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Comic book, sci-fi, and Joss Whedon fans, check this out: it's an introduction to The Avengers done in the style of the TV show Firefly! -via The Daily What Geek

Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell are living in Busan, South Korea, and reporting on their blog For 91 Days. In the neighborhood of Jangsan, upstairs from a pet store, they found the Puppy Cafe. Like the cat cafes of Japan, this is a place you can go to pet, play with, and enjoy the companionship of the pet that you can't have in your apartment.

We moved into a separate area for the smallest dogs, and I found my favorite of the day: a snow-white Pekingese, so soft, cuddly and pliable. He had no problem with me picking him up, and immediately settled into a comfortable position on my lap. Jürgen welcomed a little pinscher onto his lap — two Korean girls who were there petting poodles, told us that the pinscher was (and I quote) a “whore”.

The cafe was a blast; the dogs were cute, funny and friendly, and we had a great time playing with them, although we did stink like hell when we left. I’m surprised that more doggie stores don’t offer a place for people to sit and play with their dogs. Especially in a city like Busan, where apartments are small and lives are hectic, dogs are a luxury that don’t fit into most people’s lives. A place like this, where you can come and get your puppy fix, seems like a no-brainer. And I’m sure the dogs love it.

See more pictures and a video at For 91 Days. Link

Here it is, time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Tell us what this thing is, if you know. If you don't, make a wild guess!

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

For additional pictures of this object from different angles, check out the What Is It? Blog. Have fun and good luck!

Update: nobody knew going into the game what the correct answer is. Rob at the What Is It? blog investigated all the plausible guesses and found that it is a pipe flaring tool, with some pieces missing. Craig Clayton was the first with the correct answer, and wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! But we also have a t-shirt for Straight_Flush, who thought he had it figured out.

Well, let me tell you the truth. It was hard to find out what this amazing piece of metal is. And after a lot of hard work I found out that it is “pic2592a”.

If you don’t believe me, just hover your mouse pointer on top of it and see for yourself.

Yeah, that wins a t-shirt for the funniest answer! Thanks to everyone who played along. See the answers for all of this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.

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Matt Harding started recording himself dancing in different countries way back in 2005. His last (and biggest) dance video was in 2008. In 2012, he is finally starting to try out new dance styles, in new places. Link  -via Metafilter

PS: Ethan Zuckerman wrote a great piece about how Harding's dance videos have evolved. Link

Hands have always been used to eat with. As food became hotter and sloppier, knives were developed from larger cutting blades, and spoons are simple scoops. But forks weren't used in ancient eating. And when some started using them, they were considered somewhat pretentious.

In the 11th century, forks were in use in the Byzantine Empire. An illustrated manuscript from that period shows two men using two-pronged forklike instruments at a table, and St. Peter Damian, a hermit and ascetic, criticized a Byzantine-born Venetian princess for her excessive delicacy: "[S]uch was the luxury of her habits … [that] she deigned not to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth." Damian was sufficiently offended by the woman’s table manners that when she died of the plague, he regarded it as a just punishment from God for her vanity.

A detailed history of the fork can be found at Slate. Link -via Fark

(Image credit: Flickr user Caro Wallis)

Pizza originated in Naples, Italy with a bread crust topped with cheese and maybe some spices. New World tomatoes made it snappier, and it became an American staple that is now popular worldwide. But every culture puts its own stamp on pizza. New Yorker Johan Kugelberg was most impressed with the weirdness of pizza toppings offered in Sweden. They include raisins, bananas, canned fruit cocktail, Bearnaise sauce, mashed potatoes, peanuts, etc. And it gets weirder.

It is hard to understand how all this began, but I have a couple of theories: There's plentiful anecdotal evidence that the first slew of 30-odd pizza restaurants that opened in Sweden were all owned by the same family, who saw a splendid business opportunity notwithstanding that their ethnic culinary roots weren't in the dish purveyed. Therefore, any authenticity and ethnic integrity of the dish offered went into immediate free-fall, as the inherent understanding that we all have within us in regards to the traditional foods of our country of origin were very much not at all in place here. Instead, anything anyone ever wanted as a pizza-topping at any point (including when very drunk) was unceremoniously placed upon the pie, notwithstanding how people from Naples or Rome or New York City or the Jersey Shore would feel about its interplay with a culinary tradition.

It snowballed/escalated from here: Anything that seemed exotic or exclusive would end up as a culinary titillation: something that seemed like a good idea to eat at the time.

