Guess what I got for my birthday -a brand new iMac! It's a shame that these things go obsolete so fast, but if I had any kind of normal job, the old one would have been fine. The old Mac Mini will still serve me well by keeping the kids away from my new computer. Today I am backing up and migrating 67 GB of information. And that's after I deleted everything that wasn't crucial. I hope the new setup will allow me to be more efficient in bringing you neat stuff. That is, once I figure out how to make the text large enough to see. Meanwhile, in case you were busy, here are our exclusive features from the past week that you may want to catch up on.   

David Israel presented some neat insights on what it's like to work with Curiosity in the article Now That’s Rocket Science: An Interview with JPL’s Steve Collins.

Jill Harness brought us Four of the World's Dumbest Animals.

Eddie Deezen gave us a couple of great articles, The Beatles' Final Film: Let It Be and When The World Series Opened on Yom Kippur.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us Plucked From Obscurity: Aviators’ Safety Spinner.

Air Force One was a chapter from one of Uncle John's Bathroom Readers.  

And the story of The Candy Bomber came from mental_floss magazine.

Over at the Halloween blog, we brought you Neatolicious Fun Facts: Salem, Massachusetts and 12 Gross Candies Perfect For Trick or Treaters, in addition to links on everything to do with Halloween! The Halloween blog will only get busier as we get into October.

In the What Is  It? game this week, the mystery item is a billiard cue lock (you gotta pay if you wanna play). Anker had that one right, and wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!  The funniest answer cam from Malyss, who described a "manicure manacle:"

It is an extreme manicure manacle. Normally, you would find these in pairs and they would be bolted onto the arms of chairs at a nail salon. The person having the extreme manicure would place their wrists through the manacle and the salon associate would lock the customer's wrists into place before beginning the manicure.

That's good for a t-shirt, too! Thanks to everyone who played, and be sure to check out all the mystery items at the What Is It? blog.

There was a tie for the posts with the most comments, between We Are Hungry and Should Seat Belts for Pets be Mandatory? Those are both open for more discussion.

Neatoramanauts also have discussions about various items at our social networking sites, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest as well. In fact, if you have any kudos, criticisms, suggestions, additions, or you just want to say hi, you can comment right here! And thanks.

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The characters of some of your favorite movies try to explain how time travel works. For them. Your mileage, existing in the real world, may vary. You'll find a list of the films used at Flavorwire. Link

Rug rats in disguises come to your house and demand sweets in an old-fashioned extortion scheme. What do you give them? Something really gross, right? That's what they want! Well, as long as it has sugar in it. Jill Harness rounded up a bunch of candies shaped and formulated for trick-or-treaters that might turn an adult's stomach. Blood bag candy is bad enough, but it gets worse in this list at the Neatorama Halloween blog. Link 

A Norwegian study called “Equality in the Home” found that couples who split housework are 50% more likely to divorce than couples in which the woman does most of the work. And the more housework the husband does, the higher the divorce rate climbs. However, guys, that does not mean that if you quit helping out, your marriage will improve.  

Researchers found no, or very little, cause-and-effect. Rather, they saw in the correlation a sign of “modern” attitudes.

“Modern couples are just that, both in the way they divide up the chores and in their perception of marriage” as being less sacred, Hansen said, stressing it was all about values.

“In these modern couples, women also have a high level of education and a well-paid job, which makes them less dependent on their spouse financially. They can manage much easier if they divorce,” he said.

It is also worth noting that in Norway, no matter how the housework is split, both parents tend to share childrearing duties equally. Link -via Breakfast Links

The European sport of wife carrying has become so popular that the North American Championship is in its 13th year. The event will be held in Newry, Maine, on October 6th.

The origin of the sport was apparently inspired by the Finnish wife-carrying tradition and a 19th century character named Herkko Rosvo-Rankainen, who--as folklore has it --chose people for his marauding band of thieves based on how well they could carry wives away as they plundered the villages.  

Lucky, the modern day version includes only willing participants, and the women don't even have to be married. To compete teams must be comprised of a man and a woman, 21 years or older. Women are welcome to carry the men, but that usually doesn't work out well so much.

The winning couple will receive a cash prize and the wife's weight in beer. Link  -via Breakfast Links

We saw in an earlier post that DC Comics has made more money in movies than Marvel Comics -but Marvel had a slow start and is catching up fast. A lot of the recent explosion in Marvel's Hollywood success is due to one man: Avi Arad.

In late 1996, Marvel filed for bankruptcy, cueing a two-year battle royale featuring a head-spinning number of alliances that shifted in various permutations between Perelman, Perlmutter and Arad, and Carl Icahn, the takeover mogul who owned much of Marvel’s debt.

Of all these players, it was Arad who emerged as the comic-book fan. While corporate lawyers screamed obscenities at one another, Arad wooed bankers with a stirring speech about the value of Marvel’s characters: “Spider-Man alone is worth a billion dollars,” he pleaded, as recounted in Dan Raviv’s Comic Wars. “But now, at this crazy hour, at this juncture, you’re going to take 380 million for the whole thing? One thing is worth a billion! We have the X-Men. We have the Fantastic Four. They can all be movies.”

