Remember the good old science kits of yesteryear that contained things like cyanide, uranium, and ammonium nitrate, as well as Bunsen burners and glass vials that are now considered too dangerous for children? Why, you can't even blow up the kitchen anymore! How do the original science toys stack up against their modern counterparts? Collectors Weekly looks at both the old and the new science kits, which include a lot more than chemistry, and rates the old against the new. We may not have ammonium nitrate anymore, but we have some science kits that our parents and grandparents never had. Link

The BBC News Magazine recently posted an article about "Americanisms" creeping into the English language (meaning British English in this case). That article brought many responses, as British readers shared their pet peeves about the language as spoken by Americans. Some are just examples of bad grammar.

2. The next time someone tells you something is the "least worst option", tell them that their most best option is learning grammar. Mike Ayres, Bodmin, Cornwall

40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase "that'll learn you" - when the English (and more correct) version was always "that'll teach you". What a ridiculous phrase! Tabitha, London

41. I really hate the phrase: "Where's it at?" This is not more efficient or informative than "where is it?" It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating. Adam, London

While others are purely cultural differences.

14. I caught myself saying "shopping cart" instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I've never lived nor been to the US either. Graham Nicholson, Glasgow

18. Take-out rather than takeaway! Simon Ball, Worcester

29. I'm a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York

36. Surely the most irritating is: "You do the Math." Math? It's MATHS. Michael Zealey, London

And a couple are just inexplicable.

20. "A half hour" instead of "half an hour". EJB, Devon

44. My brother now uses the term "season" for a TV series. Hideous. D Henderson, Edinburgh

Do all these complaints make perfect sense on the eastern side of the pond? Read the rest at the followup article. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(Image credit: Flickr user Chris Turner)

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories made a whole herd of googly eyes that can be stuck on most metal surfaces temporarily. The possibilities are endless! So, they posted the instructions plus a gallery of examples. They also invite you to make your own and send in pictures of what you do with them. Where would you stuck your googly eyes? Link

Want an edge over the average person playing rock-paper-scissors? Try playing blindfolded! An experiment by Richard Cook at University College in London shows that when players can see their opponent, there is a slight tendency to copy them.

Cook asked 45 people to face off against each other in several rounds of rock-paper-scissors, in exchange for real money. In every game, either one or both players were blindfolded.

Cook found that the players drew with each other more often when one of them could see (36.3% of the matches) than when both were blindfolded (33.3% of them). The latter figure was exactly the proportion of draws you’d expect if the players were choosing randomly; the former was significantly higher than chance.

Cook devised this study because he was interested in the idea that we all automatically and unconsciously imitate one another. There’s plenty of evidence that we do indeed copy one another, from obvious gestures like touching our face to subtle movements like tensing our muscles. But it’s not clear whether these actions are truly involuntary in the way that the knee-jerk reflex is. To find out, Cook wanted to see if people can stop themselves from performing these acts of mimicry.

That’s why he turned to rock-paper-scissors. Here is a game where you have to avoid imitating your opponent in order to win – the rules implicitly encourage people to avoid copying what their adversaries do. The results of Cook’s face-offs suggest that the sighted player has a slight tendency to imitate the blindfolded one – that’s why a blindfolded player will draw more often against a sighted one than another blindfolded opponent. And indeed, players were particularly likely to imitate rocks and scissors.

If that's not an option in your game, Ed Yong offers a list of tips for a beginning player. Link

In this day and age of instant stardom, it's hard to believe that someone can make a public splash and then fade into the background and remain anonymous forever. But a few managed to do that in the past, and were never found out -yet. For example, the fellow at the left who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The bystander, holding shopping bags, blocked a line of tanks heading into the square, and then climbed onto a tank and started talking to the crew. This happened for a few minutes until two random people ran up and dragged him away before the tank crew could contemplate how they would clean their tank treads of protester.

That man, who briefly stopped the government tanks all by himself and appeared in one of the most iconic photos and pieces of video in world history, was never heard from again.

Of course, no one will say who he is either to protect him or to cover up what may have happened to him. Other mysteries in this Cracked article are just hard to explain. Link -via Digg

A family in Elbert County, Colorado awoke to find their horse Summer trapped in the home's basement.

Summer had fallen down a four-foot window well and landed in the basement, which was not constructed with a walk-out door.

“We thought of bringing her up the basement stairs,” Heap said. “But the stairs didn’t look safe enough to support her weight.”

A veterinarian sedated Summer, who sustained minor cuts and injuries in the fall, and a coring company was contacted to cut into the foundation of the home. The initial plan was to expose an area around a second window well, remove a portion of the foundation and create enough space to bring the horse out of the basement, Heap said.

