The Museum of Animal Perspectives gathers videos from inside animal nests, cameras carried by animals, camera traps, and remote vehicles. You could spend days watching these! I suggest starting with the armadillo cam for a laugh. http://www.sameasterson.com/map -via Weather Sealed

The Oops Awards (previously at Neatorama) are given to the ugliest, silliest, and most useless household products of the year. This year’s winners include the skin collection by designer Nacho Carbonell, which won first prize for the ugliest product. The rest of the winners are ...interesting. Link -via the Presurfer

Stephen Von Worley created a map of the USA showing where McDonalds outlets are. As you can see, they are (almost) everywhere! You’ll have to go to South Dakota to get 100 miles away from a McDonalds. Link -via Buzzfeed

Improv Everywhere set up a portrait studio aboard a subway train and persuaded riders to have their pictures taken for the “subway yearbook”. Read the story behind this mission and see more pictures and a video at their website. Link -via Buzzfeed

Fingers tapping on the tabletop are something you usually want to get rid of instead of something to reproduce. Nik Ramage, on the other hand, created a copy of his own hand with a motor that taps the fingers incessantly. His purpose is not clear, but it might make a cool Halloween prop. Link

A newly-identified species of ghostshark has been found living off the coast of California. The Eastern Pacific black ghostshark also exists in museums, but has only recently been named as a distinct species, says Douglas Long, natural science curator at the Oakland Museum of California.

The newfound ghostshark belongs to the "big black chimeras," a group whose species number has exploded in recent years, thanks to improved diagnostic techniques, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Zootaxa.

Chimeras display some unusual features not seen in other living animals, Long said.

Male chimeras, for example, have retractable sexual appendages sprouting from their foreheads. These organs, which resemble a spiked club at the end of a stalk, may be used to stimulate a female or to pull her closer—though these are still assumptions, Long said.

Link

(image credit: MBARI)

Cynthia Blair-Hoover of Granby, Colorado crashed on the way to Denver when her car went off a cliff near Central City. Although the fall left the 52-year-old woman with eleven broken ribs, broken vertebrae, and a punctured lung, she began inching her way towards an old mine by sliding on her back.

For five and a half days and nights, Hoover sucked moisture off her hair and did her best to stay warm through rain, hail and even snow at the 8,000 foot mark in the mountains. By the following Tuesday, she was able to hear voices coming from the mine, where they were conducting tours. When the voices stopped, she would yell for help and after several minutes, one of the men heard her cries for help.

"I couldn't believe she was able to survive," said Fire Chief, Gary Allen. "We have mountain lions, bears and other critters up here. It is a miracle she wasn't mauled to death."

Hoover was airlifted to a hospital in Denver, where she is currently recovering in the intensive care unit. Link -via Arbroath

You think big hair was big in the 1980s? In the 18th century, ladies of a certain station took hairstyling to absurd lengths -or heights, actually. Social critics and caricaturists of the day had fun with the trend, as you can see in this collection of images from the period at BibliOdyssey. Link

September 22nd is Elephant Appreciation Day, celebrated since 1996. The official website has many suggestions for ways to celebrate the holiday, but you can use your imagination to honor elephants in your own way. Tell elephant jokes, send an ecard, watch elephant videos on YouTube, or make a donation to one of the many organizations dedicated to the care and protection of the world’s largest land mammal. Link -via mental_floss

(image credit: Flickr user Carmelo Aquilina)

Whatever the occasion, someone will say it with a cake. Someone somewhere is probably very happy it was just a cold sore! See more embarrassing cakes at Stupid Idiots. http://bigstupididiot.com/2009/09/21/15-most-embarrassing-cakes/ -via Digg

If you’re going to wear a mask to prevent catching the flu, why not make it something worth looking at? Now That’s Nifty has a roundup of interesting face masks from all over. Link

New technologies are often blamed for the “dumbing-down” of new generations, but it’s hard to see that any generation is “dumber” than the one before it in a historical context. Professor Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University studied college students' writing and how it changed from 2002 to 2006.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.

Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Mads Berg)

If you recall the Tetris Shower and wanted one of your own, you’re going to love this. A tile supplier in England makes ceramic tiles in Tetris shapes! Pick up to seven colors for the six shapes and design your own video game bathroom or kitchen. For faster installation, they also offer sheets of mosaic tiles with preset patterns. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Tom Houk of Steamboat Springs, Colorado built a putting green in his yard, and got into the habit of leaving his golf balls where they landed until he returned. A few months ago, he woke to find all his golf balls gone! Houk produced more balls, but the next day, they would be gone, too. This continued until Houk finally spotted the thief.

A hairless fox was standing there with one of his golf balls in his mouth.

"We just couldn't believe it and we thought he just snatched one," Houk said.

The fox had more than one golf ball in mind.

"He doesn't just take one ball," Sally Houk said. "He came back and forth and back and forth until he took all of them."

Tom Houk thinks the fox has taken nearly 100 of his golf balls.

What does a fox do with a hundred golf balls? Jerry Neal of the Colorado Division of Wildlife thinks he probably plays with them. No word on what size clubs the fox uses. Link -via Arbroath

Have you ever wondered what horizontal cross sections of the human body look like? Here is an animation of a full-body MRI from head to toe! Don’t blink or you’ll miss a vital organ. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

Update: According to several commenters, the images used in this animation are from The Visible Human Project and were taken from a deceased body, using MRI and CT scans and cryogenic cross sections. That body belonged to 39-year-old Joseph Paul Jernigan, who was executed for murder and had donated his body to science.