Dark Roasted Blend welcomes guest blogger M. Christian as he profiles six very scary animals that you might not even see before they kill you!

As anyone who has studied nature can attest, the world and all its creatures (great as well as small) really are out to get us. Some of their attacks are easy to defend against, and we - in general - know how to survive them. Yet there are creatures on this globe that can snuff us out like a cheap candle in a stiff wind.

Pictured is the yellow-banded poison dart frog, which exudes a slime that can kill you just by a touch. Link

Social worker Julio Diaz was walking to a diner in the Bronx when a teenager pulled a knife on him. After handing over his wallet, Diaz offered the mugger his coat as well. The teen was even more surprised when Diaz asked him to join him for dinner.

"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says.

After they ate, Diaz told the teen he’d have to pay for dinner, since he didn’t have his wallet. The teen handed the wallet back, and Diaz gave him twenty dollars, although he did ask for the knife, which the teen handed over.

"I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."

Listen to the entire story at NPR. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89164759 -via reddit

Tim Tyler constructed his microswitch keyboard with 124 keys. Some of the keys are vertical, to alternate hand stress between the flexor and extensor muscles of the fingers. This would require a much larger desk than mine! Link -via b3ta

This barbecue has a better attitude than the Angry Barbecue. From GeekFlirt. -via Reddit

Ganvié is a community of around 3,000 stilted buildings on Lake Nokoué in Benin. It has a population of between 20 and 30 thousand people. The town on the lake was settled several hundred years ago to protect residents from slavery, as local religious tradition forbade attacking anyone on the water. See more pictures and video of Ganvié at A Welsh View. Link

(image credit: Hugo!)

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The Job takes your expectations and turns them upside down. A award-winning short by Screaming Frog Productions. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Leonid Stadnik of Podolyantsi, Ukraine has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest human on Earth.

In 2006, Stadnik was officially measured at 2.57 meters tall (8 feet 5 inches), surpassing a Chinese man to claim the title of the world's tallest person.

His growth spurt began at age 14 after a brain operation that apparently stimulated the overproduction of growth hormone. Doctors say he has been growing ever since.

While he may appear intimidating due to his size, Stadnik charms visitors with a broad grin and childlike laugh. He seems at times like a lonely boy trapped in a giant's body, even keeping stuffed toys on his pillow.

Life has not been easy for Stadnik. He had to quit his job as a farm veterinarian because he could not afford shoes that fit, and suffered from frostbite. But since his recognition by the Ukraine government four years ago, he has received help from all over. Strangers have provided shoes and clothes to fit him, an oversized bicycle and exercise machine, and running water for his home. The president of Ukraine even gave him a new car- although he doesn’t fit into it well.

"I have always dreamt that my life and the life of my loved ones ... would become more comfortable," Stadnik said. "My dream is coming true."

His neighbors joke that they may also benefit from Stadnik's success. "Of course we are proud of him _ we may have gas here soon thanks to him," said Nila Kravchuk, 75.

Link

Researchers say they have found a recording of a human voice that predates Thomas Edison’s first recording by almost twnty years!

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California

Earlier recordings have been played back, but they are not of good enough quality to pass for an authentic sound recording. This makes one wonder what else new technology can interpret from the past. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.php -via J-Walk Blog

(image credit: Isabelle Trocheris)

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There is no information on this clip, other than it's from a Japanese TV show. Maybe someone who reads Japanese can translate the screen text. I thoroughly enjoyed it. -via Metafilter

Update: Thanks to Kaz@MA, who pointed out this is the same band, Ooedo No Hikeshi, who did Smoke on the Water.

You know what they say about March: In like a lion, out like a lamb. March is National Umbrella Month. In honor of the occasion, the Luchtime Quiz today at mental_floss is on umbrellas. I scored 80%. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/13632

Genealogists Christopher Child and Gary Boyd Roberts have spent three years tracing th family trees of the US presidential candidates. The results are interesting. Barack Obama’s distant cousins include President George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman, James Madison, Vice President Dick Cheney, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, and Civil War General Robert E. Lee. Hillary Clinton is related to Madonna, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Jack Kerouac, and Camilla Parker-Bowles. John McCain is a sixth cousin of first lady Laura Bush.

Obama is ninth cousin to Brad Pitt, and Hillary Clinton is ninth cousin to Angelina Jolie. Therefore, the couple’s daughter Shiloh is related to both candidates. Link

41-year-old Garrett A. Dalton of Naugatuck, Connecticut entered a radio station contest to win Hannah Montana tickets last year. He had to run a 40-yard dash in high heels carrying an egg on a spoon. The bad news: he didn’t win. The worse news: he was recognized on a TV news report. Authorities say Dalton was collecting workman’s compensation at the time for an injury that made him unable to work, and he is now under prosecution for fraud. Link -via Fark

(image credit: iirraa)

It only makes sense: a rug that lights up when you walk on it. They call it Footlume.

"The glow that the rug emits is very soft," said co-inventor Leona Dean, of London South Bank University, who also noted the innovation's party applications, "It can provide ambient mood lighting or flash in time to music as a talking point at a party."

Dean and another LSBU engineering student Zoe Robson developed the light-up rug, called Footlume, for a college course, and they will exhibit the innovation at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show in London this month.

The electroluminescent rug uses rechargeable batteries and lights up in response to the weight applied when a person walks across the carpet.

It could also light the way to the bathroom in the night and serve as a child’s night light. Footlume is a prototype, but could be produced commercially if investors are interested. Link -via Digg

Dave Worsley and a team of engineers at Swansea University were researching ways to protect steel when they hit on the idea of painting sheets of steel with solar cell paint.

The idea is to coat every piece of steel cladding with a solar cell paint. As steel is passed through the rollers multiple coatings of of the solar cell system are applied to it. Based on the preliminary research, the materials that are being applied are suited to capturing low level solar radiation, which means that they should work just as well in areas where the sun doesn’t directly shine on them.

The innovation here is to equip the materials before building construction instead of adding solar paint as an afterthought.

If the Solar Paint project gets off the ground, it is expected that they would be able to press around 30 to 40m2 a minute. This may not sound like much, but put it into perspective: according to Dr. Worsley, if all the steel cladding produced by just one manufacturer was produced to be energy generating, at a very conservative energy exchange rate of 5%, it would be the equivalent of 50 wind farms, or roughly 4,500 gigawatts of electricity, per year.

Link -via Digg

21-year-old Frank Singleton of West Palm Beach, Florida was released Tuesday from being jailed on a trespassing charge. He immediately tried to carjack a Nissan in the jail's visitors parking lot! He grabbed the keys from the driver, but he couldn’t leave because he didn’t know how to drive a car with a manual transmission. He was quickly arrested.

"I don't think he wanted to go back to jail," Miller said. "I think he really wanted to get away and was looking for a car." When the detective was making the arrest, he asked Singleton why he did this.

"I didn't feel like walking," Singleton said.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sfl-0325carjacking,0,2861462.story -via Fark