When the crew had removed enough material around the window, Summer walked out on her own. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Elbert County Sheriff's Office)

(YouTube link)

Phillip Mendonça-Vieira accidentally found himself in the possession of 12,000 screenshots of the New York Times homepage from September 2010 to July 2011, which he arranged into a video for your perusal. There are some stories that were so big you can follow them even at this breakneck speed. At his site, Mendonça-Vieira writes about the ephemeral quality of pages like this, which are rarely if ever archived. Link -via Laughing Squid

Rob Surette send us this image of his latest art project: the world's largest Lite Brite creation! The work is titled "World Peace" and features American faces on the left and faces the rest of the world on the right, gazing at each other in friendship. The piece is 20 feet long and 10 feet high, and contains 504,000 Lite Brite pegs! See more of Rob's work at his website. Link

Through the ages, the classiest cars always had fancy hood ornaments. They began as radiator caps and continued even after the caps retreated under the hood. They began to disappear in the 1960s, so now you only see them on fine classic cars -or as art objects by themselves. See a wide variety of all kinds of hood ornaments at Dark Roasted Blend, from familiar logos to one-of-a-kind artworks. The ornament shown here graces a 1931 Packard Eight. Link

(Image source: Second Chance Garage)

Photographer Caren Alpert takes pictures of food. Really, really close-up pictures of food. What you see here are cake sprinkles, shot at a 65x magnification. See more at her website. Link -via Boing Boing

Thieves in Vienna, Austria made off with 21 tons of mustard and ketchup.

The loot was in a semitrailer parked in a lot over the weekend northwest of Vienna. Police say the truck driver showed up Monday to deliver his cargo only to see the trailer missing.

Police assume the thieves were more interested in the trailer than its contents.

Authorities are on the lookout for the missing mustard as well as the $22,000 trailer. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(Image credit: the NeatoShop)

The Kermode bear, also called a spirit bear, is a walking contradiction. One in ten black bears on Prince Royal Island, British Columbia are born white. National Geographic tell us more about spirit bears.

Neither albino nor polar bear, the spirit bear (also known as the Kermode bear) is a white variant of the North American black bear, and it's found almost exclusively here in the Great Bear Rainforest. At 25,000 square miles—one and a half times as big as Switzerland—the region runs 250 miles down Canada's western coast and encompasses a vast network of mist-shrouded fjords, densely forested islands, and glacier-capped mountains. Grizzlies, black bears, wolves, wolverines, humpback whales, and orcas thrive along a coast that has been home to First Nations like the Gitga'at for hundreds of generations. It's a spooky, wild, mysterious place: There are wolves here that fish. Deer that swim. Western red cedar trees that have stood a thousand years or more. And a black bear that is white.

There's also a related photo gallery at NatGeo. Link

(Image credit: Paul Nicklen)

(YouTube link)

Cartoonist Winsor McCay {wiki} creates an early movie animation in this 1911 film, originally entitled Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics but often just called Little Nemo, after McCay's comic strip. Most of the video is a dramatization of how the animation came about. The actual animation happens about eight minutes in. McCay later went on to produce Gertie the Dinosaur, which many of us learned was the "first" animated movie. -via Buzzfeed

One hundred years ago, women in Britain who wanted to vote were considered terrorists. Many were jailed, and although Scotland Yard wanted to record them in photographs, the women refused to cooperate. So in 1912, officials purchased a camera and hired a paparazzi-style photographer to shoot the inmates from a distance. BBC news explained how and why these photographs were taken. You can see an online collection of the photos, which give us a glimpse into the world of suffragettes and how they were treated by police. http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/07/suffragette-surveillance-1913/ -via Metafilter

(Image credit: © National Portrait Gallery, London)

Plants and herbs play a big part in the magic of Harry Potter. The students of Hogwarts encounter plants that scream, pulsate, spew poison, and most importantly, become ingredients in magic potions. What's more is that many of those fantastic plants are based on real plants, or at least real legends of plants. Garden Design gives us the lowdown on the fictional and the actual botanical specimens mentioned in the series. For example, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, we meet a plant that grabs people with its tendrils, intending to eat them!

Carnivorous trees have popped up now and again in various superstitious texts, including one outrageous tall tale invented by a 19th-century German explorer named Carl Liche who claimed to have seen an eight-foot-tall plant with long hairy tendrils pick up a woman—supposedly belonging to what was later deemed a fictional Malagasy tribe—and devour her whole. Liche's story, which was written up as a non-fiction travel account in the South Australian Register, was later found to be completely false.

An entire list of plants from the series are examined in this article. Link -Thanks, Claire!