Neatorama

---

• Devils Visit for New Year's Eve in Japan
• Largest Man Made Crater
• All You Need is Love
• Project Underway: The First 3D Map of the Brain's Connections
• Flexible Furniture
• Map of the Most Remote Places on Earth
• Rabbit
• See-through Goldfish
• 16 Cool Anti-theft Gadgets
• Where'd the Pier 39 Sea Lions Go?
• The Mysteries of Rabies
• How to Make a Luke Skywalker Tauntaun Costume
• A Sub Shop Made Inside Shipping Containers, Moved By Crane
• The Smartest Kids in the World
• The Sound Sculptures of Zimoun

Devils Visit for New Year's Eve in Japan Posted: 30 Dec 2009 02:59 AM PST On New Year’s Eve, in the cold hinterlands of northern Japan, a pack of hairy scary devils known as Namahage descend from their mountain lairs to terrorize children. They aren’t going to eat them though. The Namahage want to make sure that they aren’t lazy and will work hard for their family. The Namahage are Japanese devils who visit villages on the Oga peninsula every New Year's Eve. They wear straw coats, carry large kitchen knives, and wooden buckets. They come in the night down from their mountain homes howling and waving torches. The Namahage burst into homes stomping about looking for lazy children. If the children are hiding, the Namahage will flush them out threatening to take them into the mountains. Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by samuraidave.

Largest Man Made Crater Posted: 30 Dec 2009 02:47 AM PST The Storax Sedan test {wiki} was a nuclear test conducted in Nevada in 1961. The aim was to explore nuclear bombs for non-military uses, such as mining, but the resulting contamination affected more people than any other nuclear test. It left behind the largest manmade crater in the US. The Sedan crater is now on the Historic Register. The nuclear device buried 635 ft under the ground displaced 11,000,000 tons of soil, leaving a crater 320 ft. deep and with a diameter of 1280 ft. It is the largest depression caused by a nuclear detonation. Over 10,000 people visit the crater every year. The test took place on July 6, 1962 and resulted in large amounts of radioactive fallout. The negative effects and health concerns apart, it remains a sight to behold. Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by THC55.

All You Need is Love Posted: 29 Dec 2009 05:59 PM PST (YouTube link) Starbucks launched their campaign against AIDS in Africa by putting together singers from 156 countries in one video performing The Beatles’ song All You Need is Love. Link -via Buzzfeed

Project Underway: The First 3D Map of the Brain's Connections Posted: 29 Dec 2009 02:09 PM PST The picture above is a 3D image of some of the neural connections in an owl-monkey’s brain. The Human Connectome Project of the US National Institutes for Health is currently engaged in a similar, but more ambitious project: to map every connection in the human brain. It’s like a circuit map for neurologists: The complexity of the brain and a lack of adequate imaging technology have hampered past research on human brain connectivity. The brain is estimated to contain more than 100 billion neurons that form trillions of connections with each other. Neurons can connect across distant regions of the brain by extending long, slender projections called axons — but the trajectories that axons take within the human brain are almost entirely uncharted.[...] The field of neuroscience emerged in the late 19th century, when scientists observed individual brain cells for the first time. Since then, researchers have made breathtaking progress in understanding the anatomy, cell biology, physiology and chemistry of the brain in both health and disease. Yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered, including how brain function translates into mental function and why brain function declines with age. Advances in neuroimaging, genomics, computational neuroscience and engineering have put us on the brink of another great era in neuroscience, when we can expect to make unprecedented discoveries regarding normal brain activity, disorders of the brain and our very sense of self. Press Release and Article Link via GearFuse | Image: Van Wadeen

Flexible Furniture Posted: 29 Dec 2009 01:49 PM PST (YouTube Link) FlexibleLove is the creation of Chishen Chiu, a Taiwanese furniture designer. Its honeycomb structure made from recycled materials allows users to expand, shrink, and reshape it as needed. It’s like a Slinky that you can sit on. Official Website via Make

Map of the Most Remote Places on Earth Posted: 29 Dec 2009 01:43 PM PST This map by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy is an attempt to demonstrate what areas of the world are comparatively accessible by land and water travel. The cartographers concluded that much of the world commonly thought of as inaccessible is not: The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks (see the maps). It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province. Map Link and Article Link via Volokh Conspiracy

Rabbit Posted: 29 Dec 2009 12:13 PM PST (YouTube Link) Run Wrake made this very strange, yet very intriguing short called “Rabbit.”  Like the Dick and Jane books of yesteryear as seen through the eyes of a madman, the style is unique, and the moral of the story is poignant.  (Warning: animated animal slaughter.)

