Legend has it that the Vikings used a navigation device called the sunstone to tell the direction of the sun, even on a cloudy day. The device was dismissed as myth ... until today:

... experiments have shown that a crystal, called an Iceland spar, could detect the sun with an accuracy within a degree – allowing the legendary seafarers to navigate thousands of miles on cloudy days and during short Nordic nights.

Dr Guy Ropars, of the University of Rennes, and colleagues said "a precision of a few degrees could be reached" even when the sun was below the horizon.

An Iceland spar, which is transparent and made of calcite, was found in the wreck of an Elizabethan ship discovered thirty years ago off the coast of Alderney in the Channel Islands after it sank in 1592 just four years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Link (Image: Treasure Mtn Mining/YouTube)

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A cat sees a printed version of the Rotating Snake Illusion and reacts as if its moving. The cat's owner, rasmusab, said the cat did not react to a different illusion on paper, and in fact, lost interest in the snakes after a few exposures. So he began to wonder how other cats react to illusions, and produced a form you can submit to relate your own cat's experience. -via reddit

A recently-published study on the history of dogs says that the domestication of wolves was initiated by the wolves, not by people. That makes so much sense, when you boil it down to the basics of who benefits the most, as we see in this comic from Doghouse Diaries. Link -via Tastefully Offensive  

Graphic artist Kapil Bhagat designed a series of ten typographic posters featuring the names of scientists, with each showing a clever clue as to what they are famous for, as a project celebrating Science Day in India. The prints can be purchased at Society Six. See them all at Bhagat's site. Link -via Flavorwire

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Rogelio, a pancake artist in Mexico City, is a master of his craft. Watch him create edible versions of Jake and Finn from the cartoon Adventure Time. Some art school should get him on its faculty immediately.

- Thanks, Christopher Jobson!

I have enough trouble making tying knots with my shoelaces, so this is doubly awesome: researchers at the University of Chicago, Illinois, have created a 3D knot in a fluid.

To investigate, Dustin Kleckner and William Irvine of the University of Chicago, Illinois 3D-printed strips of plastic shaped into a trefoil knot and a Hopf link. Crucially, the strips had a cross section shaped like a wing, or hydrofoil (see picture).

Next, the researchers dragged the knots through water filled with microscopic bubbles. Just as a wing passing through air creates a trailing vortex, the acceleration of the hydrofoils created a knot-shaped vortex that sucked in the bubbles. The result was a knot-shaped flow of moving bubbles – the first fluid knot created in a lab – which the team imaged with lasers.

Jacob Aron of NewScientists has the video clip of the fluid knot: Link

David Daniels produces animation by the process of stratacut animation. Once you know how it's done, the difficulties of this art will blow your mind. From vimeo:

Strata-cut animation is most commonly a form of clay animation in which a long bread-like "loaf" of clay, internally packed with varying imagery, is sliced into thin sheets, with the animation camera taking a frame of the end of the loaf for each cut, eventually revealing the movement of the internal images within. Wax may be used instead of clay for the loaf, but this can be more difficult to use because it is less malleable.

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Stratacut is created only through an in depth understanding of space-time, because in stratacut, you build your imagery not just in X, Y, and Z space, but also considering time as a dimension, and the most important one. Students who have undertaken the challenge of creating stratacut animation will tell you, it is not for those unwilling to bend their perception of animation, and time in the process.

Next, consider what is involved in designing and building that "internal imagery" in the clay loaf, both in the artistry and timing. Now that you have the process in mind, enjoy some clips of Daniels' work. You will probably recognize some of these, but you'll appreciate them more knowing how they are done.

This is big news: scientists reported that a Mississippi toddler born with HIV has been functionally cured of the infection, thanks to early use of antivirals.

Gay enlisted the help of Mississippi state health authorities to track down the child. When they found her, the mother said she had stopped giving the child antiviral drugs six or seven months earlier.

At that point, Gay expected to find that the child's blood was teeming with HIV. But to her astonishment, tests couldn't find any virus.

"My first thought was, 'Oh, my goodness, I've been treating a child who's not actually infected,' " Gay says. But a look at the earlier blood work confirmed the child had been infected with HIV at birth. So Gay then thought the lab must have made a mistake with the new blood samples. So she ran those tests again.

