(Break.com link)

And you thought your home wiring was weird! Caution -don't try this at home, or anywhere else. -via reddit

1913 The First T-Shirt Models

White cotton, crewneck T-shirts became regulation underwear for the U.S. Navy. Two decades later, at the University of Southern California, football players don similar shirts to prevent chafing from heavy shoulder pads. The tees became so fashionable that students start pilfering them for casual wear. In response, the school began stenciling "Property of USC" on its T-shirts as a crime-prevention tactic, not a statement of pride.

1951 An Undershirt Named Desire

Hollywood rebel Marlon Brando exudes animal magnetism in A Streetcar Named Desire when he wears a thin, white T-shirt. Teens dig the look, and by year's end, T-shirt sales total $180 million. But for Brando, the style is only a means to an end. A graduate of The Actors' Studio, he'd learned to use his body to show his character's inner turmoil. The T-shirt is only a thin veil, meant to cover not only his rippling physique, but also his character's bestial urges.

1969 Tie-Dyed Shirts Become Groovy

For decades, the only people using Rit dye were old women who wanted to color their drapes and linens. But in the mid-60s, advertising whiz Don Price markets the dye to hippies, who use it to tie-dye their tees. But Price's real stroke of genius comes in 1969, when he produces hundreds of the shirts and gives them away to performers at Woodstock. The multicolored tops are quickly adopted as part of the counterculture uniform.

1977 I ♥ NY

Throughout the 1970s, New York City gains a reputation as a tourists' nightmare -dirty, decadent, and crime-ridden. To revitalize the city's image, the Commerce Department hires designer Milton Glaser to fashion an eye-catching logo for the city. Over lunch one day, Glaser sketches "I ♥ NY" on a napkin. The logo spearheads a resurgence in New York tourism and becomes the most imitated T-shirt design in history. Glaser claims that the shirt's appeal comes from decoding the symbols: "You feel smart when you figure it out."

1984 Frankie Learns to Talk




BBC Radio bans song "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, claiming the lyrics are too explicitly sexual. Naturally, sales of the single skyrocket, and the song goes to No. 1. To flaunt the band's triumph over censorship, record label owner Paul Morley puts the song's words in big capital letters on T-shirts.

The "FRANKIE SAYS RELAX" tee turn millions of music fans into human billboards. Soon, Frankie knock-offs are everywhere. Although the band's popularity quickly dies, the T-shirt lives on, appearing on the torso of everyone from Jennifer Anniston to Homer Simpson.

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The article by Bill DeMain is reprinted from Scatterbrained section of the January-February 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Subscribe today to get it delivered to you!

Be sure to visit mental_floss' website and blog for more fun stuff!

Research into why Transylvanian naked neck chickens have naked necks reveals a complex balance between genes and chemicals that produce a bird's (not just chickens) feather pattern while it is still an embryo in an egg. Once the combination was discovered, Chunyan Mou from the University of Edinburgh found that bird necks are naturally more disposed to nakedness than the rest of their bodies. This may be no benefit to poultry, but chickens are related to birds that do benefit.

Mou thinks that similar genetic tweaks have happened time and again in the evolution of birds. Many groups have lost their neck feathers independently, including vultures, the marabou stork, and large flightless birds like ostriches and emus. Naked necks allow vultures to stuff their heads into carcasses without soiling any feathers; in other cases, a naked neck probably helps its owner to keep cool in hot climates.

Whatever the benefit, it seems that it’s particularly easy for birds to evolve a naked neck, rather than another part of their body. After all, Mou found that the necks of embryonic ducks, turkeys, quails and guinea fowl all have much higher levels of retinoic acid than the rest of the body. This pattern would normally be innocuous, completely hidden from natural selection. But it allows BMP-boosting mutations to denude the neck in one fell swoop, while keeping the rest of the body covered in feathers. As Mou writes, “An underlying map within the skin provides a one-step route to a bare neck.”

The post goes into detail about how the genes initiate the production of chemical activators and inhibitors, and ends with a parable from Alan Turing that explains the concept in layman's terms. Link

(Image credit: Demontux)

Amazing, indeed. The picture on the left is dated 3/11. The picture on the right is dated 3/15. Meanwhile, a stretch of highway near my home was repaved in only 18 months. If you can read this post in Japanese, maybe you could give us more details. Link -via reddit

An 11-month-old Tibetan mastiff named Hong Dong (Big Splash) broke the record for dog prices, going to a new home in China for 10 million RMB, which is £945,000 or about $1.5 million US.

