It is once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Do you know what this thing is? Can you give us a wild guess?

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 win 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?

There's a second picture of this object posted at the What Is It? Blog. Take deep breath, do your best, and good luck!

Update: Stephen was the first to peg this item as a show business prop but also a real weight from a old-fashioned strongman show. It belonged to Warren Lincoln Travis, who indeed lifted this with his hips by a chain running through the hole in the middle, as Stephen said in his entry. It weighed between 1650 and 3750 pounds, depending on how much sand he filled it with. There's even more information about it at the What Is It? blog.

The funniest answer was from samuel, who gave us a Super Mario answer:

Conjoined Bomb-omb twins. They're waiting anxiously out outside of Dr. Goomba's office to see if a surgery is possible. It's been over a year now since the castle guards pulled them out of that koopley's famous freak show on a case of child abuse. They look so happy in this picture, even though they're nervous.

Good luck Bomb-ombs, I hope the answer will come soon!

Both win t-shirt from the NeatoShop!

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a contraption that will automatically pour six, count 'em, six liquid ingredients into a cocktail glass for the geekiest mixed drink ever! Drink Making Unit 2.0 is a few steps up from the three-liquid unit they'd previously produced. Microcontrollers, LEDs, tubing, and the kind of equipment all evil mad scientists have around come together to make a machine that Rube Goldberg would be proud of. It looks good, too! Link

(College Humor link)

How many internet memes are incorporated in this music video? All of them! But they happen so fast you won't catch them all the first time around. -via Laughing Squid

Police in Lincoln, Nebraska arrested William Logan Jr. on a misdemeanor theft charge. Logan was caught on a surveillance camera using a vacuum to suck change out of coin laundry appliances.

Photos show a man entering the laundry room with a backpack, which contained a vacuum. The man pries open the coin tray, plugs in the vacuum and sucks out the change.

On Tuesday morning, detectives said they made contact with William Logan Jr., 40, and his father at the residence they share. Logan’s father immediately recognized his son in the surveillance images, according to Lincoln police.

Authorities said Logan was able to get about $20 in quarters from the machines at an apartment on Holdrege Street. According to police, Logan no longer has the vacuum.

Logan was previously convicted of stealing a Christmas tree from the Salvation Army. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(Funny or Die link)

Billy Crystal and Helen Mirren team up for a sequel to the megahit romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. Contains some NSFW language. -via The Daily What

Teacher David Crichton was holding a physical education class outdoors in Galashiels, Scotland, last week when worms began raining from the sky.

The boys heard a "soft thudding" on the artificial pitch - then looked up to see dozens of worms plummeting from the sky.

David, 26, said he and other teachers at Galashiels Academy were baffled by the incident.

And they later found more worms spread across a school tennis court almost 100 yards from the pitch. He said: "We started hearing this wee thudding noise. There were about 20 worms on the ground.

School staff eventually found about 120 worms. It is believed that a freak weather event lifted the worms along with water from a nearby river. The story was first reported on April first, but there is of yet no indication that it was an April Fool. Link -via Fortean Times

(Image credit: Kingdom News Agency)

(Video link)

Cultural differences can manifest themselves in ways people never consider until they cross from one culture to another. In this clip, refugees from Sudan encounter America for the first time, and find it quite different from their homeland. This is from the 2006 National Geographic movie God Grew Tired of Us.  -via reddit

Jean-François Rauzier makes huge high-resolution pictures with amazing attention to detail. Hyperphotos are his way of combining "infinitely big and infinitely small things in one same image."

He found his way by juxtaposing, duplicating, twisting images with Photoshop, making it possible for him to reproduce human vision more accurately. This way, he generated a genuine numerical puzzle, in which the pieces, cut out, “drawn again”, come up along on top of the imagination of the artist.
From this technique is issued numerous fascinating and unusual details on which the spectator can dwell on.

For example, the picture here has a lot of people in it. At the site, you can zoom in and see them clear as daylight. http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/voyages-extraordinaires/ -via J-Walk Blog

The picture blog Scaffoldage uses the tagline "Skeletal Archiporn." It's another project from Shaun Usher of Letterheady and Letters of Note. Some of the scaffolds shown are almost works of art; others can frighten or even make you feel woozy. There is no text, but each image is linked to its source. The scaffold shown here was used during construction of the Water Cube built for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. http://www.scaffoldage.com/ -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user dominique bergeron)

The Caribbean island of Montserrat once had its government and most of the island's services centered in the small town of Plymouth. The community was evacuated in 1995 due to volcanic activity. In 1997, an eruption buried Plymouth under several feet of ash, rock, and lava. It has been an exclusion zone ever since, and no residents have returned. See a collection of 40 pictures of what's left. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Nick Brooks)

An aquarium enthusiast who goes by the name Steveoutlaw on forums was poisoned while trying to rid his aquarium of an invasive colony of anemones. To kill it, he boiled the rocks from his fish tank, and accidently inhaled some fumes. He ended up in the hospital, a victim of palytoxin, the second deadliest poison found in the natural world.

Palytoxin is shrouded in legend. Hawaiian islanders tell of a cursed village in Maui, whose members defied a shark god that had been eating their fellow villagers. They dismembered and burned the god, before scattering his ashes in a tide pool near the town of Hana. Shortly after, a mysterious type of seaweed started growing in the pool. It became known as “limu-make-o-Hana” (deadly seaweed of Hana). If smeared on a spear’s point, it could instantly kill its victims.

The shark god may have been an elaborate fiction, but in 1961, Philip Helfrich and John Shupe actually found the legendary pool. Within it, they discovered a new species of zoanthid called Palythoa toxica. The limu-make-o-Hana was real, but it wasn’t seaweed – it was a type of colonial anemone. In 1971, Richard Moore and Paul Scheuer isolated the chemical responsible for the zoanthid’s lethal powers  – palytoxin. Now, Jonathan Deeds from the US Food and Drug Administration has found that the poison is readily available in aquarium stores.

The problem is that the anemones that contain palytoxin are almost impossible to distinguish from species that don't. Read more about it at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link -via reddit

(YouTube link)

Have you ever wondered what astronauts do in their free time? Cady Coleman {wiki} is a scientist, flautist, and an astronaut, currently aboard the International Space Station. In this video, she gives us the short version of what it's like to play music in space. -via Geeks Are Sexy

(YouTube link)

This odd but appealing animated documentary was produced by Diego Maccione and Adam Gill for Al Jazeera. A rat narrates the history of New York hot dogs. Link -via Buzzfeed

A wedding ring is symbol of commitment and permanence. A tattoo is commitment and permanence in itself. Some couples are skipping the jewelry in favor of matching or complementary tattoos on the couple's ring fingers. And why not? You don't have to remove it to shower, work with machinery, or have an MRI. It can't be lost or stolen. It will never have to be resized or replaced. And you can design your own unique symbols! See a variety of wedding band tattoos in this list by Shaun Usher. Link

Dan Meth created this handy chart comparing the sizes of various sandworms. The next time you encounter one, it may help you to identify what type it is. Link -via Laughing Squid