Hungarian artist Mézesmanna is an master with royal icing as a medium. Here, she takes a cookie and turns it into a lace basket of flowers with a deft hand and a mesmerizing style. These intricately-iced cookies, a sort of gingerbread, are a Hungarian tradition and are given as gifts and souvenirs. The original video is on Facebook. -via Sploid
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We generally think of the rise of “talkies” in the 1920s. The first movie with sound actually dates from 1895, when a short film called "Dickson Experimental Sound Film" was made. The image is that of Edison engineer W. K. L. Dickson playing a violin. The sound was recorded on a wax cylinder at the same time the film was shot. The Edison company was working on ways to present both images and sound, but there is no evidence that this film was ever shown to the public with sound, due to problems developing the technology to synchronize separately-recorded media. Eventually, the two were physically separated, and the film went to the Library of Congress, while the Edison National Historic Site had the wax cylinder, which broke at some point. The wax cylinder was rediscovered in the 1960s, and the audio was recovered and synched with the film in 2000. -via Futility Closet
A new type of armor is on the market to protect small dogs from coyotes, hawks, big dogs, and other predators. Paul and Pamela Mott developed the Coyote Vest after their dog Buffy was killed by a coyote.
He and his wife worked through a few designs that ended with the CoyoteVest. It has plastic spikes around the collar, spikes down the length of the torso and long plastic quills shooting up along the center from the neck to the rump.
Mott said it would deter any animal from biting into his dogs.
"I just want to save my dogs, and then I realized maybe this invention can save someone else's dog," he said.
There is also an accessory that can be activated by remote to deliver an electric shock. You have to wonder what canines think about the look. Read more about the Mott's business in this news story. -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Coyote Vest at Facebook)
A truck driver left his semi idling near a Kwik Trip convenience store in Mankato, Minnesota, Friday afternoon and went inside to make a purchase. While he was in the store, his Labrador retriever knocked the truck into gear and it drove across the street, crashing into a tree and a parked car. Luckily, no one was hurt, including the dog. And passerby Marie Brace captured a priceless photograph. -via reddit
(Image credit: Marie Brace)
We often think of ourselves -and other animals- as symmetrical because we have two two eyes, two hands, two legs, etc that are pretty much alike. But we are not symmetrical. Our hearts are on the left, and our liver is on the right, except for a tiny minority of people who have those reversed. And almost all of us have one dominant hand that we use for skilled tasks. Scientists have been looking back into the evolutionary line to see when and how animals developed asymmetry, and why one direction is so dominant in a species. Pond snails were a good species to study, since their shells spiral either right or left from the time they begin to grow them.
In 2010, Reiko Kuroda showed that these asymmetries begin in the snail’s earliest moments. Like all of us, they begin life as a single cell, which divides into two, and then into four. At this stage, all the cells are the same size and shape. But the next division is unequal, pinching off a small cell on top of a big one—picture four ping pong balls sitting on top of four tennis balls. The ping pong-sized cells then rotate to nestle between the furrows of the tennis-sized ones. If they rotate clockwise, the snails end up with a right-handed shell. When Kuroda nudged them anticlockwise, using glass rods and exceptional dexterity, she produced left-handed shells.
Scientists Angus Davison Mark Blaxter looked further at snail development and found differences in the very first cell division -and traced the difference in the two cells to one protein. Manipulating this protein also caused frogs to grow their hearts on the “wrong” side of their bodies. Read more about the research into animal asymmetry at the Atlantic.
(Image credit: H. Zell)
The new Star Wars bad guy, or at least wannabe bad guy, has branched out into the villain roles in several other films! And even a couple of hero roles, and a comedy, too.
See Kylo Ren stretch his acting chops in this supercut by Darren Wallace and Dane Boe that the Sith-in-training could use as an audition reel if he chose. It's a cheesy idea, but so well-done that you may be surprised. -via Digg
Last fall, animator James Curran spent a month in New York City. Each day he created a new .gif inspired by something he did that day. Put together, they are a collection of funny vignettes that keep an active rhythm as if they were set to a song.
If you see one you particularly like more than the others, they are all posted individually in .gif form at Curran's website. -via Everlasting Blort
If only nature would find a way to cover these oranges so we didn't need to waste so much plastic on them. pic.twitter.com/00YECaHB4D
— Nathalie Gordon (@awlilnatty) March 3, 2016
Whole Foods got into a bit of public relations trouble last year when they sold asparagus water for $6. Now they’ve come up with a new convenience product: oranges, already peeled for you and then packaged in a hard plastic container that probably takes as long to open as it would to peel an orange. They cost $5.99 a pound. That’s a bit pricy for oranges, but remember, you’ve got to factor in the cost of someone peeling them for you, and the cost of the elaborate packaging, too. -via The Daily Dot
In 1903, 26-year-old George Wyman had a bicycle with a motor attached, called a California Moto Bike. He had already ridden it over the Sierra Nevada mountains, and was determined to ride his prototype motorcycle across the United States.
