It is once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: The very first comment had the correct answer! UnderpantsGnome knew this object as a spring winder for making conical bedsprings. The award for the funniest answer goes to lonewolfe13, who gave us this gem:

It is obviously for making giant spaghetti balls. First you take your pot of pasta and you tilt it sideways so you can get the tip if the spiral cone into the pasta. Then a friend of yours would spin the crank until you have a flying spaghetti monster worthy dinner.

Both win T-shirts from the NeatoShop. Congratulations, guys!

NASA scientists collected images from the Hubble space telescope and other sources and knitted them together to give us a visual representation of all the known galaxies in the universe, from the perspective of our tiny little spot. Cosmic. Link

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YouTube member Sp0ntanius performs the "Song of Healing" from the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Not only does he play all the parts on wine glasses well, but as you watch the video, weird things start to happen! -via The Daily What

Did you ever own a Magic 8-Ball? Inside the ball, there's a 20-sided die called an icosahedron that displayed one of 20 answers to your questions when it floated into the window. "Yes" is a given, but how many of the other 19 possible answers can you name in ten minutes without pulling your 8-Ball out of the closet? That's the challenge of today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I never owned one, so when I tried the quiz, my first dozen guesses were wrong and I gave up! Link

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Carole Anne and Ron caught video of some penguins wandering about in the Falkland Islands. These two seem to have a small conundrum.

Penguin: Ooh, look, the ground is gone here!
Penguin: It's water.
Penguin: But not deep enough to swim in.
Penguin: What will we ever do?
Penguin: I'll have to think about that a bit.
Penguin: Look, maybe we could ...walk through it!
Penguin: I don't know, that doesn't look right.
Penguin: Give it a try!
Penguin: I believe I will ...jump!
Penguin: Now you're just showing off.
Penguin: Well, your idea of walking through it may be for the best.
Penguin: Hey look! Mud! Whee!

-via Arbroath

A popular new restaurant in China is staffed by robots!

Located in Jiang, China’s Shandong Province, the Dalu Rebot Restaurant opened on the 5th of December and can cater to about 100 customers, featuring two robot receptionists and a “staff” of six robot-waitresses. Two of them serve drinks, two serve small tables and another two tend to the big one. It seems that more “hiring” well be made in the near future as owners expect the restaurant will become quite a hit.

As all the waiting is done by robots, the tables were set in a circular pattern so that the robots can follow an exact route. Not all the work in the restaurant is done by them though, there are also people working there, especially in the kitchen, but some were also hired to welcome customers into the restaurant.

See more pictures at Oddity Central. Link

The biggest rooms in the world are those built to store aircraft. Not only are they huge, but some have interesting stories to go with them. For example, the Arium hangar in Germany was built for the production and operation of a new aircraft called the CL160. However, the aircraft project was abandoned, leaving one of the biggest buildings on earth unused. It was reopened in 2004 with a tropical resort inside! Link

Imagine riding to kindergarten in a bus that looks like Pikachu -you would learn to love school right off the bat! This is just one of the ways the Pokémon character has settled into pop culture all over. Check out the other nine ways, including the USB Head Bobble Pikachu, Pikachu shoes, and the The Pikachu Circuit Bending Orchestra! Link

A tongue-in-cheek opinion piece in the National Post celebrates the return of the octothorpe. Some called it the pound sign, or a "capital 3".

The Big O is a sign with deep historical and cultural roots, part of our heritage. It didn't deserve the neglect it suffered in recent times. It's lived under many names: the hash, the crunch, the hex (that's in Singapore), the flash, the grid. In some circles it's called tic-tactoe, in others pig-pen. From a distance it looks like the sharp sign on a musical score. Whether you call it a pound sign or a number sign or anything else, it retains its identity. It's so majestically simple that it always looks good, even if drawn by someone utterly without graphic talent. Good old #. It can't go wrong.

The octothorpe has enjoyed a resurgence thanks to its use on Twitter, but how much do you really know about this punctuation symbol? This article has the history of the octothorpe and several theories about how it got that name. http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/What+have+here+great+comeback+stories+history+competitive+punctuation/3903206/story.html -via Metafilter

Ah, the memories of a year chock-full of useless and incomprehensible things to occupy your time. These are the internet memes of 2010, causing a laugh or two as they fly around the web. If by chance you've missed any of them, you can become familiar with all 25 before someone calls you out as a n00b. If you are familiar with them, it's a chance to relive the greats, or maybe not-so-greats of the past year. Link -Thanks, Joanne Chu!

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"Roxanne" by The Police mixes well with "Rudolph, the Red-nose Reindeer" in this mashup by mojochronic. -via Laughing Squid

Hundred of millions of years ago, sea creatures crawled up on land and started to become mammals. Then much later, a few went back into the sea, but left few fossils to show us how they did it -or at least that's what we used to think.

For more than a century, our knowledge of the whale fossil record was so sparse that no one could be certain what the ancestors of whales looked like. Now the tide has turned. In the space of just three decades, a flood of new fossils has filled in the gaps in our knowledge to turn the origin of whales into one of the best-documented examples of large-scale evolutionary change in the fossil record. These ancestral creatures were stranger than anyone ever expected. There was no straight-line march of terrestrial mammals leading up to fully aquatic whales, but an evolutionary riot of amphibious cetaceans that walked and swam along rivers, estuaries and the coasts of prehistoric Asia. As strange as modern whales are, their fossil predecessors were even stranger.

These fossils raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read more at Smithsonian magazine. Link

Or maybe in this case, you could say "statement blanket"! Julie made this warm and funny pun blanket that really makes a statement for her boyfriend's birthday gift.

Over the summer, my boyfriend and I were making up puns based on bedding (“post-modern four-post bed” and the ilk) and came up with "blanket statement blanket.” It took about 14 hours to complete.

Clever. -Thanks, Julie!

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Rudolph the Red-nose Reindeer got into a bit of trouble Saturday when he was impaled on a traffic light pole during the 2010 Dominion Christmas Parade in Richmond, Virginia. Link -Thanks, Comedy Wizard!

Slate has an interactive map showing when and where cases of diabetes are soaring. At the link, you can adjust the year with a slider and mouseover the counties to find yours. My county had a diabetes rate of 11.4% in 2008. http://labs.slate.com/articles/diabetes-in-america/ -via Gene Expression