The European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany presents a 24-hour webcast involving astronomical observatories around the world. Live streaming video will be available, plus links for each participating observatory and the times they will be online in Universal Time (GMT). The webcasts will start Friday morning at 5AM Eastern Daylight Time, or 9AM UT/GMT with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, then move around the world. The webcast is part of the 100 Hours of Astronomy project to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Gemini North Observatory)

How does a grown man accidentally swallow a pair of scissors?

Lin Kong had borrowed a four-inch-long pair of nail scissors to use instead of a toothpick to clean his teeth after a meal.

But as one of his friends told a joke, the 27-year-old laughed and swallowed the clippers.

As he tried to cough up the scissors, the points, which were facing upwards, dug deeper into his throat, causing serious damage.

Surgeons in Putian, China used local anaesthetic and surgically removed the scissors. Link -via Unique Daily

Mock Duck is "a delicious assortment of thrift store cookbooks", with scanned pictures and descriptions that will make your mouth water... NOT. This page is from a 1962 British cookbook called TV Suppers from Heinz.

Gaily coloured peppers almost make you forget you're eating beans again.

Pizza is topped with canned spaghetti and a lattice of anchovy fillets and processed cheese.

http://www.swankola.com/md/mockduck.html -via Everlasting Blort

Celebrate April Fool's Day as you like, but what if you were born on April first? Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss celebrates 15 notable people who happen to have a birthday today. I scored 73%; the average at the time was 59%. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/24213

This high-quality sleeping bag looks just like a Tauntaun, complete with saddle, internal intestines and glowing lightsaber zipper pull. Now when your kids tell you their favorite Star Wars movie is "Attack of the Clones" you can nestle the wee-ones snug in simulated Tauntaun fur while regaling them with the amazing tale of "Empire Strikes Back".

Use the glowing lightsaber zipper pull on the Tauntaun sleeping bag to illustrate how Han Solo saved Luke Skywalker from certain death in the freezing climate of Hoth by slitting open the belly of a dead Tauntaun and placing Luke inside the stinking (but warm) carcass. If your kids don't change their tune on which Star Wars film is the greatest ever, you can do your best Jar Jar impression until they repent.

Why has no one thought of this before? I, of course, clicked the "buy now" button. Color me disappointed. Like the Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt from last year, this will be the in-demand product Think Geek will actually have to produce sooner or later. Link -via Unique Daily

From NASA's always-amazing Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Now, as part of the planned upgrade of the International Space Station, an Expedition 18 astronaut has upgraded her own head. The Human Extended Analog Device 9000 was attached with only minor delays, making the astronaut's remaining spacewalks over 40 percent more efficient. With the HEAD 9000 attached, an astronaut can now directly access 4 Gigabytes of computer flash memory with their own brain, perform complex mathematics by "directed thinking", and play a pre-installed game of Tetris at no additional charge.

Link -via Digg

These ten different timelines, which are all affected whenever someone uses a time machine, can be confusing (as all time travel stories are), but reading them may help you prepare for the new movie Terminator: Salvation.

I've mulled it over some more, and I still believe there has to be a timeline where someone other than Kyle Reese is John Connor's father. When The Terminator was a standalone movie, you could read it either way. Either there's a circular causality, where Kyle is "always" John Connor's father, or Kyle's time travel creates a new branch. But Terminator 2 pretty much establishes that time travel always creates new branches, because there's no fate but what we make. And the Connors, with their friendly T-800, are able to stop or at least delay Skynet. But of course, your mileage, even backwards and forwards through time, may vary.

Link -via reddit

Preserved plants don't look much like their living counterparts after they are flattened and dried. The Harvard Museum of Natural History instead has displays of plants made of glass!

Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf came from a long line of talented glassmakers. As a hobby, Leopold began making glass flowers from illustrations in natural history books. So beautiful, accurate and delicate were these models, a buzz began to generate in his hometown in Germany, and a local aristocrat commissioned 100 glass orchids. Leopold’s son, Rudolf joined him in the painstakingly intricate work. Thus began a prolific career in natural history glassmaking, ending in the largest commission of their lives; an order from Harvard college for over 3000 plant and flower models for their botany students. Leopold didn’t live to see the completion of the project, but Rudolf continued on without him, working alone from 1895 - 1936, three years before his own death.

