Give the folks you know a little lift for the things they do with merit badges! The badges shown are for being drunk as a skunk, going out on a limb, having a bun in the oven, and bringing home the bacon. There are plenty more badges available from Etsy seller leemeszaros. Link -via Metafilter

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Caro the kitten is trying to liberate Miho from an invisible force field. Meanwhile, mama is glad to have a minute of peace and quiet inside the box! -via Arbroath

What if you could train plants for national security? A biologist at Colorado State University working with the Department of Defense is doing just that. Genetic engineering is making plants react to threats they never encountered in nature -for human benefit.

Picture this at an airport, perhaps in as soon as four years: A terrorist rolls through the sliding doors of a terminal with a bomb packed into his luggage (or his underwear). All of a sudden, the leafy, verdant gardenscape ringing the gates goes white as a sheet. That’s the proteins inside the plants telling authorities that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the guy’s arsenal.

It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. “Plants can’t run and hide,” says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. “If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.”

That would be the “receptor” proteins in its DNA, which respond naturally to threatening stimuli. If a bug chews on a leaf, for instance, the plant releases a series of chemical signals called terpenoids — “a cavalry call,” Medford says, that thickens the leaf cuticle in defense.

So far, plants have been produced that react to the presence of TNT, but other factors, such as light and movement, interfere with the process. Medford thinks a working plant is still three or four years away. Link -via Fortean Times

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The right music makes a world of difference. In this remixed movie trailer, the family musical The Sound of Music turns into a zombie Nazi thriller! -via Buzzfeed

Up-and-coming bands often change names because someone else is using the current name, or the record company asks them to, or because someone pointed out a problem. You know these bands by the group name on the recordings. But what did they used to go by? In this Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you'll be given an obscure band name. All you have to do is decide what name they used when they hit the big time. Easy? No. I only knew two answers, but scored 45% by guessing. Link

Have you ever watched a movie end "happily ever after" and later thought, "Hey, what about...?" Lots of major movies hope you will just let those ragged plot lines go, and we do most of the time. Saturday Night Live once made an alternate ending to It's a Wonderful Life because Mr. Potter received no comeuppance in the film. And I've often wondered about The Wizard of Oz, which is featured in this article from Cracked:

If you haven't seen The Wizard of Oz in a long time and are relying on a vague childhood memory of it, you probably don't remember exactly why Dorothy got sucked into a tornado and transported to the magical land of Oz. The whole reason she wound up in that predicament is that her little black terrier, Toto, had bitten an annoying townsperson named Almira Gulch. Gulch then goes out and gets a sheriff's order to have the dog put down.

Isn't it time someone made an alternate ending resolving the fate of Toto? Read about more such movies at Cracked. Link

Scott Lang coached basketball at tiny La Roche College in Pittsburgh for 18 years, 13 of them as head coach. He never married, although he had girlfriends -but relationships couldn't seem to survive basketball season, when Lang was totally dedicated to his team. He had opportunities to move up from Division III to a position in Division I college basketball, but turned them down.

“I’d rather be a big fish in a small pond,” he told his brother Mike. “I can do more here. I can make a bigger impact on people’s lives.”

Lang collapsed at the gym coaching the team on December 10th. He was rushed to a hospital, but died of heart failure. The school held a memorial, the basketball court was named for him, and pages were written in tribute to the coach, but the team says very little about him. Instead, they are following Lang's instructions.

In the six weeks since Lang died La Roche can’t lose, winning all nine of its games, two in overtime. The most recent victory came last Saturday when it beat Hilbert on the afternoon the school held a ceremony to name the court for him. The Redhawks are 16-1 and in first place in the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference. This week they received votes in the Division III top 25 poll for the first time ever. It is easily the best season in the program’s history.

Suddenly there is talk about the NCAA’s Division III tournament, about going all the places that Lang spent all those nights and all those hours dreaming of someday being able to take La Roche. Anything seems possible. And it is all very much still him.

The players say they are sure Lang is watching. He wouldn’t miss a year like this. The four men who have taken over the coaching all have other obligations; they have families and full-time jobs. They can’t dedicate half a day let alone an entire life to La Roche. They say the players are winning themselves, that the lessons from Lang were so deep that the team has simply absorbed them.

