A large mule deer became stuck on the ice over a frozen lake near the Coors Brewery in Golden, Colorado. The deer, which had been seen in the neighborhood before, couldn't get enough traction with his hooves to move. After weighing a few options, park ranger Todd Taylor, a certified ice rescuer, was called in. Taylor was able to lasso the deer and pull it in, with the help from brewery employees. See more video at KRQE. Link -via Arbroath
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When cats are too lazy to walk themselves around the yard it's time for an intervention, but this sheep seems rather content with playing taxi.
Maybe the cat has agreed to share his treats with the sheep, either that or the cat has some dirt on that wooly casanova!
--via Tastefully Offensive
This luxurious house called Villa Vals is built directly into a hillside in the village of Vals in the Swiss Alps. A collaboration between architectural firms Christian Müller and SeARCH, it features four bedrooms that are surprisingly flooded with natural light and have beautiful Alpine views. A thermal springs spa is nearby. The exterior is partially made of quartzite collected from the springs and surrounding area. There is a private hot spring in the home, as well as a hot tub and patios. The environmentally-friendly house is thermally insulated and has a heat pump, heat exchanger, radiant floors and uses hydroelectric power generated by a local reservoir.
See more pictures of the Villa Vals in the gallery above, and check out nine other beautiful underground dwellings at Homedit. Link -via Unique Daily
(Image credits: SeARCH, Iwan Baan, Salottobuono)
Eighth grader Matt DeMember made an unbelievable shot that just beat the buzzer in a youth basketball game at Greenridge Baptist Church in Maryland. Not only did he get a great reaction from the crowd, but later ESPN tweeted the video. It's a kid's dream come true!
-via HuffPost Sports
Jeff Wysaski at Pleated-Jeans must have taken a look at my daughter's art class assignments. In all, 18 classical paintings are interpreted by a modern teenager. These are not quite the interpretations the painter had in mind when creating these works. Link
Simon, the 6-month-old dog, is happy to teach 8-week-old Daisy how to walk down stairs. That's a helpful dog! -via Tastefully Offensive
Yes, that's really a quarter in the upper right corner! Mario Marchese, maker of the train set inside a record player case, emailed me about his latest project. This train set, the second smallest in the world, is pulled by a locomotive half an inch long. Mario writes:
They are 1/2 inch pieces cut out of wine cork, painted and embedded with magnets. Servo motor with a cardboard disc guides the train across the the tracks. It's a PWM circuit powered by a 555 timer. The sound comes from a Radio Shack recorder Module.
More Photos and a Video --- Thanks, Mario!
A gargantuan rubber duckie floated into Sydney Harbor on Saturday. No one panicked, as the 15-meter-tall duck was there to open the annual Sydney Festival, a celebration of art featuring 750 artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, and other cultural participants from 17 countries. Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, known for his giant ducks, created the spectacle. See more pictures at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Newtown grafitti)
Putting dogs in a hospital may seem like an unsanitary move, but if they are specially trained to sniff out bacteria to help diagnose patients infected with Clostridium difficille before anyone would ever be able to identify the infection then they can actually help save lives by preventing the spread of the bacteria.
Via Geekosystem
Best. Toilet store. Window display. Ever. If I lived in Austin, I would make this my exclusive plumbing store destination.
Link Via The Mary Sue
In Edmonton, Alberta, Daniel Gray and his girlfriend Kathleen Starrie built an amazing igloo with hundreds of colored ice bricks. Ms. Starrie's parents conceived of the project as a way to distract Gray from their daughter. To prepare, they collected hundreds of milk cartons to use as molds for the bricks. Gray, an engineer, embraced the project:
Originally, Gray thought the best way to build the igloo would be to cut each of the ice blocks so they would fit together perfectly. Instead, he used what he now calls "snowcrete" to put the ice blocks together.
"(It) is just snow and water but, it sticks really well to the ice," Gray said, "The snowcrete just shaped and moulded however you wanted so it made it possible."
In total, the group spent about 150 hours carefully putting about 500 ice blocks together, one by one, to build the colourful igloo.
You can watch a video at the news story link.
Link and News Story -via Colossal
This looks like something right out of a fantasy book. Somewhere in Vermont, a couple of kids had not just one tree house to share, but three separate houses of their own that they could go to and from with a ladder and a bridge. If I had one of these tree houses, I'm sure I'd only ever go home in the winter time or to stock up on food and clean clothes.
Wildlife documentarian Gordon Buchanan traveled to Svalbard for his new series The Polar Bear Family and Me. He did not know that it is customary there to bring a dish to dinner when visiting the polar bears. The mother expressed their displeasure at this breach of etiquette and tried to break through his protective capsule:
Mr Buchanan, who has filmed the world’s deadliest creatures for 20-years, described the ordeal as his scariest ever experience.
He said: 'A lot of people think that carnivores are intrinsically dangerous but most aren’t - there’s a minimal risk and attacks are the exception.
'But polar bears are different, without a doubt she wanted me for lunch. She was so persistent, looking for a weak spot for almost 45 minutes.
'I was terrified and you could hear my heartbeat on the mic. It really was a sensational moment and a worrying situation.
A farmer in Cambridgeshire, England, discovered a massive 44-foot-long oak log in a peat bog last February. The wood had been perfectly preserved for 5,000 years! Cabinet makers Adamson and Low specialize in processing bog wood, and recognized that this one is special, and made special plans for it.
Besides, bog oak is beautiful and historical, but it’s first and foremost a carpentry wood, prized for centuries as England’s only native black timber. (The tannins in the oak react to iron in the subsoil to turn the wood dark brown or black.) Because the giant oaks were so much larger than they are today, bog oak wood has medullary rays far wider than in modern oak. That makes for a thick stripe grain that looks particularly gorgeous on quarter-sawn boards. Traditional drying methods couldn’t preserve it in thick pieces, so its main use was as inlay wood or in the making of smaller decorative or furniture items. It’s only in the past 20 years that drying technology has advanced enough to allow the preservation of substantial hunks of ancient wood.Hamish Low had the ambitious idea to preserve the majesty of this trunk while still tying it into the hundreds of years of British carpentry tradition. He could go ahead and plank the trunk, but instead of dividing the planks into more easily dried boards, they would be kept in their 44-foot lengths. Once dried the planks would shrink, but they’d still be massive and could be used to make a giant table. That huge tabletop could then be exhibited as an example of and tribute to the arboreal giants that once dominated the English landscape. There isn’t a single piece of bog oak as such on public display in the UK. Here was the perfect opportunity to rectify that oversight.
The log became known as the Fenland Black Oak as the plans fell into place. A special kiln was built big enough to dry the wood, and the log was removed from its peat bog in September. The table is expected to be ready in the summer of 2013. Its final destination is undetermined, but it will be available for the public to see. Link | Project blog -via TYWKIWDBI
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