Once again, it's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you know what the object in this picture is? You can win even if you don't know!

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will each win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

Check out the What Is It? Blog for more mystery items of the week. Good luck!

Update: the mystery item is indeed a millstone. The first commenter who got it right (and followed all rules) was Craig Clayton, who wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer was from Dug, who said it is a "Recently unearthed Pompeii Satellite Dish Network receiver. It was still tuned to the Discovery channel when found. Some alarmist rhetoric show about end of the world, cataclysm, apocalypse, yadda yadda yadda." That one deserves a t-shirt, too! There were lots of funny answers this week; you should read them all. Several people mentioned the currency of Yap, which you can read more about in the post Funny Money: Strange currencies of the world. The answers to all this week's mystery items are posted at the What Is It? blog. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone for playing along!

When you hear about government conspiracy theories, you often picture folks wearing tinfoil hats. But as outlandish as their claims may be, there's often a kernel of truth that started it all. After all, governments have been known to do nefarious rings, even our own.

Conspiracy #6: The government has exposed me to harmful radiation.

The Truth: If you’re over 50, it’s possible.

“It is desired that no documents be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such work field should be classified ‘secret.’” –Atomic Energy Commission memo, 1947

In the late 1980s, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a damning report called “American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens.” The report spotlighted Operation Green Run, a military test at a Washington plutonium facility. There, in 1949, managers purposefully released a massive cloud of radioactive iodine-131 to test how far it could travel downwind. Iodine-131 and xenon-133 reportedly traveled as far as the California-Oregon border, infecting 500,000 acres. It’s believed that 8000 curies of radioactive iodine floated out of the factory. To put that into perspective, in 1979, Three Mile Island emitted around 25 curies of radioactive iodine.

And there's more. Read the rest, plus seven other government conspiracy theories at mental_floss. Link

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The Fresh Prince of Bel Air is quite a familiar theme song, but experimental band cdza ran the lyrics through Google Translate into other languages and then back into English.

The lyrics were translated from English to the world's most spoken language (Mandarin), to the second most (Spanish), to the third most, to the fourth most, ETC, putting all 64 languages in order by finding the demographic population size on every language on Wikipedia.

We have no idea why we did this.

Yes, something is lost in translation. -via Laughing Squid

A ski resort in Arizona fought for years for the right to make snow out of wastewater, and began doing so on Christmas Eve. Since then, complaints have come in about the yellow snow at the Arizona Snowbowl. The slope's manager blames rusty pipes; others blame the fact that the water used to make the snow is from Flagstaff's sewage treatment plant.  

Mike Fulton, water quality division director of the state Department of Environmental Quality, said the agency was “looking hard” into several complaints it had received claiming that the presence of the manufactured snow on the slopes violated state laws on the use of reclaimed water, which prohibit ingesting it. Critics argue, among other things, that wastewater snow is being tracked into eating areas and that children are playing in it and touching their faces with it.

The water used for making snow at the ski area is not drinking water. Studies have found that it contains hormones, pharmaceuticals, antibiotics and other chemicals. There is much debate about whether these chemicals are harmful in small amounts.

Regardless, the discolored snow has meant Snowbowl has to contend with a heightened ick factor. Kaelan Monroe, 11, said he went skiing on New Year’s Day and that the conditions were “kind of disgusting.”

State officials have sent an expert out, but the snow has not yet been tested. Link  -via reddit

(Image credit: Rudy Preston)

Scouting New York reports on the difficulty of pleasing movie and TV directors by finding them the Chinese restaurant they want to film in. It must look exotic, with red wallpaper and lots of dragons and intricately-carved furniture. After all, they've seen that Chinatown restaurant in lots of other movies! The problem is, they are looking for the restaurant decor of the early 20th century.

But those days are gone. Chinese restaurants don’t need crazy decor anymore to convince New Yorkers that the cuisine is worthwhile. And while I really wish just one holdover from the 1940s or 1950s had survived into the modern age as a historical relic, they’re kaput, and no amount of scouting will bring them back.

So the Chinatown restaurants you see on film are usually built on sound stages. You can see plenty of those screenshots, plus what actual New York restaurants look like, and a couple of vintage interiors that no longer exist, at Scouting New York. Link -via Digg

Some of the most coveted mushroom species don't grow well in captivity, which is why people roam the forests to find them. Or maybe it's because roaming the forest is a beautiful experience in itself. It certainly seems so when you see the photographs taken by Osma Harvilahti in the woods near Helsinki, Finland. Please note that the legality of mushroom hunting varies by country. Link 

(Image credit Osma Harvilahti)

A team led by Australian amphibian biologist Jodi Rowley was hiking through the lowland forests of Vietnam in 2009 when they first saw the large frog on a log.

Rowley later discovered that the 3.5-inch-long (9-centimeter-long) creature is a relatively large new type of flying frog, a group known for its ability to "parachute" from tree to tree thanks to special aerodynamic adaptations, such as webbed feet, Rowley said.

