Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, on the planet Endor, under the forest canopy, lies a village made of chocolate, breakfast cereal, and gingerbread! And don't look now, but there's a Death Star lurking above. The Canadian baker who blogs under the name The Infinite Yums built this Ewok Village for a charity auction. The post about it has the building process and plenty of pictures of the details. Link -via Boing Boing

Popular fashion trends come and go in cycles, and once again we are seeing a trend of the "Native American look" in clothing, home furnishings, jewelry, and bedding. Some companies are running into legal trouble over their merchandise, as there are laws and trademark restrictions against products attributed to Native Americans. Even when the letter of the law is followed, the trend is causing bad feelings about the appropriation of a culture.

“The problem,” says Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and doctor of Native American studies who teaches at Arizona State University and blogs about Native American fashion designers at Beyond Buckskin, “is that they’re putting it out there as ‘This is the native,’ or ‘This is native-inspired’. So now you have non-native people representing us in mainstream culture. That, of course, gets tiring, because this has been happening since the good old days of the Hollywood Western in the 1930s and ’40s, where they hired non-native actors and dressed them up essentially in redface.

“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans,” Metcalfe says, “but also who gets to profit.”

Collector's Weekly has an extensive article about the history of the trade in Native American style, and how the controversy is playing out today. Link -Thanks, Lisa!

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The Brothers McLeod have a series of videos called The Existential Pleading of the Inner Heart. This installment, Fear of Flying, continues the musings on everyday anxiety with a particular focus on flying. -Thanks, Myles!

Can you judge a workplace by the art they decorate their office with? That's hard to say. Buzzfeed has a mega-post of artworks and decorations found in website offices from all over. Find out what Playboy, College Humor, Gawker, Dailymotion, VH1, and many others have on their walls. Pictured here is the artwork that greets employees at Threadless. Go to the post to see Neatorama's positively minimalist office art. Link

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It's a short film. And you'll probably see the ending coming. We're sorry, Kurtis Hough. -via reddit

A pregnant cat named Puss Puss had been missing for three days in the village of Moelfre in North Wales. She had escaped while being transported to a foster home by an animal charity worker. Then someone heard a meowing sound coming from a donation bin for used clothing! But the lock on the bin had been damaged, and it wouldn't open. The fire brigade was called, and they, too, failed to open the bin. Finally, the entire bin was loaded up and taken 20 miles away to an engineering company.

There, steel saws were used to gain access and the mewing prisoner was revealed – as nothing more than a squeaky toy.

Kelvin Owen, who owns the engineering firm, said: ‘Once we got into the bin we heard the miaowing – it sounded just like a cat and we all started to carefully search the bags.

‘Then I found a bag of toys and picked out a toy. I said: “It couldn’t be this, could it?” As I held it it went “miaow, miaow”. Mystery solved!’

The sounds came from a talking plush toy resembling Marie from the Disney movie The Aristocats. Rescuers had a good laugh at the 12-hour effort to rescue the toy. Puss Puss is still missing, but may have been taken in by someone unaware of the search. Link -via Arbroath

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Stuntman Greg Gasson doesn't wear a parachute when he jumps out of a plane. He doesn't even wear shoes! Instead, he grabs a packed parachute with his hands. Don't try this at home -or anywhere! -via Buzzfeed

DeviantART member deezoid felt a little cramped in his office cubicle, but knew just how to improve it. Now it's a TARDIS! Link

Need a toucan? There are plenty of them reprinted from the 1806 publication Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux de Paradis et des Rolliers, Suivie de celle des Toucans et des Barbus (Natural History of the Birds of Paradise and Rolliers, Followed by the Toucans and the Bearded Ones) at BibliOdyssey. But no Froot Loops! Link

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Bizzle had a hard day, what with people telling him he has the face of a dog and all. So he came home and treated himself to a snack of Dunkaroos. This trick has been done a lot, but rarely this well. -via reddit

A year ago, we told you about artist John Morse and his Roadside Haiku project in Atlanta. Now his talents have been commissioned for traffic signs in New York City! The New York City Department of Transportation has installed a collection of curbside signs written in haiku along with graphics designed by John Morse. The seventeen-syllable poetry warns drivers, pedestrians, and bikers to watch for safety hazards. Some also have QR codes. See more of them at core77. Link -via Metafilter

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A litter of six Bengal kittens and their mother watch Japanese skater Daisuke Takahashi perform on television. And try to catch him. I was surprised by this, as my cats prefer nature documentaries to sports.  -via Buzzfeed

Admit it, you've done exactly this at one party or another during your lifetime, haven't you? From cartoonist Gemma Correll. Link -via reddit

People who make toys, dollhouses, or other miniatures know that certain laws of physics apply that make miniaturization difficult. Certain laws of biology apply, too, but the fairy wasp seems to do an end-run around some of those rules. How else could an insect exist that is smaller than many single-celled creatures? Some are revealed by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University, who has studied these tiny wasps for years.

Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the fairy wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.

And yet, the fairy wasp has thousands of them. As it changes from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving space inside the adult’s crowded head. But the wasp doesn’t seem to suffer for this loss. As an adult, it lives for around five days, which is actually longer than many other bigger wasps. As Zen Faulkes writes, “It’s possible that the adult life span is short enough that the nucleus can make all the proteins the neuron needs to function for five days during the pupal stage.”

There are other tricks tiny insects use to maintain life in miniature, which you can read at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link

George Merryweather was a doctor in Whitby, on the British coast of Yorkshire. He was also an inventor.

...the thing which Mr. Merryweather became truly famous for was his "Atmospheric, Electromagnetic Telegraph, conducted by Animal Instinct," or, more shortly, his Tempest Prognosticator," which he built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. It is a beautiful structure, with a bell at the top designed to look like the dome at St. Pauls. Around the bottom are placed a dozen glass bottles; threading from tiny hammers around the edge of the bell are threads, which connect to a piece of whalebone just inside the neck of each bottle. Inside each bottle is poured an inch of rainwater and then -- oh happy home! -- each bottle is occupied by a leech. A common, ordinary surgical leech.

Being a doctor, Merryweather had observed that medical leeches responded to barometric pressure or electrical charge in the air, or whatever it is that allows smaller animals to know when bad weather is afoot. The leeches' response was to climb -- probably a good response for water-dwelling creatures just before a rain, so that they don't get washed away. So when Merryweather's leeches climbed to the top of the bottle, they nudged the piece of whalebone, which caused the string to move and ring the bell. It's not clear, but it appears that the more the bell rang before a storm, the worse the weather to come.

The Tempest Prognosticator proved to be surprisingly accurate, but did not catch on because it was not considered scientific enough. Read more about the device at Cabinet of Wonders, on a visit to the Whitby Museum, where Merryweather's device is housed. Link