A few days ago, you read about Clonehenges, art installations that are made to resemble the original Stonehenge. You might not realize that Stonehenge is far from the only ancient stone circle in the UK, and there are some in Europe and North America as well. WebEcoist looks at 13 of these circles, including the pictured Avebury Stone Circle in England, which is bigger and older than Stonehenge! Link

Sherwood Forest Golf Course in Transylvania County, North Carolina offers a memorable golf experience every Tuesday. You can rent a llama to be your caddy! A llama from Fairway Friends Llama Farm will carry two sets of clubs for $40. This is a sure way to get kids interested in playing golf. http://www.llamacaddy.com/golf/ -via the Presurfer

(YouTube link)

The Tama Zoo in Tokyo has unveiled their new snow leopard cub named Yukichi. The male cub was born on July 2nd. He is the fourth cub born to his mother Yuki and the first for his father Valdemar. And he's adorable! http://www.examiner.com/x-10430-Japan-Travel-Examiner~y2009m9d4-Baby-snow-leopard-cub-on-display-at-Tama-Zoo-in-Tokyo

The announcement in the Times of London told the world that Kate Pong had given birth to quintuplets named Beyonce, Tyra, Bobbi, Barrack and Earl. The small item prompted Robert Littlejohn of The Daily Mail to speculate on the mother’s marital status. But it turns out that Kate Pong is a chocolate Labrador! Kate’s owner, Fiona Wallace of Newport, Shropshire said a friend had placed the birth announcement but didn’t bother to mention that Kate is a dog.

“We have a lot of friends in the business all over the country and lots of people read about her on the website.

They keep logging on and it’s just snowballed from there.

“So many people were asking about her and the pups that we decided to put it in the Times so everyone around the country would know.”

Link to story. Link to website.

Architects from the University of Stuttgart in Germany constructed a treehouse with a difference. The nine meter tall structure is made from living trees! Some of the hundreds of White Willow trees are planted in the ground; others are in containers. They are all expected to grow together into one giant plant. The experimental tower will be open to the public beginning September 19th. Link -via Unique Daily

Roxy Freeman never went to school until she was 22 and decided to go to college. She found the lifestyle that went with her studies to quite a challenge, and very different from the Gypsy life in which she was raised.

Instead of going to school, my siblings and I, like many children from travelling families, were taught about the arts, music and dance. Our education was learning about wildlife and nature, how to cook and how to survive. I didn't know my times tables but I could milk a goat and ride a horse. I could identify ink caps, puff balls and field mushrooms and knew where to find wild watercress and sorrel. By the age of eight or nine I could light a fire, cook dinner for a family of 10 and knew how to bake bread on an open fire.

Freeman is now studying journalism. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Tam Carrigan)

It all makes perfect sense now. I don’t know the original source for this image. If I find who did it, I’ll celebrate by calculating the area of a blackberry pie. -via Digg

When a baby wants to come into the world, he/she doesn’t care if the mother is ready. If her due date is still some time away, the mother may be anywhere. There are also cases where circumstances get in the way, as in the case of Rosita Cheindza.

It sounds like the birth story of an ancient goddess, but it's true. Ms Cheindza was near term in 2000 when flood waters raged through her town in Mozambique. She climbed a tree to escape the crocodile-infested waters and stayed there for four days with nothing to drink or eat. Finally on the fourth day, her baby came. Soon after, helicopters arrived to winch the mother and the baby, Rosita, to safety.

And that’s only the first of ten strange birthplace stories. Link -via Unique Daily

Don’t worry about the guy perched on the fourth-story ledge of a building in Vienna. People stop and wonder, but he won’t jump. That’s just art. With a small A. The building houses investment and real estate offices, and the man is made of plastic. The art installation is scheduled to stay up for a year.

The artist, Austrian Ronald Kodritsch, says the piece -- called "Reason to Believe" -- is not necessarily about suicide.

"It's not interesting whether he will jump or not. It's all about having a different perspective on things and about what might cross his mind," Kodritsch told Reuters. "Hyperrealism is boring!"

Link

(image credit: Reuters/Heinz-Peter Bader)

What better for a Labor Day cookout than a steak in the shapes of the USA? Philadelphia artist Dominic Episcopo took photographs of states that look good enough to grill. Link -via the Presurfer

German arachnologist Peter Jaeger has discovered 200 species of spiders in the past decade. Now he has named one of his finds after singer David Bowie. The new species, a large yellow spider in Malaysia, is called Heteropoda davidbowie. Jaeger said he named the spider to draw attention to the discovery, and to the endangered status of many spiders.

"It is working against time," he said. "We are also quickly losing genetic resources that have evolved over more than 300 million years."

Bowie had a 1972 album entitled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His 1987 tour was named the Glass Spider Tour. http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2009/09/06/bowie-spider.html -via Digg

(image credit: Senckenberg Forschungsinstitute/Naturmuseen)

Have you ever wondered what the first item sold on eBay was? Or who ran the first banner ad on the internet? Or what the first spam massage tried to sell? 11Points has those firsts and more, including this picture, which was the first image on the internet in 1992. It was uploaded by programmer Silvano de Gennaro in Geneva at the request of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

Berners-Lee asked Gennaro to scan some photos from a CERN party and post them on that page. Gennaro didn't really get what he was talking about but scanned in the photos, FTPed them to the server and linked them to a page. The picture of the four women, complete with their early '90s "Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead" fashion sense, was the first one ever viewed in a web browser.

Link -via Unique Daily

Submit a fact to the website Learn Something Every Day and you may see it turned into a brightly-colored poster. There’s a new fact posted each day. They don’t even have to be factual facts, since Mel Blanc was not allergic to carrots. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Click on the raindrops to make a melody, which will loop for you in this interactive page from Lullatune. Click the green clock for a metronome if you like. I managed to make a pleasant tune and played it for quite some time while I surfed the ‘net. Link -via Arbroath

How much weight you gain may depend on when you eat, according to a new study that looked at the timing of meals in mice. Scientists at Northwestern University fed two groups of mice the same amount of high fat food, but one group ate during regular waking time, while the other ate during what would normally be their sleeping period. The second group gained twice as much weight as the first group!

"For a long time we questioned whether or not eating patterns had anything to do with gaining weight," says obesity expert Dr. Louis Aronne of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He points to previous observational research suggesting that people who skip breakfast in favor of massive meals in the evening hours tend to be overweight. "We had no proof that it's a real problem," says Aronne, who was not involved in the study. "If an experiment like this is replicated in humans, it might clarify for us just how much time of day matters when it comes to obesity."

It is not yet clear whether the difference is due to hormone production or the disruption of sleep patterns. Link -via Digg