25 April 2010

Recent Neatorama posts

So you think you have good eyes and good perceptual skills?  Think you can distinguish a spiral from a set of concentric circles?  No, you can't.

Sperm race around inside the female genital tract.  You can follow their progress if you use a fluorescent tag to mark some of them red and some of them green.  It looks like a totally bizarre Christmas ornament.

It's a truism that life cannot exist without water.  But life may be able to pass through a totally dehydrated state and return when water is reapplied.  A Cambridge University scientist demonstrates the alien-like abilities of the rotifer.

Remember Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men)?  If he played golf, this is the club he would use - it has an explosive charge inside the clubhead...

Some people argue (not illogically) that income tax records should be public information (bottom lines, not details).  It was actually done that way in the 1920s.

Outsourcing - coming to universities and colleges near you.  Teachers can now outsource the grading of student papers.  Don't like it?  Would you prefer that the teacher not assign any written papers because he/she doesn't have time to read it?  It's a complex problem.

You can make music with a vinyl tube and a mouthpiece; you don't need all those metal parts.

The post office has Automated Postal Centers that print up stamps on demand for you, with the date of printing on the stamp.  In certain circumstances that knowledge might prove useful.

The turtle ant is a "living door."  When you see his head, you will understand how/why.

Here's a very strange photograph made with a pinhole camera.  I'll bet a nickel you can't guess what the bright lights behind the house are.

This photo shows the awesome power of an earthquake.

I posted the Ross Sisters performing Solid Potato Salad last year, but found a better quality YouTube video of their act.  In case you have forgotten, they are singing acrobatic contortionist sisters with abs you would die for.

An ancient Roman coffin is shaped like a burrito.  No one knows why. 

A sculpture representing the Virgin Mary is shaped in the most curious way.

Earthworms communicate by touch and travel in herds.  And after reading that, you can watch the famous "cat herding" commercial.

If you've ever pushed a rotary lawn mower, you've had to clean grass out from the area under the deck around the blade.  But yours never looked like this.

Video of a dog leading police to the site of a burning house.   A cat would have just headed to the neighbors looking for a new source of food.

Homemade snowmobiles in Russia.

A huge computerized baggage carousel sorts books at the NYPL.

If/when you use a public photocopier, consider covering up sensitive information (social security number etc, which you presumably can remember without having it on your copy) because the photocopier may store the photo of your document, and it might fall into the wrong hands if the machine's hard drive is not wiped before it is resold.

When cars hit wild boars, both lose.

As always, for the relevant photos you need to go to the Neatorama links.  The ones embedded above show our newly-eclosed luna moth (and his magnificent pheromone-detecting antennae) and some bluebells and grape hyacinth in our garden.

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