Two couples from Norfolk, England got married in a double wedding dressed as characters from the TV show The Flintstones!

Andrea and Simon Bean, aka Fred and Wilma Flinstone, and Richard and Jill Noble, aka Barney and Betty Rubble, celebrated their double wedding at Weston Park Golf Club on Saturday by taking a quick trip to the next door dinosaur park for some spectacular wedding photographs sure to raise eyebrows on any mantelpiece.

With 165 guests dressed as cavemen and women, two best men dressed as dinosaurs, and a spectacular tiered wedding rock cake, both Wilma and Betty entered the ceremony to the traditional organ sound of Wagner's Bridal March.

However, this was quickly replaced by an organ version of The Flintstones theme tune.

All of the participants had been married before and felt no need for a tradition wedding. In lieu of gifts, the couples received donations for the Children's Liver Disease Foundation. http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=ENOnline&category=News&tBrand=ENOnline&tCategory=news&itemid=NOED23%20Aug%202009%2016%3A07%3A34%3A170 -via Arbroath

(image credit: James Bass)

Some animals have been bred in space, but not mammals. Japanese researchers are looking into the possibility, and doing experiments with mice on earth that mimic lower gravity space conditions.

To test these effects, the researchers artificially fertilized mouse eggs with sperm that had been stored inside a three-dimensional clinostat, a machine that mimics weightlessness by rotating objects in such a way that the effects of gravity are spread in every direction.

Fertilization took place normally, suggesting that microgravity hadn’t harmed the sperm. But as the embryos continued to develop inside the clinostat, many developed problems. Their cells had trouble dividing and maturing.

There were some baby mice produced after the embryos were implanted, but not many survived compared to a control group. Link -via Digg

David Austin made a chainmail chessboard in 2001, and a few years later completed the chess pieces to go with it, also out of chainmail. The result is a game fit for a medieval king! Link -via Unique Daily

You may think you have a difficult, greedy, egotistical boss, but you haven’t met anyone like the boss who locked his employees inside a factory, or the boss who paid in script only redeemable at his stores, or the one who made his employees analyze animal poop. Then there was Bryant and May who decided to save money on the material they made matches from.

They had a better idea. They had been making their matches with the extremely flammable but otherwise safe red phosphorous. But there was this other kind, white phosphorous, that was way cheaper. And there was absolutely no downside.

Oh, except it would literally eat your face off when you handled it.

The description of what happened to the employees may make you queasy. Read about all six horrific bosses at Cracked. Link

Now you can make your own keyboard cat that plays his own little papercraft keyboard when you crank the handle! TubbyPaws has a pattern and a cute video tutorial. Link -via Metafilter

Have you ever wondered where comic books writers get their ideas for super heroes? In this t-shirt by Chop Shop, they are named after Photoshop effects! The results are at least as believable as anything DC or Marvel has. Link -via Laughing Squid

The percentage of new pharmaceutical products that fail their effectiveness trials is growing. The culprit is the placebo effect, which appears to be stronger than in years past. If a drug cannot provide relief significantly better than a sugar pill, it won’t go on the market.

The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn's disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an "unusually high" response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests.

Wired takes a look at how the placebo effect works, and the various reasons newer drugs don’t compete as well with the mind’s ability to affect our bodies. Link -via Boing Boing

Previously at Neatorama: Prozac: No Better Than Placebo?

Kaitlin at Whisk Kid made this cake as a treat for the eye as well as the palate! The recipe is posted with the warning that you will need more frosting than you think. Link -via Digg

Attaining the status of Eagle Scout is a noteworthy achievement, and is often an early sign that a man is going places with his life. Do you recall which high-achievers were Eagle Scouts when they were young? That’s the subject of today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I scored seven out of twelve. Surely you can do better! http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/32508

Super Tremendous has a collection of ten videos that will make you giggle. There are people who sound like machinery, cartoon characters, or just plain weird when they let their hair down and laugh. Of course, "Dad at Comedy Barn" (previously at Neatorama) is included, but he is only ranked at number two. Link

Many folks built small bomb shelters to survive a nuclear attack during the Cold War, but others took the idea to great lengths. Good Magazine has a pictorial taken from the book Waiting for the End of the World by Richard Ross, in which you’ll see the interiors of shelters meant to house people waiting out the apocalypse. From Switzerland to Texas, you’ll see how people prepare for the end of the world as we know it. The underground dining room shown is in Sanpete Country, Utah. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

You can probably guess the number one, and maybe number two daredevils of the past and present, but have you heard about the 63-year-old woman who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel?

63-year-old Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to successfully go over Niagara Falls in 1901, when she took the plunge inside a wooden barrel. A schoolteacher by trade, Taylor had found herself in financial trouble, and conceived the stunt in the hope that it would gain her fame and fortune. She had a specially designed barrel filled with padding, and after testing it with an ordinary house cat, went over the Horseshoe Falls section of Niagara herself on October 24, 1901. Amazingly, she survived the 173-foot plunge with little more than a small gash on her head.

You can see videos of some of the more recent daredevils in this list. Link

Lucky is a turtle living in Petaluma, California. On July 31st, Lucky was attacked by what his owner Sally Pyne believes was a raccoon. A veterinarian amputated what was left of Lucky’s front legs. But Lucky can walk again, since the vet put stacked plastic chair sliders under the front of his shell, allowing his back legs to push him along without catching his shell against the ground. Link (with video) -via Buzzfeed

Scientists found the fossil of an ancient squid of the species Belemnotheutis antiquus at a dig near Trowbridge, England, when they reopened an archaeological site that had been abandoned for 170 years. Inside there was a one-inch black ink sac that still contained ink granules. As an experiment, researchers ground up a small portion of the ink and dissolved it in an ammonia solution. Then they used the sample to draw a picture of what the squid may have once looked like! Excavation leader Dr. Phil Wilby said,

"It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimension, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old.

"The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it. I suppose we could theoretically use it for food colouring, too, but I don't think I will try tasting it."

A sample of the ink has been sent to Yale University for further analysis. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: BMPS)

When you see a town like Tightwad, Missouri, you have to wonder how that ever came about.

This small town got its name from an incident in which a store owner cheated a postal worker by charging him an extra fifty cents for a better watermelon. Certainly they are much more hospitable these days, though it appears they all are still pretty tight with their money: none of the families counted in the 2006 census were living below the poverty line. And most of them keep their money in the Tightwad Bank.

Read about twenty other strangely-named places and the stories behind them. Link -via J-Walk Blog