Jalopnik asked its readers for suggestions on what vehicles would be best for surviving and traveling in a post-apocalyptic world. Nine existing vehicles and one semi-fictional vehicle made the cut. Pictured is the Dobbertin Surface Orbiter.

Built out of an old milk tanker, the Orbiter was designed to circumnavigate the globe on land and water, which is good for when you're on the move and forced to deal with the suddenly changing seasons that the nuclear fallout will likely bring. And like all good survival vehicles, it comes complete with a kitchen and porta-potti.

Link -via the Presurfer

Life isn't easy for a long-legged wading bird with only one leg, but this one got help to live a relatively normal life. A stork named Dietmar has become the world's first stork with a prosthetic wooden leg. The stork is under the care of a bird sanctuary in Saxony, Germany. Medical specialists crafted a new limb after sanctuary workers raised a £1,000 to finance the venture.

"He gets on very well in the sanctuary with his new leg but he can't live in the wild any more so he's here with us for the rest of his days," said keeper Rolf Arensberg.

http://austriantimes.at/news/Around_the_World/2009-11-25/18355/Wood_you_believe_it -via Arbroath

Hebert's Specialty Meats can supply your Thanksgiving entree complete with alligator dressing. Order it with your turkey, duck, chicken, quail, or rabbit. From the description, it sounds delicious!

Sauté onion, bell pepper, and that wonderful Cajun seasoning, smother alligator meat in tomato sauce. Combine finished product with white rice.

http://www.hebertsmeats.com/asccustompages/products.asp?categoryid=16 -via Woman's Day

(image credit: Flickr user Paraflyer)

How did whales manage to grow so big? And is there a limit to how big they can get? Scientists looked at the mechanics of how whales feed, especially those species that consume tiny krill. They call what they discovered "lunge-feeding", which is detailed in an article at Discover Magazine.

In order to make lunge-feeding work, you have to have a really big mouth to capture enough water in one gulp. But in order to have a big mouth, you need a big body. And in order to keep that big body running, you need to get a lot of food. And in the very act of getting that food–diving deep, lunging open-mouthed, and then pushing a school-bus-sized volume of water forwards–requires a lot of energy on its own.

This type of feeding might explain the size of whales.

If the scientists are right, they may have discovered one of the big ironies in evolution. Lunge-feeding may have allowed whales to become the biggest animals ever to roam the planet. But this was not an open-ended invitation.r. Once whales got large enough, lunge feeding itself became so costly it prevented them from getting any bigger.

Link

A nanny goat led a herd on a break for freedom during rush hour, and German police had to stop them in order to allow traffic to move. What to do? Identify the perpetrator, and handcuff her to a fence!

Hapless police didn't have a clue how to herd the goats back to their farm and so cuffed them until owner Uwe Stiller, 50, arrived in Bielefeld, Germany, to collect them.

No word on whether the ringleader goat will have to face charges. http://austriantimes.at/image/10458/news/Around_the_World/2009-11-24/18323/Getting_his_goat -via Arbroath

Americans know about Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, but you probably aren't familiar with all the Native Americans from the history of the early United States profiled in this slide show. Red Cloud is ranked at #8.

Without a doubt, one of the best Native American war leaders the United States Army ever faced, Red Cloud organized 2,000 Arapaho, Sioux and Cheyenne in a successful bitch-slapping of U.S. forces out of the Lakota territory that is now Wyoming and southern Montana. Known as Red Cloud’s War, the two-year skirmish ended with the U.S. agreeing to completely withdraw from their area.

Link -via Gorilla Mask

Howard, the kitten whose front paws were amputated after an assumed encounter with farm machinery, has a home. The kitten was adopted by the family of Kyle and Bryce Billingslea, the two boys who originally found the kitten in a ditch and sought help for his injuries. A video from the Lansing State Journal shows Howard adjusting well to house cat life. Link -via Arbroath

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Pioneering professional nurse Florence Nightingale {wiki} was already 70 years old when she recorded this snippet for Thomas Edison and posterity in 1890. This recording has been redubbed to different formats and speed-corrected at least once, so the legibility after 119 years is due to Nightingale's slow and overdramatic delivery. -via the Presurfer

For the first time, evidence from an fMRI was introduced as evidence for the defense during the penalty phase of a murder trial. Brian Dugan was convicted in Chicago of the rape and murder of a ten-year-old. Dugan's scan was introduced to show his brain was psychopathic. It is not clear how this information was supposed to mitigate his culpability, as Dugan was ultimately sentenced to death.

