It's not exactly what people think of as a Christmas tree. The town of Poole, Dorset, England has a municipal Christmas tree that falls in line with Britain's stringent health and safety guidelines, which try to avoid all possible risks, no matter how remote.

Thus it has no trunk so it won’t blow over, no branches to break off and land on someone’s head, no pine needles to poke a passer-by in the eye, no decorations for drunken teenagers to steal and no angel, presumably because it would need a dangerously long ladder to place it at the top.

Last year Poole boasted a Norwegian fir draped with strings of coloured lights. It cost £500 and continued a decades-old tradition. The replacement, which is constructed on a metal frame overlaid with what appears to be artificial grass, cost £14,000 and comes with built-in fairy lights and hidden speakers to play Christmas tunes that will put shoppers in the festive mood. But the only mood apparent among shoppers who saw the tree yesterday was a bad one.

Citizens compared the tree to a wizard's hat and a traffic cone. Link

Alex may think his turkey cake looked like poo, but it has a long way to go to make it to this collection of Thanksgiving turkey cakes gone wrong. Link

According to a new study published in Nature, our skin helps us decipher the sounds we hear with our ears. Blindfolded volunteers listened to the "pa", "ta", "da", and "ba" sounds. Unknown to the participant, a puff of air, softer than would be felt in normal conversation, accompanied some of the sounds. Sometimes the puff of air accompanied the appropriate sounds, at other times not.

The researchers found that if there was no air puff, participants misheard "pa" for "ba" and "ta" for "da" 30 to 40 percent of the time. The accuracy improved 10 to 20 percent when an air puff over the hand or neck accompanied "pa" and "ta." No improvement occurred, however, if an air puff was sent through the tube in the ear, suggesting that the participants were not simply hearing the airflow.

The opposite effect was observed when the participants received an air puff with the inappropriate sounds— "ba" and "da." While subjects correctly identified these sounds in about 80 percent of cases when played without the release of air, the accuracy decreased by about 10 percent if the sounds were accompanied by puffs of air.

Most of the volunteers were not consciously aware of the puffs of air. Link

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