See-through Goldfish Posted: 29 Dec 2009 11:19 AM PST Japanese researchers have succeeded in developing see through goldfish, whose beating hearts and other organs can be seen through their transluscent skin.  The move to develop see through goldfish (and other animals) was spurred by the desire to reduce/eliminate dissections of animals, still a sore point for many. The joint team of researchers at Mie University and Nagoya University in central Japan produced the “ryukin” goldfish by picking mutant hatchery goldfish with pale skin and breeding them together. “Having a pale colour is a disadvantage for goldfish in an aquarium but it’s good to see how organs sit in a body three-dimensionally,” Tamaru told AFP. The fish are expected to live up to roughly 20 years and could grow as long as 25 centimetres (10 inches) and weigh more than two kilograms (five pounds), much bigger than other fish used in experiments, such as zebrafish and Japanese medaka, Tamaru said. Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

16 Cool Anti-theft Gadgets Posted: 29 Dec 2009 11:17 AM PST An awesome collection of 16 various anti-theft gadgets that will help you keep your personal belongings, food and computer data out of strangers’ and thieves’ hands. Don’t miss the home security paintball turret! Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by talsiach.

Where'd the Pier 39 Sea Lions Go? Posted: 29 Dec 2009 09:41 AM PST Image Composite: Left: flickr/wallyg. Right: Twitter/@GarySoup If you’ve been to the Fisherman’s Wharf part of San Francisco in the past twenty years, chances are you’ve seen (and heard) the resident sea lions that call Pier 39 home.  I’d spend long stretches of time just observing them and their behavior patterns, and always found them neat. Since about a month ago, when they collectively slipped into the bay and disappeared, the pier has been quiet and barren. The sea lions' disappearance is as strange as their initial colonization of the pier about 20 years ago, in late 1989. They just started showing up one day and as their numbers increased, their traditional hang out, Seal Rocks, became less populated. There are all sorts of theories about why the pier became a favorite haul-out spot for the sea lions, but no one knows for sure why the animals' behavior changed. It doesn't appear that local weather conditions could have influenced the animals. The weather in San Francisco has been normal, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Rick Canaepa. "It's pretty typical winter conditions," Canaepa said. There is also no apparent population increase on Seal Rock; apparently hundreds of them just decided to move on. Link

The Mysteries of Rabies Posted: 29 Dec 2009 07:16 AM PST This article about rabies surprised me a little. See, we know how to prevent rabies, but we have absolutely no idea how to cure it. In fact, we don’t even really know how it kills people. Despite (and, perhaps, because of) its status as one of the first viruses to be tamed by a vaccine, rabies remains a little-understood disease. What about all those stories you hear of someone being bitten by a rabid animal and having to get painful shots? I thought that was the cure, but it turns out those shots are actually a vaccine after the fact. “You think about flu, that’s a very quick virus. You develop symptoms in a couple of days. In a week, it’s passed. But rabies incubation is very long,” said Zhen Fu, DVM Ph.D., professor of pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. “It may be weeks or even months before you develop an active infection. So we have enough time after a bite to immunize with normal vaccine and bring up the immune system.” New treatments for vaccine show promise, but with few cases to study, the results are not conclusive. Maggie Koerth-Baker researched the disease after she found a bat in her living room. Link

How to Make a Luke Skywalker Tauntaun Costume Posted: 29 Dec 2009 06:29 AM PST Scott Holden finally realized the dream of being Luke Skywalker and the Tauntaun he rides in The Empire Strikes Back. When the time came to unveil the costume for a competition, Scott was injured and had to let a friend wear it! But then he posted the entire process of making this awesome costume at Cockeyed.com, so we can all enjoy it. Link (with video) -via crystalkiss From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by rappin.

A Sub Shop Made Inside Shipping Containers, Moved By Crane Posted: 29 Dec 2009 06:20 AM PST (Video Link) Construction workers rebuilding the World Trade Center in New York City often have to spend half of their lunch breaks riding elevators up and down to buy lunch. But soon, a sub shop will come to them. The Subway restaurant company built an outlet out of shipping containers. A crane will lift it high into the sky to provide meals to workers where they are: Meals will be offered high in the sky for efficiency; to get food from street level, hundreds of ironworkers now use an elevator and must also climb. “This amenity will save time by allowing construction workers to stay in the tower throughout their shift rather than having to go all the way up and down,” said Candace McAdams, spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the World Trade Center site. A full Subway menu will be served, including the trademark $5 foot-long hero. Richard Schragger, who owns the Freedom Tower franchise, said he’ll also offer extras no other Subway has: hot dogs, hamburgers and New York’s famed pretzels. Like other franchises of the Milford, Conn.-based company, this one will bake its own bread daily — higher and higher above ground zero. As the tower grows, the lift will “jump” to the next new floor along with the restaurant, at a rate of one story about every week or two, engineers estimate. Link via Gizmodo

The Smartest Kids in the World Posted: 29 Dec 2009 06:19 AM PST Watch videos of ten child prodigies in action, in the fields of medicine, geography, music, business, and of course school subjects like science and math. Shown is Adi Putra Ghani, who gives lectures on business even though he’s only ten years old! Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Sweetgirl88.

The Sound Sculptures of Zimoun Posted: 29 Dec 2009 06:06 AM PST (Video Link) Swiss artist Zimoun builds sound installations that create a unique audiovisual experience. This video is a compilation of many of his projects, including listening to woodworms at work using a microphone, an automat with selections representing different cities, and pvc hoses flopping about under the force of compressed air. You can see an archive of project-specific videos at the above video link. Official Website via Make

You are subscribed to email updates from Neatorama To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610