Imagine the reaction when people see you taking a sip from a urine specimen container! Formula P and Blood Sample are sour candy liquids packaged in specimen bottles. Guess which one is lemon and which is cherry. Link -via Unique Daily

The world’s first transgenic dogs are a litter of four cloned beagles that glow red under ultraviolet light. The puppies were cloned by a team led by scientists at Seoul National University in South Korea. They used a virus to infect canine fibroblast cells with the glowing gene, then cloned cells to produce 344 embryos implanted into 20 dogs, producing seven pregnancies.

A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.

Lee and stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang were part of a team that created the first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005. Much of Hwang's work on human cells turned out to be fraudulent, but Snuppy was not, an investigation later concluded.

This new proof-of-principle experiment should open the door for transgenic dog models of human disease, says team member CheMyong Ko of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "The next step for us is to generate a true disease model," he says.

Link -via Buzzfeed

See also: Fluorescent cats, fish, pigs, and rabbits.

Today is the 445th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. In honor of this occasion, today is Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Here are some ways to do it:

1. Instead of you, say thou. Instead of y’all, say thee.
2. Rhymed couplets are all the rage.
3. Men are Sirrah, ladies are Mistress, and your friends are all called Cousin.
4. Instead of cursing, try calling your tormenters jackanapes or canker-blossoms or poisonous bunch-back’d toads.
5. Don’t waste time saying "it," just use the letter "t" (’tis, t’will, I’ll do’t).
6. Verse for lovers, prose for ruffians, songs for clowns.
7. When in doubt, add the letters "eth" to the end of verbs (he runneth, he trippeth, he falleth).
8. To add weight to your opinions, try starting them with methinks, mayhaps, in sooth or wherefore.
9. When wooing ladies: try comparing her to a summer’s day. If that fails, say "Get thee to a nunnery!"
10. When wooing lads: try dressing up like a man. If that fails, throw him in the Tower, banish his friends and claim the throne.

Forsooth, 'tis a pity methinks, if no one deigns to understandeth me. Link -via the Presurfer

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has quite a few neat things you can do with magnets. Some are really artful, some are great for teaching purposes, and here's one I'll definitely use sometime:

Find studs in your walls

Move a magnet over the wall until it finds a screw or nail head under the paint. You don't even need to mark the wall-- you can just leave the magnet there until you've drilled your holes.

Link

The actors who played characters in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation have names that are sometimes more difficult to spell than the alien characters they played. In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are asked to correctly spell eight actor's names. I scored 100% because I'm such a nerd. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/24858

Environmental Graffiti is taking Earth Day literally with a roundup of artful and over-the-top world globes, including two made of chocolate! Shown is the walk-in Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. Link -via Digg

The Big Picture Blog from the Boston Globe has pictures from NASA sent back by the Cassini spacecraft as it passed Saturn and its moons. Cassini has been functioning in space for almost five years now, and the pictures are awesome!

Cassini looks toward Rhea's cratered, icy landscape with the dark line of Saturn's ringplane and the planet's murky atmosphere as a background. Rhea is Saturn's second-largest moon, at 1,528 km (949 mi) across. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired on July 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million km (770,000 mi) from Rhea.

Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI)

See also: Saturn's Newest Moon

For the person who has everything, here's SmartFaucet. Besides the features you've actually heard of in a faucet, it has a face recognition system so it can adjust heat and flow to your individual preferences. And it has a touchscreen display on which you can check your email! I think I will pass -I'm so old-fashioned that I prefer my water without electricity. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(YouTube link)
This is what we would have enjoyed if Jim Henson had produced the movie Ocean's Eleven. -via Unique Daily

This picture of tracks in Lakehurst, New Jersey looks quite intriguing. Can you guess what they are for?

in order for a plane to safely land on an aircraft carrier without racing off the end, its tailhook needs to be 'caught' by arresting cables attached to the carrier's deck (see here). these cables need to be extremely strong and durable but also flexible enough so as not to stop the plane too quickly. these 5 test tracks, located at navair in lakehurst, are dedicated to testing these very systems and the emergency barricades.

See more pictures of vehicle testing facilities at deputy dog. http://deputy-dog.com/2009/04/record-breaking-jet-sleds-and-rooftops.html

The city of Yokohama, Japan is welcoming two giant spiders to celebrate Expo Y150, the 150th anniversary of the port city. The spiders are the work of La Machine and Artichoke. They did The Sultan's Elephant in 2006 and La Machine in Liverpool last year. See more pictures and a video at Pink Tentacle. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

Original names and working titles of movies, TV shows, companies, sports teams, and even people are often very different from what we know them as. If you read posts at mental_floss on a regular basis, you'll know the answers to today's Lunchtime Quiz, which asks you what earlier names these things had for a time. I scored 50%, which means I haven't been reading as closely as I should. Or else my memory is going. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/24786

(YouTube link)

Can you get any geekier than Bohemian Rhapsody played by an orchestra of vintage gadgets? I think not. From the YouTube page:

Please note no effects or sampling was used. What you see is what you hear (does that even make sense?) Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar 8 Inch Floppy Disk as Bass 3.5 inch Harddrive as the gong HP ScanJet 3C was used for all vocals. Please note I had to record the HP scanner 4 seperate times for each voice. I tried to buy 4 HP scanners but for some reason sellers on E-Bay expect you to pay $80-$100, I got mine for $30.

I wonder if it takes requests? -via Arbroath

CakeWrecks has a collection of really neat cakes that share the theme of classic board games, from chess to Operation! The Taboo cake shown was made by a 16-year-old named Melia. Link

Zaskoda started out to mount a camera on a snowboard and ended up designing a steampunk model, complete with sails and a "generator"! Link -via Unique Daily