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Well, it’s not laser shark but nature is definitely taking a step towards the ultimate formation of the Sharktopus. Behold, ladies and gentlemen: the world’s first hybrid shark!
Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world’s first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.
The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.
“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.
“This is evolution in action.”
Dr. Evil would definitely approve! Link (Photo: Pascal Geraghty)
Princess Platter – $19.95
Are you looking for the perfect dish set for your precious little princess? You need the Princess Platter from the NeatoShop. This fantastic princess castle set includes:
Mealtime just got a whole lot more regal.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Mealtime Fun!
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In 2006, a street artist who goes by the name Posterchild left signs in Toronto that would lead reasonably intelligent residents to conclude that the Batman had left Gotham City. I mean, if you saw a Batarang stuck into a telephone pole or a bat-marked bootprint on the wall, what would you think?
This amazing LEGO sculpture of a Hyperion Battlecruiser from the video game Starcraft 2 was made by Sven Jungo, who used over 15000 LEGOs to build the highly detailed starship and must throw his back out every time he tries to move this thing!
And where does he display this behemoth in his house? I hope Sven doesn’t let any bratty little kids around this thing, because they might try to take it apart when no one’s looking.
You can see more pics of this incredible LEGO masterpiece at the link below, including artwork from the game as a point of reference. LEGO builders-Sven has already set the bar high for 2012!
When it comes to “discovering” new species of animals, I think it’s more about having found where they’ve been hiding themselves from humanity and less about discovering brand new species.
I mean, most of the animals in this gallery look like the result of genetic evolution and adaptation, not some brand spanking new little critter.
But they are cute, and great fun to read about, considering that they’re so rare to see in nature. So take a look at this gallery and see what the animal guides were missing up until last year.
Link image credit: Indraneil Das
With the start of a new calendar year, movie studios have started rolling out teasers and previews for their upcoming features, to ensure that ticket sales are high.
Personally, I don’t really care about the latest Hollywood blockbusters, and I prefer my features, and actors, to be animated. That’s why this list of animated features being released in 2012 had me so excited, and most of them look like great fun!
But you don’t have to take my word for it, peruse the titles for yourself at the link below, and sound off about which ones you’re looking forward to watching on the big screen.
The Tweeting Cat Toy is handy for keeping up with your cat’s activities while you’re gone, but wouldn’t it be nice to pet your cat or even groom him from a remote location? Taylor Veltrop hooked together a Nao robot, a Kinect sensor bar, two Wii remotes, a head-mounted display, and a treadmill for the purpose of brushing his cat. Rube Goldberg himself would have been proud! And all this technology only worked because the cat is extremely tolerant. But Veltrop shows that it can be done, even though it took a year to perfect the procedure. Link
There’s a good reason why this Spitfire is painted pink. It helped its pilot hide in the clouds. Esther Inglis-Arkell explains how:
To make sure they were rarely seen from above, these planes were painted to fly just under cloud cover. Although the planes were ideally meant to fly at sunset and sunrise, when the clouds took on a pinkish hue and made the plane completely invisible against them, they were also useful during the day. Clouds are pinker than we give them credit for. We perceive them as white against the sky because the particles in the sky scatter blue light, sending some of it down towards us and letting us see the sky as blue. Clouds scatter every kind of light, and against the intense blue sky look whitish gray. But their color depends on what kind of light gets to them, and what they are floating next to.
Although we see the sky as a radiant blue, the particles are actually filtering out a lot of the blue light that gets down to the earth’s surface. When the blue light is scattered, a good deal of it goes right back up into space, which is why the atmosphere of earth glows blue in some pictures. This filters out a good deal of the blue that gets to the clouds. The clouds scatter what they have, which is a spectrum of light with at least some of the blue filtered out, shifting the overall light ever so slightly towards red. Add to that the fact that the water droplets in clouds can diffract light at different angles, and the clouds are often rife with pastel shades of pink, orange, and green. They look white compared to a glowing blue sky, and a quick glance leaves people with the impression that they are white, but a long look should reveal this shifting, if minor, shades. A light pink plane is safer against them than anyone would expect.
There’s a video at the link that demonstrates the effectiveness of this camouflage scheme.
It is not unknown in the annals of history for warring powers to continue to trade with each other, on a limited basis, during active hostilities. But journalist Adam Hochschild found a remarkable episode of it during World War I and wrote about it in his new book To End All Wars. Tyler Cowen, an economist, summarizes:
My favorite section details how the British responded when it turned out they had a drastic shortage of binoculars, which at that time were very important for fighting the war. They turned to the world’s leading manufacturer of “precision optics,” namely Germany. The German War Office immediately supplied 8,000 to 10,000 binoculars to Britain, directly intended and designed for military use. Further orders consisted of many thousands more and the Germans told the British to examine the equipment they had been capturing, to figure out which orders they wished to place.
