Volkswagen's new microcar will seat two people and get a stunning 235 miles per gallon!

Volkswagen's had its super-thrifty One-Liter Car concept vehicle -- so named because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers -- stashed away for six years. The body's made of carbon fiber to minimize weight (the entire car weighs just 660 pounds) and company execs didn't expect the material to become cheap enough to produce the car until 2012.

But VW's decided to build the car two years ahead of schedule.

A limited number of cars will be produced in 2010. The car will use a two-cylinder diesel hybrid engine, and will automatically shut off at stoplights -and (we hope) automatically restart when you hit the gas pedal. http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/07/laugh-at-high-g.html -via the Presurfer

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A Star Wars nerd opens a gym for like-minded individuals. Just when you start to think this is too long, unexpected events make it something very different. -via Metafilter

Calorie Lab's Fattest States rankings for 2008 are out, and Mississippi is number one for the third year in a row. Colorado has the smallest percentage of obese people.

West Virginia passed Alabama to become the second fattest state in 2008. The four states of Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana have obese populations that exceed 30 percent over a three-year average and two-thirds of the citizens of Mississippi and West Virginia were either overweight or obese by CDC standards in 2007.

Link -via Digg

Excavations at Ferry Farm in Virginia have turned up the foundation of George Washington's boyhood home. Half a million artifacts have been uncovered and are being studied for clues about Washington's early life.

"When you look at the normal biographies of Washington, they start when he's 23," said David Muraca, who oversaw the excavation as director of archaeology at the George Washington Foundation, which owns Ferry Farm.

"This piece of the story is very difficult for historians to get their hands around," he said. "This dig will let us start our stories much earlier."

Washington first lived in the house at Ferry Farm in 1738, when he was six years old. After seven years of work, the team has identified the floor plan, despite the fact that stones were recycled when the home was altered and remodeled over time. Link

(image credit: L.H.Barker (c) 2008.  All rights reserved.)

Many of the Muppet characters were inspired by real people or other fictional characters. Some Muppets changed over time as they became viewer favorites. Read the stories behind ten of them at mental_floss. Link

Worth1000 challenged Photoshop users to hide an elephant! Some of the entries are ingenious. http://www.worth1000.com/contest.asp?contest_id=19677&display=photoshop#entries -via Geek Like Me

Satellites take pictures of the earth for mapping, weather, science, and security. Art is a low priority when you've spend this much money to launch the camera! But the earth is a beautiful place, and the pictures sometimes are works of art. See Environmental Graffiti's 30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth.

The images you see below were taken at the turn of the Millennium, when NASA’s scientists had a brilliant idea: to scan through 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite and display only the most the most beautiful. A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.

Pictured are underwater sand dunes in the Bahamas. Link -Thanks, Tom!

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Bobba Fett does Flashdance. A film by Patrick Boivin. (via YesButNoButYes)

Shahar Peleg designed this Tic Tac Toe game played on a a mirror. The Xs and Os are only half a letter, but seem whole when placed on the mirror board. It makes a way-too-simple game seem almost cool! Link -via Unique Daily

The lollipops are shaped like the head of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, and they taste like cola! He would be rolling in his grave if he were in a grave instead of on display in Moscow. Link -via Ectoplasmosis

The USA's Independence Day holiday is Friday, but most people refer to it as The Fourth of July, or just The Fourth. None of the questions on today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss have to do with the holiday, but they all have to do with something that is the fourth. I scored 50% because I knew half the answers, but all my wild guesses were wrong. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/16201

Kurt Vonnegut's new book Armageddon in Retrospect is about war and peace. Included is a letter he wrote to his family in 1945 explaining the late author's stint as a POW in Dresden. His experiences became the basis of the book Slaughterhouse Five.

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me.

After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.

When General Patton took Leipzig we were evacuated on foot to Hellexisdorf on the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. There we remained until the war ended. Our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P39's) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen. But not me.

Read the entire letter at Newsweek. Link -via Grow-A-Brain

Years of copper mining left behind a toxic waste pit near Butte, Montana that is so massive the EPA's Superfund is relying on containment instead of cleanup. It was thought that nothing could live in that water -even migrating birds on a short stopover died by the hundreds! But in 1995, a chemist spotted clumps of green slime growing in the pit.

After examining the slime under a microscope, the researchers identified it as Euglena mutabilis, a protozoan which has the remarkable ability of being able to survive in the toxic waters of the Berkeley Pit by altering its local environment to something more hospitable. Through photosynthesis, it increases the oxygen level in the water, which causes dissolved metals to oxidize and precipitate out. In addition, it pulls iron out of the water and sequesters it inside of itself. This makes it a classic example of an extremophile. Extremophiles are organisms that can tolerate and even thrive in environments that will destroy most other living things. Some can even repair their own damaged DNA, a trait which makes them extremely interesting to cancer researchers.

Eventually, over 160 species of extremophiles were found in the pit -many never seen anywhere else before! These microbes may be able to clean up toxic waste and possibly even cure cancer. Read the story at Damn Interesting. Link

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The latest from filmmaker Lasse Gjertsen (featured many times on Neatorama) is a short animation featuring a friendly game of Rock, Paper, Scissors... and other things. Contains brief cartoon nudity.

Imagine coming home from work to your new home and finding everything gone!

Bobo and Joy Dickson bought a house had been headed for foreclosure, but JPMorgan Chase apparently didn't get the message that the former owners had moved out and the new owners were in residence. So, naturally, they hired a firm to drill the Dickson's locks and take everything they owned, including their food. Now JPMorgan Chase is "taking it seriously."

The prosecutor's office declined to press charges against the reclamation firm, Field Asset Services Inc. saying there was no criminal intent. The Dicksons have filed suit against JPMorgan Chase. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Deborah Cannon/AMERICAN-STATESMAN)