(Daily Motion link)
The Giant Amazon Water Lily, or Victoria amazonica {wiki} is the largest water lily in the world. And it throws its weight around, too! Sir David Attenborough narrates this time-lapse video. -via Digg

You may think you know a lot about Star Wars, but how much do you know about John William’s musical score? Try your skills out with today’s lunchtime quiz at mental_floss. I scored 70%, which set the average because I was the first one to take the quiz! http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14108

You probably prepare yourself for your children asking questions about the facts of life, but children are full of questions about everything, especially things you never thought about the answer to. Why does hair go gray? The first answer you think of is, “because children drive parents crazy,” but that won’t satisfy their curiosity. Why is urine yellow? I didn’t know the correct answer to that one, and I also didn’t know bilirubin was named after William Rueben. Here are eight such questions, with the short answers for each. Link -via Digg

Graffiti artist Banksy was at it again over the weekend, painting an indictment of closed circuit TV in central London. Despite the presence of a CCTV camera, he erected a three-story scaffolding and a plastic cover under which he painted his masterpiece. Not only can the real cameras be seen just to the right of the graffiti, a policeman with a camera is part of the artwork. Link -via Fark

The Flora London Marathon was held yesterday, and was won by Martin Lel of Kenya who set a record time of 2 hours, 5 minutes, 15 seconds. It was his third win in four years. See the list of winners, and read on for updates on runners previously featured at Neatorama.

Buster Martin ran the marathon yesterday in slightly more than ten hours, but officials from the Guinness Book of World Records are holding off on certifying him as the oldest marathon runner ever. Martin does not have proof of his age. Evidence has surfaced that Martin is a mere 94 years old, not 101 as previously claimed.

Amarilis Espinoza, of Guinesss World Records, said: “We’re not denying that he is obviously an old man running the marathon. But at this point he has not yet sent any documents we can use as definitive proof for a record attempt.”

Four of the six Maasai warriors from Tanzania completed the race in 5 hours, 24 minutes, but one was taken to the hospital, and another accompanied him. They raised at least £26,000 in their quest for a water system for their village, which is expected to be more once the donations are counted.

Dave Heeley crossed the finish line in 5 hours, 20 minutes, and completed his goal of being the first blind runner to accomplish seven marathons in seven days on seven continents.

See pictures from the marathon at the BBC.

If the story of Star Wars had been set in World War II, these would be the action figures sold to support the movies. This set of action figures was customized by Sillof. Yes, he could’ve cheated and substituted Indiana Jones for Han Solo, but he didn’t. See the collection at Gizmodo. Link

Also see Sillof’s Steampunk Star Wars figures. Link

(YouTube link)
Try to figure out what these acrobats are illustrating before it's revealed at the end of the ad. Whatever they are doing, they’re good at it! -via Digg

Dark Roasted Blend has a collection of photos from various nuclear research facilities in Russia.

Some of them are buried deep in the Caucasus mountains, others are lurking in abandoned salt mines underneath forgotten villages, yet others are set up deep underwater in Lake Baikal - all are fully functional, facilitating cutting-edge research, with scientific progress routinely made on glaringly obsolete equipment.

And they come with their own quirks, too, like an Orthodox church sharing space with a neutrino detection facility in an old salt mine, or the real danger of falling rocks at the entrance to another facility. Link

(YouTube link)

Two engineers try to make sense of three cats. The result is pretty much what you’d expect. I especially enjoyed the game at the grocery store. -via Viral Video Chart

This photo of variable star V838 Monocerotis was taken by the Hubble telescope in 2002. At the time, no one realized how much it looked like the Firefox logo, since the browser wasn’t even named that until 2004. http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/firefox-logo-sp.html -via the Presurfer

A new drug being developed for the US military can protect cells against the effects of radiation, according to a study publish today in the journal Science.

Although radiation is an important weapon used by doctors to blast cancers, drugs that limit radiation's devastating effects on healthy cells are needed to reduce the potentially severe side effects.

Radiation induces damage in healthy tissues not by directly killing cells but by prompting them to commit "suicide" through a process called apoptosis.

The new drug, called "Protectan CBLB502, tested in mice and monkeys, protects radiation-blasted tissues by shutting down this cell death programme, which the body normally turns on in cells with damaged DNA to keep them from multiplying, says Dr Lyudmila Burdelya, who worked with Drs Vadim Krivokrysenko and Andrei Gudkov at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and colleagues at the company Cleveland BioLabs, also in Buffalo, New York,

Research shows that tumor cells are not given the same protection by the drug. Link -via Digg

Good spoons have heavy handles, but that makes it difficult to lay your spoon down when eating from a bowl. If you don’t want to put the spoon down on the table, you’ll tip the bowl over. But this bowl and spoon combination makes it easy to rest your spoon in your bowl. $21.00 Link -via J-Walk Blog

James Spring wanted to help someone in some way to celebrate his 40th birthday. He read about a case of a couple wanted for murder who may have gone to Baja, Mexico, an area he was intimately familiar with. The couple had their two children with them, although they did not have legal custody of six-year-old Viana.

"I took off Sunday morning," Spring said. "I found them in a day and a half."

After contacting US Marshals, it took some time to arrange the paperwork to have the couple arrested and brought back to the US. Mexican police raided the family’s house late Monday afternoon, and Viana and her infant sister were delivered to their grandparents in San Jose on Tuesday night. The parents, Richard Carelli and Michelle Pinkerton are accused of murdering a roommate and leaving his decomposing body in their van.

Spring said he's accomplished what he set out to do and has no plans to meet the girls' relatives in Soquel or produce a first-person account of his adventure. He turns 40 on April 29.

Link -via Fark

Real Men Wear Kilts is a website with information on how to wear a kilt, news about kilts, links to vendors, and a member registry with pictures.

I have long felt that there was a desperate need for a website devoted to the WEARING of the kilt, not merely the sales of highland wear, kilts, sporrans, etc. To be certain, there are definitely sites detailing the history of the kilt, how to wear the kilt, etc., but not one that celebrated the wearing of this simple but somewhat controversial fashion.

I love to see a man wearing a kilt! Link -via the Presurfer

NASA rocket scientists have used the gravitational pull of one planet to “slingshot” space craft toward another planet. This method causes acceleration without additional fuel use. What if we could set up a system where craft were in (almost) perpetual motion between Earth and Mars, using each planet’s gravity to sling it toward the other? Such a trajectory is available, thanks to the work of Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The orbit is called the Aldrin Cycler. Unmanned explorers and astronauts could catch a cycler every 26 months and ride to Mars (or back) using a small fraction of the fuel that would be needed for a conventional mission. The cycler orbit simulation above can be seen in motion at Damn Interesting. Link