Artist Reid Peppard makes fashion accessories out of dead animals. Imagine cufflinks made from little mouse heads, a coin purse that was once a rat, or headbands with real wings. Shown is a hair comb made from a guinea pig. Link -via Digg

That didn't take long. You can get your very own Balloon Boy Halloween Costume Kit from Plantraco Microflight. Includes balloon (some assembly required). Link -via the Presurfer

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Who says turtles are slow? This strange-looking soft shell turtle made a quick getaway! -via Unique Daily

These are the kinds of wine that people buy just for the name. Are they good? Who knows? No one wants to open a bottle, they just want everyone to see the name on their wine shelf! The wine pictured was named (Oops) because it was made from grapes that had been mislabeled for years. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

Harry Potter of Portsmouth, England was born in 1989 and had eight years of peace before J.K. Rowling wrote the books that would make him miserable.

He said: 'No one ever believes that I'm telling the truth about my name. I had to show my girlfriend my passport, my bank card, and my driving licence to convince her that I wasn't lying.

'Even getting my season ticket for Portsmouth FC was a bit of a pain - I'm a massive football fan, but I had problems at the ticket office.

'First they didn't believe that my name was genuine, and when I convinced them, they thought it was hilarious. It's never-ending.

'I play a lot of football as well in a local league, and the match reports are always full of puns - 'Harry Potter cast a spell on the opposition and that kind of thing.'

The real Harry Potter also has a scar on his forehead like the book character, and is the same age as Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Potter in the movies. Link -via Unique Daily

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The bubbles are doomed when people get hold of bubble wrap! An award-winning horror story by Arthur Metcalf. NSFW language. -via Everlasting Blort

Watch slime molds and mushrooms grow in this time-lapse video. I was particularly taken with the Stinkhorn Mushroom, which casts a net! Link

Daniel East and his sister, Tevyn were traveling on Interstate 80 near the Utah-Nevada border when a coyote ran in front of the car. They hit the animal, but kept driving as they assumed it was dead. Eight to ten hours later, they stopped in California and noticed the coyote was stuck in the car's grill! They called the Wildlife Rehabilitation and Release office in Penn Valley, which sent a volunteer.

Jan Crowell, a rehabilitation center volunteer, said she brought a catch pole, an animal carrier, gloves and blankets.

When she arrived, East and his sister were taking the screws out of the car's grill in an effort to get the animal out. Once the grill was pulled forward, the coyote poked its head out.

"No broken bones, no internal injuries -- nothing," Daniel East said, adding that the animal only had a few scrapes on one of his paws.

The coyote was kept at the center until it escaped on its own. Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: David Lovere)

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Last week, a surveillance video of a drunk guy at a convenience store became quite popular. However, it was almost eleven minutes long and was, well, a store surveillance video. The guys at Mustache and Monocle re-edited it and gave it the silent movie treatment, making it much easier to watch, and just as funny. -via Gorilla Mask

A new species of golden orb spider has been found in South Africa. It is the biggest spider ever found that spins a web -and what a web it is!

The female of the new species of golden orb weaver spider has a body one and a half inches long with a leg span of five inches and weaves a web more than three feet wide.

The tiny male, however, has a leg span of just one inch. The variation of the Nephila species, named as Nephila Komaci, was discovered by US and Slovenian researchers in Africa and Madagascar

Nephila Komaci has a limited range and is believed to be an endangered species. Link -via Unique Daily

For a science fiction series, Star Trek had a lot of references to religion. Gene Roddenberry once said he rejected all religions, yet one or another of the Ten Commandments showed up in quite a few episodes. Beliefnet takes a look at some of those episodes.

In "The Apple" from the original "Star Trek" series, Captain James Kirk and his crew encounter an idyllic world whose ageless inhabitants feed a computer named Vaal.
It seems like a dandy setup to Mr. Spock, but Dr. McCoy argues that it can't be healthy to have all your needs met by a "hunk of tin" (perhaps shortly after polishing off a meal created by the Enterprise's replicator). Eventually, the Enterprise is forced to zap Vaal with its phasers, sending the binary being to an ignoble, smoky end.
The natives are seriously bummed, but Kirk cheers them up by telling them they can now work and struggle and get sick and die just like everyone else. Yay!

Link -via Digg

Police found a leech at the scene of a robbery in Tasmania eight years ago. They took a sample of the blood the leech had consumed. In 2008, Peter Alec Cannon was arrested on an unrelated drug charge. The DNA from his blood matched the blood from the leech!

Cannon would probably have got away with the crime had he not been charged with drug offences late last year, and asked to give a DNA sample - which matched that from the crime scene.

Detective Inspector Mick Johnston, who was involved in the police investigation from the start, said Cannon's conviction validated the use of DNA technology.

"It's a testament to DNA evidence and the legislation that allows us to keep such evidence in relation to unsolved crimes - this is a fantastic result," he said.

Link -via Boing Boing

(image credit: BBC)

There is something mysterious and intriguing about spiral staircases. Atlas Obscura looks at some of the most magnificent spiral staircases in the world, with lovely pictures and facts you might not know. For example, the staircase at the Vatican Museum, pictured here, is actually a double helix, with one staircase going up and the other coming down. Link -via Curious Expeditions

If scientists and police investigators can reconstruct a face from a skull, why can't we figure out what Skeletor looked like before he was a skeleton? David at Ironic Sans went to work, or to be accurate, his wife did, and recreated faces for Skeletor, Manuel Calavera, and Jack Skellington. Link -via Laughing Squid

A few people were lucky enough to be pan pals of a sort with Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh often added sketches or paintings to his letters, to illustrate what he wrote about. BibliOdyssey has a collection of these letter sketches, along with the letters that accompanied them. Link