Habanerocouscous

Special effects artist Maria Bradley has been doing some amazing body art—including some cool “baby bump painting” for years. So when she became pregnant herself, it was a chance to do something really unusual.

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Prince Paul and De La Soul popularized the hip-hop skit, and Dr. Dre turned the concept cinematic, but the nine-man Wu-Tang Clan raised it to the level of esoteric art. Mixing stream-of-blunted-consciousness talk with pulp-fiction plot twists, copious gunshots, and equal parts skewed humor and authentic anger, Wu skits became etched into the pop-culture landscape right from the early-’90s jump-off.

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Here are a few samples from one of the better cats-that-look-like-pinup-model websites out there.

Honduran midfielder Luis Garrido suffered tears to both his ACL and PCL in an absolutely harrowing-looking leg injury in the first half of a 2-0 defeat to Mexico in World Cup qualifying, according to Honduran paper Diario La Prensa. He will be out for a year.

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How can a nonsense poem somehow make so much sense?

What does a millionaire who made his fortune selling his company to Facebook do afterwards? He invents an even better version and gives it away, of course.

I’ve never been in a fight. I’ve been on the receiving end of a number of punches, but engaging in physical violence has never been my thing. That’s just one of many reasons I’m puzzled by Rumblr, a matchmaking app for face pounding that launches today.

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https://youtu.be/x9n9dt2fKeE

This is wonderful. When Stoney Emshwiller was 18 years old, he filmed himself interviewing his older self. Thirty-eight years later a 56-year-old Stoney completed the interview by answering his younger self's questions. He's funded the production of a movie, called "Later That Same Life."

2006 Olympic gold medalist Brad Gushue was rushed to a hospital today in Nova Scotia after a fall left him gushing blood all over the ice at the Grand Slam of Curling.

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Jason Pierre-Paul has finally returned to the New York Giants, a few months after blowing apart his right hand in a fireworks mishap. Now that he’s under contract, JPP doesn’t have to be shy about his injury, so he let an AP photographer snap some photos when he met with the media today. The guy’s hand is pretty fucked up!

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It's not in English, but you won't miss it in this amusing collection of pranks played on bike thieves. My favorite part is the ceremonial chasing of the confused thief after his downfall. [via]

For months, one diligent artist has toiled to make and curate a majestic collection of landscape photographs, unlike anything you’ve seen before. Were these merely pretty landscapes, Clancy Philbrick would be just another world traveler with an aspirational Instagram account, but they’re not: they’re Nutscapes. And there’s a big, hairy nutsack in each one. Which means he’s also a genius.

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Li Jianbin only had eyes for the ball. The rest of the world faded away and there was only the ball, Li, and the necessity for Li to punt the thing into orbit. But when his bicycle kick was completed and he fell to the ground, the only thing Li had succeeded in clearing was his Shanghai Shenhua teammate Xiong Fei’s mind of all rational thought.

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Oops!

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Mirrors start off as melted glass—and big mirrors need an appropriately large oven to cast properly. It takes a full year to cast segments of the mirrors used to build the Giant Magellan Telescope, and the melting process is elaborate and hypnotic.

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Georgia running back Nick Chubb, who last year established himself as one of the nation’s best rushers, left today’s game against Tennessee in the first quarter after suffering a gruesome hyperextension of the left knee.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F8sPBsR9Lo

They've already made up their minds about annoying buzzing noises we humans are in two minds about.

The controlled demolition of old buildings is always a fun thing to watch, especially when demolition experts do extremely accurate math in order to bring down huge structures. Just like in the case of the coal-fired Cockenzie power station in East Lothian, Scotland.

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https://youtu.be/sSUXTFceilo On arbitration show Judge Judy, the plaintiff describes the possessions allegedly stolen by the defendant. But she never gets to finish the list. [via r/videos]

The ongoing war in Syria has led researchers to make the first withdrawal of seeds from a "doomsday" vault in an Arctic mountainside, to protect global food supplies.

The Crop Trust reports that the newly-removed seeds, which include samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, were requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo which was damaged by the conflict.

“This diversity provides our scientists, breeders and farmers the raw material needed to improve agriculture to overcome the challenges of climatic changes, population growth, pests, and diseases,” the researchers say.

[caption id="attachment_423028" align="alignnone" width="937"] The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, research field station and gene bank in Syria.[/caption]

PRI did an amazing profile of the Aleppo seed bank earlier this year. You can listen or read here.

“We’re very lucky that [the rebels] realize the importance of conserving biodiversity; it’s one of the activities that has never been interrupted in Aleppo,” Ahmed Amri of the Syrian seed bank told the radio news network a few months ago.

“But we cannot predict how each day will be.”

[caption id="attachment_423038" align="alignnone" width="800"] Photo: The Crop Trust[/caption]

From Reuters' coverage:

"Protecting the world's biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault," said Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground storage on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.

The vault, which opened on the Svalbard archipelago in 2008, is designed to protect crop seeds - such as beans, rice and wheat - against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease.

It has more than 860,000 samples, from almost all nations. Even if the power were to fail, the vault would stay frozen and sealed for at least 200 years.