The Germans in turn demanded rubber from the British, which was needed for their war effort. It was delivered to Germany at the Swiss border.
Cowen offers a few possible explanations for this transaction at the link.
Link | Amazon Link | Photo: Imperial War Museum
This is the most fascinating video that you will see all day, and possibly all week. Two champion cyclists try to be the fastest at this thousand-meter race by moving the slowest. In fact, the two competitors go so slowly that at the 3:38 mark, both come to a complete halt. Why? Dan Lewis explains:
The tactical advantage should be clear — the racer in the rear can make a sudden move when the front racer isn’t looking, catching the front racer flatfooted and therefore unable to catch up. But this advantage is moot if a cyclist believes he can simply outrace his opponent over the 1,000 meter course. That’s where aerodynamics come in. Vehicles in motion create slipstreams behind them — basically, rifts in the air similar to what a ship creates in the water. Other vehicles close behind them travel within this slipstream and get a benefit from it: they “draft” and experience less drag, and therefore need to expend less energy in order to go the same speed.
In the case of match sprints, this gives the trailing cyclist an enormous advantage. If the lead racer pushes it from the start, he will end up with only a slight lead with 200 or so meters to go — but his opponent will have much fresher legs. So in order to combat this, we get this weird do-si-do — on bicycles.
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more drones! Thankfully, the US Navy has developed the Cicada Mark III disposable drone. Technicians have equipped the Tempest Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with two of them. They’re about a foot long, but can fly up to eleven miles and land within fifteen feet of their targets.
Link -via Geekosystem | Photos: US Navy
Snapshots normally capture narrow slices of time, but photographer Michael Chrisman preserved an entire year. He aimed a pinhole camera at Toronto’s skyline and exposed the photosensitive paper inside on January 1, 2011. He then closed the aperture precisely one year later.
Link -via Geekologie | Photographer’s Flickr Stream
You can buy a pen like this, but the more ambitious tinkerers among you may try to make their own. Instructables user Mrballeng shows you how to make a reliable click ballpoint pen with two .30-06 cases. Find photos, written instructions and a lengthy video at the link.
Link -via Make | Maker’s Website
Erica has a sweet tooth, and that’s a good thing because she’s a dental student. She made these cupcakes and you can, too, by following her instructions at the link. When you see the Baron, remember the tooth! The tooth!
Link -via Bit Rebels
Psst!
Wanna get a good score on the SAT? Forget studying - the (criminally)
smart way is to buy the perfect score.
Here's the story by Alison Stewart at 60 Minutes of how one really smart guy named Sam Eshaghoff ran a criminal enterprise of taking tests for profit (an academic gun for hire, if you will), and how he got caught:
Eshaghoff: As soon as I took that first test, and I went in and I killed it, like my first time ever taking the test for somebody else, I got a perfect score on the math section. It was like, "Whoa, that was easy and that was great. And I'm good at this."
It was clockwork from there. Over the course of nearly three years, he took the SAT over and over again, consistently scoring in the 97th percentile or higher for the students he called his "clients."
Eshaghoff: I mean my track record speaks for itself. Like if you know somebody's so stellar at doing something so flawlessly, without one exception it goes without saying: that's a reliable service.
Stewart: Were you invested at all in the score you would get?
Eshaghoff: Oh yeah, absolutely. Just like any other business person, you wanna have a good track record, right? And essentially like my whole clientele were based on word of mouth and like a referral system. So as soon as I, like, as soon as I saved one kid's life...
Inspired by the video game WipeOut, researchers at the Japan Institute of Science and Technology incorporated quantum levitation into a miniature race track. Or it’s viral marketing for the game. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Men,
want to go swimming in Papua New Guinea? Pray you don't encounter this
lil' fella, lovingly named the "ball cutter" fish by the locals
for the obvious reason:
This is the ferocious 'Ball Cutter' fish which has killed two men by biting off their testicles. A British angler has told how he snared a predator known to feast on the testicles of men.
Jeremy Wade, 53, spent weeks fishing in remote Papua New Guinea after locals told him how a mysterious beast was castrating young men in the area's waters. He finally caught the perpetrator: the Pacu fish, known locally as The Ball Cutter. Jeremy wrestled the 40lb monster on the floor of his boat and opened its snapping jaws with his bare hands to discover a set of human-like teeth. The Ball Cutter boasts an impressive set of gnashers, which tear off the testicles of unwitting anglers and swimmers, leaving them to bleed to death.
If you’re not following @neatorama on Twitter, you don’t know what you’re missing!
