Shannon Wright created this wallpaper design depicting the body's urinary system. Perfect for any bathroom or urology clinic. http://www.shannonwright.org/drawings/wallpapernumberone.html -via LA Weekly -Thanks, Erin Broadley!

Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will test your memory of halftime shows at the Super Bowl over the years. Even if you think you won't do well, the questions will make you say, "Oh yeah! I remember that!" I scored 50%, which is the average so far. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/18818

This is a game I'll have to share with the kids! In stage one, you place bones in the proper spot on the body. In stage two, find those bones by name. Pass those (time counts), and you are challenged to beat each bone with a mallet. I did pretty well! Link -via Everlasting Blort

It's October, time for harvest and Halloween decorating! Some people prefer to paint pumpkins instead of carving them. See pages and pages of wonderful painted pumpkins submitted by readers at Tagyerit Presents. The pumpkins pictured were painted by Janet Lange. Link -via the Presurfer

The Phoenix Mars Lander was expected to work for three months, but has passed the four-month mark. That's fortunate for us, because the lander has observed snow falling in the Martian atmosphere!

Using lidar (analogous to radar, with pulses of laser light standing in for radio waves), Phoenix picked up signs of snow drifting down from clouds some 2.5 miles (four kilometers) overhead. It has not been seen reaching the Martian surface; it appears to vaporize before landfall.

"Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars," James Whiteway of York University in Toronto said in a statement. Whiteway is lead scientist for Phoenix's Meteorological Station (MET), the Canadian Space Agency's contribution to the mission. He added that the MET team will now seek to discover "signs that the snow may even reach the ground."

The Martian winter is approaching, and soon there will be inadequate sunlight to power the lander. Link

The world's first commercial wave farm is operational three miles off the shores of Portugal. The three 140-meter generators were built by British company Pelamis. The "sea snakes" convert the kinetic energy of wave motion into electricity -enough to power 1,000 homes.

Each of semi-submerged Pelamis devices is 142m long, has a diameter of 3.5m and is made from 700 tonnes of carbon steel. A single wave converter is composed of four articulated sections that move up and down as the waves pass along it. At each of the hinges between the sections, hydraulic rams use the wave motion to drive generators to produce up to 750KW of power at peak output.

The electricity generated by the three Pelamis devices will be carried by undersea cable to a substation in Aguçadoura, which will then feed the power into the Portuguese national grid.

The wave farm will eventually add another 25 generators, enough to produce up to 21 megawatts of power, with no CO2 emissions. Link -Thanks, Jee!

The major league baseball playoffs begin today. While you're watching the games, check out the patterns cut into the grass. Red Sox groundskeeper David Mellor is considered the top grass artist in baseball. He has even written a book on the subject: “Picture Perfect: Mowing Techniques for Lawns, Landscapes, and Sports”.

“Mowers have been making patterns since 1830, when the first mowers were built,” Mellor said.

He was an assistant groundskeeper at Milwaukee County Stadium in 1993 when a concert badly damaged the grass in the outfield. With the support of the head groundskeeper Gary Vanden Berg, Mellor mowed a busy pattern to serve as camouflage. The design, not the damage, was all anyone noticed.

“I still think that was the coolest pattern he ever made,” Vanden Berg said.

Mellor found himself with a niche, and others followed. The striping side effect of mowing has been creatively rearranged into pop art. With few exceptions — one is San Francisco’s AT&T Park, where all the grass is usually mowed in a single direction to keep the slate clean and old-fashioned looking — baseball is played atop an increasingly busy backdrop.

Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: J. Gunther/New York Times)

In honor of the company's tenth anniversary, Google has enabled its oldest search engine available, the 2001 version. The results are linked to the Internet Archive cache of the sites as they appeared in 2001. Using this, only 3 results came up for "Neatorama", and they were all adjectives used to describe other sites. There were no results for "Miss Cellania", so you can rest assured I am an original. Link to article. Link to search. -via J-Walk Blog

(YouTube link)
This is Romeo, a Siberian lynx. In this video, he is three months old and nursing on a sheet. Look at the size of those paws!

Impersonating an imperial storm trooper gets a lot more comfortable with a hoodie from Mark Ecko. The front zips up to look like a mask, but I can't tell if you'd be able to see out of it or not. Also available in Bobba Fett style. Link -Thanks, Max!

(YouTube link)

Being a guinea pig for the British government's Common Cold Unit in 1946 was very popular with students. They saw it as a cheap holiday: getting free accommodation in spacious flats fully equipped with books, games, radio and telephone, and spending your leisure time playing table tennis, badminton, or golf. You even got paid three shillings a day.

The students were instructed to maintain a distance of at least 9 metres from all unprotected persons, other than their flatmates. The unpleasant part of the experiment began when the participants had to spend half an hour in a draughty corridor after taking a hot bath, had to wear wet socks for the rest of the day, and were infected with nasal secretion from a cold sufferer.

This was the experiment that contradicted what your mother told you: the common cold is not caused by cold temperatures, but by infection. This is just one of nine of the oddest experiments ever, detailed at New Scientist. The last one is a hoot! Link -via Digg

From the late eighth to the mid-eleventh centuries, Vikings invaded community after community across Europe and even parts of Asia and the western hemisphere. According to a new study published in the current issue of Antiquity, the reason behind all that travel is -a shortage of wives!

An intriguing archaeological clue is that much of the bounty plundered from Britain — particularly from monasteries — wound up later in the graves of Viking wives. The items included precious metals, fine cloth, jewelry and other handicrafts.

Barrett's analysis of Nordic historical records found that Scandinavian men often served as warriors, frequently forming "military brotherhoods," until they were able to marry and establish their own households, which were key to prestige and power.

The Vikings themselves may have caused the shortage, by practicing female infanticide. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: henribergius)

(YouTube link)
Artist John Chiara thinks big. He built his own box camera, and made it as big as a room. Chiara takes it to a location on a trailer and puts it together on site. One benefit is that the camera never wiggles! He must also develop his own film, because the photographs are huge, too. -via the Presurfer

French street artist JR, best known for his technique of photographing inhabitants of an area & pasting the resulting imagery up on grand scale around the community has taken to the favelas of RIO DE JANEIRO in a grand project to honor the residents of one of the world’s biggest slums. The scale of this project never siezes [sic] to amaze me. One day we will plan on doing something of this level.

See more pictures at DNA Imagery. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

I had never heard the argument that the moon orbits the sun, but it does go around the sun as it revolves around the earth. The question, which does it orbit more? Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy Blog lays out the argument and explains.

Turns out, it orbits the Earth, despite these claims. The above claims are true, but are not important in this argument. Instead, you have to look at something called the Hill sphere. Basically, it’s the volume of space around an object where the gravity of that object dominates over the gravity of a more massive but distant object around which the first object orbits.

OK, in English — and more pertinent to this issue — it’s the volume of space around the Earth where the Earth’s gravity is more important than the Sun’s. If something is orbiting the Earth inside Earth’s Hill’s sphere, it’ll be a satellite of the Earth and not the Sun.

The derivation of the math isn’t terribly important here (and it’s on the Wikipedia page if you’re curious), but when you plug in the numbers, you find the Earth’s Hill sphere has a radius of about 1.5 million kilometers. The Moon’s orbital radius of 400,000 km keeps it well within the Earth’s Hill sphere, so there you have it. The Moon orbits the Earth more than it orbits the Sun. In reality it does both, and saying it orbits one and not the other is silly anyway.

Link

(image credit: NASA)