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A guinea pig in Rosyth, Fife, Scotland, named Truffles took a leap into the record books in front of Guinness-appointed witnesses, his 13-year-old owner Chloe Macari, and her scout troop. Truffles jumped for neither fame nor fortune, but for his favorite snack, cucumber. The jump was measured at 30 centimeters, which was 10 centimeters more than the previous record set in 2009. When Macari learned of the 2009 record, she knew her guinea pig could jump further, and petitioned Guinness officials for a chance to prove it. Truffles now goes into the record book, and Macari earned credit toward a community events scout badge. Link -via Arbroath

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National Geographic photographer Mattias Klum tells the story of a special moment he shared with a endangered Asiatic lioness that could have eaten him. -via Metafilter

Previously: Revenge of the Meerkat

Have you ever seen a horse with such a luxurious mane? Linus the Wonder Horse was born in 1884, the result of careful breeding for long hair. Linus was exhibited with a circus act, with promotional materials declaring he was of the "Oregon Long-Haired Wild Wonder horse" breed. His mane was 14 feet long, and his tail 12 feet long! Read more about Linus at Environmental Graffiti. Link

A man came to the emergency room with strange symptoms. He had previously been diagnosed with viral meningitis because of a high white cell count in a spinal tap -but no infectious agent was found. And his symptoms weren't consistent with the diagnosis. Then the doctor remembered another strange case he'd read about.

In a Vital Signs column in this magazine 17 years ago, infectious-disease physician Abigail Zuger described the conundrum of a young woman with recurrent meningitis. Hospitalized four times in a matter of months, the patient exhibited high fevers, delirium, and a stiff neck—all signs of life-threatening ?bacterial, septic meningitis. CAT scans were normal. Spinal taps revealed high white cell counts in the cerebrospinal fluid—usually a harbinger of severe infection—but bacterial and viral cultures grew nothing. The patient was becoming ill and then abruptly getting better. The fourth time, to general eye-rolling, a medical student was tasked with asking the woman for the umpteenth time whether she had taken anything, anything, prior to getting sick. He hit pay dirt: Advil.

Zuger’s patient hadn’t considered over-the-counter, everyday Advil a medication. It is also sold as Rufen or Motrin, and the chemical moniker is ibuprofen. Ubiquitous as this drug is, until reading Zuger’s article I hadn’t known that in rare cases it can cause meningitis.

Case reports are the lifeblood of diagnosis. The dry, reductionist, what-percent-have-cough and what-percent-have-fever lists in medical texts will put you to sleep. But good stories stick. Doctors trade odd diagnoses like baseball cards; we glean them from journals, TV, and friends, stockpiling them against the next tough diagnosis. Zuger’s story—even 16 years later—primed me to jump on one small clue.

Ibuprophen-induced meningitis is rare, but it explained everything about this particular patient. Read the rest at Discover magazine. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

Pictured left is actor Jimmy Smits, who was not stabbed in this article. He did the stabbing!

Jeff Chase is an actor and stuntman who has been in the business consistently for years and is well respected, though not well known. He was shooting a scene for Dexter, the awesome Showtime show about a killer who kills killers.

In this scene, Chase was supposed to get stabbed by Jimmy Smits using a prop knife, but somehow, Smits got his hands on a real knife, claims we was completely unaware it was real, and stabbed Jeff Chase multiple times in the chest. In front of tons of people. And on film.

The weirdest part is Smits went into a sort of stabbing-trance, and just kept stabbing Chase, until Michael C. Hall (aka Dexter) yelled STOP at him multiple times.

Chase survived, and so did the other five actors in this post from Unreality magazine. Link

At one time, radium, or radiation, was considered new, cutting-edge, and the savior of mankind. Any and all products were "better" when infused with radiation! See a collection of these miracle products at Buzzfeed. Link

A truck transporting milk and cream on the A75 in Galloway, Scotland, caused chaos Tuesday morning when the cargo began to explode. Other drivers saw that the truck was on fire!

Motorists tried to alert the driver Phil Sykes, from Cleveleys, Lancashire, who was heading south with the load of milk and cream.

But it was near the Kirkcudbright turnoff at Tarff, about seven miles west of Castle Douglas, before the driver became aware of the fire around 6am.

He managed to pull the lorry into the roadside where firefighters from Kirkcudbright and Castle Douglas extinguished the blaze after nearly two hours. They were hampered by the exploding skooshy cream containers and milk cartons, and traffic was delayed for more than two hours before single-file traffic was put in operation by police.

Mr Sykes said: “I phoned my boss to let him know but he said it was no use crying over spilled milk.The main thing was that no-one was injured.

Firefighters responded to the scene and said there was milk everywhere. Link -via Arbroath

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Abby the St. Bernard plays with the new kitten! The kitten, named Little Bugger, was taken in as a stray at four weeks of age, and Abby loves him dearly. The uploader says that the kitten is now over a year old and is still best friends with Abby. -via The Daily What

Human bones belonging to at least five individuals have been found at Red Deer Cave in Yunnan Province and at Longlin in Guangxi Province in China. They are fairly recent, dating to between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago. But these bones show features that makes scientists think they might be from a species different from Homo sapiens. Team co-leader Darren Curnoe from the University of New South Wales says that will be a hard call to make, as there is still no agreed-upon definition of Homo sapiens.

The skulls and teeth from the two locations are very similar to each other, suggesting they are from the same population.

But their features are quite distinct from what you might call a fully modern human, says the team. Instead, the Red Deer Cave people have a mix of archaic and modern characteristics.

In general, the individuals had rounded brain cases with prominent brow ridges. Their skull bones were quite thick. Their faces were quite short and flat and tucked under the brain, and they had broad noses.

