A female hippopotamus named Nikica swam out of her enclosure at a private zoo in Plavnica, Montenegro when flood waters rose over the fence. The two-ton hippo has stayed close to the zoo, but cannot be rounded up until the flood recedes.

A spokesman for Montenegro's natural disasters commission, which responds to floods, said the law required animals that can endanger human lives to be killed. But state veterinary authorities said they were not entitled to kill animals.

Zoo owner Dragan Pejovic insisted Nikica is not dangerous, "unless someone attacks and kicks her."

He said that her movements were being tracked by the zoo's private security and that she was "tame and peaceful".

Pejovic added that Nikica now had nowhere to return because the zoo, on a small island in a lake south of the capital, remains flooded. She was being fed with loaves of bread and bales of hay at a swimming pool of a restaurant owned by Pejovic and his brother.

Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Savo Prelevic/AFP/Getty Images)

The temperature at Russia's Vostok research station in Antarctica read -128.6F (-89.2 C) during the winter of 1983. This is the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth. The winter temperature at Vostok averages a mere -54F. Why the mercury dipped so low has puzzled scientists for 26 years.

But scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in Russia were able to solve the mystery with a computer model developed to simulate the future evolution of the Antarctic climate, along with weather charts and satellite imagery of the area.

They found that relatively warm air that normally flows over the Southern Ocean onto the high Antarctic plateau almost came to a halt during this period. A flow of cold air circling Vostok was preventing the mixing of this warmer air from lower latitudes, isolating the station and causing near optimum cooling conditions.
Adding to this was the absence of a heat-trapping cloud cover and the presence of a layer of tiny particles of ice suspended in the air (known as diamond dust), allowing more heat from the continent's icy surface to be lost to space.

Link -via reddit

Prena Thomas of Lakeland, Florida has an unusual "pet" she keeps in her freezer -a snowball! She made the snowball in 1977 and has kept it frozen safe in a bread bag ever since. Thomas occasionally takes it out to show to friends.

Thomas said that over the decades, she has never had a power outage that would destroy the cold hunk she says is precious to her.

"It's just like a little pet," she said.

Thomas made the snowball during a rare Florida snowfall 33 years ago. Link -via Fark

You'll be on video at Narita International Airport in Tokyo, but not for security purposes. An infrared camera scans incoming international passengers looking for people who may have a fever! Those who show signs of a fever are interviewed and may be given medical treatment. Link

(image credit: Lazlo Thoth)

If you've ever been to Retro Sabotage (featured previously at Neatorama), then you know Mario Jumping will not be like any other Mario game you've ever played. The payoff is well worth the effort. Link -Thanks, Tof!

A new set of tombs have been found near the great pyramids of Egypt, belonging to the workers who built the pyramids 4,000 years ago. The discovery points away from the idea that the monuments were built by slaves. Instead, Egyptologists now believe they were paid professionals, according to Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," said Hawass in the statement. "If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's."

Evidence from the site, Hawass said, indicates that the approximately 10,000 laborers working on the pyramids ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from farms in northern and southern Egypt.

Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

Once, the United States issued $5,000, $10,000, and even $100,000 bills. Why on earth would someone carry bills that big, especially back when they were really worth something?

Believe it or not, it wasn’t just to save space in fatcats’ wallets. When the Treasury started printing these giant bills, their main purpose was making transfer payments between banks and other financial institutions. Before sophisticated wire transfer systems were fully developed, it was apparently easier and safer just to fork over a $5,000 bill to settle up with a fellow bank. Once transfer technology became safer and more secure, there really wasn’t much need for the big bills anymore.

Mental_floss has the story on when and why such large bills were issued, what they looked like, and why they aren't in circulation anymore. Link

Matthew Inman once again puts into comic form what we've all thought at one time or another. Has anyone ever been completely happy with their printer? Between the cost of ink, the difficulty of setting them up, and their reliability, it's a wonder anyone uses them anymore! Link -via Gorilla Mask

(YouTube link)

Misery loves company, so this should make you feel as if you aren't alone. -via the Presurfer

Lee at Serious Eats spotted three different vendors in Thailand who sold ice cream sundaes served in hot dog buns.

The dessert was delicious: the bananas were chewy, the pineapple sweet and tart, the coconut ice cream rich, cold, and creamy, and the peanuts added the perfect amount of crunch and toasted flavor and the drop of milk brought all of the flavors together.

The bun? It got soggy pretty quickly (as I suspected) and if I ate it any slower, we would have had a real mess on our hands.

But it was a nice take on a portable sundae, minus the paper or plastic cup to throw out at the end! I kept thinking that it would have been interesting with a toasted bun.

If you toast that bread long enough, pretty soon you'll invent the ice cream cone. Link -via J-Walk Blog

Photographer Susan Mullally took portraits of homeless people who are part of The Church Under the Bridge in Waco, Texas. In each picture of the collection called What I Keep, the subject is holding an object that means something to them, and tells why. In the portrait shown, Vietnam veteran Tindall Herndon keeps his hat to remind him of fallen brothers-in-arms. Link -via Metafilter

Some animals eats algae and incorporates the algae's chlorophyll into its own body. According to Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa, the sea slug Elysia chlorotica no longer has to, because it has incorporated enough of the plant's genes into its own DNA to manufacture chlorophyll in its own body!

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Microbes swap genes readily, but Zardus said he couldn’t think of another natural example of genes flowing between multicellular kingdoms.

It looks like the tree of life has some spots where it merges as well as branches. Link

(image credit: Nicholas E. Curtis and Ray Martinez)

(YouTube link)

A collaborative art film from a group called Hydra, Homunculus pits "little men" against each other. This is the stuff nightmares are made of. -via Everlasting Blort

Remember when you were a kid and you pulled a string to make a toy do something? Well, I do! Now that principle can charge your batteries. The YoGen hand-held charger was displayed at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where its developers showed how a pull of a string will recharge your phone battery.

A 5 Watt charge can be generated with a very easy pull of the string. It doesn't matter how fast or slow you pull, the same charge is generated. And I'm told it gives the same charge as if you were plugging into a wall, so 1 minute of pulling is equal to the same amount of talk time you'd get after 1 minute of wall charging, or about 5 minutes of talk time. It's intended as a solution for quick emergency charging.

YoGen also demonstrated a foot-powered charger for laptops. Link -via Digg

We looked forward to the promise of video phone calls for fifty years, but now that they are here, no one wants to actually use them. The hassle of dressing up or cleaning the room for a phone call only explains part of it. Joel Stein captures the exact reason why video phone calls never caught on, despite the availability of Skype.

...Skype breaks the century-old social contract of the phone: we pay close attention while we're talking and zone out while you are.

As soon as you begin to talk, I feel trapped and desperately scan the room for tasks I can do to justify the enormous waste of time that is your talking. I wash dishes, I file receipts, I read news sites, I make little fake suicide faces to my wife Cassandra about how much I want to hang up that cause her to yell "Joel, I need you now" in a really unconvincing way that I've asked her not to do, but I still can't stop making the suicide faces. In desperate times, when I am on my cell phone in the middle of nowhere, I will pace. The only other time I pace is when I stub a toe or burn myself. But when I start talking, I assume that you are sitting perfectly still, rapt.

Link -via Digg

(image credit: John Ueland/TIME)