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Victor Huang was recording video underwater at Wahine Memorial near Wellington, New Zealand when something really strange happened.

while trying to get video of a wild octopus, it suddenly dashed towards me and rips my shiny new camera from out of my hands, then swims off, all while the camera is recording! he swam away very quickly like a naughty shoplifter. after a 5 minute chase, I placed my speargun underneath him and he quickly and curiously grabbed hold of the gun as well, giving me enough time to reach in and grab the camera from out of his mouth. I didn't feel threatened at all during the whole ordeal. he seemed to be fixated on the shiny metallic blue digital camera. the only confusing behavior was how he dashed off with it like a thief haha. cheeky octopus.

-via Metafilter

Moody Gardens on Galveston Island in Texas welcomed rare twin baby pygmy lorises, a male and a female, born March 22nd. The pygmy loris is not an easy species to breed in captivity, but the twins' mother Luyen has been very attentive to the babies. The lorises will go on display to the public when a new facility is finished in 2011. See more photos and a video at Zooborns. Link -via Fark

The municipal landfill in Columbia, Missouri got a delivery of 1,500 cases of beer. To be dumped in the landfill. Really. After 700 cases were destroyed, two city employees tried to salvage as much beer as possible. They considered it a rescue operation -and a victory!

And it was a victory, one to be celebrated with say a couple truck loads of free beer, even, that is until word got back to the fun haters in the main office who are going by the book on this one and calling the beer salvaging rescue effort, which some are now calling Operation Safe Suds, a theft and possibly a matter for the police. See, because anything left at the landfill officially becomes city property, these city employees were technically stealing this beer. One of the employees has already resigned from his position and both may face criminal charges.

Treehugger considers this a tragic waste, and has posted a list of 8 Ways To Use Beer, outside of putting it in a landfill. Link

PS: According to the original news story, the beer was discarded because its expiration date had passed. The beer distributor said that doesn't mean it was unhealthy, but may begin to lose taste.

The brains of people who perform complex tasks such as shooting a gun or a basketball -and do it very well- are different from the average brain. While participating in their chosen sport, an athlete must constantly predict movement, analyze feedback, and make adjustments to maximize performance. A series of experiments by different scientists find that athletes' brains emit stronger alpha waves, which indicate a restful state. Also, the different parts of the athletes' brains communicate with each other better than non-athletes. The best part is that training affects the brain's anatomy!

As soon as someone starts to practice a new sport, his brain begins to change, and the changes continue for years. Scientists at the University of Regensburg in Germany documented the process by scanning people as they learned how to juggle. After a week, the jugglers were already developing extra gray matter in some brain areas. Their brains continued to change for months, the scientists found.

So there may be hope for us non-athletes after all! Link

(image credit: Flickr user Jason Permenter)

People often wear colored ribbons on their lapel or stick a magnet on their cars to raise awareness of a certain cause. There are a lot of ribbon colors to keep up with! In this Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss, we'll see how well you know your charity ribbons by the color. I managed to score 80% even though I was only certain about a couple of them. See if you can beat that! Link

Some animal species get more press than others, but there's always more to learn about the animal kingdom. For example, you've heard of the giant squid? Its cousin, the colossal squid, is even more astounding.

Colossal squids are found in the oceans around Antarctica, and were only recently photographed alive. Measuring up to 14 meters long and weighing up to 200 kgs, it is easily the largest invertebrate in the world. It also has the largest eyes of any living animal; these eyes allow it to see in the dark, an useful ability for an animal that spends most of its life in the deepest parts of the sea. Colossal squids are powerful, formidable predators armed with eight arms and two long tentacles; unlike the giant squid, which is armed with suction cups only, the colossal squid has both suction cups AND “tiger-like claws” on its tentacles, which allows it to catch bigger prey and to defend itself against its two main enemies, the sperm whale and the giant sleeper shark, both of which can sustain serious injury while trying to attack one of these squids.

