These Apple-themed cake pops will be part of the Steve Jobs Inspired Cake Shop, a fundraiser in London next Wednesday for the organization Pancreatic Cancer UK. It's part of series of events called Internet Week Europe. Oh yes, they'll have candied apples, too! Find out more at Cakehead Loves Evil. Link

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On October 26th, explosives opened the Condit Dam in Washington State to allow the free flow of the White Salmon River after 98 years. The reservoir took about two hours to drain, shown here in time-lapse. Read about the dam dismantling project at National Geographic. Link -via the Presurfer

For 50 years, farmers, scientists, and homeowners have looked for a way to get rid of kudzu. The invasive plant native to Japan grows at such an astounding rate that people in the southern U.S. joke about closing their windows at night to keep it out of the house. Another invasive species should teach us to be careful what we wish for. Megacopta cribraria, an insect that hitched a ride to Atlanta on a plane from Asia in 2009, eats kudzu. The kudzu bug could eat away a third of the kudzu covering several states within a decade.

"I'm all for it," says Keith Brouillard, owner of Raleigh, N.C.'s Carolina Forestry, a consulting group that helps manage timber land for private owners. "Kudzu is a nuisance and almost impossible to get rid of." The vine is virtually impervious to herbicides, chain saws and even fire. Its roots can weigh 300 pounds and run 12 feet deep.

But the bug is also chewing up soybean stalks, reducing some yields recently by as much as a quarter, according to entomologists at the University of Georgia.

"Disappearing kudzu is a cultural problem," says John Shelton Reed, a sociologist and essayist on Southern life. "But disappearing soybeans is an economic problem."

Researchers are looking for ways to protect soybean crops from Megacopta cribraria while still searching for a species that will kill kudzu and leave crops alone. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: University of Georgia at Griffin)

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Conan O'Brien officiated a same-sex wedding on his TV show last night. Whether that is big news or not, the way the story has been covered shows how much television news depends on someone else to write their scripts news copy. There's another video at Laughing Squid that synchs the newscasts so they repeat the phrase in unison. Link

Have you ever felt like you are in over your head, that you don't have nearly the competence to be doing the job you're doing, and that sooner or later, others will find out you're faking it? Maybe it will help to know that those other folks sometimes feel the same way. It's called Impostor Syndrome.

“They used to call it an inferiority complex. You’re convinced you’re not good enough or smart enough to do this. Impostor syndrome. The only thing holding you back is you.” I wish I could say this call changed everything, but it didn’t. My second Master’s degree was worse than ever. Studying in a profoundly theory-heavy program, I felt hopelessly lost in every class, every day. I was convinced at any moment uniformed thugs would burst into my seminar to unmask me and drag me out. Obviously I did not belong here, as I understood maybe one tenth of what I was reading, and was frequently confused even by the comments of my own classmates. It seemed so easy for them. Surely I had made yet another mistake. It never occurred to me that I was there to learn, or that other students might be feeling the same way.

Read more about Impostor Syndrome and how to deal with it at xoJane. Link -via Metafilter (Image credit: Flickr user madamepsychosis)

Heterochromia means eyes that come in two different colors. Complete heterochromia means the color of the left eye is completely different from the color of the right eye. In cats, this most often occurs in white cats or cats that have the white-spotted gene, but can occur in any color of cat. See a collection of beautiful odd-eyed cats at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user P!XELTREE)

I learned this morning from reddit that the Google search page will do a barrel roll if you tell it to. That's far from the only neat tricks Google has embedded in their sites for those who have the time to find them. For those who don't, Buzzfeed has a list of ten you might have fun checking out. Link

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Thomas Beg animated the Lifecycle of a Mushroom for the Spectacular Science collaboration project in the style of the cartoons of the 1920s. Link -via Dangerous Minds

A group of artists and game designers, plus a teenage apprentice, built a one-of-a-kind video game for a restaurant in Eugene, Oregon called Off The Waffle. The tale of how it was born all hinged on the sign at the Orian brothers' restaurant that says, "We Barter."

Richard Hofmeier saw the sign a little over a year ago when he first visited the restaurant, then located in the Orian brothers' home in Eugene's funky Whiteaker neighborhood. Hofmeier wondered if the Orians would be interested in anything he had or could make.

Hofmeier, 28, was constantly bringing projects back to his Eugene gallery, Ink Thirsty, and the cast of characters who worked or hung out there. They'd done video games before - if there's a hulking lump under a drop cloth at Hofmeier's place, that's probably an arcade cabinet. This time he had a wild idea for the guys.

'Let's make a video game and see if we can get free waffles for life.'

Did they succeed? Find out at Kotaku. Link -via Metafilter

And after you read the story, you'll want this recipe. Link

Well, what else would you call an emo elephant? And he'll never forget his angst, either. Link

In English, that's Who's Coming? which was a kinderbuch (children's book) from 1910 showing all kinds of people who come to the house. The illustrations are by Julie Conz, and you can see eleven of them at BibliOdyssey. Not only are they beautiful, but they also highlight how differently goods and services were provided 100 years ago. Link

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A collection of starlings is called a murmuration. Liberty Smith and Sophie Windsor Clive unexpectedly caught a rather large and exquisitely balletic murmuration on video while canoeing on the River Shannon in Ireland. -via Metafilter

Artist Aakash Nihalani was commissioned to produce art specifically for Facebook's offices in New York City. The wall mural shown is called Domino. See the other works at his site. http://www.aakashnihalani.com/facebook.html

Previously: Aakash Nihalani's Street Art

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Did you know that hard candy is technically a glass? Dr. Richard Hartel is a professor of food engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Watch him make lemon drops and act like it's a chemistry lesson. -via the Presurfer

It's hard to think of Spongebob Squarepants as tough. He usually comes out of his ridiculous adventures just fine, but that's mostly dumb luck. So these mashups by DeviantART member DazTibbles might cause a bit of cognitive dissonance. He placed the various characters from the Spongebob Squarepants TV show into the video game universe of Street Fighter. See the rest of them at Unreality magazine. Link