Their jaws jutted forward but they lacked a modern-human-like chin. Computed Tomography (X-ray) scans of their brain cavities indicate they had modern-looking frontal lobes but quite archaic-looking anterior, or parietal, lobes. They also had large molar teeth.

So far there are several theories about the Red Deer Cave people, which you can read at the BBC report. Link -via the Presurfer

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In 2001, Animusic produced a music video called Pipe Dream that became an animation classic. Ten years later, Intel commissioned Sisu Devices to recreate that video in physical space. It's not as colorful as the original, but the fact that they pulled it off at all is remarkable. Link -via Metafilter

It's once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is? Can you make up something interesting?

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 more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. And good luck!

Update: the pictured object is a Pro Pitch Gauge, made by The Classic Company, for measuring the angles in the holes of bowling balls. Steve Pauk had the right answer with the very first comment! However, he did not select a t-shirt. StilesJM wins the prize for the funniest answer: Phrenology gauge used by sororities, applied to the cranial midline of a prospective member to determine how much of a pitch she really is. That wins a t-shirt! See the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

The actual genesis of The Beatles is a bit nebulous and could be argued. However, most Beatles historians cite the date of July 6, 1957 as the official beginning of The Beatles.

John Lennon, a Liverpool guitar player (and local troublemaker, part-time shoplifter and full-time egomaniac) had been playing a few local gigs in the area for a year or so. John's initial band was called The Blackjacks, consisting of a few of his mates from school. Soon thereafter, the band's name was changed to The Quarrymen, in honor of their present school, Quarry Bank High School.

It was on July 6, 1957 that John and his ragtag band were playing twice at the St. Peter's Church fete in the Woolton parish. This date is significant as possibly the single most important seminal date in the history of rock music. Why? It was on this day that John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met.

The Quarrymen, led by John, played on the back of a coal truck, giving one performance in the afternoon and another in the early evening. Several cameras were out that day, and the very brash Lennon took the lead vocals on a few of the popular rock'n'roll songs of the day. Lennon was decked out in a checked shirt, tight pants ("drainies'), and his hair was slicked-up in the fashion of his supreme idol, Elvis Presley.

The event was a bit bittersweet, too, although Lennon didn't know it at the time. John's beloved mother, Julia, was there in the crowd, rabidly cheering her teenage son on. As a sad sidebar, Julia was to be killed tragically, a little over a year later, in a car accident. Julia was killed by a drunken off-duty policeman as she was walking across the street to catch a bus. John was never to really get over the loss of his mother, and called it "the worst thing that ever happened to me."

Paul had been invited to watch The Quarrymen by a mutual friend, and he watched with curious interest as John sang. John and his Quarrymen were actually scheduled to play twice that day, once in the afternoon and later in the evening. After the band's first concert Paul was introduced to John, who, Paul later recalled, had breath smelling of illegally-obtained beer.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is a NASA satellite that constantly observes the sun. Twice a year, the satellite's view is obscured by the Earth, which means there's an eclipse, but only observable from the satellite. SDO technicians made a video of the eclipse seen from the satellite last night. The video is pretty neat, but here's something you can pass along with or without a link:

And I’ll leave you with this question: when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, it’s a solar eclipse, and when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon, it’s a lunar eclipse. So what do we call it when, for us on the surface, the Earth gets in between us and the Sun?

Answer: night.

See the video at Bad Astronomy. Link

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Simon's Cat has a smashing good time in a new animation from Simon Tofield. I can relate to this, as I have three mantlepieces. I also have four cats, but only one of them likes to knock things off a mantle. One is enough. -via Laughing Squid

Previously: More animated adventures starring Simon's Cat.

We in the modern world sometimes think of ourselves as constantly writing, tapping out words on a keyboard to communicate with each other. But compared to earlier generations, how well do we really express what we think and feel? Annalisa Grier has been reading and digitizing the letters her great-great-great-grandfather, David P. Grier, wrote to his wife Anna McKinney Grier. They were separated for long periods during the early part of their marriage while he was fighting in the Civil War. The love expressed in those letters is breathtaking.

I had this idea, before I opened the letters, of my theoretical great-great-great-grandparents as stiff and restrained — my family is largely Scottish, and even more largely Scottish Presbyterian, which lends itself to a particular sort of buttoned-up repression. You can hear that Presbyterianism coming through occasionally in the letters: “if hereafter I ever do anything to cause you unhappiness, I will thank the hand that punishes me for it,” he writes. But he writes also about the “gayest southern Ladies” he had met while traveling: “I do not care a snap for any of them — I just feel that my heart is gone forever from my Keeping and that it is a great waste of time in going around talking and carrying on with them.” The words David uses in his letters aren’t what I expected to read when I first started this project, and they’re not words that I could imagine myself writing down. The language is so open, so vulnerable to injury, and it makes me feel protective: Watch out, I want to tell him, it’s so easy to get yourself hurt.

But sometimes, also, I’m jealous. It makes me much more uncomfortable to even think about writing such things than it apparently made my 19th-century ancestors to actually write them. I can hardly imagine sitting down to write to my boyfriend “my heart is irrecoverably lost and it is yours, for ever” (which is meant rather as a commentary on my own capacity for expression rather than to knock my feelings for my boyfriend. Love you!). Were I somehow, accidentally, to write that line, I’d probably stare at it for a moment, backspace, and re-draft with something much more noncommittal; something much less likely to put my own heart out on the table next to a knife and fork.

It makes you wonder what future generations will think of our texting, blog posts, and forum comments as the writing of the 21st century. There's lots more at The Hairpin. Link