Their seed bank in Aleppo miraculously managed to keep functioning, partly, until now. The Syrian location included a cold storage, despite the ongoing war. But the Aleppo bank was unable able to perform its duty as a hub where seeds could be grown and distributed to other nations, primarily in the Middle East.

[caption id="attachment_423035" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Svalbard “doomsday vault.” Image: The Crop Trust[/caption] More from The Crop Trust's news release:

The vault was established in 2008, and is built to survive rising sea levels, power outages and other calamities that could affect the seeds. Its main storage area is kept well below freezing to preserve the contents, and it can hold 4.5 million varieties.

“There are seeds in the vault that have originated from nearly if not every single country,” Lainoff says. “It really is kind of the only example of true international cooperation. There’s seeds sitting on the same shelf from North Korea and South Korea, and they get along just fine up there.”

Around 500 seeds of each variety are contained within the vault, according to Lainoff, and the different varieties are key to genetic resistance against potential disease that could affect the world’s major crops.

What has caused the first withdrawal from the global vault is man-made, however, as fighting between the Syrian government and rebel groups, as well attacks from Islamic State militants, have devastated the country. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands and forced more than 4 million people to become refugees.

ICARDA managed to move its headquarters from Syria in the early days of the war, while some of its workers remained at the gene bank in Aleppo in an attempt to save the collection. The organization managed to duplicate 80 percent of its collection in Svalbard as of March this year, where the seeds were safely stored along with others from around the world.

In food security, as with computer security, redundancy is key. How amazing does the Svalbard seed vault look? I want to go there.

Robert Lewandowski came on for Bayern Munich at halftime in a match they were losing 1-0 to Wolfsburg. Five minutes and 40 seconds into his appearance, his first goal hit the back of the net. Almost exactly nine minutes later, his fifth goal did the same. This man is on fire.

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An anonymous reader writes: Pokemon Go marks Nintendo's biggest move into mobile yet: the augmented reality mobile game makes use of your location as well as your phone's camera to let you interact with pocket monsters in the real world. It's an audacious idea — with an accompanying trailer — but as one writer points out it will have to nail a lot of different systems to build up an active community in the same that developer Niantic has done for its previous game, Ingress. The author looks at Ingress to see where Nintendo and Niantic may draw inspiration, pointing out that the game's portal modding system could prove a great mechanism for allowing Pokemon evolutions. Expect plenty more Pokemon amiibo to interact with the upcoming wristband, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A reader says he took this video at Saturday’s White Sox game. The wave sucks. Consider this a prompt to argue about the wave.

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I doubt it's safe to do what these guys are doing in this video, but it's fun to watch them use the guts of a microwave oven to illuminate and pop light bulbs and vaporize metal objects.

From Joey deVilla:

At the heart of every microwave oven is a magnetron, which takes your ordinary household AC (alternating current) and turns it into a blast of electromagnetic energy vibrating at 2450 MHz, or about 2.5 billion times a second. Those vibrations, when pointing at things, especially things with some water content, cause their molecules to vibrate more, raising their temperature and cooking them.

Inspired presumably by the twin demons of boredom and terror (Luhansk is in that part of Ukraine that Russia’s trying to annex), Kryukov and Pavlov decided to see what they could do if they took the magnetron out of a microwave and pointed it at things. After extracting a magnetron from a microwave oven, they fashioned a crude waveguide out of a coffee can so that they could direct the energy emitted from it.

This Czech nightclub has a special standing-height toilet for puking into -- but I bet they don't have urinals that sort piss by the booze you've consumed (meanwhile, check out that "puke here" ped-glyph!).

Last year, the Meadville (Pa.) High School football team scored 78 points in one game while rushing for more than 600 yards and lost, 79-78, to Warren . Tonight the Bulldogs did that feat one better—by being the victor, and turning the Dubois Beavers into the sad loser in a 107-90 victory... in, obviously, regulation.

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With the click of a button you can create a custom menu and name for a trendy Brookyln bar. There are a lot of places like this in LA, too, which serve pricey tapas portioned for a pygmy jerboa.

Marble Falls (Tex.) beat San Antonio John Jay 15-9 Friday night, and the above video is purportedly from that game. We have no other context to it, other than the title which alleges the umpire was targeted by John Jay players “because of a bad call.”

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You are kidnapped by political-science majors (who are upset because you told them political science is not a real science). Although blindfolded, you can tell the speed of their car (by the whine of the engine), the time of travel (by mentally counting off seconds), and the direction of travel (by turns along the rectangular street system). From these clues, you know that you are taken along the following course: 50 km/h for 2.0 min, turn 90° to the right, 20 km/h for 4.0 min, turn 90° to the right, 20 km/h for 60 s, turn 90° to the left, 50 km/h for 60 s, turn 90° to the right, 20 km/h for 2.0 min, turn 90° to the left, 50 km/h for 30 s. At that point, (a) how far are you from your starting point, and (b) in what direction relative to your initial direction of travel are you? – From Halliday & Resnick Fundamentals of Physics Extended 9th Edition

This is, supposedly, the Kansas State band as the U.S.S. Enterprise “encountering a horrible space creature.” It looks a lot more like the Kansas Jayhawk performing fellatio.

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