— via deviantART
White Mushroom (Lepiotaceae), originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
Alice Finch and her castle, originally uploaded by Alice Finch.
Last October at BrickCon 2012, Seattle-area builder Alice Finch unveiled what just might be the largest Lego structure built by a single person, a near-complete minifig-scale rendition of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series of books and the corresponding movies — via The Brothers Brick
— via Redbubble
People may in future be able to have missing or diseased teeth replaced with ones grown from cells taken from their own mouth, scientists have predicted.
Hybrid teeth created by combining human gum cells and stem cells from mouse teeth have been grown in laboratory mice by researchers who hope the work could lead to dentures being superseded by new teeth grown on a patient’s jaw.
The mixture of mouse and human cells was transplanted into adult mouse kidneys and grew into recognisable tooth structures coated in enamel with viable developing roots, according to a study published in the Journal Of Dental Research — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The box is inexpensive to make. It’s simply a cardboard box, white paperboard and some tissue paper. But truly, the light box is so simple and fast to make and the impact on photo quality is SO enormous, I have no idea why I waited — via flax & twine
Here’s a surprise ruling. For many years we’ve written about how troubling it is that Homeland Security agents are able to search the contents of electronic devices, such as computers and phones at the border, without any reason. The 4th Amendment only allows reasonable searches, usually with a warrant. But the general argument has long been that, when you’re at the border, you’re not in the country and the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply. This rule has been stretched at times, including the ability to take your computer and devices into the country and search it there, while still considering it a “border search,” for which the lower standards apply. Just about a month ago, we noted that Homeland Security saw no reason to change this policy. Well, now they might have to. In a somewhat surprising 9th Circuit ruling (en banc, or in front of the entire set of judges), the court ruled that the 4th Amendment does apply at the border, that agents do need to recognize there’s an expectation of privacy, and cannot do a search without reason. Furthermore, they noted that merely encrypting a file with a password is not enough to trigger suspicion — via Slashdot
War Wounds, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
Came off second best in a game of bitey face
Wonderful news from the northbound platform of the Northern Line at Embankment Tube station. London Underground have reinstated the original Mind the Gap announcement — just so that the widow of the man who said it can go and hear his voice — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The people who sold us the house, an extremely friendly brother-and-sister contracting team who flip houses all over town, had done a spectacular job on the house. They’d all but gutted it, salvaging a structure on the verge of condemnation and putting in new floors, windows, appliances — pretty much everything except the walls themselves. It was the perfect purchase for someone like me, an unmanly man whose expertise with maintenance and engineering pretty much starts and stops with changing a bike tire. It was move-in ready, everything brand new and fully functional.
Except for the plumbing. Rick explained why: The cleanout valve, usually in the basement of a house, is where one accesses the house’s main sewer line so it can be cleaned with a sewer snake, commercially known as a Roto-Rooter. Over the years, the sewage main that runs from a house to the city’s sewers under the streets gets clogged with things people aren’t supposed to flush down toilets, along with roots, which inevitably work their way into pipes through the couplings or cracks. An old house — in our case, one built in 1900—is especially susceptible, and its sewer line needs to be cleaned almost every year.
The problem was that the sellers had installed a useless cleanout valve, one that sat at an acute angle to the sewer main, impossible to get a snake through. Rick suspected that the structural malfeasance was more extensive than that, but first he’d have to remove part of the wall to find out. This was not as involved a process as I imagined; in under two minutes he used a box-cutter to slash away at the sheetrock until there was a 2×2’ hole in the wall surrounding the valve. But this only sent him further into a spiral of shock and dismay. He stood up, brushed off his pants, and said, This is worse that I thought. This is totally illegal.
Illegal? Could inanimate objects be illegal? Well, guns and drugs, I suppose. But walls? plumbing? Renovated dream houses? How could any part of that be illegal?
As Rick continued fulminating, I eventually grasped the vague outlines: While they’d competently renovated the rest of the house, the sellers had cut corners on the plumbing, and it wasn’t compliant with city code. Rick suspected that they hadn’t paid a city inspector—pulled a permit, in the parlance of our times — to look at the plumbing before they walled it up, so the private inspector we hired when we bought the house wouldn’t see it, either — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Excavation, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
People take silverware, cups and plates, and that adds up over the course of a year to a lot of money,
he said. With Nutella, it added up much more quickly. Where Dining might have to spend $50,000 to replace silverware and cups, they were spending thousands of dollars on Nutella in one week.
Ms Dunn told me it was close to $5,000 in that first week,
he said. As for the amount of Nutella that Columbia students were consuming, or at least loading up on and walking away with, he said, I was told it was more than 100 pounds per day.
How much more? That was all I got,
he said.
Before hanging up on a reporter who called on Wednesday, Ms Dunn said: I’m not allowed to comment on anything. You have to go through university communications.
A spokeswoman declined to comment on the Nutella situation at Columbia. She said that numbers quoted in The Columbia Daily Spectator — and repeated by Mr Bailinson in a telephone interview on Wednesday — were speculative and inaccurate
and that the cost figures were roughly 10 times greater than the actual figures
.
Nutella is widely available on school campuses, though precise figures could not be obtained. It was also unclear whether Nutella hoarding had become a financial concern on other campuses — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via Instructables
Music composed by Bernard Herrmann. Played by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Conducted by Keith Lockhart at the Royal Albert Hall, 12 August 2011 — via Youtube
A crystal found in a shipwreck could be similar to a sunstone — a mythical navigational aid said to have been used by Viking mariners, scientists believe.
The team from France say the transparent crystal may have been used to locate the Sun even on cloudy days.
This could help to explain how the Vikings were able to navigate across large tracts of the sea — well before the invention of the magnetic compass.
However, a number of academics treat the sunstone theory with scepticism — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A pensioner branded a neighbour from hell has been warned that she must keep the peace for six months or face a fine after destroying a homeowner’s flower bed — in an apparent row over a squirrel.
Marion Webster, 78, has been reported to police at least 40 times by long-suffering neighbours for her anti-social behaviour.
She was found guilty of criminal damage last October for tearing out £50 of flowers from a neighbour’s flower beds at Solihull Magistrates Court — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Shattered Dreams, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
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