88-year-old Kimani Nganga Maruge began his education in 2004 after Kenya introduced free primary schooling. That’s when he set the world record for the oldest person to ever start primary school. He attended for four years until last week when he was taken to an elderly care facility.

The school's head teacher, Jane Obinchu, said he had never missed school before and so when he failed to show up on Thursday, they began to look for him.

"We immediately had to establish what had gone wrong to ascertain our fears before his fellow pupils told us they had seen him aboard a Red Cross vehicle," she told the AFP news agency.

The Red Cross later confirmed Mr Maruge had been taken into care.

Ms Obinchu expressed her disappointment at the decision and said it may have been hastily taken.

"He is an international figure who was very keen with his studies. I doubt if he can accept his studies to be interrupted," she added.

The chairman of the local parents' and teachers' association, Albert Kebenei, called on the ministry of education to "come to our rescue" and explained that Mr Maruge had dramatically increased enrolment at the school by inspiring families.

Mr. Maruge had wanted to earn a veterinary diploma. Link -via Arbroath

You know the names, but do you know what that initial stands for? Today’s mental_flosss quiz tests your knowledge of famous people with middle initials. I scored 50%, which is about what I expected. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15597

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I confess, this is a solution to a flat tire that I never considered before. Maybe it will work long enough for this guy to get to the garage. -via Unique Daily

A business name should tell you what kind of business it is, and it should be memorable. This one certainly is! Best Week Ever has pictures of 50 storefronts featuring giggle-inspiring puns. Link -via I Am Bored

Macie Hope McCartney was born twice, once at six months gestation when she was brought out for surgery, and again at eight months. An ultrasound showed that Keri McCartney’s baby had a tumor the size of a grapefruit, benign but still deadly. The only hope was immediate surgery, although the pregnancy wasn’t far enough along to ensure survival. Fetal surgeon Dr. Darrell Cass explained the operation:

“It required that Mrs. McCartney went under a very, very deep anesthesia, about seven times deeper than the average operation,” he said. “That’s necessary in order to have the uterus very, very relaxed.”

He and two other surgeons opened Keri’s abdomen and brought her uterus entirely outside her body. “We had to find an area of the uterus that we could open safely so that we didn’t disturb the placenta,” he explained.

When they found such a place, they opened the relaxed womb and extracted about 80 percent of Macie Hope’s body — which weighed no more than a quarter of a pound — leaving just the head and upper body in the womb. Exposing the fetus to the air carried the danger that she would go into cardiac arrest, and the surgeons worked quickly to remove the tumor and return Macie to the safety of the womb.

That part of the four-hour procedure took about 20 minutes. The surgeons then had to carefully close up the uterus so that it would be watertight, to keep the amniotic fluid from leaking out.

“Then we had to hope that the pregnancy was going to last,” Cass added.

It lasted another ten weeks. Macie Hope was delivered on May 3 perfectly healthy. Link (with video and very graphic slideshow) -via YesButNoButYes

Paul Nicklen is a photographer for National Geographic Magazine. Over the course of several days last year, he developed a relationship with a 12-foot 1,000 pound leopard seal. She brought him penguins to eat and even tried to teach him how to hunt penguins! The story is told in a multimedia presentation on Nicklen’s work. Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Paul Nicklen/National Geographic)

The Color Sense Game from Pittsburgh Paints finds your “color personality” based on your five senses, your interests, and your style. Each resulting personality gives you lots of colors to work with. My color personality is Mosaic and Tapestry, which I can’t argue with. Link -via the Presurfer

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A customer is a customer, and the customer is always right. -via Fuzzytopia

Rob Manuel of b3ta experimented with making toasted candy sandwiches. Yes, candy on real bread. He and his wife tried three sweets, two I’m not familiar with, but they fall into the apparent categories of what Americans would call chocolate bar, Starburst, and gummi candy. See the results and the reviews of each.

Yes, it’s a letter, from 2003. Found in the bottom of a pond.

Recently, a friend of ours, Simon, moved to Over, just North of Cambridge, UK. He was moving to a lovely property, with a nice garden and a pond.

Simon wasn’t so keen on the pond though. It’s not very child friendly, and with two young ones running around the garden, he thought it would be safer to get rid of it.

A few buckets and hours of sweating later, Simon lifted the pond lining to discover a laminated piece of paper sitting at the bottom of the gaping hole that once was the previous owner’s pond.

You’ll need to go to the linked story to read the entire letter, but I’ll let you know this much: the writer was not happy. Link -via Metafilter

Talk about a space saver! The Design Odyssey Vertebrae is an entire bathroom in one column. The toilet is at the bottom, then a sink at sink level, and a shower head folds out from higher. This is one of 10 examples of cutting-edge bathroom design at DVICE. Some are hi-tech, others are just beautiful. I particularly like the huge shower head embedded in the ceiling. Link -via Digg

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Stuntman89 had a wonderful idea for a homemade slide. He should have beta-tested it before getting the camera out. -via b3ta

Bdelloid rotifers are tiny transparent animals that live in damp places. They reproduce asexually by laying eggs that don’t need to be fertilized. They are not the only animal that needs no males to reproduce, but they are more successful than others, having evolved into 450 species, which perplexed scientists.

It now looks as though the bdelloids do acquire new genes from time to time — that mutation isn’t their only source of genetic novelty. Yet their means of getting new genes is unlike anything previously known for an animal. Namely: they seem to pick up genes from the environment, and add them into their genomes.

The latest analysis of bdelloid genomes shows that the animals don’t just have rotifer genes. They also have dozens of genes from bacteria, fungi, and plants.

Now that's weird. This puts the microscopic creatures in a league with human scientists who are just now learning to genetically modify animals! Link -via Digg

(image credit: William Dembowski)

Hats made from hair? It’s an art project by designer Nagi Noda (featured previously at Neatorama here, here, and here). I can’t think of an event to which you’d want to wear one of these! http://www.uchu-country.com/works/hairhats.html -via the Presurfer

Vanity Fair has an in-depth look at how a Cold War defense project somehow led to MySpace and YouTube. The 50-year history of the internet, told by the people who made it happen.

Bob Taylor: There were individual instances of interactive computing through time-sharing, sponsored by arpa, scattered around the country. In my office in the Pentagon I had one terminal that connected to a time-sharing system at M.I.T. I had another one that connected to a time-sharing system at U.C. Berkeley. I had one that connected to a time-sharing system at the System Development Corporation, in Santa Monica. There was another terminal that connected to the Rand Corporation.

And for me to use any of these systems, I would have to move from one terminal to the other. So the obvious idea came to me: Wait a minute. Why not just have one terminal, and it connects to anything you want it to be connected to? And, hence, the Arpanet was born.

When I had this idea about building a network—this was in 1966—it was kind of an “Aha” idea, a “Eureka!” idea. I went over to Charlie Herzfeld’s office and told him about it. And he pretty much instantly made a budget change within his agency and took a million dollars away from one of his other offices and gave it to me to get started. It took about 20 minutes.

It took a bit longer (and a lot of people) to design what we have now, but the stories are fascinating. Link -via Boing Boing

(image credit: Christian Witkin)