Link to story. Link to more photographs at Flickr.

(image credit: Curious Expeditions)

A ship discovered off the coast of North Carolina in 1997 has been identified by experts as the Queen Anne's Revenge, a ship used by the pirate Blackbeard. The ship was originally named Le Concorde before the pirate seized it from its French crew in 1717. Artifacts, such as this apothecary weight featuring two fleurs-de-lis, helped to identify the ship as Blackbeard's.

Le Concorde's surgeon, who was forced to serve briefly in Blackbeard's crew, may have owned the weights, designed for pharmaceuticals. Pirates could have also used the weights to measure gold dust, experts say.

See more pictures at National Geographic. Link

(image credit: Wendy M. Welsh, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources)

This wedding dress valued at 1.5 million dollars is made from 2009 peacock tail feathers! It was unveiled at a recent wedding expo in Nanjing, China. Link -via J-Walk Blog

There are plenty of over-the-counter erectile dysfunction pills available now. Whether they work or not, they have names that could fit right in the Star Trek universe! In this mental_floss quiz, can you tell which of ten names are actual pills, and which are characters found on one or more of the various Star Trek series? I scored just 60%; surely you can do better. Link

When you approach the North Pole, compasses don't work properly because the difference between the geographic pole and the magnetic pole are more pronounced than elsewhere. So the Catlin Arctic Survey, currently en route to the pole to measure the Arctic Ice Cap, are having to use alternate methods of navigation. To measure wind direction, they are using a pair of lacy panties! The expedition is led by veteran explorer Pen Hadow.

Mr Hadow, who was the first person to trek solo to the North Pole, said the knickers were kindly donated by a supporter of the expedition.

Speaking from the Arctic via satellite phone, he said: "It an entirely genuine situation. If you can get gossamer thin material and attach it your ski pole it is particularly useful for this project because we can cannot use the compass as we are so close to magnetic north and it is too cold to use the GPS.

This expedition is particularly difficult because they are taking a route that has never been traveled. They expect to reach the pole in May or June. Link -via Arbroath

Shoe designers have been busy incorporating the latest technology into shoes. This list has shoes embedded with iPod transmitters, CDs, MP3 players, GPS trackers, and headlights. Others have springs or computer-enhanced fit. The shoe pictured was produced especially for the social media site Digg, with glow-in-the-dark logos! http://aleptu.com/coolest-geeky-shoes-2919520.html -via Digg

Just reading this article can be painful. It has descriptions of the horrible treatments that were often the only thing available for what ailed you in the Middle Ages.

It was not a pleasant time to be a patient, but if you valued your life, there was no choice. To relieve the pain, you submitted to more pain, and with any luck, you might get better. Surgeons in the early part of the Middle Ages were often monks because they had access to the best medical literature – often written by Arab scholars. But in 1215, the Pope said monks had to stop practicing surgery, so they instructed peasants to perform various forms of surgery. Farmers, who had little experience other than castrating animals, came into demand to perform anything from removing painful tooth abscesses to performing eye cataract surgery.

Some of the medieval medical graphics may be NSFW. Link -via Gorilla Mask

(Vimeo link)

Sound designer Diego Stocco recorded different sounds made by sand, then turned them into music!

I had some sandbags in the backyard that I used in November during a rainy day. I was moving them to a different spot when I heard the noise of the sand. I thought that maybe I could try a new sound design technique so I bought some piezo film transducers and started to experiment with them.

The entire track is created only out of tuned sand tones. No additional sounds or waveforms. I emphasized the inner notes of the sand grains and mapped them on a sampler as a series of instruments. The grooves are all played live with various techniques, including taping two piezo films to my fingers.

http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Music-from-Sand/171792 -Thanks, Diego!