The Liebherr LTM 11200-9.1 is a monster crane with a 100 meter (328 feet) boom that can lift up to 1200 tonnes (1322 US tons). You may have seen bigger cranes, but this one is carried on its own truck -two, actually. See pictures and video of this crane in action at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

The fossil itself is not as big as this picture.

The spider, a new species called Nephila jurassica, stretches about two inches from end to end. It was found in a fossil-rich rock formation near Daohugou village in northeastern China. The fossil dates back to the Middle Jurassic, about 165 million years ago, researchers reported in the April 20 Biology Letters.

Spiders from the same family still exist today. Female giant golden orb-weaver spiders can grow to a whopping 4 or 5 inches in diameter (although males tend to be less than a quarter that size). These spiders are known for spinning huge webs of golden silk and have been known to trap bats and small birds.

Spider fossils are very rare, and this discovery leads scientists to believe that the Nephila genus is 130 million years older than previously thought. Link

(Image credit: Paul Selden)

(YouTube link)

Why are giant eggs hollow and small eggs full of sugary creme? Several years ago, we brought you the recipe for making your own Giant Cadbury Creme Egg. Epic Pudding Time shows you a shortcut to making your giant egg by using existing eggs in this video. -via the Presurfer

The Bregenz Festival brings opera to the shores of Lake Constance in Bregenz, Austria in July and August. They are now building the stage on the lake front, which is, as you can see, quite an enterprise. See more pictures of this fantastic stage and its meaning at Kuriositas. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Kecko)

War- what is it good for? Well, if the Falkland Islands are any indication, it certainly helps penguins.

Rockhopper Penguin (Image credit: Flickr user Marcus Borg)

For several hundred years, human activity on the Falkland Islands -roughly 300 miles of the Argentine coast- threatened its penguins' survival. But the trend started to reverse in 1982, when Argentina and Britain began duking it out for control of the Falklands. Turns out, a war, a few landmines, and some unstable diplomatic relations might have been just enough to get the penguins back on track.

The Falkland Islands are small. Collectively, the 200-plus islands that make up the Falklands are only about as big as Connecticut. But through the years, they've managed to inspire some Texas-sized international contention. Ever since Argentina gained independence from Spain in 1816, it's been vying for control of the Falklands in one form or another. Some Argentines even claims possession of the region today, even though Queen Elizabeth's face graces every piece of currency, the Union Jack appears on the official flag, and every other government in the world recognizes British rule over the Falklands. Despire the fact that Argentina famously lost its military bid for control of the islands back in 1982, national polls still show 80 percent of Argentines want their government to take back the Islas Malvinas, as they're known in the Spanish-speaking nation.

King Penguins (Image credit: Flickr user andym8y)

So what is it the Argentines so jealously covet? Hard to say. The Falkland Islands aren't home to much, other than about 3,000 humans, 700,000 sheep, and a few fishing installations. What they do have, however, is an enormous population of penguins from five different species -the Southern Rockhoppers, the Magellanic, the King, the Gentoo, andthe Macaroni. Their names derive from, respectively, the ability to hop on rocks, a celebrated circumnavigator, a British ruler, a religious slur, and a slang reference to flashy dressers. With those five species combined, the Falklands are home to to a penguin army more than 1 million strong. That's pretty impressive, but it's believed the number was closer to 10 million only 300 years ago.

I just learned a lot about sunspots from Dr. Phil Plait. He's quite excited about NASA footage that shows the formation of a cluster of sunspots earlier this year.

Sunspots are actually regions of slightly cooler material at the Sun’s surface. Hot plasma (ionized gas, stripped of one electron or more) rises from the solar interior, reaches the surface, cools off, and sinks back down. This is called convection, and is the same process you see in a pot of boiling water. But at the surface, the tortured and twisted magnetic field of the Sun can suppress convection, preventing the cooler material from sinking. Since the brightness of the plasma depends on the temperature, this cooler stuff is darker. Boom! Sunspot.

