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This looks way cool. You can ignite the particles in a stream of smoke! It's not so cool when you think about how this would work in a burning house. -via reddit

Peepshi is sushi made from marshmallow Peeps! Yeah, it looks like sushi, but the ingredients are Peeps, Rice Krispies, and Fruit by the Foot, so you know it's super sweet. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(image credit: Robyn Lee)

The Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy is a group that gives $100 grants to people who promise to give it away in a meaningful and creative way. The formerly-secret society was founded in 2006.

Miss [Courtney] Martin was an aspiring writer who had just finished her first book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, and suddenly found herself in possession of a six-figure royalty advance. Unlike most people, who would be thrilled to have this amount of cash in their pockets, Martin felt guilty that she suddenly had so much money, so she decided to give some of it away to charity. The only problem was that she didn’t know how. In the end, she decided to give nine of her friends and family members $100 and then ask them to give it away as they saw fit. She only asked that they reported back to her a month later.

Several years later, we are privy to many stories of how members have given away their $100 grants. Read about 15 such grants, some with video reports, at mental_floss. Link

Nana Kikuchi designed these place mats that make setting a proper table easy, with silhouettes of the proper flatware placement.  They and the coasters come in a convenient roll. Link -via Nag on the Lake

Look at me! I'm an action figure! This bit of swag was a total surprise. Can you imagine the fun I'm going to have posing this doll and taking pictures to illustrate blog posts? It's an action figure (or doll) from CMT's "Adventure Country", which is a group name for their two new shows. I am apparently a character from Danger Coast, a reality show that follows the Marine Operations Bureau of Miami, a kind of rescue squad for the ocean. The other show, Gator 911 is about an alligator shelter. My action figure did not come with an alligator, but it did come with a life jacket, oxygen tanks, a uniform, a wetsuit, a computer, and other equipment. This is a limited edition doll, so you won't find it in stores, but you can take part in an interactive adventure at the "guided tour" part of the website. Link

If you've ever been to an emergency room, you've seen the chart they give you to help describe the pain you are feeling on a scale of one to ten. Allie redrew the chart to make it more descriptive of real-world pain. Link -via Buzzfeed

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The Carroll High School Chargers powder puff cheerleaders perform a halftime routine for the crowd in Fort Wayne, Indiana. -via YesButNoButYes

Bill and Amarins packed up their three young daughters Cheyenne, Jasmine, and Robin and set off on a 7,000 mile journey from Mt. Vernon, Kentucky (just up the road from me) to Alaska. What's different about this trip is that they are traveling on a bicycle built for five! They call themselves the Pedouins, which is combination of pedal and Bedouins, meaning nomadic people. The journey included a detour to Mexico, since the purpose of the trip is to teach their children about the world. The family began the trip in October of last year, and they've made it to California so far. You can follow their adventure on their website. Link -Thanks, Hanan!

Author and food activist Raj Patel says he is not the Messiah. But after his appearance on the TV show The Colbert Report, he found himself to be an object of worship for a religious group. Patel only wanted to plug his latest book called The Value of Nothing.

Their reasoning? Patel's background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or "the world teacher".

His job? To save the world, and everyone on it.

"It was just really weird," he said. "Clearly a case of mistaken identity and clearly a case of people on the internet getting things wrong."

Patel has issued a denial of holiness on his website,  where he compares his situation to the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian. Followers have traveled thousands of miles to see him. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Eliot Khuner)

On March 30, 1848, the roar of Niagara Falls went silent as the river ran dry. No one knew what happened to the water. Factories shut down for lack or power, fish died, and everyone freaked out.

Thousands of people filled the churches to attend special services. They prayed for the falls to start flowing and the world to continue, or for salvation and forgiveness of their sins as the Last Judgment approached.

No one knew why the falls had stopped. The telegraph was still a new invention. Railroads served towns on both sides of the river, but the tracks were unreliable, and Buffalo — the nearest big city — was three hours away even when the trains ran on schedule.

But it was from Buffalo that word eventually arrived that explained the bare falls and dry riverbed. A strong southwest gale winds had pushed a huge chunks of lake ice to the extreme northeastern tip of Lake Erie, blocking the lake’s outlet into the head of the Niagara River. The ice jam had become an ice dam.

On the evening of March 31st, a great wall of water flowed down the riverbed and things were back to normal. Link

You thought that Saturn's moon Mimas looks like the Death Star? The Cassini probe analyzed temperature differences on the surface of Mimas and determined that it is actually Pac-man! Link -via Digg

(image credit: NSA/JPL/SSI)

The LHC began shooting subatomic particles at each other on Tuesday underground across the borders of France and Switzerland, and the world did not end.

Following two false starts due to electrical failures, protons whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece around a 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack outside of Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed together inside apartment-building sized detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the world.

The soundless blooming of proton explosions was accompanied by the hoots and applause of scientists crowded into control rooms at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built the collider.

Link -via Boing Boing

See the video. Link

Billie Lampard will always be able to tell people that Danger is her middle name, and so will her brother. Their parents Amy and Glenn Lampard of East Melbourne, Australia named the newborn twins Billie Danger and Ridley Danger.

"I've always wanted to be able to say it myself," Mr Lampard said.

"We're actually enjoying calling them the 'Danger Twins' at the moment. It's a bit of a novelty."

Billie Danger Lampard and her brother Ridley Danger Lampard were born about six weeks early at Epworth Freemasons Hospital on Wednesday.

They say family and friends have mixed reactions to the names. http://www.news.com.au/weird-true-freaky/billey-and-ridley-lampard-given-danger-as-middle-name/story-e6frflri-1225846444721 -via Arbroath

Mental_floss has posted plenty of quizzes about US geography, but Canadians will have an edge in today's Lunchtime Quiz. How well do you know Canadian geography? I scored 70%, not bad for someone who has never been to Canada. Link

The crater shown was created in 1970 by the Apollo 13 moon mission. Wait -you remember Apollo 13 {wiki}, don't you? That's the one where Tom Hanks James Lovell and his crew didn't get to land because everything went wrong! Still, they ejected the third stage of the Saturn V rocket and sent it toward the moon's surface. Forty years later, this is considered a fairly new crater. The picture was taken just last year. Read all about it at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link

(image credit: NASA, NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)