As the economy sputters, everyone's looking for new ways to save on food. So, we've collected a whole bunch of no-budget meal ideas for those of you daring enough to scrimp.

1. Tree Bark

A classic meal of human desperation, tree bark has become a must-have meal during periods of scarcity. But you don't have to eat it al dente the way termites and beavers do. Inhabitants of the Lapland in Finland, for example, are known to make bread with ground tree bark during cruel winter months, and several Native American groups use tree bark as a dietary supplement. In fact, the Adirondack Mountains derive their name from a derisive term for the Algonquin Indians that means "tree eaters".

Not all bark is equally edible, so you'll have to experiment with your neighborhood flora. Some popular favorites include aspen, birch, willow, maple, and pine -trees common in cities and forests alike. So sharpen your teeth and dig in!

How to Prepare

For the choicest strips of bark, be sure to go for the nutritious, tender inner layer known as the cambium. (Eating the outer bark would be no more pleasant than chomping into your bookshelf.) If some resin or gum oozes out as you pry off the main course, be sure to lap it up for quick energy. Here are a few fun ways to serve tree bark:

Raw. Shred finely and chew thoroughly.

Slice it into strips and boil it to make a rustic pasta. Top with sap, dandelion greens, or insect parts (see entry #2). Alternatively, you can add the noodles to a stew.

Dry and grind into flour. The ground bark is pretty versatile and can be mixed with water into a breakfast gruel, baked into bread, added to soup for extra body, or even guzzled straight like a Pixy Stick.

2. Bugs

With more than 10 quintillion of these creepy crawlies infesting the planet, bugs are a virtually limitless source of protein and flavor. Bug eating exists in nearly every culture; in fact, approximately 10 percent of the protein consumed around the world comes from bugs! There are grasshopper tacos, steamed ant eggs, and even fried tarantulas. In the United States, the FDA permits a limited number of insect parts in commercial foods, such as five fly maggots per pound of pizza sauce. While most of our big eating in this country is unintentional, it doesn't have to be.

How to Prepare

In general, avoid brightly colored bugs, which tend to be poisonous, and always be sure to remove any shells, wings, or other textural offenses. Also, cook them before eating to kill off the inevitable parasites. Beyond that, each bug has its own qualities to consider. Here are a few of the more traditional cooking methods.

Crickets and grasshoppers: First, pluck off the barbed legs, because they can chafe your digestive tract. Then, roast the body for a snack that's both crunchy and nutritious.

Ants: Boil for six minutes to neutralize the formic acid of the stingers. After that, inhale them by the handful.

Caterpillars: They can give you a mouthful of tiny hairs, like licking a kiwi, so bite off the heads and then squeeze the insides into a pot. Boil and serve warm.

Worms: The dirt from the insides must be removed before they can be eaten. This can be done by starving them for one day, or squeezing out the dirt by hand.

3. Leather

Transforming your wardrobe into your pantry is simple. Shoes, jackets, and biker pants make meals both fashionable and filling. In fact, in every era, leather has been enjoyed by the starving masses. Indomitable explorers, stranded pirates, famine-stricken peasants, and even emaciated prisoners have downed a shoe or two. Just two years ago, when Chinese miners in Beijing were trapped underground for nearly a week, they survived on nothing but pieces of paper and a leather belt.

How to Prepare

Before cooking, rinse and dice the (preferably undyed) leather, then pound the pieces between stones to tenderize. For a satisfying soup, you can boil the leather until relatively tender, then add seasonings such as dried worms and nettles. Leather can also be chopped up and roasted to make nutritious chips. And remember to drink plenty of water; leather's generally as dry as a bone.

4. Dirt

No matter how bad the economy gets, there will always be enough dirt to go around. Soil can provide essential minerals. Think of it as a no-budget replacement for your expensive multivitamin supplements. In fact, dirt eating, known as geophagy, is so prevalent in some parts of the world that scientists and anthropologists think that nutritional deficits may bring on the craving. Even in the modern United States, reports persist that poor and rural Southerners still indulge in select soils by the spoonful, a custom that may have been brought over from West Africa.

How to Prepare

The secret to good dirt eating is simply to choose wisely. Soil that is rich in clay tastes the best, and it can be enhanced by adding salt and vinegar. When you find a good source, save some in a plastic bag so you can snack on it all day long. Of course, if you're looking to enjoy the original mud pie, garnishing the meal with a few worms never hurts.

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The No-Budget Diner's Guide was written by David Clark and appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today for more!

Ransom Riggs collects old snapshots, and particularly likes pictures on which someone has written something personal.

One thing I’ve found a lot of is photos where people have written deprecating things — usually about themselves — on the back. “I look so fat here!” is a shockingly common theme; I guess people were as concerned with their weight (and as self-conscious about pictures of themselves) fifty and sixty years ago as they are today. I want to share some of these with you, not so much to laugh at (although they are funny) but to demonstrate how little our attitudes about ourselves have changed over the years.

