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Forget rap, forget the news, THIS is what auto-tune was meant for! Carl Sagan sings his lovely prose about our wonderful universe with an appearance by Stephen Hawking. -via Geeks Are Sexy

It looks like a new volcano is growing in Nola, Italy, near Mt. Vesuvius! The Vulcano Buono (good volcano) is a commercial center designed by Renzo Piano. The interior space is bigger than it looks due to the sloping grass roof, which insulates the building. Inside you’ll find a forest and an amphitheater, plus shops, a hotel, a supermarket, and a movie theater. See more pictures at Inhabitat. Link -via Metafilter

You may be familiar with Scrat, the “saber-toothed squirrel” from the Ice Age movies, but a real one lives in Niagara Falls, New York. This squirrel has an unusual tusk growing out of its lower jaw! Mary Jo Sutter has been feeding the squirrel since it was young. Watch the video of the squirrel who has no fear of humans or cats. Link

Ken Morrish of Colaton Raleigh, Devon, England picked a bizarre Red Delicious apple off his tree. It looks as if someone stuck together half of a green apple and half of a red apple, but these colors are natural.

John Breach, chairman of the British Independent Fruit Growers Association, said: 'I've never seen this happen before to a Golden Delicious. It is extremely rare. It is an extreme mutation.

'There has been the occasional case of this type reported. If there was a whole branch of apples with the same colouring then fruit experts would get even more excited.'

Jim Arbury, fruit superintendent at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey, said it was probably the 'result of a random genetic mutation'.

'This is known as a chimera where one of the first two cells has developed differently giving rise to one half of the apple being different,' he said.

Morrish is keeping the apple in his refrigerator because so many people want to see it. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(image credit: Archant Devon)

The United Nations is in session, with leaders and representatives from all over the world meeting to exchange ideas. Just how can they do that, when they speak so many different languages?

The United Nations hires about 120 interpreters—not to be confused with translators, who translate text—who are considered the best in their profession. No education is required, but roughly 70 percent of the members of the American Translators Association have college degrees. Interpreters slot the languages they know into three categories: A, B, and C.

Interpreters work under strict protocols, which you can read about at Slate Magazine. Link

Some of the buildings you know from your favorite TV shows are real brick-and-mortar places, although the signs are sometimes different. Super Tremendous has video of eight of them and addresses for those who want to go see for themselves.

Located at the Corner of Bedford and Grove in Manhattan, the Friends apartment building houses many New Yorkers who pay way too much money to brag about living in the Friends apartment building.

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As they say, the third time is the charm. Three different missions to the moon have relayed back evidence of water. There were traces of water in the moon rocks brought back by Apollo, but that was attributed to contamination. Three more recent examinations have found evidence of water: India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe detected water by mapping wavelengths of light from the moon’s surface, the Cassini probe found evidence of global distribution of the water signal, and the Deep Impact spacecraft found evidence by infrared detection.

"The Deep Impact observations of the Moon not only unequivocally confirm the presence of [water/hydroxyl] on the lunar surface, but also reveal that the entire lunar surface is hydrated during at least some portion of the lunar day," the authors wrote in their study.

The findings of all three spacecraft "provide unambiguous evidence for the presence of hydroxyl or water," said Paul Lucey of the University of Hawaii in an opinion essay accompanying the three studies. Lucey was not involved in any of the missions.

The new data "prompt a critical reexamination of the notion that the moon is dry. It is not," Lucey wrote.

The amount of water on the moon is miniscule by Earth standards, with one ton of lunar surface holding about 32 ounces. Link -via Digg

For weeks, Armando Del Manso found dead snakes with teeth marks on his property near Cairns, Australia. He assumed his dog was killing the snakes until he saw two rabbits killing another snake!

“We were watching from the veranda with a spotlight, and I thought, who is going to believe this, they’ll think I’m crazy.”

He said the rabbits lived under a pile of wood in the backyard and were around the same size as a household cat.

“These are killer rabbits man,” he said.

“I’ve never ever seen or heard anything like this happening, it could be a breakthrough.”

The rabbits are apparently protecting two baby bunnies. Del Manso is glad to have the rabbits around, as he raises chickens and hasn’t lost any to a snake. Link -via Arbroath

The largest piece of cloth ever made from spider silk measures four feet wide and eleven feet long. To make it, 70 people collected golden orb spiders over four years! The spiders were then hooked up to a machine that extracted the silk from the spiders without harming them, in a project headed by Nicholas Godley and textile expert Simon Peers.

To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”

By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June.

Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. “We can go back and re-silk the same spiders,” he said. “It’s like the gift that never stops giving.”

The resulting cloth is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Link

Lots of artists are entering the contest “Where the Wild Things Ought To Be”, placing characters from the Maurice Sendak classic into other worlds, real and fictional. The entries include Max and his buddies in The Dark Knight, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Where’s Waldo, and even on Fox News! This entry has Vincent van Gogh illustrating the book Where the Wild Things Are. Link -via Super Punch

Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is for Seinfeld fans. The character of George Costanza held many different jobs during the run of the show. How well do you remember them? I scored abysmally by guessing, so you will of course do better. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/35244

The Museum of Animal Perspectives gathers videos from inside animal nests, cameras carried by animals, camera traps, and remote vehicles. You could spend days watching these! I suggest starting with the armadillo cam for a laugh. http://www.sameasterson.com/map -via Weather Sealed

The Oops Awards (previously at Neatorama) are given to the ugliest, silliest, and most useless household products of the year. This year’s winners include the skin collection by designer Nacho Carbonell, which won first prize for the ugliest product. The rest of the winners are ...interesting. Link -via the Presurfer

Stephen Von Worley created a map of the USA showing where McDonalds outlets are. As you can see, they are (almost) everywhere! You’ll have to go to South Dakota to get 100 miles away from a McDonalds. Link -via Buzzfeed

Improv Everywhere set up a portrait studio aboard a subway train and persuaded riders to have their pictures taken for the “subway yearbook”. Read the story behind this mission and see more pictures and a video at their website. Link -via Buzzfeed