Wyman left San Francisco from Lotta’s Fountain on May 16, 1903, with a promise from Motorcycle Magazine to publish an account of his journey. Fifty days later, he rolled into New York City. His bike was so busted that he had to pedal the last 150 miles, but he had made it: he was the first person to motor across the country.
Just 20 days after he arrived, though, Horatio Nelson Jackson completed the same journey in a car. Jackson’s cross-country trip had taken longer than Wyman’s—Jackson and his two companions (one human, one canine) had traveled 63 days from west to east. But that didn’t matter. The car captured the American imagination in a way bikes never had, and for decades, Wyman was almost completely forgotten.
Along the way, he rode on bumpy railroad ties to avoid sinking in the sand, replaced numerous parts on his bike, and even saw families traveling in covered wagons. The roads weren’t paved, and in many places, you couldn’t even find a road. Read about Wyman’s journey at Atlas Obscura.
You might not be able to see them, but there are two guys in this video. The bobcat didn’t see them, either, which is a testament to the power of camouflage, and the fact that they didn’t move a muscle. The bobcat is a bit startled to realize the guys are right in front of him, then he's confused, then after thinking about it, he decides this party is just too awkward.
According to the original, longer video, Toby and Shad were out hunting coyotes in southeast Oregon when the bobcat found them. This segment was given to the company that sells the camouflage. From the way it looks, you have to imagine the bobcat seeing human faces floating among the foliage, and nothing else. -via reddit
If you were Superman, would you just let the bullets bounce off you to impress the bad guy, or would you just go ahead and arrest him? Superman always stops to show off his bulletproof chest, but then ducks when the gun is thrown. Why is that? Now we know. Kerry Callen (previously at Neatorama) continues his series of delightfully retro superhero comics with a story about how much of a jerk Superman really is. -via Geeks Are Sexy
That’s a depressing attitude to start the say with, and he was wrong anyway. Today will turn out to be fantastic, even if you don’t run into any dragons or orcs or witches. It will be fantastic because of what you make of it. This comic is from Lunarbaboon.
A zoot suit consisted of a long coat and baggy pants that narrowed at the ankles, often accessorized with a broad brimmed hat and a long watch chain. The look flourished in the 1940s and ’50s, especially among young Mexican-Americans who referred to themselves as “pachucos,” although zoot suits were also worn by many African-Americans and various immigrant groups -and young white guys, too. But the suits seemed threatening to the establishment. Wearers were considered delinquents, or even “un-American.” In 1943, the fashion led to a riot.
Essentially what happened was a group of Navy guys were cruising in East Los Angeles when they spotted a group of Mexican guys in their fancy zoot suits, and thought it would be fun to beat them up and strip them of their suits. Not long after the incident, another group of Navy guys went back to the area, and this time the Zoot suiters fought back. Suddenly, the LA Times was running sensationalist headlines like “Zoot Suiters Beat Up and Stab Servicemen!” during the height of WWII when laying a finger on a serviceman for whatever reason, was like committing treason.
When US servicemen based in LA read those headlines, hundreds and then thousands of U.S. Navy officers headed to East LA and began terrorizing anyone they came across wearing a zoot suit, also worn at the time by several minority groups including African American and Filipino/Filipino American youths. The first attacks involved victims that were 12 to 13 year-old boys. More servicemen followed, entering bars and cinemas in Latino neighbourhoods and assaulting them.
The police did not interfere in the fights because, you know, servicemen. They did arrest quite a few people. Read about zoot suits and the Zoot Suit Riots, and see plenty of pictures, at Messy Nessy Chic.
Which one of the Disney Princesses do you relate to the most? Or more importantly, which one sings a song you particularly like? The songs I like best are from Mulan and Frozen, which coincidentally feature my favorites heroines, too. In this video, Evynne Hollens is 14 different Disney Princesses as she sings iconic songs from each of their movies, presented in chronological order from 1937 to 2013. She’s got a lovely voice! -via Buzzfeed
Movies and TV shows often dance around situations in which a regular everyday person would turn the air blue with foul language. Studios wouldn’t approve of cursing in early Hollywood, and modern movies risk an adult rating if there is too much profanity. The result is a mess of complicated insults, odd epithets, hard left turns, and gibberish.
In this supercut, we see the lengths that movies can go to in order to cut down on the cursing. As we watch a movie, these are just odd moments that passes quickly, but put together, they sound absolutely ridiculous. Oh, video contains NSFW language. -via Viral Viral Videos
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