It's time for another Fill in the Bubble Frenzy with boy genius Mal and his talking dog Chad! Fill in the empty speech bubble and win any T-shirt available in the NeatoShop -take a look around, pick one out and tell us what shirt you’d like with your submission in the comments. If you don't specify a t-shirt with your entry, you forfeit the prize. Enter as many times as you like (text only, please), but leave only one entry per comment. For inspiration, check out Mal and Chad’s comic strip adventures by Stephen McCranie at malandchad.com. Good luck!
Update: Congratulations to our winner, Matt, who said "I think you misheard! I wanted PteriYAKI!"
Google Instant brings up results for your search terms as you type. That's weird enough in itself, but use it to type the lyrics to Tom Lehrer's "Elements Song" and it quickly turns to entertainment! -via Boing Boing
Anson Wong spent years running a global network of illegal wildlife trafficking. He smuggled contraband such as Sumatran rhino horns, panda and snow leopard fur, and live endangered species across borders for those who paid premium prices.
Wong previously served five years in U.S. prison, after being nabbed by an extraordinary international undercover investigation by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service called Operation Chameleon, considered one of the most successful in history. [You can read about this extraordinary sting operation in last January's National Geographic, in writer Bryan Christy's story, 'The Kingpin".] But Wong's wife continued to operate the smuggling network while her husband was in prison, and Wong returned to Penang in 2003 to resume his criminal activities. "Nothing can be done to me," Wong boasted then to an undercover agent. "I could sell a panda -- and, nothing. As long as I'm here, I'm safe."
He was caught this time by an alert airline security officer [Hear! Hear!] who noticed the broken lock on his luggage, and found it to be full of 95 boa constrictors.
The good news is that traffickers are no longer safe from prosecution in Malaysia. Wong was convicted by Malaysian court this week under a new law designed to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade. Link
This is an image taken by the Hubble telescope of a binary star system (named AFGL 3068) in which one star is a a carbon star, a dying red giant, which throws off material in which appears to us to be a spiral pattern. The explanation of this very strange star system is at Bad Astronomy. Link -via Monkeyfilter
The roof of the reptile house caught on fire at the Poestlingberg Zoo in Linz, Austria. One species that couldn't make a quick getaway from the billowing smoke were the four huge tortoises.
Quick-thinking firemen and zoo staff adapted oxygen masks designed for humans to save the lives of the 140lb African-spurred tortoises.
"We expect them to make a full recovery," vet Isabella Eberle told CEN. "The masks were designed for human use but we managed to make them fit."
This baby monkey clings to a young boar for security as it roams about the Fukuchiyama Zoo in Kyoto, Japan. TV reports on the two have caused five times the usual number of people to visit the zoo!
Baby monkeys are known to cling to their mother for many months after they are born, and Miwa the orphaned monkey seems to think of the boar as his mommy (even though the boar is a boy). Miwa has also taken a liking to the woman who works at the zoo’s ticket counter. When he’s not riding the boar, Miwa is usually sleeping in the woman’s lap.
Both the monkey and the wild boar are growing up fast. The rodeos will only continue until the monkey grows out of the stage at which he feels it needs to cling to a parent – or – until the the boar will no longer tolerate the presence of a monkey on his back.
See several other videos of Miwa and the boar at Japan Probe. Link
Our friends at Urlesque are staging a giveaway in which you can win prizes from the NeatoShop! Just select an item valued at $25 or less and post that item and how you're going to use it in the comment section of the Urlesque giveaway post, or at their Facebook page. Four winners will be selected randomly. Good luck! Link
Oh, did you think Morse code was obsolete and had no use in the modern world? Here are six ways the code is still used -although most of these gadgets were designed specifically for geeks who know Morse code to show off their knowledge. I would be impressed! Shown is a Morse code leather arm guard, a steampunk creation by Etsy seller ProfMaelstromme. http://blog.promomachine.co.uk/morse-code/ -Thanks, David!
This is a portion of a 1858 map of property lines along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The map reminded the author of shotgun houses -long, narrow houses with all the rooms stacked in a line, one behind another. Is there any relation between the two? Maybe the odd property shapes point to the fact that every landowner wants a bit of riverfront. See the entire (enlargable) map at Strange Maps. Link
A team of psychologists showed video footage of male dancers to 37 young women who rated them, and used the results to pinpoint what makes a man a good dancer or a bad dancer.
Men who were judged to be good dancers had a varied repertoire and more moves that involved tilting and twisting the torso and neck.
But the majority of men displayed highly repetitive moves that used their arms and legs, but not the rest of their bodies.
"It's rare that someone is described as a good dancer if they are flinging their arms about but not much else," said Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, who led the study.
"Think about a head banger. Their head movement has a large amplitude, but it's not changing direction or showing any kind of variability. That's a bad dancer. Or someone who is just twisting and turning left and right? That's a bad dancer too."