Tibetan Mastiffs are huge and fierce guard dogs that have stood watch over nomad camps and monasteries on the Tibetan plateau for centuries.

They are thought to be one of the world's oldest breeds, and legend has it that both Genghis Khan and Lord Buddha kept them.

More recently, however, they have become highly-prized status symbols for China's new rich. The dogs are thought to be a pure "Chinese" breed and they are rarely found outside Tibet, giving them an exclusivity that other breeds cannot match.

Accordingly, prices have risen from around 5,000 yuan a puppy five years ago to the hundreds of thousands and even millions.

Hong Dong's new owner will command high stud fees, as much as 100,000 RMB and may earn his money back soon. Link -via The Daily What

An experiment shows how banana peels can be useful for other things besides slapstick comedy. They can also clean up dissolved metals left in water by industrial waste -better than other organic materials, and they are a safer alternative to chemicals currently used.

For the study, Castro and his team dried and ground banana peels, then combined them in flasks of water with known concentrations of metals. They also built water filters out of peels and pushed water through them.

In both scenarios, “the metal was removed from the water and remained bonded to the banana peels,” Castro said, adding that the extraction capacity of banana peels exceeded that of other materials used to remove heavy metals.

Link -via Look at This

(Image credit: Christina DiPaola)

A shopping center in Perth, Scotland was flooded with small red balls when a contest went awry. An Alfa Romeo was filled with balls for a "guess how many" contest at St. John’s Shopping Centre to benefit Comic Relief. However, the contest organizers failed to ensure that all the car doors were locked. A child, thought to be about three years old, opened the passenger door and released hundreds of balls.

Crowds gathered and cheered the farcical scene as several of the centre’s security team battled to gather up the balls, while many young children were seen making off with a few.

Siobhan McConnell, the shopping centre manager, said: “This was a bit more comic relief than we had originally planned.

Most of the balls were eventually retrieved, and the contest will resume this Friday. Link -via Arbroath

(YouTube link)

Take an Xbox Kinect to a convention and look what you get! This unnamed fan at Boston's PAX East gaming convention gives his all to the game Dance Central. Link -via Buzzfeed

Creative partners Oli Beale and Alex Holder posed to recreate several Mills & Boon romance novel covers in photographs. See the rest at their site. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Oli Kellett)

May they live long and prosper! Star Trek fan Pamela recently got assimilated married. Two wedding cakes graced the event, one a recreation of the starship Voyager and the other a Borg Cube. See another picture at Geeks Are Sexy. Link

(YouTube link)

Remember Chatroulette? Once in a great while, something really good can happen. I wonder how many "strangers" these guys rejected before they found Diana. -via reddit

As this emperor penguin chick matures to adulthood, his "bib" took the shape we are all familiar with. Wildlife photographer Sue Flood said this chick is the only one she's ever seen with such markings. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Sue Flood)

(YouTube link)

Well, of course a humorous sign could never be posted on more than one blog, could it? This video was labeled as a "Fail", which may be true for the contestant, but it's a win for Jason Kottke. I wonder how much it would cost us to get someone to guess "Neatorama" on Jeopardy? -via Kottke

(vimeo link)

This is something you can honestly call mechanical animation. Tim Wheatley made his own zoetrope out of a bicycle wheel! -via @LettersofNote

Chicago actress Nina O'Keefe is currently starring in the play Heddatron, which is about a woman who is kidnapped by robots. Her boyfriend, Erik Schroeder, works for a different theater company, but was called on stage for the curtain call because it was his 30th birthday. However, that was just a ruse.

After Sunday's show, Schroeder was called up on stage, ostensibly so the cast, crowd and the robots involved in the play could sing happy birthday, but instead of receiving the birthday song -- and prompted by a robot -- Schroeder pulled out a ring and proposed to his girlfriend of six years (watch video below).

"It was my great grandmother's sister's ring," said Schroeder. "She had to take off the costume ring she was wearing for the play, but I was lucky because it fit perfectly."

And of course, O'Keefe said yes.

After which the robots serenaded the happy couple. The proposal was captured on video. Link -via Fark