In case you can't read it, the note on this picture says, "I’m not as fat as I look here, it’s the terrycloth pajamas over my bathing skirt plus wind." See lots more pictures at mental_floss. Link

The Twilight Zone was more than just a science fiction television show. It was theater that made you think, a showcase for Rod Serling's vision for television, and it was a proving ground for talented but relatively unknown actors, like William Shatner.

The Twilight Zone featured some of Hollywood’s most famous faces… or at least faces that would eventually become famous. Looking back at the original series and seeing such star power, most of whom were just budding actors and actresses at the time, is actually quite interesting. Many of these celebrities may not be familiar to younger readers. However, others should certainly be easily recognizable. One such celeb was William Shatner (a man synonymous with sci-fi) who six years prior to “boldly going where no man had gone before” appeared as a newlywed obsessed with a small diner’s spooky fortune-telling machine.

Shatner, as we all know, went on to star in another classic Twilight Zone episode entitled Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, where he played a man slowly driven insane by a creature only he was able to see prancing about on the wing of his plane.

Read about more Twilight Zone actors who went on to stardom afterward, and other reasons that made The Twilight Zone a masterpiece. Link

I can talk pretty fast, but years of producing radio ads taught me that if you talk faster than people can listen, you may as well shut up. Still, there are some fast-talkers we love to listen to even if we can't follow what they are saying. Take a look at a few of these on video and marvel at the rate of words coming out. For example, New Yorker Fran Capo once blurted out 603 words in 54 seconds, which broke her own world record as the fastest-talking woman ever! Link -via the Presurfer

There are happy dogs that expect a good thing to happen, and then there are others who seem to have a case of the gloomies. Dogs can be classified as optimists or pessimists the same as humans, according to research from a team led by Michael Mendl.

Mendl, who is head of the Animal Welfare and Behavior research group at Bristol University's School of Clinical Veterinary Science, and his team came to this conclusion after putting 24 male and female dogs, representing different ages, through a few tests.

For the first test, each dog was taken to a room where a researcher interacted with it for 20 minutes. The next day, the researcher did the same thing, but left after just five minutes of interaction. The scientists documented how the dog, when left alone, acted. Some dogs, for example, happily awaited the person's return, while others barked and became anxious.

Next, the researchers trained the dogs to understand that a bowl on one side of a room was full of yummy food, while a bowl on the other side was empty. The researchers then placed bowls at ambiguous places and observed how quickly the dogs would go to the bowls.

"Dogs that ran fast to these ambiguous locations, as if expecting the positive food reward, were classed as making relatively optimistic decisions," explained Mendl. "Interestingly, these dogs tended to be the ones who also showed least anxiety-like behavior when left alone for a short time."

Pessimistic dogs are more likely to be destructive and display other behavior problems. Link -via J-Walk Blog

One of our favorite characters from Star Trek had a face that changed every episode. Here are five fun facts about Red Shirts.

  1. In the original Star Trek TV series, wearing a uniform with a red shirt meant that someone was in operations, which included the security department (gold or green meant command, and blue was worn by the science department). It made sense to take an extra security person on an expedition to a new planet. The landing party would consist of the show's stars, plus one unknown in a red shirt. This unknown security guard is often killed immediately after beaming down to the planet of the week, which conveniently displays how dangerous the residents of the planet are, and what strange powers they have. This device was used so often that the term "Red Shirt" came to signify an obviously expendable character who will die early in the show. 

2. Did red shirts died more often than characters wearing other colors, or did it just seem that way? After all, Captain Kirk had a reputation for finding a girl in every episode, but an analysis of episodes show only seven romances in 79 episodes. Matt Bailey compiled statistics on deaths among the Enterprise crew in Star Trek: TOS. He found that 73% of those who died were wearing red shirts, compared to 10% for yellow shirts and 8% for blue shirts (the rest were wearing other uniforms). The majority of red shirt deaths happened on an alien planet. The trope was not our imagination, however the "red" part may have escaped the notice of many who didn't have color TVs in the mid-'60s.

3. Mythbusters once dressed their crash test dummy Buster in a red shirt when they tested the Gorn Cannon myth, which was based on a Star Trek episode. You can see the destruction in this video.

4. The episode of Star Trek: TOS that had the most red shirt deaths was Where no Man has Gone Before, in which twelve red shirts kicked the bucket. In second place was The Changeling, which saw six red shirt deaths.

5. Forget the debate about whether Star Trek or Star Wars is a better science fiction universe- the real conundrum is among the minor characters. You know red shirts are always killed. You also know that Storm Troopers shoot and shoot and can't hit anything. If the two groups were to meet, we would have The Redshirt v. Stormtrooper Paradox. The question feeds many forum threads to this day.

(YouTube link)

Imagine landing at the airport and finding that hungry rabbits have eaten your car. Well, not the entire car, just the parts that make it run. That's happening more and more at the Denver International Airport.

A vacationer returned after a nine day holiday only to find that his brand new VW Jetta would hardly crank. When he got it started he sought the help of the dealer, as anyone would, knowing that it is covered under the bumper to bumper warranty.