Read about more of these little-publicized species at Listverse. Link -via Look at This

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Windows errors are annoying, but if you have enough of them you can dance! From Today's Big Thing. -via b3ta

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Personally, I prefer this version from a few years back that uses sounds from both Windows 98 and XP.

The list is labeled "Passive Aggressive Library Signs", but they seem pretty straightforward and useful to me. They clearly communicate the frustration of the sign maker, and some are downright hilarious! I would love to know the story behind the sign pictured here. Link

(image credit: Flickr user rockcreek)

The Big Picture blog has some stunning images of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. The volcano erupted on April 3rd and spewed enough ash into the air to disrupt air travel to and from Europe. See photographs of the eruption in progress and its effects on the atmosphere as well as satellite images. Link -via reddit

(image credit: Ulrich Latzenhofer/CC BY-SA)

The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories will put an LED into anything, but this is quite lovely. The dried shells of sea urchins are already beautiful, and can be made into tiny lights that resemble paper lanterns for night lights or decorations. Link

Three fox cubs got their heads stuck in a drain grate in Plainfield, Connecticut last Friday. Neighborhood residents could hear their mother calling for them from out of sight. After firefighters were unable to cut the grate, Animal Control Officer Karen Stone tried lubricating the pup's heads with Vaseline, then corn oil, but had no luck. What finally did the trick was a dose of Dawn dishwashing detergent. The pups were freed from the grate and driven back to the area of their den, soapy but unharmed. Link -via Arbroath

A small but terrifying new species of leech roams the Amazon basin. Tyrannobdella rex seeks out animal orifices to enter and attach itself inside, in order to suck the victim's blood. The case of a 9-year-old girl in Peru with a leech in her nasal cavity brought the creature to the attention of doctors and researchers. Three years later, earlier cases have been confirmed and a report has been published in the journal PLoS ONE.

"We named it Tyrannobdella rex because of its enormous teeth," said researcher Mark Siddall, curator in the division of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Although its teeth only reach up to 130 microns high — a little more than the width of a human hair — "that's at least five times as high as that of other leeches," Siddall said. "And every one of the people who were found with these in the clinical cases had a frontal headache. Their teeth are big, and these things hurt."

Link -via Unique Daily

(image credit: Anna J. Phillips et al., PLoS ONE)

This website is an ongoing tournament to rank the most awesome things ever. Play along and choose from two things at a time to raise or lower their rankings. You can also check the current top rankings, which are pictured here. Those may be different tomorrow, depending on participation. You can also suggest awesome things to add to the competition! Link (warning: sound) -Thanks, Victor!

Cake Wrecks has a roundup of tragic cakes specifically for school events: back to school, the last day of school, graduation, teacher training, or in the case of the cake pictured, a special lesson in history (I think). Did I spell all those words right? I wouldn't want these cakes to rub off on me! Link

Hanako-san is a girl ghost who haunts school toilets. The urban legend goes back decades. No one knows for sure how the story got started, but artists and pop culture outlets are happy to feed the fear.

It is not uncommon for schools to have a toilet permanently occupied by the mysterious girl, who is known in Japanese as Toire no Hanako-san (lit. “Hanako of the toilet”). She is often found in the third stall in the restroom on the third floor — usually the girls’ room — but this can vary from school to school. Details about her physical appearance also vary, but she is usually described as having bobbed hair and wearing a red skirt.

Hanako-san’s behavior also varies according to location, but in most cases, she remains holed up in the bathroom until an adventurous student dares to provoke her. Hanako-san can be conjured up by knocking on the door to her stall (usually three times), calling her name, and asking a particular question. The most common question is simply “Are you there, Hanako-san?” If Hanako-san is indeed present, she says in a faint voice, “Yes, I’m here.” Some stories claim that anyone courageous enough to open the door at this point is greeted by a little girl in a red skirt and then pulled into the toilet.

See more possibly disturbing pictures of Hanako-san at Pink Tentacle. This story is part of a series on Japanese urban legends. Link