This will be the last opportunity for the Neatobot to wear his London Olympics t-shirt. The closing ceremonies are tomorrow evening, and we'll see the official handoff of the Summer Games to Rio for 2016. Then maybe things will settle down a bit. I'm talking about more than just the Olympics. My kids started back to school last week, and the first thing they did was take a four-day weekend for a local festival. Meanwhile, I've been trying to get used to the new site here at Neatorama. The more I use it, the easier it is, and I'm lovingthe new functionality. Plus, I'm up to my elbows in tomatoes and beans and canning jars. So a little return to normalcy is a good thing! We had some great feature article this weeK:

Jill Harness showed us 7 Amazing Natural Landmarks. And yes, you can visit them!

Eddie Deezen gave us 12 More Baseball Feats That Only Happened Once, a continuation of his earlier post on the same subject.

The Nutmeg Wars. Or, how the Dutch East India Company destroyed a civilization for a pricy spice, courtesy of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us On the Gradual Diminution of the Human Head.

10 Scales Worth Posting an Article About originally had "Printing" in the title, because it came from mental_floss magazine.

Neatorama is rolling out our photo gallery feature with some interesting sets of photos that are easy to look through. First we had Bacon Demon, featuring scary meat sculptures. Rock And Roll! had David Israel's pictures of the largest boulder ever transported in modern times. In Virtual Nanoscopy: The Ridiculously Zoomable Cell, we saw the inside of a zebrafish embryo, cell by cell. The Whimsical Art of Joana Vasconcelos was quite easy to se in gallery form. There are others, but those will get you used to the new feature.

We also revealed what's in the ParaNorman Mystery Box! The goodies included a personal letter from someone who know way too much about Alex. The winners of the contest associated with the mystery box will be announced soon.

In the What Is It? game, the mystery object is a 35mm film leader retriever, used to retrieve film that has been accidentally wound into the cassette. Berhard was the first with the correct answer, so he wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer came from The Professor, who said "This is a nitpicker, designed to extract tiny slivers of controversy from the finest cracks in logic." That's an answer that deserves a t-shirt! Thanks for playing, everyone. You can see the answers to all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.

The post with the most comments this week was Amtrak's $16 Burger. No other post came close (except the giveaways). We get complaints about posting political articles on Neatorama, but that seems to be the only ones we get comments on! Hey, why don't you all try out the new comment system, and show us what kind of items you really like to see on Neatorama. You can sign up for a Neatorama account if you haven't already, leave comments, reply to other commenters, and vote for your favorite posts with the little heart at the top of each one. That way, we'll know what you really want to see more of! You'll find complete instructions here.

There are more new features that we will be introducing gradually at the new Neatorama, so check back often, and jump in and play with us!

So far at the London Olympics, seven athletes from Cameroon went missing, and three from Sudan have requested asylum. The Olympics have been the scene of political defectors, asylum-seekers, and others who don't want to go home ever since 1948, when the president of the International Gymnastics Federation took the opportunity to avoid returning to Czechoslovakia.

Marie Provaznikova, a Czech who was President of the International Gymnastics Federation, was the first person to defect from the Olympics. Czechoslovakia had recently become a satellite of the Soviet Union, and Provaznikova knew her country wouldn’t be the same. She darted to the United States, where she later taught gymnastics. Provaznikova lived in the U.S. until 1991, dying at age 101.

Read the stories of defectors from many different Olympiads at mental_floss. Link

The historic Eastman Gin in Phoenix, Arizona, is going to be dismantled. The town council has allocated $70,000 for the demolition of the 84-year-old gin.

Town officials say the cotton gin, which operated until 2005, is structurally unsound and filled with roosting penguins. They’re concerned that the town will be liable if someone is hurt inside.

