Adrian Bennett has been obsessed with the Mad Max movies since 1982 when he was a teenager in England. In 2001 he built his own Interceptor, the car Mel Gibson drove in the film. Three years ago, he moved his family from Yorkshire to Australia. Now he has settled in the remote Outback town of Silverton, where the first two movies were made. Silverton has a population of 51 (counting the five Bennetts), but draws 140,000 tourists a year and is also used often as a set for the film industry. Bennett plans to open a Mad Max museum in his new hometown. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

See more pictures of Bennett’s Interceptor.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Census of Fatal Occupation Injuries, fewer people died on the job in 2008 than the previous two years. Still, some jobs are much more dangerous than others. Using statistics from 2008, here are the five deadliest careers.

1. Fishers
2. Loggers
3. Aircraft Pilots and Flight Engineers
4. Structural Iron and Steel Workers
5. Farmers and Ranchers

Yahoo Finance has the statistics on each job. There is also a linked slide show from Forbes looking at the top ten deadliest jobs. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: Flickr user Sam Beebe / Ecotrust)

Most moviegoers don’t notice the math in popular films, but it’s there if you know what to look for. For example, one mathematician compared the spread of zombies to that of infectious diseases.

The problem of zombies intrigued Philip Munz of Carleton University and his colleagues at the University of Ottawa, who recently wrote a scientific paper quantifying various properties of zombie epidemics. Standard modeling techniques for disease outbreaks weren’t quite sufficient, the authors found. “The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease,” they wrote, “is that the dead can come back to life.”

After a thorough, if tongue-in-cheek, analysis, the authors found that the optimal method for halting such epidemics involves killing zombies early and often - the rare scientific paper that satisfies both the splatter-film aficionado and the Centers for Disease Control.

Other math questions come up in The Dark Knight, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and other films you are familiar with. Link -via Buzzfeed

(image credit: Flickr user joelf)

In this clip from National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles, two filmmakers study Johnny Rooks, predatory birds sometimes called Flying Devils, in the Falkland Islands. Meanwhile, the birds are having fun with the filmmakers!

“It’s all very amusing, of course. Unless it’s your campsite.”

It is not my campsite, and you will most likely find it as amusing as I did. Link -via Digg

See more adventures from National Geographic's Wild Chronicles.

Your mother always urged you to sit up straight, and you should have listened to her. A study by researchers from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain and Ohio State University finds that sitting up straight makes you feel more confident about yourself. 71 students were given a reason to either sit up straight or slouch in their chairs. Then they wrote down either three positive or three negative things about themselves. Then they were tested to see how much they believed the things they wrote.

The results showed that people who had been sitting up straight were much more likely to believe the positive things they'd been writing about themselves, whereas those who were slouching weren't so sure. Meanwhile a doubtful posture had very little effect on the half who were thinking negatively about themselves.

You know, Mom is always right. http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/09/sit-up-straight-be-confident.php

Corridors in science fiction movies may seem like a strange subject for an article, but that’s just because you’ve never thought about them. Martin Anderson notices them, rates them, and brings them to you for consideration. You’ll be surprised at how many there are, and the many features they have in common. Link -via b3ta

The Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 and followed over 5,000 participants for decades. The volunteers made up 40% of the population of Framingham, Massachusetts.

In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn't care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant's close friends, colleagues, and family members.

"They asked for follow-up purposes," Christakis says. "If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down."