Rowley dubbed the new species Helen's flying frog, in honor of her mother, Helen Rowley, "who has steadfastly supported her only child trekking through the forests of Southeast Asia in search of frogs," according to a statement.

The newfound species—there are 80 types of flying frogs—is also "one of the most flying frogs of the flying frogs," Rowley said, "in that it's got huge hands and feet that are webbed all the way to the toepad."

"Females even have flappy skin on their forearms to glide," added Rowley, who has received funding from the National Geographic Committee on Research and Exploration.

The flying frogs aren't seen much because they tend to stay in the forest canopy, but with Ho Chi Minh City only a few miles away and growing, their habitat may soon be threatened. Read more on the new frog at NatGeo News. Link

(Image credit: Jodi Rowley)

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The Boys and Girls Clubs of King County (Washington) staged a "Snow Day" Saturday at the Seattle Center. They trucked in 162,000 pounds of snow and staged a Guinness attempt at the world's largest snowball fight, with a Guinness judge present who verified 5,834 participants. Filmmaker Devin Supertramp (Devin Graham) was there to make us wish we had been there as well. Link -Thanks, Kat!

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Watching a live police chase on TV can be exciting! And even more exciting when it's local! Mercury News has more an the actual chase. Link  -via reddit

It looks like a football, but it's an egg. But it's not an egg, it's just an eggshell (although one that resembles a football) that has chocolate cake inside. Got it? Pull off this project, and the response at your Super Bowl party will surely be, "Oh, you went to a lot of trouble for these, didn't you?" Yes, indeed. Get complete directions to make your own at The Cupcake Project. Link -via Laughing Squid

One particular driver did not let the fact that Denny's does not a have a drive-through stop him from driving through a Denny's in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, this morning. Four people were injured in the crash, one seriously, and the unnamed driver was arrested. But look at the picture. See a larger image here. How did the car get into this position? Speculation runs from an optical illusion in perspective to a tree suddenly growing in that spot. What do you think? Link -via reddit

Flowcharts lay out the process for solving problems in a logical, step-by-step manner. According to this flowchart, the wizard Gandalf the Grey uses perfectly logical reasoning, at least according to the folks at the LOTR Project. Link -via Flowing Data

The process of leading children from birth to adulthood is a long and complicated journey. Sometimes just civilizing a toddler enough to get him to preschool seems like moving a mountain. But are we really working with a blank slate? Research in infancy seems to point to a naturally-occurring knowledge of what's good and what's bad, even when the child is too young to guide his own behavior accordingly.

Infant morality studies are so new that the field’s grand dame is 29-year-old J. Kiley Hamlin, who was a graduate student at the Yale lab in the mid-2000s. She was spinning her wheels for a thesis project when she stumbled on animated presentations that one of her predecessors had made, in which a “climber” (say, a red circle with goggle eyes) attempted to mount a hill, and a “helper” (a triangle in some trials) assisted him, or a “hinderer” (a square) knocked him down. Previous infant research had focused on other aspects of the interaction, but Hamlin wondered if a baby observing the climber’s plight would prefer one interfering character over another.

“As adults, we like the helper and don’t like the hinderer,” says Hamlin, now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. “We didn’t think babies would do that too. It was just like, ‘Let’s give it a try because Kiley’s a first-year graduate student and she doesn’t know what she’s doing.’”

Wynn and her husband, the psychologist Paul Bloom, collaborated on much of Hamlin’s research, and Wynn remembers being a bit more optimistic: “Do babies have attitudes, render judgments? I just found that to be a very intuitively gripping question,” she says. “If we tend to think of babies being born and developing attitudes in the world as a result of their own experiences, then babies shouldn’t be responding [to the scenarios]. But maybe we are built to identify in the world that some things are good and some things are not, and some helpful and positive social interaction is to be approved of and admired.”

In fact, 6- and 10-month-old babies did seem to have strong natural opinions about the climbing scenarios: They passionately preferred the helper to the hinderer, as assessed by the amount of time they spent looking at the characters. This result “was totally surreal,” Hamlin says—so revolutionary that the researchers themselves didn’t quite trust it. They designed additional experiments with plush animal puppets helping and hindering each other; at the end babies got the chance to reach for the puppet of their choice. “Basically every single baby chose the nice puppet,” Hamlin remembers.

The same experiment on even younger babies showed that their gaze lingered longer on the "helpers," too. But that's just the beginning of the research going on with infants, and even on that oxymoron called "toddler altruism," that you'll see in a fascinating article at Smithsonian magazine. Link

(Image credit: Jill Greenberg)

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This spider has an inflated perception of his capabilities. -via Daily of the Day

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Sean Pawling figured skiing was just too easy, so he took his trombone along on a downhill run at Lake Tahoe. If you were going to shuss down a mountain while playing music, what song would you play? Yep, that's right. -via Arbroath