The service representative quizzed the owner if he had just picked up the Jetta from DIA and the gentleman responded, “Well as a matter of fact I did.” The culprit, according to the dealer, are rabbits who have combined exercise and a healthy diet to ensure against early onset cardio vascular disease.

The bunnies are feasting on rubber coated wires and other delicacies that may be infused with soy oil during the manufacturing process.

In the case of the VW Jetta, the warranty does not cover damage caused by hungry rabbits. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Flickr users Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis)

(YouTube link)

The folks at Improv Everywhere used 3,000 participants for their latest mission. Each had an MP3 player that received simultaneous instructions (and music). That had to appear really strange to anyone not in on the plan! It all culminated in a flashmob at Bryant Park. Link -via The Daily What

It's time for another puzzle, in collaboration with Conceptis Puzzles! Every Tuesday, we'll be offering a different logic puzzle, today featuring a 9x9 sudoku puzzle. Please give us some feedback on the new feature- we'd love to hear if you found it too easy, too hard, or what you think about Neato-Puzzles. Ready? Click here to play!

(YouTube link)

Synesthesia is when stimuli from one sense is perceived as sensation from a different sense, as in tasting colors and smelling music. Terri Timely created this video to illustrate the concept. -via DocPop

You probably haven't heard the song in at least nine months, so this is a good time to test your memory of the song "The 12 Days of Christmas." Can you name all the gifts mentioned in the song? You have five minutes to complete the task. It took me a whole 58 seconds to type them all, because I don't type well. Link

A goose in Wausau, Wisconsin escaped becoming dinner when the man who was chasing him had to be rescued from the Wisconsin River.

Troy Kaczor, 40, told police he shed his shirt and shoes at Big Bull Falls Park in downtown Wausau before he dove into the river, intending to catch the one-legged bird and then roast it, Wausau Police Lt. Bill Kolb said.

Kaczor, who had been drinking heavily before taking the plunge, was unable to escape the clutches of the cold water and was rescued by Wausau firefighters, Kolb said.

The goose, apparently sober and a better swimmer, came to no harm, but was unavailable for comment. Link -via Arbroath

(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user Nita W)

(Image credit: Flickr user racineur)

A previously unacknowledged plant family of significant economic importance plants has been flourishing around us for many years. The fact that this immense and diverse family has been heretofore ignored by most botanists is astonishing—its members are found worldwide in nearly every society. This family is more than a botanical curiosity. It is a scientific conundrum, as the taxa:

1. lack genetic material,


2. appear virtually immortal and


3. have the ability to form intergeneric crosses with ease, despite the lack of any evident mechanism for cross-fertilization.

In this study, conducted over approximately six years, we elucidate the first full description and review of this fascinating taxon, heretofore named Simulacraceae. The distribution, ecology, taxonomy, ethnobotany and chemistry of this widespread family are herein presented. We have identified more than 80 species, and determined that this cosmopolitan family has a varied ecology. This report delineates seventeen genera (Calciumcarbonatia, Celadonica, Conglomeratium, Dentumadhesivium, Ductusadhesivia, Granitus, Lignus, Metallicus, Papyroidia, Paraffinius, Photophyta, Plasticus, Polystyrin, Prophylactica, Simulacra, Silicus and Textileria).

Figure 1. Performing a species inventory in the Simulacraceae hotspot of the Rainforest Café, Palisades Center, Nyack, New York.

Methods

We used opportunistic sampling as our principal method for the study of the simulacraceae. We first became acutely interested in the simulacraceae during the 2000 Society for Economic Botany (SEB) annual meeting, when we began pondering the identities of ornamental arrangements. At the 2001 SEB meeting in Honolulu, Hawai’i, our interest was piqued by the species diversity evidenced in the culturally important lei (a Hawai’ian traditional garland of flowers, usually worn around the neck). Since then, we have been collecting simulacraceae whenever we stumble upon them. Family, friends and colleagues have contributed to this effort.

Street artist Banksy visited New Orleans in 2008, decorating various buildings with his distinctive paintings. He encountered an enemy who became known as the Gray Ghost.

Fred Radtke made it his mission to erase every bit of graffiti in the city long before Banksy’s arrival, sweeping down the street with his paint roller in hand. The anti-street-art crusader passed quietly through each neighborhood, obliterating all traces of spray paint with his own signature splotches of gray – hence his nickname. Some locals celebrated his dedication to keeping New Orleans clean, while others decried his assault against free expression.

The Gray Ghost upset some property owners because an original Banksy work increases the value of a building considerably. Banksy responded by incorporating the Gray Ghost in some of his works. The battle with the Gray Ghost eventually came to an end in court, but today only one original Banksy image remains in New Orleans. Link -via Rue the Day

A two-year-old boy is fascinated with outer space and all it contains. And he knows more about it than most adults! Watch this cute video submitted to a contest which asked people how scientific discovery impacted their lives, at NeatoBambino. Link