Perfect experiment

SMOKE RING COLLISION

Real Mom vs Robo-Mom

How to tell the difference between your real mom and robo-mom :)

Everyone's a Smart Ass

The Best Smart Ass Answers of 2008!!

SMART ASS ANSWER #6

It was mealtime during an airline flight.
'Would you like dinner?', the flight attendant asked John, seated in front.
'What are my choices?'  John asked.
'Yes or no,' she replied.

SMART ASS ANSWER #5

A flight attendant was stationed at the departure gate to check tickets. As a man approached, she extended her hand for the ticket and he opened his trench coat and flashed her.
Without missing a beat, she said, 'Sir, I need to see your ticket, not your stub.'

SMART ASS ANSWER #4

A lady was picking through the frozen turkeys at the grocery store but she couldn't find one big enough for her family. She asked a stock boy, ' Do these turkeys get any bigger?'
The stock boy replied, 'No ma'am, they're dead.'

SMART ASS ANSWER #3

The police officer got out of his car as the kid who was stopped for speeding rolled down his window. 'I've been waiting for you all day,' the officer said.
The kid replied, Yeah, well I got here as fast as I could.'
When the cop finally stopped laughing, he sent the kid on his way without a ticket.

SMART ASS ANSWER #2

A truck driver was driving along on the freeway and noticed a sign that read: Low Bridge Ahead. Before he knows it, the bridge is right in front of him and his truck gets wedged under it. Cars are backed up for miles.
Finally a police car comes up. The cop gets out of his car and walks to the truck driver, puts his hands on his hips and says, 'Got stuck, huh?'
The truck driver says, 'No, I was delivering this bridge and I ran out of gas.'

SMART ASS ANSWER OF THE YEAR 2008!!

A college teacher reminds her class of tomorrow's final exam. 'Now class, I won't tolerate any excuses for you not being here tomorrow. I might consider a nuclear attack or a serious personal injury, illness, or a death in your immediate family, but that's it, no other excuses whatsoever!'
A smart-ass student in the back of the room raised his hand and asked, 'What would you say if tomorrow I said I was suffering from complete and utter sexual exhaustion?'
The entire class is reduced to laughter and snickering. When silence was restored, the teacher smiled knowingly at the student, shook her head and sweetly said, 'Well, I guess you'd have to write the exam with your other hand.'

A BONUS EXTRA

A woman is standing nude looking in the bedroom mirror. She is not happy with what she sees and says to her husband, 'I feel horrible; I look old, fat and ugly. I really need you to pay me a compliment.'
The husband replies, 'Your eyesight's damn near perfect.

GIF Reactions to Real-Life Situations

When someone steps on the back of your shoe

When you see your ex after the breakup

When you’re in the back seat and the front windows are down

When people don’t warn you before taking your picture

When your phone rings while you’re trying to take a nap

When people smoke near you

When your girlfriend calls to tell you her problems

When you feel people staring at you

When you have to sneeze, but it won’t come out

When you were at a pet shop as a kid

When you are at a pet shop today

When you ask for a bite of food and your friend says, “Actually, you can have the rest.”

When you’re at a restaurant and you see your food coming

When you confess something bad you did to your parents

When you were young and heard someone curse

Y'Know the Flying Dragons in Avatar? Tiny Real-Life Version Photographed in Indonesia

Can't Wait Until They Find the Full-Sized Species...

A Reddit.com user by the name of Biophilia_curiosus posted a few photos that he took in Indonesia. They show an amazing species of gliding lizard which basically looks like a miniature dragon. Fans of the film Avatar will be reminded of the flying Toruks... More photos below.

Check out the full-sized slideshow here.

Biophilia_curiosus wrote: "The crazy part is that those lines you see running through the wings like veins are actually its ribs! Evolution did a number on these guys. They can expand and contract their chests at will to glide great distances. We were only able to catch females as they were laying their eggs. All we could do is watch as the males soared overhead."

The photos were taken in Buton, Indonesia, in the Lambusango Forest reserve. As far as I can tell, nobody has identified the exact species of this lizard. 

Amazing Social Experiment

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that 1,100 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. 

Three minutes went by, and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace, and stopped for a few seconds, and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping, and continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried, but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally, the mother pushed hard, and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money, but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the most talented musicians in the world. He had just played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, on a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste, and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

Water.. Made by Apple

1994's Most Bizarre Suicide

Don Harper Mills

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Sciences, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story...

On March 23 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a gunshot wound of the head caused by a shotgun. Investigation to that point had revealed that the decedent had jumped from the top of a ten story building with the intent to commit suicide. (He left a note indicating his despondency.) As he passed the 9th floor on the way down, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, killing him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the 8th floor level to protect some window washers, and that the decedent would not have been able to complete his intent to commit suicide because of this...

Ordinarily a person who starts into motion the events with a suicide intent ultimately commits suicide even though the mechanism might be not what he intended. That he was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not change his mode of death from suicide to homicide, but the fact that his suicide intent would not have been achieved under any circumstance caused the medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands...

Further investigation led to the discovery that the room on the 9th floor from whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. He was threatening her with the shotgun because of an interspousal spat and became so upset that he could not hold the shotgun straight. Therefore, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife, and the pellets went through the window, striking the decedent.