Or, in this case, sunspots. You can see five of the suckers here, changing and mutating as the plasma interacts with the magnetic field. I recognize these spots, too: they were responsible for the first X-class flare of the season on March 15th. There’s dramatic footage of that as well which I posted on my blog at the time. They’re busy spots; they blew out a lower energy flare a few days earlier, too.

And here I am calling them cute and little when they’re actually comfortably bigger than the Earth and exploded with the energy equivalent of millions — millions! — of nuclear bombs.

Now I'm excited, too! Watch the video at Bad Astronomy. Link

(Image credit: NASA/SDO)

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Q: How hard is it to get a cat into a bowl?

A: That sounds like a skit for a Japanese variety show!

-via Metafilter

To commemorate the royal wedding next week, UK outlet Brewdog is selling a limited edition run of 1,000 bottles of Royal Virility Performance, a specially brewed beer that contains Viagra!

According to the specially commissioned label, the Royal Virility Performance contains Viagra, chocolate, Horny Goat Weed and ‘a healthy dose of sarcasm’. The beer is a 7.5% ABV India Pale Ale and has been brewed at BrewDog’s brewery in Fraserburgh.

With this beer we want to take the wheels off the royal wedding bandwagon being jumped on by dozens of breweries; The Royal Virility Performance is the perfect antidote to all the hype. A beer should be brewed with a purpose, not just because some toffs are getting married, so we created something at our brewery that will undermine those special edition beers and other assorted seaside tat, whilst at the same time actually give the happy couple something extra on their big day.

One bottle will cost you £10 plus delivery charges; may not be available in your area. Link -via Boing Boing

The PC version of Portal 2 launched today. Obviously, there will be a drop in productivity in all sectors, and no reason to bother holding class. Geoff Pado's professor gave in. Link -via reddit

An Associated Press photographer had snapped a picture of a group of Shelties wandering the streets in Minami Soma city, an area that has been evacuated because of proximity to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Japan. A team called Sheltie Rescue went into action after the picture was published, determined to bring the dogs out of the danger zone.

Through emails and Internet research it was established that the owner of the dogs was a breeder in Minami Soma. The group contacted the Fukushima city branch of the Japan Collie Club, tracked the owner down by phone at a shelter and got her go-ahead to rescue the dogs.

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, seven volunteers left Tokyo and drove over broken roads and past demolished houses to meet three other volunteers in the ghost town that Minami Soma has become. Some had prepared radiation suits and others wore simple vinyl raincoats.

The group found the dogs waiting for their owner. A few ran off, but the group was able to remove twenty dogs from the area. Some of the dogs are being boarded at a veterinary clinic; others at the homes of volunteers. See more pictures at the MSNBC Photoblog. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Tamiko Nakamura/Sheltie Rescue)

Many science fiction scenarios have planets with two or even more stars. How would life evolve differently under such a system?

In a new study, researchers have assessed the potential for photosynthetic life in multi-star systems with different combinations of sunlike stars and red dwarfs to figure out what plants might be like. The team has speculated that on an Earth-like planet with two or three suns, the vegetation may appear black or grey.

"If a planet were found in a system with two or more stars, there would potentially be multiple sources of energy available to drive photosynthesis," said PhD student Jack O'Malley-James from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

"The temperature of a star determines its colour and, hence, the colour of light used for photosynthesis. Depending on the colours of their star-light, plants would evolve very differently."

If a life form evolved to use two different colors of light for energy, the vegetation would appear black to our eyes. They might even develop the ability to use infrared or ultraviolet light that we can't see at all to power photosynthesis. Link -via reddit

Get your thinking caps on -it's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you have any idea what this contraption is? Can you come up with an interesting 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 more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: ladybuggs was the first of many with the correct answer. This is a National Cash Register Stamping Phone, used in bigger department stores. It was for clerks to get approval from "credit specialists" in the back room for customers to charge their purchases. Read more about them here. The funniest answer came from next2exits, who declared that this is a Wisconsin voter polling station. The handset allows the governor to call you and tell you who to vote for.

