Soap Making

Kerri Mixon has turned her passion for soap making into a business, her home into a soap making factory and her husband into a soap salesman.



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(thanks Cora)

What People Eat For Breakfast Around The World

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Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, keeping us healthy and sharp. But breakfast foods vary wildly from place to place. Take a look at some classic breakfast choices from countries around the world.

How Much Would It Cost To Build The Starship Enterprise?

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So you want to build the Enterprise? Well good news: according to some quick, messy, napkin math, it's possible. Kind of. The bad news? It's going to be stupid expensive. But not unfathomably so!

Since we can't predict the future, or even come close to gauging the cost of development for revolutionary new inventions or substances like warp and impulse drives, shields, and teleporters, we're going to stick to what we know. It might not make us a real Enterprise, but it's about as close as you're going to get.

Bright Explosion On The Moon

For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. And they've just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the program.

On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium. It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything ever seen before.



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(thanks Miss Rare)

15 Wonderful Hilltop Towns And Villages

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Hilltop towns and villages are picturesque settlements nestled into the hillsides or on top of hills. They often date from the Middle Ages, and the most common reason for such geographical position is the protection from the invaders.

Fairy-tale look, medieval buildings, narrow winding streets and beautiful views of the surrounding valleys are just some of the reasons why these hilltop destinations are offered by many travel agencies.

(thanks Bosko)

The Truth About Why We Laugh

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Plato and Aristotle saw it as a tool to topple the mighty. It often accompanies gruesome acts of cruelty. Most of us will use it more routinely - to win friendship and love. So what lies behind the apparent spontaneity of laughter?

Kitten Goes Crazy

A kitten is introduced to a couple of lizards.



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What Is It About Bees And Hexagons?

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Solved! A bee-buzzing, honey-licking 2,000-year-old mystery that begins with a beehive. Look at the honeycomb in a beehive and ask yourself: Why is every cell in this honeycomb a hexagon? Bees, after all, could build honeycombs from rectangles or squares or triangles.

But for some reason, bees choose hexagons. Always hexagons. And not just your basic six-sided hexagon. They like 'perfect' hexagons, meaning all six sides are of equal length. Why?

Why Do Old People Get So Hairy?

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You've seen it at the local pool, at the beach, or even on your own grandpa. Old grizzled men with enough back hair to knit an afghan. Rampant tufts of hair springing out of dark nasal and ear cavities and eyebrows that look Cro-Magnon. What causes hair to grow everywhere but the head as we age?

Scientists don't exactly know what causes hair to sprout excessively from places like the ears and nostrils but Dr. David Liebovitz, an associate professor of Medicine at Northwestern University, guesses that it has to do with hormones and the lifecycle of hair.

Guangzhou 2012/China

Time-Lapse video of China's sprawling megacities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen.



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(thanks Cora)

What Is The Most Complex Chinese Character?

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Chinese characters are made up of strokes. Learning to write them involves not only learning where all the strokes go, but also the order in which they are supposed to be written and the direction of each individual stroke (left to right, up to down, etc.).

The simplest character is yī (one), a single stroke written from left to right.
The most complex character, biáng (picture above), is made up of 57 strokes.

The Highs And Lows Of Human-Powered Flight

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Greek mythology's Daedalus and Icarus famously got airborne under their own steam, and set the stage for a lively cast of historical characters that flew the noble flag for science while taking to the skies - and more often than not, the ground again a little too quickly.

Early attempts at human-powered flight were unsuccessful because of the difficulty of achieving the high power-to-weight ratio. As of 2008, human-powered aircraft have been successfully flown over considerable distances. However, they are primarily constructed as an engineering challenge rather than for any kind of recreational or utilitarian purpose.

Holland. The Original Cool

What do you know about Holland (or the Netherlands as its official name is)? Flowers, windmills, canals, cheese, wooden shoes, master painters from the Golden Age, bicycles. You're probably familiar with these. A new marketing campaign called 'Holland. The Original Cool' shows what's really cool about Holland.



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(thanks Cora)

Gloriously Grotesque 19th-Century Pipes

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The meerschaum pipes carved in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century are among the most bizarre and improbable concoctions in decorative art. Some feature bowls made from the heads of historical figures like Napoleon while others sport the likenesses of literary characters such as Sir Dagonet, King Arthur’s much-abused jester.

Meerschaum is a relatively new material to pipe making, appearing no earlier than the 18th century. Found primarily in and around the city of Eskişehir in western Turkey, meerschaum is a porous mineral that's soft enough to be carved but hard enough to be polished, revealing the carver's artistry.

(thanks Ben)

500 Years Of Rare Science Illustrations

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Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library brings together an extraordinary collection of works from the Rare Book Room and Rare Book Collections of the American Museum of Natural History's Research Library, spanning five centuries of anthropology, astronomy, earth science, paleontology, and zoology representing all seven continents.

Each highlighted work is accompanied by a short essay exploring its significance, what makes it rare - scarcity, uniqueness, age, binding type, size, value, or nature of the illustrations - and its place in natural history. 500 Years of Rare Science Illustrations.

Clever Water Stop Sign Prevents Tunnel Crashes In Australia

Faced with truck drivers not heeding warnings when their tractor trailers were too tall to enter the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, officials turned to a company called Laservision to put an end to these costly crashes that were not only closing the tunnel for weeks at a time, but also put other drivers on the road in considerable danger.

Laservision's Softstop system projects a familiar bright red stop sign, seemingly in mid-air, at the tunnel's entrance if a vehicle too large to enter is detected. In fact, the stop sign does not float in mid-air, but rather is projected onto a water screen that, should a vehicle not heed its command, would cause no damage from being driven through.

(thanks Cora)

Beat The Cheat

Nicholas Johnson is an Australian magician and comedian. He figured out how to cheat at every board game in the world in this mind bending video. The video was shot in one take with one hour of rehearsal including 20 people and 50 different computer and board game references.



YouTube link

Nicholas Johnson's website.

How Many Tribbles Will Fit In Your House?

'The Trouble With Tribbles' is an episode of the American science fiction television series Star Trek. Tribbles are depicted as small, soft, and gentle, and produce a soothing purring sound. These traits are said to endear them to most sentient races which encounter them.

Here's a fun calculator that tells you how many Tribbles would fit inside your home as well as how long it would take to fill your home up with these mulitplying trouble makers.

(thanks Sally)

Friday Cartoon By Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson is a professional cartoonist from the Chicago area. His cartoons have been published in Reader's Digest, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Woman's World and the Saturday Evening Post, to mention just a few. Among his clients are GM, General Electric, FedEx, Microsoft, and IBM.

UFP: Starfleet Academy

Almost a year ago I posted about Facebook Starfleet Academy, a Star Trek story-telling project. It's a social internet series set in the year 2374, that allows page fans to experience the Dominion War as well as other Star Trek events - in real time.

In the past year, that story project has grown immensely, and is now followed on a daily basis by nearly 2,500 Star Trek fans from around the world. The project has, in many ways, become a unique and very popular fan-produced Star Trek internet series.

(via Jon Baas)