When one intends to kill subject A, but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. The old man was confronted with this conclusion, but both he and his wife were adamant in stating that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded. It was the longtime habit of the old man to threaten his wife with an unloaded shotgun. He had no intent to murder her; therefore, the killing of the decedent appeared then to be accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded...

But further investigation turned up a witness that their son was seen loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal accident. That investigation showed that the mother (the old lady) had cut off her son's financial support, and her son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that the father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus...

Further investigation revealed that the son became increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to get his mother murdered. This led him to jump off the ten story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through a 9th story window.

The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.

New Super-Earth Discovered Just 22 Light Years Away

By McKinley Noble, PCWorld    Feb 6, 2012 4:00 PM

New life might be waiting just around the corner, as a brand-new "super-Earth" was recently discovered by a team of astronomers from UC Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution for Science.

As PhysOrg.com reports, the planet is roughly 4.5 times larger than our own Earth and orbits host star GJ 667C, an M-class dwarf star in a triple-star system. Even more interesting is the fact that despite the abundance of suns, the planet is at a perfect distance from its host star, perhaps at just the right distance that people could live there. With that many suns in the planet's skyline each day, it's surprising that it can support life in the form of water -- but then again, even Tattooine manages moisture, and it's mostly a desert world.

"It's the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it's not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze," Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. "It's right smack in the habitable zone — there's no question or discussion about it. It's not on the edge, it's right in there."

Also, this super-Earth is relatively close to our own solar system, but definitely nowhere where we'll be able to reach any time soon. At 22 light years away (or 132 trillion miles of space, if our math is accurate), it would take even the fastest space probe roughly, well, forever to even get that far. We won't bore you with the equations, but by the time a probe reached "Earth 2" in time to ask them to come pick us up in their assumedly-advanced spaceships, the Earth's water and atmosphere would already be completely burned away by Sol, our own host star.

On a cheerier note, Geekosystem notes that the discovery of this planet means that there's probably a lot more hospitable worlds than we think. Whether or not that means there could be closer super-Earths is anyone's guess. If there are, we certainly hope something out there is willing to drop us some light-speed travel technology and let us couch surf for a while.

The host star, dubbed GJ 667C, is an M class dwarf star and is part of a triple star system, which contains the other two stars, GJ 667A and B, which are a pair of orange K dwarf stars. [UC Santa Cruz's Steven Vogt] states that the star was an unlikely candidate to host other planets, due to its metal-poor composition, and theorizes that if this star can host planets, other unlikely stars could as well, which in turn could make the amount of hosted planets greater than expected.

Look into it further if you happen to read Astrophysical Journal Letters, while the official manuscript will go online at http://arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph via Cornell University.

[PhysOrg.com via Geekosystem; Image via Wikipedia.]

Sick New Ferrari Concept

Photo by: Evan Baczek

Kitten Massage!!!

3 Surprising Reasons to Give Up Pop

By now, it's probably fair to say that most Americans know soda isn't a health-promoting drink. Over the years, the carbonated beverage has been blamed for the obesity epidemic and rising healthcare costs. Some public health experts have even called for a soda tax to help deter people from drinking so much of it. While love handles and diabetes are obvious problems associated with soda, drinking the sweet carbonated beverages harbors hidden threats, too.

1. It causes invisible fat buildup around your organs.
In the latest bad news for the soda industry, Danish researchers discovered that drinking non-diet soda leads to dramatic increases in dangerous hidden fats. In the study, researchers asked participants to drink either soda sweetened with 50 percent glucose and 50 fructose (table sugar, the soda sweetener of choice in Denmark), milk containing the same amount of calories as the regular soda, diet cola, or water every day for six months.
While total fat mass remained the same across all beverage-consuming groups, researchers say dramatic increases in fats that are hard to detect with the naked eye occurred. Those who drank the regular cola experienced a 132 to 142 percent increase in liver fat, a 117 to 221 percent jump in skeletal fat, and about a 30 percent increase in both triglyceride blood fats and other organic fat. The regular soda-drinking group also experienced an 11 percent increase in cholesterol, compared to the people who drank beverages.
In America, many sodas are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup that has been shown to cause even worse fat buildup. Avoid turning to diet soda as a healthy alternative. Artificial sweeteners and food dyes have been linked to brain cell damage and hyperactivity; people who drink diet soda are also more prone to developing diabetes.

2. Some contain toxic flame retardants.
Some popular soda brands, including Mountain Dew, use a toxic flame retardant chemical ingredient to keep the artificial flavoring from separating from the rest of the liquid. Brominated vegetable oil, also sometimes listed as BVO on soda and sports drink, can cause bromide poisoning symptoms like skin lesions and memory loss, as well as nerve disorders.

3. You're taking part in the biggest science experiment on the planet.
Many soda brands on the market in America today are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, a heart-harming man-made compound derived mainly from genetically engineered (GE) corn. GE technology was only introduced into our food chain in the 1990s. We don't know the long-term health impacts of their use because the corporations that developed the crops never had to test to make sure it's safe over the long term. Other independent scientists are finding that GE crops are linked to digestive tract damage, accelerated aging, and even infertility.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-ap-bkc-oklahomast-iowas,0,4500544.story