“I don’t know of any other cases where fMRI was used in that context,” Stanford professor Hank Greely told Science.

While the possibility of using fMRI data in a variety of contexts, particularly lie detection, has bounced around the margins of the legal system for years, there are almost no documented cases of its actual use. In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court allowed brain scans to be entered as evidence to show that adolescent brains work differently than adult brains.

That’s a far cry, though, from using fMRI to establish the truth of testimony or that specific structures within an individual defendant’s brain are legally relevant.

It’s difficult to tell whether the Dugan case will be a watershed moment in the use of brain scan evidence in court, or if the evidence impacted the decision in this case.

The jury is still out, so to speak, on the reliability of brain scans for its many possible uses in law enforcement. Link

39-year-old Sara Foss of Derby, England is already the mother of 13 children and is expecting her 14th. She says as soon as the new baby is born in April, she'll try to get pregnant again. Foss vows to keep on having babies until she has twins or triplets!

Her mammoth brood now comprises Patrick, 23, Stephen, 13, Malachai, 12, Peppermint, 11, Echo, 10, Eli, nine, Rogue, eight, Frodo, seven, Morpheus, five, Artemis, four, Blackbird, three, Baudelaire, two, and nine-month-old Voorhees.

No word yet on what number 14 will be named. Link -via I Am Bored

(image credit: Flickr user Mick 0)

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A team led by psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland found that visual illusions that befuddle adults don't effect children as easily. The pair of orange circles in the above illusion are slightly different in size. The blue dots will either accentuate those differences, or mislead the eye into thinking they are bigger or smaller than they are. In an experiment, participants of different ages were asked to identify the circle that looked bigger.

For 4- to 6-year-olds, accuracy of size perception for misleading images remained at about what it was for control images. Misleading images increasingly elicited errors from older children and tricked adults most of the time. Adults made almost no errors on helpful images. Kids from age 7 to 10 erred on a minority of helpful images, while 4- to 6-year-olds performed no better than chance.

The results suggest that considering context in images is something we learn as we age. Link

Drive sober in Salinas, California, and Tuesday could be your lucky night. At a certain DUI checkpoint, some motorists who pass through will be awarded a free turkey!

This is the seventh year Salinas police have added a giveaway to the Thanksgiving week DUI checkpoint.

It's become so popular, Salinas police are now asking drivers not to go through the checkpoint more than once just to try to win a turkey.

Police keep the location secret ahead of set up.

The turkeys were donated by police, businesses, and private citizens. http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local-beat/Why-Drivers-Flock-To-One-DUI-Checkpoint-70989117.html -via J-Walk Blog

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These festive robots were built from RoboBuilder kits and synchronized to some classic holiday tunes. OK, just pretend that those little squeaks and servo motor noises are jingle bells. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Denver Post recently uncovered a collection of photographs taken by Durango, Colorado photographers William Pennington and Lisle Updike between 1915 and 1920. They were featured in the newspaper in 1974. From that article:

These pictures, bearing the stamp of their studio, were recently discovered in a long forgotten file of the Denver Post library.

The two young photographers supported themselves with their portrait business, but satisfied their artistic urges by traveling around the Four Corners area in a wagon taking pictures such as the ones appearing on this page.

“There was no money in taking pictures of Indians,” Updike, 84, said from his winter home in Phoenix, Arizona. His sons and grandsons now operate a chain of Updike studios in Utah and Arizona.

Updike died a couple of years after the original article appeared. The linked post features 16 of those prints. Link -via Cynical-C

(image credit: The Pennington Studio)