Image by Martin Deutsch via Flickr

WebUrbanist points out the delightful work of Jan Vormann, an artist who repairs damaged structures with colorful arrangements of Legos.

They write:

The stark contrast of monochromatic, crumbling stone buildings and
small, colorful plastic toy blocks is especially jarring in Berlin,
where evidence of the horrors of World War II is still visible in
cracks and bullet holes. But that’s what makes this setting so poignant
for German artist Jan Vormann, who patches damage to old buildings around the world with Legos. Vormann aims to fill Berlin with new life – even if only temporarily
and symbolically – using this sometimes controversial juxtaposition of
new and old, and the unity that it brings to onlookers who stop to help.

You can read the rest of the WebUrbanist post here, or visit Vormann’s website here.

Image by AJC1 via Flickr

The Science Times reports that the Borna Virus, a virus which can “drive horses into wild fits,” causing them to “kill themselves by smashing in their skulls” or to “starve themselves to death,” lurks buried within the human genome. Carl Zimmer writes:

The virus now turns out to have an intimate bond with every person on
Earth. In the latest issue of Nature, a team of Japanese and American
scientists report
that the human genome contains borna virus genes. The virus infected
our monkey-like ancestors 40 million years ago, and its genes have been
passed down ever since.

But that’s not all. It turns out that

Borna viruses are not the only viruses lurking in our genome.
Scientists have found about 100,000 elements of human DNA that probably
came from viruses. But the borna virus belongs to a kind of virus that
has never been found in the human genome before. Its discovery raises
the possibility that many more viruses are left to be found.

Apparently, as much as 8.3 percent of the human genome can be “traced back to retrovirus infections.” You can read the whole article, my part-virus friends, here.

Back in the day, a single giant sea-blob was enough to cause a stir. In fact, that’s just what happened last summer, when a huge, mysterious blob floated menacingly towards the Alaskan coast.

National Geographic, though, reports that blobs like these – called “mucilages” – are on the rise:

As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a
mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new
regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says (sea “mucus” blob pictures).

And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant.

Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally,
usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season’s warm weather
makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the
organic matter that makes up the blobs (Mediterranean map). 

Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages are forming in winter too–and lasting for months.

[…] Mucilages aren’t a concern for just the Mediterranean, Danovaro added.
Recent studies tentatively suggest that mucus may be spreading
throughout oceans from the North Sea (map) to Australia, perhaps because of rising temperatures, he said.

It would certainly be unnerving to run into one of these. While they won’t devour you like the horror-film Blob, the article – which you can read here – notes that they “are hot spots for viruses and bacteria, including the deadly E. coli.“

Are you tired of it? Since its earliest days, the internet’s text-based nature has been an impediment to the clear communication of sarcasm, and misunderstood sarcasm can often drastically distort the meaning that someone gleans from a message. 

The official, easy-to-use punctuation mark to emphasize a sarcastic phrase, sentence or message. Once downloaded to your computer or cell phone, it’s a quick key-stroke or two to insert the ®  where you want, when you want, in your communications with the world. Never again be misunderstood! Never again waste a good sarcastic line on someone who doesn’t get it!

Sarcasm – Punctuate It – SarcMark ®

Stand Up For Sarcasm – It needs a punctuation mark. Let your voice and written word be heard across the country, the continent, and the world.

You can, er, order your own SarcMark here for only $1.99 – a regular bargain for a punctuation mark!

The Oatmeal presents this useful Zombie Bite Calculator. I suggest you use it now, while you still have the benefit of electricity, a functioning computer, and a live internet connection – you never know when the worst might happen. And information like this could save your life or your loved ones.

Personally, it seems I would last 1 hour and 16 minutes after being bitten. I need to bulk up.

Image via Wikipedia

boingboing points out this fascinating story:

In the latest episode of The Memory Palace podcast, reporter Nate DiMeo
tells the captivating story of “The Great Moon Hoax” of 1835. According
to a series of New York Sun articles published that year, a respected
astronomer named Sir John Herschel had observed an amazing array of
flora and fauna on the moon, including bipedal beavers, winged
humanoids, and (yay!) blue unicorns. None of it was true. (Or so we’re
told now.) And Herschel wasn’t even aware until much later that he was
the star of this bit of science fiction presented as fact. The
lithograph above accompanied one of the articles to illustrate what
Herschel had “seen” through his giant telescope.

You can listen to the podcast at The Memory Palace here.

According to Wikipedia, the Moon Hoax spanned six articles, which were likely written by one Richard A. Locke. Locke’s intentions, it is said, were “to create a sensational story which would increase sales of the New York Sun, and, second, to ridicule some of the more extravagant astronomical theories that had recently been published.” In particular, a “direct object of Locke’s satire was certainly Rev. Thomas Dick, who was known as ‘The Christian Philosopher’ after the title of his first book. Dick had computed that the Solar System
contained 21,891,974,404,480 (21+ trillion) inhabitants. In fact, the
Moon alone, by his count, would contain 4,200,000,000 inhabitants” – a number higher than the contemporary population of Earth.

