When you go to grab some of this salad, it will grab you back! It’s a robotic hand made of cucumbers. Push play or go to YouTube. From MAYA : Make. -via Engadget

Seven cases of not-quite-standard arenas, athletes who aren’t what they appear to be, shortcuts, and hitting below the belt. Some go the extra mile to win, even if that includes bending or even breaking the rules. This article at mental_floss looks at some of the more egregious cases of unsportsmanlike behavior. Pictured is Charles “Kid” McCoy, whose story you won’t forget. Link

This nightlight by Sun Young Lee will go off by itself as you drift off to sleep. The light only stays on while the sand in the hourglass passes by! To turn it back on, just flip it over. Link -via Gizmodo

in celebration of the 2008 Olympics, the city of Mudanjiang, China erected streetlamps shaped like athletes! Link

Lenore at Evil Mad Scientist adapted the traditional “tumbling blocks” quilt pattern and made a pieced quilt based on the videogame Q*bert! Link

Dark Roasted Blend has posted another edition of weird signs, including this scary infographic from an Israeli bus. Link

Pic-Tac-Toe is a nine-picture grid puzzle where the three pictures in each row, vertical, horizontal, and diagonal, share a common theme. You figure out what they have in common! The middle square has to pertain to four different themes. Todd constructed one online; can you figure it out? http://home.earthlink.net/~tagross/personal/KJ/pic-tac-toe.html to the puzzle. The answers are in this forum; you’ll have to highlight text to see the guesses. -via Ken Jennings

It’s Walk vs. Don’t Walk in this video by Joeri Holsheimer. Push play or go to YouTube. -via Viral Video Chart

Birthday Stars is a generator that will find a star whose distance matches your age in light years from earth. For example, if you are 28 years and 6 months old, it will find a star 28.5 light years away from earth. The light arriving now from “your” star was generated at the time of your birth. Light travels at over a billion kilometers per hour {wiki}, so these stars are very far away. http://outreach.jach.hawaii.edu/birthstars/year.php -via the Presurfer

Damaris B. Sarria is a Thermal Protection Systems Engineer on the Space Shuttle Orbiter, and is pursuing her Masters in Aeronautical Science. She is documenting her work and progress towards her goal of becoming an astronaut on her blog How I Am Becoming An Astronaut. Her latest post is about analyzing the tile damage on the current mission of the space shuttle Endeavor. Link -via Bad Astronomy

People in Russia say that there is no wedding without a fight. That’s not right, there are. But not this one.

From English Russia, with love video. http://englishrussia.com/?p=1228 -Thanks, Jan!

There is no end to the ideas people have for decorating their bodies. Neatorama featured science tattoos recently; now here is a gallery of anatomical tattoos! Link -via Respectful Insolence

An Egyptian mummy known as Demetrios at the Brookyn Museum is wrapped in linen decorated with rare red paint. X-ray fluorescence revealed that the paint matched the chemical analysis of lead from Spain’s Rio Tinto region. Demetrio’s death is calculated to be 94-100 AD, according to museum conservator Lisa Bruno.

"At the time, Egypt was in the Roman Empire, so the finding reveals how widespread trade was throughout the empire," Bruno said. "The mix of cultures probably was not unlike what exists today in Egypt."

Link

Wired Blogs is looking at who is editing Wikipedia entries in order to protect or shape their own image.

Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith just launched an unofficial Wikipedia search tool that threatens to lay bare the ego-editing and anonymous flacking on the site. Enter the name of a corporation, organization or government entity and you get a list of IP addresses assigned to it. Then with one or two clicks, you can see all the anonymous edits made from those addresses anywhere in Wikipedia's pages.

Wired is collecting cases of Wikipedia edits coming from those who stand to lose or gain depending on the accesible information. Several are already listed. They invite anyone to contribute cases you know of, or that you can find via Griffith’s search tool. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/vote-on-the-top.html -via Metafilter

Fark displayed its 3 millionth active thread today. Fark is an odd news aggregator and networking site launched by Drew Curtis in 1999. Fark now receives around 2,000 submissions a day. Congratulations to Drew and the gang at Fark on the milestone! Link