And he was right! Read the whole story at Slate. Link -via The Week

Quite a few states were proposed in the history of the United States that never became reality -although most of the areas in them were or eventually became part of other states. But what if they had gained statehood? Kids in school might be singing rhymes that include Absaroka, Scott, Transylvania, and Nickajack! Read about these and more states that might have been at mental-floss. Link

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You knew it had to happen sooner or later. This Star Trek version of PSY's "Gangnam Style" is sung in the Klingon language. At least that's what they want you to think -I can't understand any of it. But the dance is just as goofy when non-terrans and Starfleet officers do it! -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Mars rover Curiosity seems to have landed near a long-extinct river bed on Mars. NASA mission scientist John Grotzinger described the nearby environment as a once potentially habitable site.

“A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment,” he said. “We’re still going to Mount Sharp [a three-mile-high mound at the center of the crater], but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”

Curiosity team scientists determined that flowing water was once present near the Gale Crater landing site based on the telltale size, shape and scattering of pebbles and gravel nearby, especially those found in conglomerate rocks at three sites.

The roundedness of the pebbles is especially significant, they said, and strongly suggests that the rocks were carried down a roughly 20- to 25-mile stream or river and were smoothed along the way.

In order to determine whether the water had ever supported life, Curiosity will analyze the river pebbles in the chemistry labs it carries to determine if carbon is present. Link -via Fark

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS and PSI)

The renowned Smithfield Meat Market in East London is hosting a pop-up art installation sponsored by Capcom called Wesker & Son Resident Evil Human Butchery to promote the release of the game Resident Evil 6.

Once at the butchery, members of the public will be invited to sample and purchase a dizzying array of edible human limbs including hands, feet and a human head, which will be available to buy directly from the shop.  As well as these specially created products, gamers will be able to buy 'Peppered Human & Lemon Sausages' and 'J’avo Caught Human Thigh Steaks' along with some specially made pots of Red Herb and Green Herb.  All proceeds from the sale of the meat will be donated to the Limbless Association, which provides information and support to the limb-loss community.
 
In addition to the pop-up human butchery and morgue, Resident Evil fans will be invited to attend two days of lectures at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum, which have been designed to explore some of the themes in the game and their links to real life.

The "butcher shop" will be open through Saturday the 29th. Resident Evil 6 will be released to the public on October 2nd. Continue reading to see more pictures, but be warned they may be disturbing.

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Chimera is a term for some mythological monsters that are made of different parts from different animals. Real-life chimeras contain the genetic material of more than one individual. And it happens more than you may realize. For example, Venus the cat is probably not a chimera, but your mom might be! -via The Daily What Geek

University of Utah computer science professor Matthew Might welcomes his new graduate students each year by explaining a PhD by drawing, literally, "the big picture" in graph form. That series of pictures has become a classic story of pride and knowledge and then a shattering dose of reality, but still ends with "Keep pushing." Don't neglect to read past the original story to the explanation of why Might is selling a printed version of the guide -it will all make sense when you see it. Link -via Open Culture

Why have a normal, everyday family portrait made in the great outdoors when you can battle a zombie horde? Evan, Ken, and their three children battled zombies and got a professional set of family pictures that none of them will ever forget! See the entire series, in which zombies sneak up on the group, they run, and then fight back, are at Pseudodad. Link -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Ashley Jones Collichio/Luke Austin Photography)

During the Berlin Airlift, one pilot's sweet tooth helped defeat Communism.

In 1948, the Soviet beast was hungry. Three years into the postwar occupation of Germany, the USSR had tired of sharing Berlin, so it blockaded ground and water access to the two million residents in the American, French, and Britsh zones. The Soviet hope was to starve them into submission. In response, from June 1948 to September 1949, thousands of pilots airlifted 2.3 million tons of food and supplies to the blockaded Berliners. The code name for the American mission: Operation Vittles.

At the airlift's peak in 1949, planes landed every 90 seconds. Pilots flew three trips a day, taking just seven hours off. Despite the exhausting schedule, one airman was determined to do more. On July 19, 1948, Lt. Gail Halvorsen decided to skip sleep. Instead, he took his hand-cranked 8mm camera and stowed away on his friend's plane to Tempelhof Airport.

At the runway's edge, Halvorsen spotted a few dozen boys and girls. Chatting with them through a barbed wire fence, Halvorsen realized something. He had met children across South America, Africa, and Europe, and all of them harrassed him for candy. These kids hadn't asked for anything.

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These goats are only a day old! Here they learn about the laws of physics by trying out the incline of a see-saw. Video by Zach Menchini, who blogs about his adventures as a New Yorker transplanted to New Zealand at Bring A Snack. -via Laughing Squid