Kugelberg posts lists of suggested pizza toppings available at various pizzerias in Sweden, and theorizes about the meaning of it all. Link -via Gawker

The pizza shown here contains prawns, banana, mozzarella, peanuts, paprika, and yoghurt. (Image credit: Flickr user Tom Paton)

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The sequel to the Pixar film Monsters, Inc. is expected to be out next summer, and the first teasers are out now. This time, the monsters are in college, which only makes sense, as the kids who watched the first movie in theaters in 2001 will be in college by then. -via Geekosystem

According to the Institute for Economics & Peace, the most peaceful country in the world is Iceland. Yes, the country that disrupted air travel across Europe with its spewing, unpronounceable volcano a couple of years ago. Icelanders have an upside for everything: they use the energy of volcanoes for heat.

Iceland is one of the most progressive nations on the planet: its welfare system offers health care and higher education for each of its 320,000 citizens; it is powered in large part by renewable geothermal energy (see volcanoes, above); and it was one of the first countries in the world to legalize gay marriage.

Tying for second place are Denmark and New Zealand. Try to guess the nation that came in dead last before you check out the article at TIME Newsfeed. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Stephen_AU)

As the full title says, these are not your grandmother's cuckoo clocks! Justin Miller has been fascinated with cuckoo clocks of the Black Forest since he was a child. He tells us about the origins of clocks with automatons, and how they became associates with the Black Forest region of Germany. Shown here are clocks featuring a butcher slaughtering an ox and another on which a man eats a plate of rats. Link -Thanks, Ben!

(Image credit: Justin Miller)

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O (Omicron) is an art installation by Romain Tardy & Thomas Vaquié. Through the magic of projection, Centennial Hall (Hala Stulecia) in Warsaw, Poland is turned into a piece of performance art. Watch and imagine you are in the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (or your favorite sci-fi craft). You can see a "making -of" video at their site. Link -via The Daily What Geek

Redditor hellomynameisadam was served a drink in a Chinese restaurant with these garnishes. Certainly worth taking a picture! Link

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A cappella group Gentleman's Rule perform a mashup of Pachelbel's "Canon in D" and Nelly's song ”Ride Wit Me.” The result is downright fun! -via The Daily What

(Image credit: Flickr user Simon Huggins)

The Effects of Temperature on the Outcome of Fair Dice

by Jason Zweiback, Photonics Division, General Atomics, San Diego , California
and Ken Wharton, Department of Physics, San Jose State University, San Jose, California

We here report the first direct scientific test of the concept of a hot craps table.

Craps is a game with a long history. For over a century players the likes of Sky Masterson, Big Julie, and Nicely Nicely have been performing the technical procedure known as "rolling the bones." Time has replaced the hood- and shark-infested dens of the past with modern casinos. This has given craps a level of respectability. The respectability is well deserved, because as games of chance go, craps is actually not a bad deal.

The accompanying box (see "The Dope on Craps," below) gives a succinct description for scientists outside our field of study.

After reading many books on the topic, we have come up with a scientifically testable hypothesis. It is a fact that nearly every craps textbook refers to the crucial difference between a "cold" table and a "hot" table.1,2 Brisman clearly states, "Every veteran dice player will warn you about "cold" tables where the dice only allow for craps and sevening out."2 Conversely, a hot table has the shooters consistently successful in making their points. Most of the reported craps strategies involve methods of determining whether or not a craps table is "hot" or "cold." These various "methods" are remarkably unscientific and obviously flawed. This is particularly surprising given that there is a perfectly straightforward, well established technique to determine "hot" from "cold." Of course, we refer to the science of thermometry. With this technique in mind, we set out to determine if temperature has any effect on the outcome of dice.

Craps with a table. (Image credit: Flickr user Alan Kotok)

Experimental Method

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"A tilt of light" is a project by ENESS design studio in which 33 rows of lights and a programmable physics engine were installed inside a seesaw. The toy was placed in Federation Square in Melbourne for people to try out. It will stay there until July first -remember, it is winter now in Australia! Link  -via Laughing Squid

Spencer West has no legs, so he walked on his hands. All the way up Mt. Kilimanjaro! Word came last night that West has reached Uhuru Peak in Tanzania, the highest altitude in Africa. From his blog:

The moment the summit was within sight... it was incredible. We looked around - me, David and Alex - and realized that, after seven grueling days of relentless climbing, after 20,000 feet of our blood, sweat and tears (and, let's face it, vomit) we had actually made it. We were at the top. The summit sign seemed almost like a mirage.

Then it sunk in. We made it. To the top of the mountain. The mountain that I promised to the world I would climb. The bleeding fingers and blisters were all worth it. I looked at the guys, my two buddies who dreamed up this crazy plan with me, and realized we actually finished what we started.

Then we had a really manly moment, collapsed into a heap, and shed a tear (or two, but don't tell my mom). There we were: me and my two best friends in the entire world, sitting together at the top of Africa, the continent that had taught us so much about compassion, humility and the power of we.

His climb was not only a personal accomplishment, but it raised funds for West's charity, Free The Children. Link -via The Daily What

His announcement can be heard in a video from the BBC. Link