How well do you keep up with political television? Anna Merlan of mental_floss looked through the public records of FCC complaints and found plenty that concerned Glenn Beck and The Daily Show. In today's Lunchtime Quiz, you are challenged to figure out which TV show each of ten complaints is about. I got 70% right, which is about average. Link

Drawing by Nan Swift, Improbable Research staff.

By Corky White
Professor of Anthropology
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

As a very young caterer in the late 1970s, I learned lessons the hard way every day. I catered for people who knew their food, and so I tried to make things I hoped they’d not yet had, to avoid comparison. Cooking off their grid and mine often meant making dishes for the first time. I took on every challenge knowing I would inevitably curdle or burn or undercook. But taking on a Roman orgy was a whole different kettle of fermented anchovy sauce.

A Harvard University professor, who will remain nameless, asked me to cater a Roman dinner, hereafter known as the Orgy. Considering the money (and not, in my innocence, the potential for blackmail), I took the job. I went to the lowest level—of Harvard’s Widener Library—and found Apicius and other texts giving clues to the foods of the Roman Empire.

Translations to 1970s Cambridge weren’t always easy. Stuffed larks? No problem: frozen quail, stuffed with a parmesan herb stuffing. Anchovies in oil with herbs came straight from Boston’s Little Italy. Nightingales’ tongues? Nowhere in our most exotic butchery were there packets of these. The smallest tongues I could find were from calves. I thought, what would a nightingale’s tongue resemble… little, slippery, wormy…snails! Periwinkles from Chinatown! With a hatpin, I plucked each of the little buggers out of their chambers and stir-fried them with garlic and green herbs. A nightingale sang in Harvard Square, or might have, except I had its tongue.


An 1817 edition of the source of the recipes.

With no orgy cookbook in front of me, I had to use my imagination. Honey cakes seemed to epitomize the evening, and I made them in buttocky shapes drenched in a nut-honey mixture.

I had thought about what to wear as costume, and summoning up dignity, decided to dress as a caterer in my long black apron. I carried the boxes of delicacies through the Doric columns of the host’s Victorian Cambridge home. The neighborhood brings together quite different styles: Olde Englande Colonial and New England clapboard, both decorous to a fault, making the fantasy of an orgy all the more titillating. The house had been swept free of  furniture, the floors laid with oriental carpets and strewn with pillows. Incense wafted from standing brass braziers in which little electric bulbs were hidden. I took the food into the kitchen. Our host said, “Oh, just leave directions for the servers,” and I swore inwardly: surely you’ll let me just watch? At that point, the doorbell rang, and I opened the door on a pair of perfectly matched and fetchingly attired male undergraduates, wearing tiny chitons that barely covered their toned bodies in draped cloth. They even sported Demetrius and the Gladiator sandals, trussed up the legs.

There was a guest list near the door and I caught a peek: they were all male faculty whose names I recognized from the Classics and English departments. I left soon afterwards with instructions to return by noon the next day to pick up my dishes. (Noon? What low expectations he had! Surely orgies go on for days!)

I came back at about 11 the following day, a tad early, expecting (or hoping) to find the floor littered with sated or expired bodies, spilled wine and pieces of clothing. It was disappointingly empty and clean, and our host, clad in monastic old-school pajamas and robe, had a bowl of Cheerios breakfast cereal in his hand.

Was the orgy a bust? Perhaps Cambridge was not ready for deeply researched classical debauchery. Perhaps I neglected to add some crucial ingredient to the nightingales’ tongues. Come on, are Cheerios the tail of the dog in the Playboy Penthouse? Well, there’s no meal you can’t learn something from. Next time I’ll leave out the saltpeter.



A Note About Apicius
De re Coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking) is a Roman cookbook from the late 4th or early 5th century C.E. The author is unknown, though the word “Apicius” which appears to be a made-up name, is associated with the text. The word “Apicius” has come to be associated with a decadent passion for food.

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This article is republished with permission from the May-June 2010 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Connecticut artist Ted Mikulski has a project in which he takes Tweets from various people and posts them in appropriate real-world settings. The result is often a clash between the idealism of our plans and the reality of the places they might take place. Link -Thanks, Liz!