Christakis and Fowler used the social data to study changes in the population over time. They constructed networks of the volunteers social connections to see how these connections affected any changes. The findings? Some behaviors are contagious. Social connections with up to three degrees of separation influence whether we quit smoking or become fat. And even happiness is contagious, both online and offline. The social connections of the Framingham volunteers are graphically illustrated at Wired. Link

These flags made out of food were created to promote the Sydney International Food Festival. Each national flag is illustrated with food associated with that country: Greece has black olives, India features curry, South Korea has kimbap, etc. Guess which country is represented by the flag pictured. Link -via b3ta

This past week, drivers in Samoa had to switch from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the wrong, er, left side. Since the switch was relatively sudden, all the buses now open onto the middle of the street! The Samoans say the switch was to end their dependence on American-made vehicles. Mental_floss takes a look at how other nations decided which side of the road to drive on. Some reasons seems silly in retrospect. Link

A 3-foot-tall macaw named Chip is in a bit of trouble over a traffic stop. The bird, who starred in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, attacked a policeman in the course of his duties in Dover, England.

The officer arrested the woman on suspicion of driving while banned.

The attack came when he attempted to drive her car to the pound, with Chip loose inside.

The parrot, who has a 1.2m wingspan, perched on the steering wheel, pecking at the officer's fingers throughout the journey.

Chip was not arrested, but is being held by the RSPCA until his unnamed owner is released. Link -via Arbroath

You can buy tea that has been picked from the bush in China by monkeys! The idea is that the rare and delicious strain of wild tea grows on steep hillsides that humans cannot reach. From the product page:

Legend has it that monkeys were first used to collect tea ten centuries ago, because upon seeing it's master trying to reach some tea growing wild on a mountain face, the monkey climbed up the steep face and collected the tea growing there and brought it down to his master.

Monkey-picked tea is now harvested in only one small village in China. Link -via the Presurfer

This series of photographs by Howard Schatz won a second place prize in the Sports Stories category of the World Press Photo Contest. He took pictures of boxers before and after fights. It hurts just to look! Also be sure to check out other contest winners. Link -via J-Walk Blog

One of my favorite scientists Carl Zimmer has an extensive article in Time Magazine that looks at recent research on how your dog thinks.

Trying to plumb the canine mind is a favorite pastime of dog owners. "Everyone feels like an expert on their dog," says Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist at Barnard College and author of the new book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. But scientists had carried out few studies to test those beliefs--until now.


This fall, [Duke University anthropologist Brian] Hare is opening the Duke Canine Cognition Center, where he is going to test hundreds of dogs brought in by willing owners. Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, recently opened his own such research lab and has 1,000 dogs lined up as subjects. Other facilities are operating in the U.S. and Europe.

What they’ve found out so far is that dogs can learn over 200 distinctive human words, but they may mean different things to a dog than to humans. And the intelligent, friendly, and obedient behavior we see in dogs evolved because those things are advantageous to the dog, even though we see them as advantageous to us. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: D.L. Anderson)

Alcoa High was leading Fulton High in last night’s football game in Knoxville, Tennessee when the game had to called due to the ground opening up and trying to swallow the players.

With Alcoa leading 20-7, a sinkhole opened up near the stands-side sideline at the 41-yard line on the west side of the still-drenched field with 6:33 left to play in the fourth quarter. The field was declared unplayable and play was suspended for the night. The remaining minutes of the game will be played at Alcoa High School's Goddard Field at 5 p.m. today. Admission is free.

http://www.thedailytimes.com/article/20090911/SPORTS/309119959/-1/RSS10 -via Fark

(image credit: Mark A. Large/The Daily Times)

There were strange things showing up on the telescopic images at the Smithsonian’s Whipple Observatory in Arizona, but astronomers knew they weren’t UFOs. An unidentified perpetrator had been leaving dusty footprints on the telescope’s mirrors for a year, eventually marring five expensive mirrors. Over the summer, employees at the observatory set out traps and captured ringtail cats on three occasions. The ringtail cat {wiki} is the official state mammal of Arizona. They are related to raccoons. The captured animals were taken some distance away from the observatory and released.

“We’re considering making the ringtail cat the unofficial mascot of the MEarth project,” said project leader David Charbonneau. “With those big eyes, they’ve certainly got the night vision to be natural-born astronomers!”

The observatory now has a webcam, in case anyone wants to watch for more intruders. Link (with video) -via Metafilter