A lamellaphone is a musical instrument that consists of metal tines fixed at one end over a sound box. Striking the tines creates sound. It's normally a simple instrument, but Gary Warner's is anything but. His remarkable Social Lamellaphone is an interactive art installation that was on display in Sydney, Australia last month.

Warner made the 270 tines from the bristles of mechanical street sweepers. They are cut at different lengths to produce different notes and fixed over a circular arrangement of sound boxes. The tonal patterns move in sequence and are repeated five times over the circumference of the instrument, so it's actually five instruments that people can play together.

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-via Recyclart

The home of Kyle of White Lightning HQ has peephole windows. He and his friends decided to use them to give neighborhood kids a unique trick-or-treating experience. They created a monster which greeted the children and gave out candy.

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The eyeball is made of styrofoam. There's an old Logitech webcam inside that lets them see what's happening on the porch. The hand is a glove made of fabric. It reached out to drop candy into trick-or-treating buckets. The kids loved it!

-via Twisted Sifter

It's the show about nothing. And intense martial arts training. For a commission, artist Nina Matsumoto drew the cast of Seinfeld in the style of Akira Toriyama, the manga artist who created the Dragon Ball series.

We've previously seen Matsumoto draw the cast of The Simpsons in a manga style and John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes as Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes.

(Photos: Frederique Olivier, John Downer Productions, Le Maho et al., Nature Methods)

Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg in France and his colleagues wanted to study the heart rates of emperor penguins. They equipped monitors on 34 penguins for that purpose. To collect data, they needed to enter the penguin colony daily. A human presence would cause the penguins to become anxious and would likely skew the data.

So Le Maho and his colleagues built this rover that looks like a penguin chick. They sent it into the colony many times to approach the tagged penguins, gather data, then leave. This rover did not disturb the penguins. Greg Miller writes for Wired:

In another experiment, the researchers disguised the rover as a penguin chick and sent it into a colony of notoriously shy emperor penguins. The birds allowed it to approach (see above) and in one case even infiltrate a creche of chicks (see below). Finally, they tried the undisguised rover on southern elephant seals, massive animals that can weigh more than 7,000 pounds. The seals hardly seemed to notice.

There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people corgis to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could.

Thus did Nick Fury bring together the greatest corgi team in the Marvel Universe. In this glorious dog cosplay, Omelette Oakenshield plays Captain America and Omelette's mom plays Nick Fury. The other dogs are stars of the corgi blogging scene, which is apparently a thing.

-via Tastefully Offensive

Here be dragons!

Or rather, on the south side of Rabat, Morocco, there's a dragon growing out of the ground. Redditor seiteta snapped this photo of a tree that is growing just the right way to inspire a fantasy novel.

-via Geek Tyrant

(Unrelated photo by TheChanel)

He used one hand to hold up his sagging pants. He used the other hand to form the shape of a gun. Then he walked up to a man walking along a sidewalk in Seattle, hoping for an easy grab.

According to Komo News, the would-be robber approached his target and said, "Give me your wallet or my buddy will beat you up."

At this point, I should mention that the criminal had failed to bring not only a belt for his pants and a weapon, but also an accomplice. He was alone.

Following the threat, the suspect reportedly made a gun with his thumb and forefinger. The suspect had his other hand in his pocket, but the victim believed he was just using that hand to keep his pants up.

According to the report, the victim walked on by the suspect, who appeared to be drunk or high, without giving him any money.

-via American Digest

(Photos: Kevin Jones)

Kevin Jones of Louisville, Kentucky is the father of Janiya, a 10-year old girl. Let me repeat that: she's 10. Even though she's 5'9" tall, her age is barely in the double digits.

Nonetheless, Janiya was dressing as a teenager and trying to convince much older boys and men online that she was anything from 14 to 18 years old.

Jones solved that problem. He made Janiya literally dress her age. She had to wear to school a shirt that says her true age on the front and her grade on the back. Janiya carried a Sofia the First backpack to school and wore ribbons in her hair. Continue reading to view more photos.

(Image: Australian Red Cross Blood Service)

You want to give blood, but you'd rather that the phlebotomist didn't stab you more than absolutely necessary. Now there's a system that can help.

The Australian Red Cross is experimenting with a new technology that detects the locations of donors' veins more effectively than the human eye.The system is an infrared light that senses the hemoglobin in the blood and projects an image of it onto the skin of the donor.

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-via Nag on the Lake

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Professional surfer Koa Smith recently won a GoPro camera contest by recording an amazing ride in Skeleton Bay in Namibia. He was in a smooth, elegant barrel wave for a full 27 seconds. I suggest starting at the 1:00 mark, where the footage becomes hypnotic if not dizzying. He appears to float through a tube of air that stretches across a world of water.

-via Twisted Sifter

As the proverb says, necessity is the mother of invention. Hence Sruli Recht's invention: gloves that you can't take off. The interior consists of the unlined skin of the Icelandic basking shark. The gills of these sharks are covered with thousands of small but sharp spikes which pick up plankton for the shark to eat.

Sticking your hands into these gloves is like shoving them down the maw of a shark because your hands will get stuck in them. The spikes face inward, so once you put them on, you can't take them off without ripping off your own flesh.

Obviously, they would make a great Christmas gift.

-via Toxel

All work and no play makes Elsa a dull girl.

Disney has long claimed that the hit movie Frozen is a retelling of the classic folk tale The Snow Queen.

Do you believe the official story?

Mary Katharine Ham doesn't. In a systematic argument, she explains how it is actually a remake of Stanely Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining.

It all makes sense. Olaf is Wendy Torrance. Anna is Danny Torrance. Elsa is Jack Torrance. They're cut off from the rest of the world in the Overlook Hotel, which is trapped in an eternal winter.

Power is growing within Danny. A dark, unearthly power. Elsa can't control it. And it will destroy them all.

-via Glenn Reynolds

There's a monster in Catropolis. That monster is Yasmine, the artist behind Cat Versus Human.

She is a menace to all feline life in Catropolis. They've tried to hide from her and wait for her rampages to subside. But this approach is no longer effective. They must take drastic measures to ensure their survival. Read on to experience their tale.

On Halloween, children approached the door for treats. So did a few reckless teenagers--though with some hesitation. But no one else went near that house ever again. Even the residents who unearthed the ghastly horror soon fled in madness, forever scarred by what they had seen.

-via Geek Art Gallery

Neil Cicierega grew up with Star Wars and Star Trek. He previously introduced us to the common non-human species on Star Trek. Now he's giving us a tour of the peoples of the Star Wars universe, including several of the named characters, such as Admiral Ackbar of the California Raisins and the crime boss Jabba the Hump.

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-via Fanboy