Fffireburns and Matt baked cookies and decorated them to match Lady Gaga's costumes! Each is shown in close up side-by-side with a photo of the singer wearing the outfit depicted. This took a lot of work. Link -via YesButNoButYes

Listverse has ten fascinating stories about animals saving the lives of humans. Four involve dogs, and surprisingly, three stories are about life-saving dolphins!

Davide Ceci was 14 years old and couldn’t swim when he fell out of his Fathers boat in south-east Italy; he was within minutes of death when dolphin Filippo came to his rescue. Filippo had been a popular tourist attraction off Manfredonia in south-east Italy for two years. While Emanuele Ceci was still unaware his son had fallen into the waves, Filippo was pushing him up out of the water to safety. The dolphin bore down on the boat and got close enough for Davide’s father to grab him.

The heroes also include a cat, a calf, and a gorilla. Link -via Look At This

(image credit: Flickr user E-nat)

Wired has a gallery of twelve trees from all over the world that have outlived everything around them. The oldest started life at least 80,000 years ago, but may be much older! The tree shown is the Llangernyw Yew in Wales, which is only three to four thousand years old, but is one of the prettiest trees in the collection. Link

Previously at Neatorama: 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World

(YouTube link)

Life flourishes in the strangest places on earth. From the YouTube link:

At a depth of 600 feet beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet, a small shrimp-like creature managed to brighten up an otherwise gray polar day in late November 2009. This critter is a three-inch long Lyssianasid amphipod found beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, about 12.5 miles away from open water. NASA scientists were using a borehole camera to look back up towards the ice surface when they spotted this pinkish-orange creature swimming beneath the ice.

-via the Presurfer

Is this a scene from Finding Nemo? Or Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds? No, this bird was caught absconding with a piece of lunch on Google Street View, specifically on John Street in Brighton, England. Link -via reddit

Why serve a cheese ball when you can serve Steve Jobs' head on a platter? Ken carved this from mozzarella cheese for his iPad launch party! See the process in pictures at The Cook's Den, with recipes for the other foods served with the Apple "head cheese" (strangely, I see no apples, but you'll find iPad Thai). Link

If you're not going to partake of green beer this St. Patricks Day, maybe you could celebrate with green food. But don't limit yourself to salad! There are plenty of green things to eat that you wouldn't think of eating any other day. Pictured is jalapeno jelly.

For the people who like a little bit of pop to that morning piece of toast. Most 8 oz jars of this southwestern concoction can have up to a pound of jalapeno peppers in them. If that doesn’t open your eyes in the morning, I dunno what will.

Jalapeno jelly isn't exactly Irish, but hey, it's green! Link -via YesButNoButYes

This is a really tiny Enterprise. This image won the prize for Best Ion MicroGraph in the 47th International Conference on Electron, Ion and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication Bizarre/Beautiful Micrograph Contest. It was created and recorded by Takayuki Hoshino and Shinji Matsui of the Himeji Institute of Technology.

The space ship Enterprise NCC-1701D of Star Trek was fabricated in one-billionth scale by 30 kV Ga+ focused-ion- beam CVD using phenanthrene gas. Length 8.8 µm.

Link -via Bad Astronomy Blog

The Art of Manliness has a glossary of manly terms used over 100 years ago. Some terms survived well into the 20th century; I've used "a month of Sundays" myself. Others are strange but maybe you can guess the meanings, as in "Shut your bone box, you saucebox, or my bunch of fives will give you a fizzing blinker!" Link -via Boing Boing

We are familiar with leprechauns, although the American version from the Lucky Charms package isn't quite the original. There are plenty of other creatures from Irish folklore you can learn about in this list. Have you ever heard of the Bean Nighe?

The Bean Nighe is the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth, condemed to wash blood the shrouds of the soon-to-be-dead for until the time at which they would have died of old age. The spirit has one nostril, one long fang, sagging breasts, and webbed feet. If you're brave enough to steal a suck off her breast, you can claim status as her foster child, and she will grant you a wish.

Link

ScienceBlogs, together with Serious Eats, held a Pi Day Bake-Off to celebrate Pi Day on March 14th. They received 35 pie entries, which have been narrowed down to ten finalists. Not only are these "pi pies" decorated in a mathematically clever way, they look scrumptious! Shown is Claudette's amazing One-Hundred-Digit pie made with cherries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Sure it's not round, but remember, pie are square! Link to photographs. Link to voting.

Mark Hogancamp is the master behind an elaborate fantasy world we can follow in pictures and video.

After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark Hogancamp built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populated the town he dubbed "Marwencol" with dolls representing his friends and family and created life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helped Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds from the attack. Through his homemade therapy, Mark was able to begin the long journey back into the "real world", both physically and emotionally - something he continues to struggle with today.

A documentary about Marwencol premiered Saturday at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. http://www.marwencol.com/ -via Metafilter

The blog 2M40 is about one underpass in Paris that has a clearance of only two meters and forty centimeters. Many truck drivers either do not read, do not understand, or do not believe the clearance warning. Several times a month, the underpass wins the battle against these drivers and 2m40 posts the pictures. The blog is in French, but the pictures tell the story. The tagline is "Un blog impactant," which means "An impacting blog." Link -via the Presurfer

(YouTube link)

Shelter dog Edie was schedule to be euthanized. She was fearful, aggressive, and hard to control. Then Bronwyne Mirkovich gave her another chance as he and Eldad Hagar recorded the process on video. -via reddit

Update: Edie has been adopted and is in her permanent home.

British soldier Craig Lundberg of Walton, Merseyside, England was blinded by a by a rocket propelled grenade in Iraq in 2007. He has been fitted with a prototype BrainPort device that converts images from a video camera in his goggles into electrical impulses send to a plate in his mouth that he can read with his tongue.

L/Cpl Lundberg said it felt like "licking a nine volt battery or like popping candy".

"You get lines and shapes of things, it sees in black and white so you get a two dimensional image on your tongue, it's a bit like a pins and needles sensation," he said.

"It's only a prototype, but the potential to change my life is massive, it's got a lot of potential to advance things for blind people.

"One of the things it has enabled me to do is pick up objects straight away, I can reach out and pick them up when before I would be fumbling around to feel for them."

Link to story (with video). -via Arbroath

http://vision.wicab.com/technology/ to BrainPort Technologies.