Pond-owners, you can breath a sigh of relief – don’t worry about your iced-over ponds, and don’t bother breaking a hole through the ice:

Received wisdom says that pond owners should break a hole in the ice to allow oxygen to reach the water.

But new research by conservation charity Pond Conservation has shown the opposite is true.

Oxygen levels can actually rise in a frozen-over pond, benefiting the animals and plants living beneath.

Take heed. This is important news.

You’re all probably aware that the island nation of Haiti was basically destroyed on Tuesday by a catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake. Haiti, which had already been considered by many to be a failed state, can do little for its own people in wake of this calamity. The people of Haiti, then, depend on your goodwill and generosity. Laughing Squid has compiled a list of ways you can help:

– text “HAITI” to “90999″ and a $10 donation will automatically be charged to your cellphone bill and given to the Red Cross

– Red Cross International Response Fund

– Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres)

– UNICEF

– Save The Children

– Yéle Haiti Earthquake Fund (Wyclef Jean)

– Mercy Corps

– AmeriCares

– Partners In Health

– Sion Fonds

The Big Picture has a photo gallery showing just how bad the situation is in Haiti.

Please donate, if you can. In the meantime, jeers to Pat Robertson, who called the quake a “blessing in disguise” and claimed that it was God’s punishment for the “pact with the devil” that Haiti made in order to gain independence from France.

Image by Curious Expeditions via Flickr

Most people are at least marginally familiar with pneumatic tubes
systems – if you’ve ever made use of drive-through banking, chances are
you’ve encountered a limited example of pneumatic capsule
transportation. During the late 19th century through the turn of the
20th, though, pneumatic tube networks were extremely important
administrative systems used throughout the Western World.

Then,
these tube networks essentially served as a primitive version of
today’s internet (perhaps leading to former Sen. Ted Stevens’s
well-known confusion on the subject).
They were most often used for the speedy transportation of telegraphs
and other paper messages. In some places, pneumatic tube networks were
deployed to deliver mail across entire cities. An 1866 London system,
according to Wikipedia, was “powerful enough to transport humans”;
Prague, in the Czech Republic, to this day has a “network of tubes
extending approximately 60 kilometers in length” which “still exists
for delivering mail and parcels.”

Even in the United States, systems of pneumatic tubes remain in surprisingly
widespread use. Beyond banks, pneumatic tubes are employed especially
by hospitals, which are required daily to quickly transport small,
time-sensitive laboratory samples from one side of a complex to
another. Stanford Hospital is home to the largest such network:

Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital
staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th
century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest
Silicon Valley wizardry can’t match: A tubular system to transport a
lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye.

In
four miles of tubing laced behind walls from basement to rooftop, the
pneumatic tube system shuttles foot-long containers carrying everything
from blood to medication. In a hospital the size of Stanford, where a
quarter-mile’s distance might separate a tissue specimen from its
destination lab, making good time means better medicine.

[…]

The value of these pneumatic tube networks is not unique to
Stanford–they are in use at hospitals nationwide–but SHC’s system,
which also serves the adjacent Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital,
is one of the largest in the country. Its architecture is a
sophisticated design of switching points, waiting areas, sending and
receiving points. It hosts 124 stations (every nursing unit has its
own); 141 transfer units, 99 inter-zone connectors and 29 blowers. To
help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more
than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.

You can read – and see – more here.

Atlas Obscura, perhaps in the same vein as our post about unusual little-known literature, offers a look at an even stranger collection of books. These books are housed at Padua University and are made entirely from wood:

What is particularly curious about these books is that while most books
are made of wood, pulped into paper, these books are both about trees
and constructed of them; their construction and contents are truly one
and the same. Each volume is about a different species of tree, with
its cover made from the wood of that tree, showing both wood radial,
longitudinal, and cross profiles. And on each spine is a section of the
tree’s bark.

You can see more here.

Urban Prankster points out the unintentional, subconscious art that results from the removal of graffiti: 

I snapped the above photo in downtown Manhattan a month or so ago. There were several stone rectangles around the property that all looked similar. What a great example of the subconscious art of graffiti removal!

WebUrbanist provides an interesting look at the space-age Futuro House, designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968:

Evoking images of flying saucers, interplanetary space pods and science fiction futurism, the Futuro house offered homeowners
a chance to live in the future without ever leaving their front yards.
Finnish architect Matti Suuronen designed the Futuro house in 1968 but
only 96 of the fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic pods were
produced over a 5-year period – killed by the 1973 Oil Crisis that
tripled the price of plastics. Today, roughly half of the ellipsoid
structures have been accounted for and their iconic design
has made them a favorite of pop culture collectors, retrofuturism fans
and all those who appreciate the impact of 1960s Space Age style.

You can read the full article, and see more pictures, here.