This photo from 1956 shows Henry Behrens, the smallest man in the world at the time, dancing with his pet cat. Henry Behrens was only 30 inches tall. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Harry Kerr/BIPs/Getty Images)

Victor Gonzalez of Oregon City had a really bad day on Friday. He found out he had lost his job as an emergency department social worker. Then he went home to find his house on fire! Gonzalez's 12-year-old daughter Audriana helped to get her sister and cousin out of the house, then called 911. Firefighters got the blaze under control in 30 minutes. Gonzalez looked at the bright side.

"If I hadn’t gotten fired from work, I wouldn’t have come home, and I don’t know how far the fire would’ve gotten. So I guess that’s a good thing," he said.

http://www.kptv.com/news/19276320/detail.html -via Unique Daily

The fictional TV doctor Doogie Howser Kept short entries in his journal that resemble Twitter updates. In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, can you identify which blurbs are from the show Doogie Howser, MD and which are actual Tweets? I couldn't confidently peg any of them! http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/24977

When Christine England married Keith Green of Barnstaple, Devon, England, she took her new name as Mrs. Green seriously -they took their vows dressed as Shrek and Fiona from the Dreamworks movie Shrek! Their 100 wedding guests were also in fantasy costumes.

'It was funny because when we said our vows Keith had these green ears sprouting from the top of his head.'

She tried to get her 18-year-old son to dress up as Donkey, another character from the offbeat cartoon fairytale, but said 'he wasn't having any of it'.

Mr Green, a builder - who doesn't seem to mind being likened to an ogre - added: 'It was a very strange experience to say the least, but a thoroughly enjoyable one. We love the films and my wife tells me I bear a resemblance to Shrek.'

The couple hired a make-up artist to make them look like the characters - voiced by Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz - in the hit films.

Christine's mother Annette England, 66, said: 'It's not necessarily how you imagine seeing your daughter get married but it was great fun.'

Link -via Unique Daily

Howie Woo crochets "creations inspired by life's fun oddities". Like this bundle of dynamite. Then he made a photo essay of the process of blowing it up! Link -via Everlasting Blort

(YouTube link)
Maru, the curious but easygoing cat who entertains us with a box or a bag finally has a box that is worthy of him. -via Buzzfeed

Researchers gave a questionnaire to college students, in which they are given a scenario and asked to rate how immoral the situation is. Some students just answered the questions. Others had to do it with a secret fart canister nearby! The results? The students who had to smell farts rated scenarios as immoral more often.

The combined ratings were significantly lower -- more immoral -- when the survey was conducted in the presence of fart smell. Schnall's team says that this demonstrates that our moral judgment is affected by disgust: we're harsher in our moral judgments when we're disgusted (a post-test confirmed that those who smelled the fart spray were significantly more disgusted than the others). Interestingly, the quantity of fart spray didn't matter: despite the fact that everyone agreed that more fart spray smelled worse, the moral judgments weren't different depending on how much spray was used.

Warning: Some examples from the questionnaire may be disturbing. Link

Imagine the reaction when people see you taking a sip from a urine specimen container! Formula P and Blood Sample are sour candy liquids packaged in specimen bottles. Guess which one is lemon and which is cherry. Link -via Unique Daily

The world’s first transgenic dogs are a litter of four cloned beagles that glow red under ultraviolet light. The puppies were cloned by a team led by scientists at Seoul National University in South Korea. They used a virus to infect canine fibroblast cells with the glowing gene, then cloned cells to produce 344 embryos implanted into 20 dogs, producing seven pregnancies.

A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.

Lee and stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang were part of a team that created the first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005. Much of Hwang's work on human cells turned out to be fraudulent, but Snuppy was not, an investigation later concluded.

This new proof-of-principle experiment should open the door for transgenic dog models of human disease, says team member CheMyong Ko of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "The next step for us is to generate a true disease model," he says.

Link -via Buzzfeed

See also: Fluorescent cats, fish, pigs, and rabbits.

Today is the 445th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. In honor of this occasion, today is Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Here are some ways to do it:

1. Instead of you, say thou. Instead of y’all, say thee.
2. Rhymed couplets are all the rage.
3. Men are Sirrah, ladies are Mistress, and your friends are all called Cousin.
4. Instead of cursing, try calling your tormenters jackanapes or canker-blossoms or poisonous bunch-back’d toads.
5. Don’t waste time saying "it," just use the letter "t" (’tis, t’will, I’ll do’t).
6. Verse for lovers, prose for ruffians, songs for clowns.
7. When in doubt, add the letters "eth" to the end of verbs (he runneth, he trippeth, he falleth).
8. To add weight to your opinions, try starting them with methinks, mayhaps, in sooth or wherefore.
9. When wooing ladies: try comparing her to a summer’s day. If that fails, say "Get thee to a nunnery!"
10. When wooing lads: try dressing up like a man. If that fails, throw him in the Tower, banish his friends and claim the throne.

Forsooth, 'tis a pity methinks, if no one deigns to understandeth me. Link -via the Presurfer

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has quite a few neat things you can do with magnets. Some are really artful, some are great for teaching purposes, and here's one I'll definitely use sometime:

Find studs in your walls

Move a magnet over the wall until it finds a screw or nail head under the paint. You don't even need to mark the wall-- you can just leave the magnet there until you've drilled your holes.

Link

The actors who played characters in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation have names that are sometimes more difficult to spell than the alien characters they played. In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are asked to correctly spell eight actor's names. I scored 100% because I'm such a nerd. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/24858

Environmental Graffiti is taking Earth Day literally with a roundup of artful and over-the-top world globes, including two made of chocolate! Shown is the walk-in Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. Link -via Digg

The Big Picture Blog from the Boston Globe has pictures from NASA sent back by the Cassini spacecraft as it passed Saturn and its moons. Cassini has been functioning in space for almost five years now, and the pictures are awesome!

Cassini looks toward Rhea's cratered, icy landscape with the dark line of Saturn's ringplane and the planet's murky atmosphere as a background. Rhea is Saturn's second-largest moon, at 1,528 km (949 mi) across. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired on July 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million km (770,000 mi) from Rhea.

Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI)

See also: Saturn's Newest Moon

For the person who has everything, here's SmartFaucet. Besides the features you've actually heard of in a faucet, it has a face recognition system so it can adjust heat and flow to your individual preferences. And it has a touchscreen display on which you can check your email! I think I will pass -I'm so old-fashioned that I prefer my water without electricity. Link -via J-Walk Blog