shoot of a vacation without his wife went viral, the ad agency that promotes Puerto Rico tourism offered him an all-expenses-paid trip back to the island so he could bring his wife and baby daughter!

And this time around, he had a wonderful time. That included retaking the same photos in the same places with his family. Blandford even made sure he took the same shirts for the photos. See the whole gallery at Imgur.  -via reddit

We’ve always assumed -or have been told- that city streetcars faded away because people preferred to drive their own cars. We know from a previous post that the powerful auto industry encouraged people to prefer cars, and the story of the streetcar system is likewise more complicated than it seems on the surface. Electrified streetcars flourished in the 1880s, and cost a nickel to ride.   

Running streetcars was a very profitable business. Cities expanded, and people who found themselves living too far from work to walk depended on them. (Some real-estate developers built nearby suburbs around streetcar lines.) Over time, the businessmen who ran the streetcars, called "traction magnates," consolidated ownership of multiple lines, establishing powerful, oftentimes corrupt monopolies in many cities.

Eventually, many of them contracted with city governments for the explicit right to operate as a monopoly in that city. In exchange, they agreed to all sorts of conditions. "Eager to receive guarantees on their large up-front investments, streetcar operators agreed to contract provisions that held fares constant at five cents and mandated that rail line owners maintain the pavement around their tracks," writes Stephen Smith at Market Urbanism.

Unforeseen circumstances combined to make streetcars impossible to maintain, although if the companies hadn’t been so corrupt, accommodations might have been made for them. Read the whole story at Vox.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Grand Rapids Historical Commission)

Have you figured your way around in the fantasy world of Game of Thrones yet? This might make it easier: MongoLife made a Google Maps version of Westeros. You can zoom into the pictures at Etsy and see where travelers go and where the action takes place in the show. He sold out the maps he had, but is busy making more. -via Uproxx