Artist Jim Tierney designed new colorful retro covers for Jules Verne books, including Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Rough sketches and rejected illustrations are included in the post. Link -via Metafilter

A team of archaeologists on the Greek island of Crete found a tool way older than what they expected to find. Thomas Strasser of the University of Providence and his crew hoped to find artifacts dating back as far as 11,000 years. The five-inch axe they uncovered was something completely different.

Knapped from a cobble of local quartz stone, the rough-looking tool resembled hand axes discovered in Africa and mainland Europe and used by human ancestors until about 175,000 years ago. This stone tool technology, which could have been useful for smashing bones and cutting flesh, had been relatively static for over a million years.

Crete has been surrounded by vast stretches of sea for some five million years. The discovery of the hand ax suggests that people besides technologically modern humans—possibly Homo heidelbergensis—island-hopped across the Mediterranean tens of thousands of millennia earlier than expected.

More digging unearthed a total of 30 hand axes plus other tools at nine locations on Crete. The rock terraces the tools were taken from are thought to range from 45,000 years old to 130,000 years old.

"I was flabbergasted," said Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels. "The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut's tomb."

It was thought that humans earlier than Homo sapiens were incapable of long deliberate sea voyages. Link

(image credit: Thomas Strasser)

Butch Bakery offers manly cupcakes for manly men who love cupcakes. Each cupcake is covered in a chocolate disk decorated in manly styles, like wood grain or camouflage. The flavors are manly as well, like the Driller: maple cake with chocolate ganache and bacon bits. Or the Old Fashioned, which is orange-soaked whisky cake with a lemon curd filling. Or the B52, which is a Kahlua-soaked vanilla cake with Bailey's bavarian filling. Twelve manly flavors are offered. Link -via Gorilla Mask

Nick Waters watched a "chick flick", or a movie targeted to women, every day for 30 days with his wife, and wrote a review for each one. He says he did it to better understand the opposite sex. His wife of seven years, Nicci, was thrilled. So what did he learn?

"Love is tender," says Waters, summing up what he took from the 30 films. "And any real relationship is based on forgiveness, compassion and vulnerability."

Unfortunately, the movies he chose to watch are no older than 2007. Link to story. Link to movie reviews. -via Buzzfeed

Is there something special about the theme to the TV show Law & Order that particularly affects dogs? See thirty-five different dogs singing along to the opening credits. Yes, thirty-five of them. Link -via Metafilter

(YouTube link)

Better than dominoes any day! Tim Fort set off 2,250 sticks in this awesome world-record stick bomb {wiki} chain. -via Boing Boing

Ken Bannister, founder of the International Banana Club Museum, is selling out. The price of the museum has dropped from $45,000 to only $15,000! Before you snap up that bargain, be aware that the museum includes only the banana artifacts but no real estate, as the museum has been housed in rented space.

Bannister told the Victorville Daily Press that he decided to liquidate the collection after the Hesperia Recreation and Park District told him that he would no longer be able to rent space at the Harrison Exhibit Building in Hesperia, California where Bannister exhibited his thousands of banana goodies. He did not have another location set up and does not want to put the items in storage.

The Guiness Book of World Records says that the museum is the world's largest collection devoted to any one fruit. Since the 1970s Bannister has done many interviews on his unique collection and has appeared on television shows including the "Tonight Show" featuring Johnny Carson. Bannister hopes that someone or some company will buy the museum and display it somewhere.

Link to story. Link to auction. -via J-Walk Blog

New York City has big plans for Coney Island. The Brooklyn neighborhood will soon have new thrill rides and other amusements designed to bring back the glory years when Coney Island was known as "the People's Playground" after years of decline.

Luna Park at Coney Island will open on Memorial Day weekend with 19 rides. Among them will be the Air Race, which sends riders swinging and soaring around a control tower. It will be the ride's global debut.

Also promised are games, live entertainment, and concessions including Nathan's Famous hot dog stand, which opened in 1916, pioneering America's concept of fast food.