"When all those came back negative, I knew something odd was afoot," Gay says. She contacted an old friend, Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga at the University of Massachusetts, who has been studying pediatric HIV/AIDS for two decades.

That was last August. Since then, Luzuriaga's lab and labs in San Diego, Baltimore and Bethesda, Md., have run ultra-sensitive tests on the baby's blood.

A couple of tests have intermittently found pieces of HIV DNA and RNA, but no evidence that the virus is actively replicating in the child's cells.

Luzuriaga tells Shots this amounts to what's called a "functional cure."

Richard Knox of NPR's Shots has the story: Link

Remember the Most Insane Rope Swing post we had on Neatorama last week? There something even more insane: pushing your girlfriend off the cliff to do the swing. Mean? Yes. Funny? Well ... you decide.

If you decide to do this to your significant other, just remember that you can only do this once. Afterwards, she will not be your significant other anymore.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

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New York Philharmonic trombonist David Finlayson gave us What The Trombone Sees. Now he shows us what goes on inside the instrument! As anyone who has ever played a brass instrument can tell you, this is shown in slow motion. The lips belong to trombonist Peter Ellefson. -via Improbable Research

This is not a painting, drawing, or Photoshop. DeviantART member Battledress decorated the head of model Michael Foster at the International Make-Up Artist Trade Show (IMATS) in Los Angeles. This is all makeup, with the exception of tape to hold his eye shut and to cover the eyebrow. The goal was to evoke classical medical illustrations. The project does that well! Link -via Laughing Squid

Photos: Darmon Richter/The Bohemian Blog

Atop the barren Mount Buzludzha in Bulgaria sat one of the strangest abandoned places on Earth: a concrete saucer that used to house the Communist Party Headquarters before the collapse of the USSR.

The tower of Buzludzha reaches a total height of 107m; the red Soviet star adorning its side measuring three times the diameter of the star emblazoned onto the tower of Moscow’s Kremlin. An eternal flame set into the front courtyard served as a tribute to fallen comrades, while great concrete letters were hung around the main entrance to spell out rousing verses:

“ON YOUR FEET, DESPISED COMRADES!

ON YOUR FEET YOU SLAVES OF LABOUR!

DOWNTRODDEN AND HUMILIATED,

STAND UP AGAINST THE ENEMY!”

Dark Roasted Blend has the image gallery and post: Link (Thanks Avi!)

Raising Children of the Korn requires a daily dose of nu metal, which is thankfully captured for posterity in this YouTube clip by XxSassahmaxX. Here are 3-year-old Lukas Payne and his older sister Serene rocking out to Falling Away From Me while on a road trip.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] (Love that? Watch 'em rock out to TENSION) - via Daily Picks and Flicks

Getting married can be like stepping into a transmorgifier, so Stephanie and Jonathan had the right idea for a wedding theme. Their invitations and wedding cake toppers were inspired by Bill Watterson's classic comic. Calvin and Hobbes themselves served as ringbearers.

Link | Photos: Junshien Lau

Sometimes, logic dictates that the best course of action to treat a serious illness is to go to prison. Here's an amazing story of how one man committed a crime in order to get the medical care he desperately needed:

A 41-year-old man who had been incarcerated came to see me recently. While in prison he got in a fight, which led to a CT scan. He hadn't broken anything, but the scan did surreptitiously show two aneurysms. Both were in his hepatic artery (the artery that feeds his liver).

They were small, so the doctors kept an eye on the aneurysms without doing surgery. But the next time they checked, they had nearly doubled in size.

He was referred to a surgeon at a different hospital than the one I work at, and underwent an angiogram, to see the aneurysms better. The surgeons there said that he was sure to die if they did not intervene, and that they should schedule a surgery within the coming weeks.

Fortunately for him (or so he thought) he was released from prison one week later. When he returned for his pre-op visit, though, he was told that since he'd been released from prison, he no longer had insurance to cover the operation. [...]

... not knowing what else to to, it occurred to him that the easiest way to get the care he needed would be to get back in prison.

The next week, he went to a department store and, making sure a security guard saw him, pocketed some moisturizing cream. He looked up at the guard, smiled, and walked out.

After he was arrested, he wrote a note to the judge saying that he needed to get back into prison for a year, to get an operation. He told me the judge said "I'll give you 14 months, go get your surgery."

Doctor Joshua Mezrich told the story over at The Atlantic: Link