(College Humor link)

 

What if all our favorite pop culture vampires got together in the same room? Pretty much what you'd expect.

Perfect for Halloween, this dish is a regular meatloaf made into the shape of a hand! Not Martha has the instructions for several different versions, depending on how badly you want to creep out your dinner guests. Link -via reddit

The Haunted Mansion attraction at Walt Disney World features tombstones inscribed with the names of real people. This series of posts called 13 Tombstones tracks down who those people are -mostly Disney employees whose names are now enshrined in the parks for posterity. Link -via Boing Boing

A church group staged a murder mystery dinner theater in Yeovil, England on Saturday night. They spent the evening looking for crime clues, but failed to notice that thieves had taken a large TV, laptop computer and the contents of a safe the night before. Elim Pentecostal Church was the victim of a break-in that went unnoticed until Sunday, despite the crime-solving party. The crime was finally noticed by Reverend Howard Davenport, whose car had been vandalized at the church earlier in the week.

Revd Howard Davenport said: “In situations like this you have to laugh really!

"We were obviously disappointed that the church had been targeted twice in a week, but when I heard that it hadn’t even been noticed I had to smile.

"You’d have thought that eight wannabe detectives might have noticed a real crime a few metres from them only hours earlier!”

Link -via Arbroath

The 7th Annual Asana Yoga Competition was recently held in New York. New York Magazine has a glimpse at the extreme poses competitors used to impress the judges. Link -via Buzzfeed

Why is it called The Hague instead of just Hague? New York City has Manhattan and The Bronx. Why not The Manhattan? Or just Bronx? And when did The Ukraine become plain Ukraine? It turns out that place names with definite articles all have a different story to explain the name, and different languages have their own peculiar rules and exceptions for naming places.

Those who live in The Hague never stopped using an old-fashioned name that described the place according to its medieval use. We get the official name Den Haag from Des Graven Hage, which means "the counts' hedge" and refers to the fact that Dutch noblemen once used the land for hunting.

Link

A reader sent this picture to Curious Expeditions, asking if they knew where it was taken. The biggest clue is the building in the background with its distinctive architecture. Can you identify the building or the setting? Link

The way to get more mileage out of a monster is to make him/her the hero. It's been done quite a few times, sometimes resulting in more confusion than entertainment.

We'd love to say that we can't blame Dell Comics for trying to cash in on the Batmania of the 1960s by turning Dracula into a superhero, but... Well, it's Dracula as a superhero. Even worse, it's a modern-day Count Dracula as a scientist who accidentally swallows some formula that allows him to transform into a bat and then decides to fight crime in a purple jumpsuit. Seriously, in what world is that a good idea?

I thought for sure this list would include Godzilla and The Terminator, but it is limited to classic Halloween-type horror monsters. Link -via Digg

Looks like Boston Dynamics, the robot company that brought us BigDog and RHex, has worked out how to make a robot walk like a man. This is PETMAN, a robot that is supposed to serve humans. Currently it is used to test chemical warfare suits for the military. Link (with embedded YouTube clip)

There has never been a documented case of cancer found in a Naked Mole Rat, which is unusual as they can live to be 30 years old. Now biologists at the Unversity of Rochester believe they have found the reason.

The findings, presented in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells "claustrophobic," stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.

"We think we've found the reason these mole rats don't get cancer, and it's a bit of a surprise," say Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov, professors of biology at the University of Rochester and lead investigators on the discovery. "It's very early to speculate about the implications, but if the effect of p16 can be simulated in humans we might have a way to halt cancer before it starts."

Further research might reveal whether the findings will be applicable to humans. Link -via reddit

Less is more with this Christmas nativity set by artist Oliver Fabel, available in German and in English. Link -via Swiss Miss

A 10-foot Great White Shark had been hooked already by a baited drum line off the coast of Queensland, Australia when it was attacked and bitten by a much bigger fish. Based on the bite marks, the attacker is presumed to be a 20-foot long Great White shark. Swimmers were warned away from the area of Stradbroke Island.

"That cannibal thing is what great whites do; they'll eat anything, including their own kind," Hugh Edwards, a local shark expert, told Australia's 7 News. "It would be sensible not to swim in that area for a little while."

Link -via Dave Barry's Blog

This is called anthropomorphic taxidermy art. It is a real squirrel dressed as Queen Victoria mounted in a shadow box perfect for hanging on your wall. Crafted by Etsy seller lovedtodeath, this could be yours for only $495.00. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Artist Nakisha Elsje VanderHoeven paints animals, most often rabbits. Her latest project is The Rabbit Tarot, consisting of 78 images of the classic cards featuring bunnies. She sells decks of them in her Etsy shop, along with a Tarot book and other Rabbbit Tarot merchandise. Link -via Metafilter

On October 26th, 1977, a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin was diagnosed with smallpox. What makes this so remarkable is that no naturally-occurring cases of smallpox have been diagnosed in the 32 years since.

The global eradication of smallpox was certified, based on intense verification activities in countries, by a commission of eminent scientists on 9 December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980[10][48] as Resolution WHA33.3. The first two sentences of the resolution read: "Having considered the development and results of the global program on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967 … Declares solemnly that the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America."[49]

Smallpox once killed millions of people every year, and may have been responsible for up to 500 million deaths in the 20th century. National vaccination programs began in the early 1800s, but it was a global push by the World Health Organization begun in 1958 that finally led to the eradication of the disease worldwide. Link -via Bad Astronomy Blog

(image credit: CDC)