It’s possible that the quote was supposed to say “pigeons,” but one week and quite a few comments later, the story has not been altered. Link -via Fark

(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user Little Sadie)

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For Shark Week, Mythbusters designed an experiment to find out if the dog paddle attracts sharks, but they really didn't want to sacrifice a dog to do it. The solution ....RoboDog! -via The Daily What Geek

The annual Perseid Meteor Shower will occur Saturday night and Sunday morning. If you're in the right spot, away from light pollution, you can see up to 100 meteors an hour!

The Perseids have been observed for at least 2,000 years and are associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 133 years. Each year in August, the Earth passes through a cloud of the comet's debris. These bits of ice and dust -- most over 1,000 years old -- burn up in the Earth's atmosphere to create one of the best meteor showers of the year. The Perseids can be seen all over the sky, but the best viewing opportunities will be across the northern hemisphere. Those with sharp eyes will see that the meteors radiate from the direction of the constellation Perseus.

NASA will be up all night, with a live chat led by astronomer Bill Cooke and his team from the Meteoroid Environment Office discussing the Perseids. And if you have to work inside or have too much cloud cover to see the meteor shower, they will have a live stream online. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Rongem Boyo_)

The title of this gallery is 10 Cryptids More Terrifying than the Mongolian Death Worm. However, it does have an entry on the Mongolian death worm, and I find the illustration of the Jersey Devil to be something other than terrifying -like, maybe, ridiculous. Still, it's a fine read on mythical monsters. Pictured here is the hodag, photographed in 1893. Link

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Cats and dogs chasing a laser pointer light would make a great music video, wouldn't it? The group Nobody Beats the Drum thought so. The last minute or so of this is the best. -via Buzzfeed

In the digital collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, there is an album of pencil and watercolor sketches of Hindu gods and Mughal emperors, but they don't know the date -possibly the 18th century. Pictured here is the goddess Durga. See a selection of these fascinating miniatures at BibliOdyssey. Link

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The latest video from asapSCIENCE explains how music makes us feel good. The secret is the same thing that love and drugs produce: more dopamine in our bodies. -via Buzzfeed

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Sports balls, disco balls, meatballs, they're all here in this short film by Everynone. There's no plot to follow, just a treat for your eyes. -via Flavorwire

We have seen a couple of solar flares this year that gave us beautiful auroras in areas that don't normally see such lights. But that was nothing compared to the coronal mass ejection known as the Carrington Super Flare in 1859.

That night there was scarcely a square inch of earth that was not illuminated by aurora. As far south as the Rocky Mountains the sky became so bright that birds began chirping and campers awoke and began cooking breakfast. Blood-red auroral light hovered over Cuba and Hawaii. The already-rattled telegraph operators at the American Telegraph Company found their equipment sputtering high-voltage nonsense messages most of the next morning, and some offices reported injuries and property damage due to electrocutions and fire.

If a solar flare of this magnitude were to happen again, the good news is that we'd know about it ahead of time. The bad news is that with modern electrical grids, the damage would be much, much worse. However, the complete opposite, meaning a lower than usual number of sunspots, can cause dangerously cold weather, as it did in 1709. Read about solar weather and its effects at Damn Interesting. Link

Did you know they did this? To ferry the javelins and discuses thrown in the Olympics back to the starting point, they use adorable little Mini Coopers! See pictures of javelins here. You'll find more pictures linked in the reddit thread. Link

There's been a lot of discussion about sexism in the way superhero comics are drawn. In a column called The Line It Is Drawn, artists were challenged to illustrate what happens when a male superhero tries to wear the costume of a female superhero. See fifteen of them in a roundup at Comic Book Resources. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Cynthia “Thea” Rodgers)

Who better to sit on the Iron Throne than Eddard Stark's long lost brother Tony? This work is from artist James Zapata. Link -via Unreality Magazine

Before he ever tackled writing for young readers, Theodore Seuss Geisel made a living illustrating advertisments of all kinds. This beer ad is part of the Dr. Seuss Collection at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego. Flavorwire has a gallery of twenty examples that display Dr. Seuss's particular style that you know so well from his children's books. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Schaeffer Bock Beer advertisement, Dr. Seuss Collection, MSS 230, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD)