You think you have troubles at work? Dairy farmer Tony Goltstein of Winchester, Indiana has methane bubbles the size of houses rising up to twenty feet tall, full of gas released by decomposing cow manure. Since wholesale prices of dairy products has plummeted, he cannot afford to properly maintain the manure lagoon. Replacing the plastic liner would cost around $200,000, and Goltstein is afraid the lagoon will overflow if the bubbles under the plastic continue to rise.

This month, Mr. Goltstein asked state regulators to let him pop the bubbles. He said he and his 19-year-old son would slice them open with a knife from a paddleboat.

Bruce Palin, assistant commissioner for the office of land quality at the state environmental agency, said officials were considering the idea. But, he added, "not knowing how much volume of gas is there and how much pressure is on it, we're concerned with just cutting a hole."

Last year, a hog farmer in Hayfield, Minn., was launched 40 feet into the air in an explosion caused by methane gas from a manure pit on his farm. He sustained burns and singed hair.

Mr. Goltstein's attorney, Glenn D. Bowman, acknowledged that the potential existed for an explosion: "We're aware of that sort of common physics issue," he said.

The Goltsteins filed for bankruptcy last month. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Lauren Etter)

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Is there no end to Maru's talent for entertaining? -via Arbroath

Annette Edwards, who has worked for years to breed the world's biggest rabbit, and was recently in the news for having plastic surgery to look more like Jessica Rabbit, is looking for help. Edwards is holding auditions for the position of rabbit handler, to help with Alice, her rabbit that holds the world's record for the longest bunny, as they made public appearances. Think you have the stuff for this £70,000 a year position?

Current Guinness World Record title holder Annette Edwards, 57, a real-life version of Jessica Rabbit, is looking for a handler to show big bunny Alice over the next year. Whoever gets the role can expect a life-changing year, travelling with Annette to far-flung corners of the globe.Already booked are personal appearances in Paris at the end of April on a television show and the heart of fashion, Milan, in May.

The two-and-a-half year old bunny also weights a whopping three-and-a-half stone so some

strength will be needed. The ideal candidates needs to be someone who can handle the rabbit and loves pets, with a big personality and not be shy in front of the camera.

Link -via Bigredkev

As March Madness overlaps Passover a little, you might find the Ultimate Matzoh Ball Game a worthy distraction. Just click to launch the matzoh ball toward the basket, but be aware that the basket is constantly moving! Link -via Metafilter

A bit too strong? No, this record has nothing to do with the way they smell. A recent study determined that a dung beetle can pull 1,141 times its own body weight. Just picture how they figured that out:

In the study, scientists calibrated the males’ strength by gluing a cotton thread to the beetles’ hard wing-cases, stringing the thread across a pulley, and tying it to a miniature bucket, to which they added drops of water [ScienceNOW]. The dung beetle’s coronation as the world’s strongest insect steals the thunder from the rhinoceros beetle, which can lift up to 850 times its own weight.

Dung beetles developed this strength in other to compete for mates, but that isn't their only strategy. Some weaker male dung beetles mate successfully because they have “substantially bigger testicles”. Link

(image credit: Alex Wild)

The twelve men who flew on the world's first nuclear bombing mission in 1945 made history, as they deployed "Little Boy" over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The youngest was only twenty at the time. For the rest of their lives (only two still survive) they were asked about their motivation and whether they thought it was worth it. Mental_floss has quotes from almost all of them, and a discussion in the comments from those of us who can only see the event in hindsight. Link

From analysis of mitochondrial DNA extracted from a pinky finger bone, scientists have identified a new species of human ancestor. The 40,000-year-old bone fragment was found in a cave in the Altay mountains in Russia. The mitochondrial DNA shows that the person (they believe it was a child) it belonged to was neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens, but shared a common ancestor to both. University of Manchester geneticist Terry Brown co-authored an article released with the report in the journal Nature.

The new-human discovery implies that there was a wave of human migration out of Africa, the birthplace of humanity, that was completely unknown to science.

"We think Homo erectus"—an upright-walking but small-brained early human, or hominid—"was the first [hominid] to leave Africa two million years ago," Brown explained. After that the record went blank until about 500,000 years ago, until now.

"This hominid seems to have left about a million years ago, so it fills in a bit of a gap," he said.

Researchers will try to extract nuclear DNA from the bone, which carries more information than mitochondrial DNA. Link

(image credit: Johannes Krause)

Scientific jobs can be glamorous and certainly are interesting, but they often a lot of hard work, and possibly gross work. Popular Science has published its annual list of the ten worst jobs in science. One of the less offensive is "armpit detective".

Groups at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and at Florida International University hope to isolate the compounds that give us each a unique aroma. The problem is that our diet, medications, toiletries and other factors make it difficult to discern natural scent from manufactured odorants. And so, since 1973, George Preti of Monell has collected human odors, recently focusing on the underarm, the mouth and urine.

You won't want to read this while eating. However, as a bonus you'll see what the best job in science is! http://www.popsci.com/science/gallery/2010-03/10-worst-jobs-science -via Digg

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The sequel will be even more original than the first! -via YesButNoButYes

Edit 4/5/10 by Alex - updated the video to a working embed and link.

Now here's a clever lamp, with a light bulb as a wrecking ball! It's made of solid bronze. See it and a companion piece the Crane Lamp at Designboom. Link -via Laughing Squid

...but the cat came back. The old song came true in the case of Alfie, an orange tom that belongs to Angelo Petrillo of Milnrow, Greater Manchester, England. Petrillo buried a cat he was sure was Alfie after a car hit the cat near his home last year. Then the Petrillo family moved to a new house. Nine months later, a friend from the old neighborhood called to tell Petrillo that a ginger cat was at their old house trying to get in!

Mrs Petrillo, 35, a manager for a wine company, returned to the couple's old home a mile away - and immediately recognised the cat as Alfie.

The three-year-old had lost the collar he used to wear and had put on weight, suggesting someone else had been looking after him while he was being mistakenly mourned.

Mr Petrillo said: 'It was just unbelievable - the cat I had buried nine months earlier, the cat we spent about a month grieving over, was back, and my wife just couldn't believe what she was seeing.'

The Petrillos still don't know whose cat they buried, or where Alfie has been all that time. Link -via Digg

Dan Coyne of Evanston, Illinois didn't know anything about Myra de la Vega, except that she was his favorite cashier at the grocery store where he shopped. Two years ago, he noticed her growing thin and asked about her health. She explained that she was on dialysis. Coyne offered to donate one of his kidneys to help her! De la Vega didn't know if he was serious, but when her sister turned out to be a poor match for a transplant, Coyne insisted on being tested. He was a match.

So, Friday morning, surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital will remove one of Coyne's healthy kidneys and transplant it to de la Vega, a 49-year-old Filipino immigrant and mother of two who was diagnosed with renal failure three years ago and has continued to work even as she's undergone dialysis ever since.

The transplant "will give me another 25 or 30 years of life," de la Vega, clearly still astounded by her customer's generosity, said Tuesday as she sat with Coyne at Pershing East Magnet School, 3113 S. Rhodes, where he works. "It's unbelievable: a complete stranger offering his kidney to me."

Coyne is a social worker at the school. His principal declared Tuesday as "Dan Coyne Day" at the school. Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Jean Lachat/Sun-Times)

Webcomic artist Giant Hamburger illustrated this children's book mashup of Winnie the Pooh and the Alien movie series. Silliness ensues when Pooh mistakes an alien egg for a honey pot! Link -via Buzzfeed

For years, two nations have both claimed the territory of an uninhabited island the Bangladeshis called South Talpatti Island and the Indians called New Moore Island. The dispute is now moot, as the island has vanished underwater.

"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Professor Sugata Hazra of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University in Calcutta.

Anyone wishing to visit now, he observed, would have to think of travelling by submarine.

The island never rose more than about six feet above sea level. Professor Hazra predicts more islands in the Indian Ocean will vanish as sea levels rise. Link -via J-Walk Blog

An unidentified 6-year-old boy in Shenyang, China has a world record 31 digits: 15 fingers and 16 toes! He isn't able to use all the fingers, as three are fused together in the middle of each hand. He will soon undergo surgery to reduce the number of extra digits. The previous record was 25 fingers and toes, held by two children in India. Link -via Arbroath