Video by Mike Randolph:
In the city of Tarragona, Spain, castellers gather every two years to see who can build the highest, most intricate human castles. This uniquely Catalan tradition requires astonishing strength, finesse, and balance. Not to mention courage.
(thanks, Clayton Cubitt)
From Business Insider:
Mayor Dave Bing is trying to save Detroit by offering incentives to lure residents back to abandoned neighborhoods.
One program offers $150,000 in housing renovation money and requiring only $1,000 down to police officers who are willing to relocate to the city. Another offers college graduates $2,500 to rent and $20,000 forgivable loan to buy properties.
Potential home buyers can choose from plenty of cheap or free homes, especially in the blighted neighborhoods of Woodward Ave. and Brush Park.
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Damselflies
(Thanks, Marilyn, via Submitterator!)
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Brooklyn artist Kilroy III celebrated the snowmageddon by building a huge, magnificent Castle Grayskull (of He-Man fame) igloo. It's the artist's second attempt at a Grayskullgloo, the first being one he attempted in the 1990s in Ohio. The primary sculpting tools were a Korean soup bowl and a spoon.
SPOTLIGHT: Snowmageddon Spawns Castle Grayskull by Kilroy III & Friends | Brooklyn Igloo
Castle Grayskull | Snowmageddon | Kilroy III (Flickr)
(via Geekologie)
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Upcycled Action Figures in Afghanistan
(Thanks, Noah!)
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In the 1930s, [Scientific Marriage Foundation founder George Crane] went around to a bunch of husbands and said, 'Hey husband, what does your wife do that annoys you?' And then he added all those complaints up and created a handy chart that let you rate your spouse against the generic ideal/anti-ideal. That's what you see in the chart above.
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[ Video Link ]
Trailer for the short film 'Las Palmas' by Johannes Nyholm, which is due out later this year. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin! Music: 'Låt i H-moll' by Björn Olsson, from the record 'The Lobster' released by Gravitation.)
In this video, you can watch a carnivorous aquatic bladderwort plant suck down tiny crustaceans in half a millisecond. Slurp! From Science News:
Using high-speed cameras, researchers have gotten the first good look at how these underwater plants spring their ambushes. Bladderworts sport trap doors that buckle in with a tiny nudge, creating a whirlpool that sucks in wee critters — all in about half a millisecond. That’s some of the fastest plant action on Earth, a French and German team reports online February 15 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B...
“Utricularia are the smallest of carnivorous plants and also, evidently, the most sophisticated,” says LubomÃr Adamec, a plant physiologist at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. These netlike veggies are dotted with tiny traps, often no wider than an ant is long.Small or not, the traps are masterpieces of suction. Pumped nearly dry, the chambers set up a pressure difference between the plant’s innards and the water outside. When swimmers brush up against a series of hairs along the trap door, the door bursts open and sucks water and crustaceans alike in.
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