La Roche won another game since the quoted article was written. Have your hanky ready to read the entire story. Link -via Metafilter

Our little friend from Star Wars is hot! This sculpture is a wood burning heater hand-crafted from steel gas bottles. From what I can tell, UK eBay seller kidsrusje has built other artful stoves. R2D2 is one of a kind, and is for sale to the highest bidder. Link -via the Presurfer

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy Blog points out that today is the 44th anniversary of the Apollo I fire that killed three astronauts: Ed White, Roger Chaffee, and Gus Grissom. I was very young, but recall being shocked and devastated that three of our national heroes died doing what they do. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, and next week is the 8th anniversary of the Columbia disaster. Dr. Plait published a tribute to all those astronauts and others who have died in the pursuit of space exploration. Link

Remember the United States of Shame, where each state was labeled with the statistic it was worst in? Ilya Gerner figured that there should be a statistic that each state is best in, and made a map accordingly. However, I'm not sure how proud I can be that Kentucky is the best armed state. Link to map. Link to explanation. -via Buzzfeed

Sharajat-al-Hayat, or the Tree of Life, is a 400-year-old mesquite tree standing i the desert two kilometers from Jebel Dukhan in Bahrain. Local inhabitants believe it to be the site of the original Garden of Eden. See many pictures of the tree and its surroundings at Triggerpit. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Harold Laudeus)

Marijuana smugglers apparently have a problem with the US border fence near Tucson, Arizona -and those pesky border patrols. So they've turned to ancient technology to deliver the goods -a catapult!

On Friday evening, National Guard troops operating a remote video surveillance system at the Naco Border Patrol Station observed several people south of the International Boundary Fence preparing a catapult and launching packages over the International Border fence, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Border Patrol agents working with the National Guard contacted Mexican authorities, who went to the location and disrupted the catapult operation. The camera showed the individuals fleeing the area before they could be intercepted by Mexican authorities.

The Mexican officials seized about 45 pounds of marijuana, a sport utility vehicle, and the catapult device.

http://www.kvoa.com/news/smugglers-catapult-pot-over-border-fence/ (with video) -via Boing Boing

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This ad is found at the beginning of American versions of DVDs from the BBC. You think it's an anti-piracy warning, but it turns into a friendly ad for the TV network. Of course, the required amount of British humor is included. -via reddit

Vladimir Nabokov was the curator of butterflies at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The lifelong butterfly researcher posed a theory of butterfly evolution in 1945. He said butterflies came to the New World in five waves of migration, through Asia across the Bering Strait into Alaska and then southward through North and then South America (much as humans migrated). Other butterfly experts scoffed at the idea. Nabokov's theory was not taken seriously until after his death in 1977. Then, in the past decade, gene-sequencing technology finds that Nabokov was right all along! A paper co-authored by Naomi Pierce of Harvard was presented to the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London on Tuesday that proclaimed Nabokov's theory to be supported by genetic research.

There were several plausible hypotheses for how the butterflies might have evolved. They might have evolved in the Amazon, with the rising Andes fragmenting their populations. If that were true, the species would be closely related to one another.

But that is not what Dr. Pierce found. Instead, she and her colleagues found that the New World species shared a common ancestor that lived about 10 million years ago. But many New World species were more closely related to Old World butterflies than to their neighbors. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated.

“By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.”

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues also investigated Nabokov’s idea that the butterflies had come over the Bering Strait. The land surrounding the strait was relatively warm 10 million years ago, and has been chilling steadily ever since. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues found that the first lineage of Polyommatus blues that made the journey could survive a temperature range that matched the Bering climate of 10 million years ago. The lineages that came later are more cold-hardy, each with a temperature range matching the falling temperatures.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is that Vladimir Nabokov. He is better known outside scientific circles as the proclaimed author of Lolita and other novels. Link -via The Loom

(Image credit: Vlad Dinca)

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A sequence from the Bollywood sci-fi movie Robot. Just when you think it can't get any more bizarre, it does just that. Overdubbed in Russian (I think), but knowing the language won't help. -via Laughing Squid