The blog 2M40 is about one underpass in Paris that has a clearance of only two meters and forty centimeters. Many truck drivers either do not read, do not understand, or do not believe the clearance warning. Several times a month, the underpass wins the battle against these drivers and 2m40 posts the pictures. The blog is in French, but the pictures tell the story. The tagline is "Un blog impactant," which means "An impacting blog." Link -via the Presurfer

(YouTube link)

Shelter dog Edie was schedule to be euthanized. She was fearful, aggressive, and hard to control. Then Bronwyne Mirkovich gave her another chance as he and Eldad Hagar recorded the process on video. -via reddit

Update: Edie has been adopted and is in her permanent home.

British soldier Craig Lundberg of Walton, Merseyside, England was blinded by a by a rocket propelled grenade in Iraq in 2007. He has been fitted with a prototype BrainPort device that converts images from a video camera in his goggles into electrical impulses send to a plate in his mouth that he can read with his tongue.

L/Cpl Lundberg said it felt like "licking a nine volt battery or like popping candy".

"You get lines and shapes of things, it sees in black and white so you get a two dimensional image on your tongue, it's a bit like a pins and needles sensation," he said.

"It's only a prototype, but the potential to change my life is massive, it's got a lot of potential to advance things for blind people.

"One of the things it has enabled me to do is pick up objects straight away, I can reach out and pick them up when before I would be fumbling around to feel for them."

Link to story (with video). -via Arbroath

http://vision.wicab.com/technology/ to BrainPort Technologies.

(YouTube link)

Forty-four years after he recorded the song we've come to know as Trolololo (previously at Neatorama), Eduard Khil is offering to sing the song again, this time with lyrics! -via Buzzfeed

As St. Patrick's Day approaches, botanist Dr. Declan Doogue of the Royal Irish Academy says that there may not be enough shamrocks for the celebration!

The shamrock was “hit hard” by the severe winter weather and “won’t be easily found” this week, said Doogue, who also stated the national plant was under threat because of modern farming methods.

In its place, bogus shamrock plants are being used, he said, stating that he hoped the shamrock that President Obama would receive from Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen would be the real thing.

If worse comes to worst, Irish people who want the real thing may have to use shamrocks from England. Link -via J-Walk Blog

The NCAA basketball tournament brackets were finalized last night. I am happy to see that Kentucky is a #1 seed, and the management at mental_floss is happy to see that Duke is also a #1 seed. But there are 64 teams in the tournament; some aren't that easy to place. In Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are challenged to match tournament colleges with the states they are in. I scored 75%. Link

Christian Marclay is a DJ and a composer of mashups, both audio and visual. He puts album covers together to make mashups that are more than the sum of their parts. Link -via mental_floss

The Wildlife Conservation Society took a two-year survey of wildlife biodiversity in the Jeypore-Dehing rain forest in India, and found seven different cat species in a 354-square-mile area. This is the highest diversity of cats ever found in a single area. Camera traps in the rain forest have captures pictures of leopards, the clouded leopard (pictured), the leopard cat, the Asiatic golden cat, the jungle cat, tigers, and the marbled cat. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Kashmira Kakati)

(YouTube link)

You might recall Sir David Attenborough introducing us to the lyrebird, a master of mimcry (and later the wonderful remix). Chook the lyrebird lives at the Adelaide Zoo. After a period of construction at the zoo, Chook was able to recreate the sounds of hammers, saws, and power tools exactly. Link -via Arbroath

Many people watched the Academy Awards last week and noticed that Best Actress winner Sandra Bullock never changed her expression. New York Magazine asks the question, if you can’t move your face, can you still act with it? Aging Hollywood stars have always resorted to plastic surgery, but Botox injections are faster, cheaper, and less invasive -and they have become almost required for an actress to look young enough for starring roles. How has this affected the art of acting?

Some actors appear to be underplaying their characters, consciously making them cool, without affect. If you can’t move your face, why not create an undemonstrative character? Others have taken the opposite approach: On two cable dramas starring actresses of a certain age, the heroines are brassy and expansive, with a tendency to shout and act out, yet somehow their placid foreheads are never called into play. Usually, when a person reenacts a stabbing or smashes a car with a baseball bat, some part of the face is going to crease or bunch up. Not so with these women. As though to compensate for their facial inertia, both perform with stagy vigor, attempting broad looks of surprise or disappointment, gesticulating and bellowing. If you can’t frown with your mouth, they seem intent on proving, you can try to frown with your voice.

The bright side is that public opinion may eventually turn to a preference for naturally aged thespians. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Hannah Whitaker)

University libraries are sometimes the beneficiary of someone's collect works, or collected obsessions. After all, when a relative doesn't have use for 400-year-old glass eyeballs, wouldn't the local college take them? Mental_floss takes a look at eleven such strange "special collections" you can read or see at our institutions of higher learning.

Yearning to learn more about your kidneys? Head to the University of North Carolina’s Carl W. Gottschalk Collection. The 12,400-item collection houses legendary medical professor Gottschalk’s passion: historical items related to the study of kidneys. Gottschalk’s medical research focused on the kidneys, and throughout his life he managed to collect texts, engravings, woodcuts, and other relics on the subject that dated back to the 16th century.

Shown is Dr. Gottschalk's kidney-shaped desk. Other collections focus on bloodletting, witchcraft, puppets, and more. Link

Should the US ditch the classic red "exit" sign and replace it with a green man? There are arguments both for and against. For the red:

The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the color is evocative of both fire and fire-safety devices (fire extinguishers, fire engines, fire alarms, and the like).

But in other parts of the world, pictograms rule. The "running man" sign was designed by Yukio Ota and adopted internationally for exits a quarter century ago!

The sign's wordlessness means it can be understood even by people who don't speak the local language. And the green color, they argue, just makes sense. Green is the color of safety, a color that means go the world over. Red, on the other hand, most often means danger, alert, halt, please don't touch. Why confuse panicked evacuees with a sign that means right this way in a color that means stop?

Slate lays out the arguments for both and a history of exit signs in one chapter of a six-part series on signs. Links to all the chapters are found at the top of each. Link -via Simply Left Behind

Gerard Vlemmings, whom you know as the Presurfer, recently retired from his real world job and is now devoting his time to blogging. He's launched a new project called Popular Coffee News which is, unsurprisingly, devoted to coffee and the people who love it. Some of the early posts include coffee science, coffee art, coffee making tips, and a video of a bird stirring a coffee cup! Link

The giant pitcher plants of the genus Nepenthes (previously at Neatorama) were thought to be carnivorous plants that could eat rodents. These pitchers, native to Borneo, are so big they would hold two liters of liquid if filled. However, carnivorous plant expert Dr. Charles Clarke has never seen a rodent inside one. He has seen tree shrew feces in them. Dr. Clarke and his colleagues in Malaysia began to look at Nepenthes in a new way. The opening of the pitcher plant is the same size and shape as a tree shrew. One end of the opening exudes delicious nectar.

"In order for the tree shrews to reach the exudates, they must climb onto the pitchers and orient themselves in such a way that their backsides are located over the pitcher mouths," explains Dr Clarke.

If the plant is a toilet, it receives nitrogen and other plant nutrients from shrew feces. Species of pitcher plants that do not attract tree shrews have different shapes.

Dr Clarke says it is the "neatest" discovery he has made in more than 20 years of studying Nepenthes meat-eating plants.

"The findings should radically alter how we look at these plants," he says.

Pretty neat indeed, especially if you are a tree shrew. Link -via Zooillogix

American architect Bryan Berg has succeeded himself as the world record holder in number of cards stacked. He built a replica of the Venetian resort in Macau inside the hotel itself. The creation is composed of 218,792 cards (4,051 decks) with no glue or other aids to hold them together. The feat took Berg 44 days. The hotel replica stands almost ten feet tall and is 33 feet long!

'This has been the most ambitious project I have undertaken to date,' Berg said.

'It's really like a real construction project because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that's supporting everything above,' he added.

'I was inspired to stack cards by my card-playing grandfather; maybe I can inspire some visitors at The Venetian Macao to try their hand at building their own structures.

'There couldn’t be a more fitting place to build the world’s largest house of cards than at the world’s largest resort hotel,” he added.

Link -via Unique Daily