The article includes a video of a dancing avatar demonstrating "bad" dancing and "good" dancing. Next research needed: the science of getting a man to even try dancing at all. Link -via Metafilter
Wow, what a fun and exciting viral video trip this has been (a first for me)! As soon as I recorded the Philadelphia Zoo's Humboldt penguins chasing a butterfly, I knew I had something special that would make some people smile. Little did I know that almost 1.6 million views later, I made a lot of people smile, which feels really good. Since I visit Neatorama daily, I knew where I had to send the link first. :)
From there, it seems like the whole internet pays attention to what Neatorama posts! I sat staring at the YouTube video view counter going up and up, laughing with my wife as she jokingly dismissed it early on.
Within a couple of days a CNN.com producer emailed me and asked me to upload it to my iReporter account- the next day it was among the featured "Editor's Choice Top Picks" on their homepage for more than 2 days, and I quickly became a CNN iReporter "Superstar". Who's laughing now? (I was, feeling like the King of the World, getting my 15 minutes of fame.) I even got an email from the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) requesting permission to include it in a internet-video TV show (I think). They'll send me a DVD of the episode after it airs- that should be fun.
Then my friends told me they saw it on Yahoo's homepage too! Wow! But they ripped the video somehow into their own player and didn't give me any credit. Boo! It was also ripped to numerous other video sites- so I learned that you can't always keep your content as your own. I work for a big company, and my amateur video got more views than the professionally created ones which cost a LOT more money. For a couple of minutes I thought I had my next gig all lined up... but viral videos don't last long.
So with all of this, the Philadelphia Zoo was of course pleased with the additional coverage/mentions of their zoo, so I asked if we could pay a return visit to see the penguins with my family and help with a feeding. Doesn't hurt to ask, right? So we visited on Labor Day 2010 and had a lot of fun. Please forgive my video editing skills as they're not great, but hopefully more penguin cuteness makes up for it!
Westminster Palace on the Thames river in London is the place where the parliament of the United Kingdom meets, both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The palace, along with Westminster Abbey and St. Margaret's Church, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also a must-see for anyone visiting London. The first palace on the site was built in the eleventh century as a residence for royalty. A fire almost destroyed the palace in 1512. After that, the King or Queen lived elsewhere and parliament met in the rebuilt structure. Another large fire ruined much of the complex in 1834. The rebuild after that disaster (which incorporated surviving parts of the original palace) gave the Palace of Westminster the look it has today. The construction took decades. In 1844, parliament decided the new palace should have a bell tower with a clock, which became the iconic tower we all recognize.
(Image credit: Flickr user Jon McGovern)
The nickname "Big Ben" is specifically for the clock's hour bell (officially named the Great Bell), the largest of the five bells, but in common use also refers to the clock faces and the tower itself.
However, the proper name for the tower is the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster. It is also called St. Stephen's Tower, a name given to the tower by Victorian journalists who also called the hall of parliament "St. Stephen's Hall". The Chapel of St. Stephen was originally built inside Westminster Palace as a private church for the king in the 13th-14th centuries (it took 70 years to complete). In 1547, parliament moved in and the chapel became the Commons Chamber. The House of Commons met there until the fire of 1834, which explains the use of the term St. Stephen's Hall as used by journalists.
Betty White has had a great year so far, starring in the TV series Hot in Cleveland, hosting Saturday Night Live, and appearing in scads of TV ads. Now she's conquered another medium -comic books!
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Bluewater Productions will publish a comic book based on her life. It’s the latest in a series of Great Woman comic bios. (Other issues have been written about Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama, so expect the comic to be a shameless cash-in on its subject’s current popularity interesting.)
Fungi come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and their range of habits and habitats is just as diverse.
It's fungi's ability to grow just about anywhere that makes it so amazing. If you name a hostile environment there's more than likely some form of mushroom or yeast that will not only grow there but prefer it over anywhere else. An extreme version of this is when researchers stuck their instruments into one of the most poisonous places on earth and found not only a species of mushroom growing there but one that actually appears to be feeding on the toxicity. How nasty is this place? Well, all you need to say is one word to shudder at the thought: Chernobyl.
But strangeness and fungi don't end with radiation-feasting mushrooms, for there are quite a number of them that feast on other things -- including animals. Nematophagous fungi, for instance, grow miniscule rings that, if a nematode happens to squirm into one, rapidly contract, trapping the unfortunate lunch ... I mean 'worm.' If this makes you a bit nervous take a bit of consolation in that the popular oyster mushroom is also a nematode killer – and it's also tasty, so while it eats them we also eat it.
See some beautiful and scary fungi at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is a continuation of the popular TypeFace/Off series in which you identify something by its distinctive font. We've tried movies, TV shows, board games, and now video games. Can you recognize them from the typeface, even if the actual words are different? Link
