The 2016 Olympic summer games will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The 2012 games will be in London, England. Since the first modern Olympics in 1896, 22 cities have hosted the summer games, some more than once. Can you name all those cities in five minutes? That’s the challenge of this Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. Good luck -I could only name 16. Link

The 19th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded Thursday night at Sander’s Theater on the Harvard campus. The awards are given to “honor achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think.” A few of the winners:

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means "Driving License".

See the entire list of winners at Improbable Research. Link

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so you’ll see a lot of items produced in pink. Some product tie-ins will make you scratch your head and smile trying to figure out how they might have anything to do with breast cancer. Most likely, the people in charge of these companies are committed to the cause and this is the best way they can show it. Still, how can you see a pink cement mixer and not do a double take? http://whipitoutcomedy.com/2009/09/30/15-strangest-breast-cancer-awareness-products/ -via Gorilla Mask

Fifteen years ago, Berkeley scientist Tim White and a team of researchers from Ethiopia and America found bones of a hominid older than the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy (A. afarensis). The team collected 110 bones, enough to reconstruct the skeletons of what was unveiled today as Ardipithecus ramidus. These bones date from 4.4 million years ago! Carl Zimmer points out several ways that this prehistoric species tells us new things about the development of humans. For example, in some animal species (including apes), male canine teeth are much bigger than the female version. These are the species in which competition for females often turns violent.

White and his colleagues found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

There have been a couple of hominid bones found that are even older than Ardipithecus, but none with enough fossils to even begin reconstructing a skeleton. Link -via Metafilter

Make your own fractals with just a mouseover on these magic dots. Other interactive toys on the same site are just as fascinating, or should I say, addicting. Link -via Gorilla Mask

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Stephen Fry gives Mark Carwardine a hard time after the parrot attempts to mate with the zoologist. From the BBC series Last Chance to See. -via Arbroath

Today is the 38th anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. In honor of the occasion, Disney created a stop-motion video using the tilt-shift effect.

“A Day at the Magic Kingdom Park” is a never-before-seen look at the park in miniature scale. The video is created from a series of photos snapped inside the Magic Kingdom Park. And the trick is tilt-shift photography.

This really does remind me of my last trip to Disney World -because of how crowded it is! Link -via Boing Boing

Artist Amy Rawson (previously at Neatorama) has created a cute-as-can-be needle felted zombie bunny for Halloween. Or at least, it's cute on the side its eyeball isn’t falling out of! See more pictures at eBay. Link

120 little people live in a village near Kunming, China. The village was set up to protect the dwarves from discrimination. You can’t live there if you are over 4 feet 3 inches tall.

Now the group has turned itself into a tourist attraction by building mushroom houses and living and dressing like fairy tale characters.

"As small people we are used to being pushed around and exploited by big people. But here there aren't any big people and everything we do is for us," said spokesman Fu Tien.

You have to wonder if there are exceptions to the community rules for normal sized children of the current residents when they pass the height limit. Link

A skunk named Mr. Bumble was turned over to the RSPCA when his owners could no longer handle him. The skunk, who loves bacon sandwiches, weighed in at 14 pounds! Mr. Bumble is now at Tropiquaria Animal Park in Watchet, England and is on a weight-loss regimen.

Park owner Chris Noisier told the BBC: "We're now working on dieting him down to what he should be and clearly bacon butties are not a normal part of a skunk's diet in the wild.

"We're putting him on the vegetarian option at the moment. It's very much like a human weight watching issue.

"He is getting to meet lots of new people so there's lots going on in his life and I suspect it's making up for the lack of his old favourite food."

Link -via Buzzfeed

When you pay a visit to your county or state fair, or when a carnival comes to town, you may get a chance to ride on one of Michael Jackson’s amusement park rides. The rides were sold to amusement companies around the country and have been refurbished and put back into use.

"It was a blast!" said Benny Vasquez, a Visalia, Calif., welder who was regaining his bearings after a dizzying turn on the Spider, an arachnid-shaped contraption with blazing green bulbs lining its black legs. "It's exciting for people to be able to sit on something that he owned."

Over the years, Jackson acquired about 18 rides for his 2,600-acre ranch in Santa Barbara County. Some gradually were swapped out for newer models and hit the carnival circuit without fanfare. But most stayed in place even after Jackson, acquitted on child molestation charges in 2005, left Neverland for good.

Several big amusement companies purchased what remained in 2008, repainting and sprucing up rides run down by weather and lack of use.

Link -via Fark

(image credit: Tomas Ovalle/LA Times)

See inside Godzilla, Gamera, and a couple of other movie monsters in poster form. If I could only read Japanese to find out where their weak spots are, then I, too, could save the world! http://www.kontraband.com/pics/19684/The-Anatomy-Of-Japanese-Monsters/?gpage=1#show -via Digg

Upodate: These are from the book An Anatomical Guide to Monsters by Shoji Otomo with illustrations by Shogo Endo, from 1967. More information can be found at Pink Tentacle, including partial translations. -Thanks, algomeysa!

Hmmm, this t-shirt outlet might not be the place to buy gifts for loved ones, but if you are a fat guy and proud of it, you’ll find a shirt to love. There are also shirts for big women and for women who love fat guys. Link -via Buzzfeed

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This ad for Freebord skateboards has skateboarders flying down the streets of San Francisco in the dark to connect glowing Tetris shapes. I have to wonder where the awesome outtakes are!-via Digg

Most of us think of sweet produce as fruit and not-sweet garden foods as vegetables, with the exception of the tomato because that’s been argued over so much. But which plant foods are scientifically fruits, and which are vegetables?

A fruit — a ‘true fruit’ — is one where all tissues are derived from the plant ovary and this alone. This includes peas. Whereas strawberries, for example, also include some of the flesh from the peg that holds the ovary, disqualifying them from fruit status. The apple gets its carpels involved as well as the ovary, leading to a kinky pome. ‘True berries’ are also ‘true fruits’, but not the other way round. Grapes, currants (red and black), elder- and gooseberries are all proper upstanding berries which will not deceive you or smuggle themselves into your house in pies before stealing your silver while you sleep.

Whatever you call them, you should have five servings a day, and eat a variety of different whatever-they-ares. Link -via Scribal Terror