There you’ll find all kinds of neato things we don’t always feature here on the blog, like special contests!
Oh, and if that wasn’t reason enough to, how about this: Pee Wee Herman follows us - don’t you want to be in such good company?
This week only: After following us, give us a shout with hashtag #neattweet2012. We’ll pick two people at random and send you any t-shirt from the neatoshop! Do it. Now. (Or at least by the weekend when we select the winners!)
Have you taken a look at your 401(k) recently? Did you find that you were plundered by the pin-striped pirates of the stock market?
Well, a bottle of wine would make you feel better, especially if you open it with this Screwed by Wall Street Corkscrew ($9.95) from the NeatoShop.
Link | More fun Barware & Cocktail supplies
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Marc
de Vinck's wife misses her new cat when she goes to work and always bug
him for updates. So what's a geek to do?
Chester is a spunky little stray who’s always looking for fun. Even if it means knocking a few things off my desk as I write this article. The only problem is, when my wife goes in to work, she misses her new cat and always wants to know his whereabouts.
She used to ask me for updates, but after a while I realized that I needed to make something that would take me out of the loop, and let the cat communicate with my wife directly via twitter.com. I needed a Twittering cat toy. And that’s how Kitty Twitty came to fruition, after some basic soldering and crafting with just a few parts.
Best of all, Marc posted the instruction on MAKE Projects so you can make your own Kitty Twitty Cat Toy: Link - via Techcrunch
Some
things may be obvious to you and me, but - surprise! - that's not good
enough for research scientists. After all, questioning assumptions and
testing hypotheses are what science is all about (except quantum physics
- that's just magic).
Scientific American has a list of 11 obvious science findings, which include these gems:
4. Pigs love mud
Turns out pigs aren't just putting on a show when they haul butt around their muddy quarters, diving into the muck. They actually like it. While mud baths keep pigs cool, a review of research reported in 2011 found wallowing may also be a swine sign of well-being. While the review found the strongest reason noted in the past studies for wallowing was to keep cool, the pigs kept it up through winter months.
5. Fashion magazines glorify youth
Surprise, surprise: Fashion mags portray women over 40 sparingly, if at all. Young celebrities and models dominate the pages of these publications, even ones targeted at older age groups. For example, researchers reported in April in the Journal of Aging Studies, that 22 percent of the reader base of Essence is older than 50, but only 9 percent of the women in its pages were even older than 40. Vogue featured only one woman over 40 on its covers in 2010: Halle Berry (then 43).
8. People aren't doing anything in particular on the Internet
Anyone who has ever gone down an Internet black hole, only to emerge hours (and dozens of Wikipedia articles) later, will be less than shocked at the revelation that online is the place to go for mindless entertainment. According to a Pew Research report released in December, 53 percent of people ages 18 to 29 get online at least once on any given day just to pass the time. Using the Internet to goof off isn't limited just to the young, either: Fifty-eight percent of all adults said they sometimes get on the Internet for no reason other than casual entertainment.
Could you imagine writing a grant proposal for these? Link
And they would know, wouldn’t they? In 2009, a man found a dead mouse in his can of Mountain Dew and sued the company. The company argued that the claim is impossible, as no mouse corpse could have survived the corrosive effects of that drink:
An Illinois man sued Pepsi in 2009 after he claims he “spat out the soda to reveal a dead mouse,” the Madison County Record reports. He claims he sent the mouse to Pepsi, which then “destroyed” the remains after he allowed them to test it, according to his complaint. Most shudder-worthy, however, is that Pepsi’s lawyers also found experts to testify, based on the state of the remains sent to them that, “the mouse would have dissolved in the soda had it been in the can from the time of its bottling until the day the plaintiff drank it,” according to the Record. (It would have become a “jelly-like substance,” according to Pepsi, adds LegalNewsline.) This seems like a winning-the-battle-while-surrendering-the-war kind of strategy that hinges on winning the argument that “our product is essentially a can of battery acid.”
Under this argument, if there had been a mouse corpse in the can of Mountain Dew that you’re holding right now, you’d never know.