By the summer of 2011, Scream Zone at Coney Island will offer two roller coasters, go-carts and a human slingshot launching people more than 200 feet into the air.

Other plans include shopping centers, restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, and 5,000 new housing units for the area. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iSlMm8ZtPhwWEzvFcJhHICzt1OHQD9DTIT180 -via Fark

(image credit: AP/NYC Economic Development Corp.)

I always have to laugh at the reactions when people discover the awful recipes of the 1950s and 60s. At the time, many women stayed home with their time-saving appliances and and used that spare time to save the money they didn't make in the workplace. Industry helped by publishing new and bizarre recipes that would stretch a family's budget and sell newfangled food products like Spam and Jell-O. Behold, the Pickle-stretcher Salad.

"The Pickle Stretcher Salad gave me the most visceral reaction I have ever had to a food-like item. I love olives, dill pickles and just about anything limey, but combining the three left me with a shiver that wouldn't stop traveling my spine. One bite, and I'm sure I will never, ever forget the texture of slime and crunchy, the taste of ammonia and acid."

The pickle salad was chosen as an example here because it was the most appetizing picture in the post. Read about twenty such recipes and the reaction they get from modern diners. Link -via Digg

Is it luck or a curse that causes German speed skater Daniela Anschutz-Thoms to finish in fourth place? Not once, not twice, but fifteen times in the Olympics, the World Championships, and the European Championships. At each competition, medals are awarded to the top three only. It happened again in Vancouver.

Right up until the last lap, Germany's unluckiest Olympian looked set to break the mold and grab silver in the women's 3000 metre speed skating race.

But eventually the 35-year-old fell short, losing out on third place by just three hundredths of a second.

No matter how hard poor old Daniela tries, she just can’t escape fourth place.

Anschutz-Thoms will have one more chance at a medal, in the 5,000 meter race next week. Link -via Digg

Is there something in our brains that make humans see the same geometric patterns during drug use, illness, or near-death experiences? Even pressing on our eyes can induce the same spirals other people see. Research by professor of Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience Paul Bressloff and his colleagues at Oxford shows that these patterns are formed in the first visual field of the brain, or V1.

An object or scene in the visual world is projected as a two-dimensional image on the retina of each eye, so what we see can also be treated as flat sheet: the visual field. Every point on this sheet can be pin-pointed by two coordinates, just like a point on a map, or a point on the flat model of V1. The alternating regions of light and dark that make up a geometric hallucination are caused by alternating regions of high and low neural activity in V1 — regions where the neurons are firing very rapidly and regions where they are not firing rapidly.

A closer look at the types of specialized neurons in the V1 field and how they interact with each other explains the geometric patterns.

Bressloff and his colleagues used a generalised version of the equations from the original model to let the system evolve. The result was a model that is not only more accurate in terms of the anatomy of V1, but can also generate geometric patterns in the visual field that the original model was unable to produce. These include lattice tunnels, honeycombs and cobwebs that are better characterised in terms of the orientation of contours within them, than in terms of contrasting regions of light and dark.

That's about as simple as I can make it in a short blurb; the entire article explains it better. Yes, there is math involved. Link -via Metafilter

In any movie, witnessing a murder will surely lead to a chase scene. In Pivot, the animation is what makes the chase special. Until the ending. Designed and animated by Kevin Megens, Floris Vos, Arno de Grijs, and Andre Bergs for the KORT! 2009 project. http://pivotthemovie.com/ -via Digg

Sure, you know some famous Canadians, but those people you know aren't on this Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You'll be given fifteen names, and you determine if those people were born in Cnada or not. It's harder than you think! I scored 73% (11 out of 15), but I would have done better if I knew who all these celebrities were. Link

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The couple in Maryland who made the fire-breathing snowman have their own dragon busy at work melting snow. Wouldn't you love to have neighbors like this? -via Gizmodo

Someone mentioned that John Coker's homemade rockets looked like crayons, so he ran with the idea. His crayon rockets were launched all together from a crayon box! Well, OK, half of them worked. See how he made them in this account of the adventure. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories