Remember SARS? Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome exploded out of China in early 2003 and frightened the entire world. Over 8,000 people were infected, and nearly 800 died. The epidemic was over by the summer, thanks to coordinated efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO), doctors who risked their lives to treat patients, and a military doctor who defied his government to break the Chinese policy of secrecy about the disease. Pictured is Dr. Carlo Urbani, an Italian epidemiologist who ultimately died of SARS. Read the entire story at Damn Interesting. Link

(YouTube link)

With a stroke of the pen, a stranger transforms the afternoon for another man in this emotionally stirring short film by Alonso Alvarez.

Alonso Alvarez Barreda won the NFB Online Competition Cannes 2008 (featured previously at Neatorama) with the short film Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign). Link -via Viral Video Chart

Jake Mandell, who brought you the tonedeaf test last year, has another musical test called the Associative Visual Music Intelligence (AMVI) test. How well can you associate a musical sequence with a visual shape? It’s not easy! I scored in the 70-80% range in the several parameters measured, which is supposed to mean “excellent”. Link -Thanks, Jake!

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander was launched last August, and is scheduled to reach the surface of Mars on Sunday. This is the first Mars mission that will set down near the planet’s frozen pole. Scientists hope to find ice, and maybe evidence of the planet’s past.

Wielding its robotic arm like a backhoe, Phoenix is designed to dig down in to the Martian soil to collect water ice samples. It will feed them into small onboard ovens and beakers to determine if its landing site may have once been habitable for microbial life.

"We believe that the ice is somewhere between 4 and 6 centimeters (1.5 to 2.3 inches) below the surface," Phoenix deputy principal investigator Deborah Bass of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) told SPACE.com. "It's not going to be ice skating rink-pure, white, shiny ice. It's going to be permafrost - dust, dirt and ice all mixed together."

You’ll be able to watch the landing “live” as the signals reach earth on NASA TV. Link -via Simply Left Behind

(image credit: NASA)

Slinkachu, the artist who brought you Little People, a Tiny Street Art Project, has a new “moving art” project. It moves pretty slowly, as it consists of snails with painted shells placed in London landscapes. He’s devoted an entire blog to the endeavor. Link -via b3ta

Artist and musician Jamie Livingston began taking a Polaroid picture every day, from March 31st, 1979 through October 5th, 1997 -his 41st birthday, and the day he died. The resulting 6,697 pictures are an art collection, exhibited by his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid. Chris Higgins at mental_floss has posted select photos that follow the story of Livingston’s life and decline as he battled cancer, plus the story of what happened to the photo collection afterward. Warning: have your hankie ready. Link

Neurophilosophy has posted a roundup of unusual penetrating brain injuries, with properly horrifying x-rays. Most of these cases were self-inflicted wounds, and all of the patients survived! Warning: not for the squeamish. Link

Rolling Stone has an in-depth article explaining why Pink Floyd adopted a flying pig as a symbol, and how it became the most famous rock and roll prop ever. The pig made its first appearance on the cover of the 1977 album Animals. Roger Waters tells the story of the photo shoot:

The first day was that beautiful sky, but the pig escaped. The rope broke and it drifted off, up into the flight path at Heathrow. Then the next day, we flew another pig, and it was a bright blue sky, and so the photographs weren't nearly as interesting as they had been from the day before. So in fact we stripped the pig from the second day into the photograph from the first day that didn't have a pig in it because it had already escaped. And that is what appeared on the album cover.

The pig has been escaping ever since. The latest incident was at the 2008 Coachella festival. Link -via Metafilter

Vertical gardening is taking off all over the world. Living walls are not only a statement, they’re works of art! They are also cooling and calming, they freshen the air, and some produce flowers and vegetables as well. Pictured is the courtyard wall of the Pershing Hall Hotel in Paris. See pictures of all 15 at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via Digg

Over the past couple of years, NASA has been watching flashes of light on the moon. It’s not a new phenomenon; they began observing the moon’s surface to prepare for the future lunar mission project. The explosions are caused by meteoroids hitting the moon. Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, says the flashes can be photographed with a backyard telescope.

That first detection—"I'll never forget it," he says--came on Nov. 7, 2005, when a piece of Comet Encke about the size of a baseball hit Mare Imbrium. The resulting explosion produced a 7th magnitude flash, too dim for the naked eye but an easy target for the team's 10-inch telescope.

A common question, says Cooke, is "how can something explode on the Moon? There's no oxygen up there."

These explosions don't require oxygen or combustion. Meteoroids hit the moon with tremendous kinetic energy, traveling 30,000 mph or faster. "At that speed, even a pebble can blast a crater several feet wide. The impact heats up rocks and soil on the lunar surface hot enough to glow like molten lava--hence the flash."

It doesn’t just happen during meteor showers. There are always pieces of natural space debris colliding with the moon. Link -via Geek Like Me

Typo Hunt Across America is the blog of the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL). They spent the last couple of months not only finding and pointing out typos on public signs, they also corrected them or tried to get them corrected (with varying degrees of success). Now the League is asking for your stories of public typo correction. Therefore, I found myself checking this post over and over in case they find a typo here! Link -via Metafilter

This bar in Gruyere, Switzerland was designed by H.R. Giger, the artist who designed the alien in the movie Alien. Spooky! Link -via Bad Astronomy Blog

Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss deals with a subject I’m not at all familiar with, but you might be.

It’s still early in the Major League Baseball season, but some teams have already been ravaged by injuries. Before fans of the Brewers or Yankees start to feel sorry for themselves, though, remember an even more star-crossed team: Mr. Burns’ collection of all-star ringers brought in to play for the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant’s softball nine. Do you remember what ultimately sidelined each player?

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15111

Guess what: they’re all in Europe (unless you want to argue about the location of Georgia). Some of them run a mile or more deep into the earth, although to actually go a mile deep, you’d have to trek or rappel for miles and miles. The world’s deepest cave for now is 7188 feet (2191 m) deep, although with research, that record can always be broken by those who feel the need to explore the “bottomless pits” of the world. Link -via Geek Like Me

(image credit: Plamen Stoev)

Nearly 3,000 people, including US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, were in attendance as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra performed last night in Tel Aviv. The star of the show was a cat who snuck in to enjoy the festivities. ddhttp://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=82730&refresh=true -via Arbroath