Link -via Say Uncle | Photo: Flickr user Like the Grand Canyon
Yesterday, after 22 years, Universal officially closed down the Jaws ride at Universal Orlando for good. Inside the Magic produced a tribute video to the now-bygone ride. For those who never got to experience the Jaws ride, this may be your best chance to experience the freaky, fast-talking tour guide, the splashing murky water, and Bruce the sometimes-functioning mechanical shark. Link -via Movieline
The tech world is talking about the new Steve Jobs action figure from Inicons that is eerily realistic. It comes with a ton of accessories, but no iPhone or iPad. The figure should be available in late February for $99. See a lot more pictures at Gizmodo. Link
Four years ago, we published an article called Life Imitates The Simpsons, containing six plots from the TV show The Simpsons which later happened in the real world. In the years since, many more Simpsons plots were prescient of, or else inspired, real-life incidents. Ranker now has a list of 13 Simpsons Jokes That Actually Came True, and I was amazed to find no overlap in the two lists! Check this out: the picture on the left shows a promotional billboard for Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie, which was featured on The Simpsons in 1992. On the right is a billboard for Kill Bill, which came out in 2003. Read all the details at Ranker. Link
There are 15, or possibly more, TV show themes in this medley by the Koren Ensemble. So far, I haven’t found a cheat list, and there’s no way I could name them all. See, I didn’t even know the Paula Cole song was a TV theme! How many can you name? Go to the YouTube page and find out how to get a free download of this song. -Thanks, Daniel!
E. Robert Schulman and C. Virginia Cox
Charlottesville, Virginia
Abstract
In this paper we demonstrate that writing a Ph.D. dissertation can have many benefits. Not only do you obtain extensive typesetting experience, but afterwards you can have your frequent-flyer literature addressed to “Dr. Your Name.”
Chapter I: Introduction
Ph.D. dissertations (e.g., Schulman 1995a; Cox 1995) are commonly believed to be comprehensive compendiums of the original research done by a graduate student in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.² In reality, the Ph.D. thesis is usually a number of disparate chapters whose most important feature is not the thoroughness of the experimental description but rather the width of the margins. In this paper, the second article in a series on scientific writing that began with Schulman (1996a), we will discuss the phenomenon of the Ph.D. thesis.
Chapter II: Preparing to Write
There comes a time in the life of every graduate student when she or he realizes that another two years of graduate school cannot be endured. Even though a year spent writing your thesis will be filled with frustration and angst, it will end up being worth it in order to escape school forever.
Remember the following phrase: “No one will ever read your thesis.” You’ll hear this phrase a number of times as you finish up, and it’s vitally important that you believe it to be true. The phrase is important because without it you would be tempted to work on your thesis until everything is perfect, and you would never finish.
(Image credit: Flickr user lunita lu)
Say “It’s good enough for the thesis” to yourself several times a day. Tell yourself that you’ll correct all the mistakes when you turn the various chapters into independent scientific papers, even though this won’t happen (see Schulman 1996aand references therein).
Chapter III: Your Thesis Committee
Your thesis committee should consist of between four and nine researchers in and outside of your field. Each committee member has a specific duty.
Your thesis advisor has the most important job: to reassure you that you don’t have to do many of the things you’re positive you should do. She or he will likely say, “It’s good enough for the thesis” fairly often.
You also need one committee member who will insist on more mathematical rigor, one who will demand that the thesis be made more concise by getting rid of all that irrelevant math, and two or three to say that you should do all the things your thesis advisor told you didn’t need to be done.
more …
Land artists take naturally occurring materials in the wild and rearrange them into works of art. That’s what Richard Shilling does, using no glue, string, or any other materials. You can see some prime examples of his ingenuity at the link. Shilling makes excellent use of translucent leaves, flexible stems, and stones to make effective sculptures. The wind often sweeps away his works within minutes of completion, but that’s okay with Shilling because it is an affirmation of the transient nature of life.
Bob Anderson of West Sussex, UK, died on Sunday at the age of 89. He was a master fencer who taught lessons while serving in the Royal Marines, then represented his country at the 1952 Olympics. Anderson went on to develop a reputation as champion, both as a fencer and as a choreographer of on-screen sword fights. Most famously, he donned the mask of Darth Vader and wielded a lightsaber in all three original Star Wars movies:
Vader, “Star Wars’” intergalactic arch-villain, was voiced by James Earl Jones and played by six foot six (1.98 meter) former weightlifter David Prowse, but Anderson stepped in during the key fight scenes.
“David Prowse wasn’t very good with a sword and Bob couldn’t get him to do the moves,” said Anderson’s former assistant, Leon Hill. “Fortunately Bob could just don the costume and do it himself.”
Anderson later added to his vast body of work by directing fencing scenes in The Princess Bride and The Fellowship of the Ring.
Link -via The Mary Sue | Photo: Johnathan Player
Rotta Huttlet Star Wars Backpack Buddy – $59.95
Are you feeling lonely and unloved? Maybe cuddling up with your very own Rotta Huttlet Star Wars Backpack Buddy from the NeatoShop will make you feel better. The huggably soft and super cute little “Stinky” is easily removed from his backpack carrying case. Who knew a Hutt could be so darn adorable.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fantastic Star Wars items.
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