April is Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month, so many clever chefs are generating innovative takes on the classic comfort food. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt combined it with one of my favorite foods: cheese-stuffed jalapeño peppers. You can find the full recipe at the link.

Link | Photo: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Alexander Graham Bell worked with sound, tinkering with gadgets to help his wife, who was deaf, communicate. He is known as the inventor of the telephone. He gave the Smithsonian more than 400 discs and cylinders of his audio experiments, but until recently there was no way to play them back.

As a result, says curator Carlene Stephens of the National Museum of American History, the discs, ranging from 4 to 14 inches in diameter, remained “mute artifacts.” She began to wonder, she adds, “if we would ever know what was on them.”

Then, Stephens learned that physicist Carl Haber at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, had succeeded in extracting sound from early recordings made in Paris in 1860. He and his team created high-resolution optical scans converted by computer into an audio file.

Stephens contacted Haber. Early in 2011, Haber, his colleague physicist Earl Cornell and Peter Alyea, a digital conversion specialist at the Library of Congress, began analyzing the Volta Lab discs, unlocking sound inaccessible for more than a century. Muffled voices could be detected reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy, sequences of numbers and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

In autumn 2011, Patrick Feaster, an Indiana University sound-media historian, aided by Stephens, compiled an exhaustive inventory of notations on the discs and cylinders—many scratched on wax and all but illegible. Their scholarly detective work led to a tantalizing discovery. Documents indicated that one wax-and-cardboard disc, from April 15, 1885—a date now deciphered from a wax inscription—contained a recording of Bell speaking.

You can hear that recording and read more about it at Smithsonian. Link

Larry Moss's Airigami team assembled this enormous and reasonably lifelike acrocanthosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous period. At 20 feet long, it's almost a 1:1 scale model. You can see photos of the assembly process at the link.

Link | Artist's Website

(YouTube link)

Skill. And a very sharp knife. And someone mentioned the advantage of a great cutting board. A whole watermelon is chopped and ready for salad in 20 seconds flat. (via Viral Viral Videos)

Gozdom's desk lamp looks sturdy, but remember that Ewoks destroyed them with just logs and rope. He writes:

The configuration follows that of the AT-ST scout walker, and the head resembles the boiler of a steam locomotive. The thorax is hardwood, the rest is brass with bronze / copper overlays. Still needs a lot of work: sealing the leg sections, guns, wiring, covering the thorax with brass, round shields at the axles and others.

Link -via Technabob

Okay, you have three cake layers, two of them peanut butter flavor, and one chocolate cheesecake layer stuffed with chocolate frosting. Then the whole cake is smothered in peanut butter frosting and garnished with chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, and pieces of Reece's Cups on top. All those parts except for the garnishes are made from scratch. You can make your own, because the complete recipe is it Hugs & CookiesXOXO. Link -via reddit

But that's Mr. Yoda to you. Don't get too familiar with your teacher. If George Lucas had kept with his original plan, our favorite Jedi master would be known as Minch Yoda. Matthew Jackson of blastr writes:

George Lucas originally intended "Yoda" to be the character's surname. His first name was going to be ... wait for it ... Minch. That's right, the coolest Jedi of them all was originally going to be a dude known as "Minch Yoda."

Luckily for all of us, Lucas eventually pared down the name, adding to Yoda's ever-present mystery. The name "Minch" did end up making a Star Wars appearance, though. Minch was another Jedi master, also of Yoda's species, who lived 700 years before the Battle of Yavin and first appeared in the story "Heart of Darkness" in the Dark Horse comic Star Wars Tales #16, first published in 2003. So, in the end, we got a Minch and we got a Yoda, but we avoided a Minch Yoda.

Link

If you like the anamorphic portrait by Bernard Pras we featured on Neatorama recently, you'd get a kick out of this one of Albert Einstein, made completely from junk. Via Juxtapoz

Heart Box (sold separately)

Mother's Day is May 12th. This year tell Mom I love you with the Heart box from the NeatoShop. This beautiful ceramic keepsake opens to reveal the text, " Je t'aime." The box is perfect for holding tiny treasures.

The Heart Box is available in three different styles: 

• Blue Ribbon with Rose
• Criss-Cross Heart
• Pink Heart with Rose

Collect all three and make it a truly heartfelt gift. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Jewelry & Keepsake Boxes. 

Link

A TARDIS isn't just a ship. It's also a practical garment! Our own Miss Cellania rounded up ten of the most impressive dresses inspired by the Doctor's one true love. My favorite is this steampunk dress made by Kenneth Shelley for J.M. Frey. She writes:

The throat-broach has a standard yale key, like the one that the Doctor gave Martha and Jack Harkness, and the belt is hung with small pieces of electronics. There’s a circuit board, knobs and handles, gears, a clock that I dismantled and aged to make it look as if it was falling apart as it dangled from my chains, and of course, a sonic screwdriver.  The belt is meant to resemble the control console.

Link -via Nerd Bastards | Photo: J.M. Frey/Christine Mak

Groupers hunt for small fish in open water, but sometimes they will beckon to a moray eel or a  humphead wrasse to go hunting with them. Morays and wrasses will grab fish out of crevices and places a grouper can't reach -and if it flushes more of them out, the grouper can catch them. But what is weird is how the grouper recruits an eel, as observed by Alexander Vail from the University of Cambridge.

The groupers always summoned the wrasses and morays with a vigorous shimmy, but they also used a second, much rarer signal—a headstand, combined with head-shaking. Vail thinks it was a signal, one that said: “The prey’s in here, guys!”

When doing their headstands, the groupers always swam over the location of hidden prey that they had failed to catch. They only used the move when a moray or wrasse was nearby, continued to do so until one arrived, and stopped as soon as one did.

Most morays and all wrasses headed towards the grouper’s location when they saw the signal, causing the prey to break their cover. (The fact that the prey didn’t abandon their hiding spots beforehand shows that the headstand itself isn’t a hunting tactic.) And when the morays ignored the headstand, the groupers actually swum after their partner and either performed their “recruitment shimmy” or forcibly tried to push the eels in the right direction.

The researchers were impressed, but they caution that such cooperative behavior doesn't necessarily mean these fish have high intelligence. See videos of the tag teams in action at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link

With multiple books on the New York Times bestseller lists, author James Patterson doesn't need any help, but he thinks that the book industry does. So he has paid for an ad in the New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly calling for government bailouts for books:

"The Federal Government has stepped in to save banks, and the automobile industry, but where are they on the important subject of books? Or, if the answer is state and local government, where are they? Is any state doing anything? Why are there no impassioned editorials in influential newspapers or magazines? Who will save our books? Our libraries? Our bookstores"

Daniel D'Addario of Slate interviewed Patterson on why he decided to raise the call for help for the publishing industry:

So do you think a bailout of books is actually realistic? Or was it a kind of purposefully outlandish “Modest Proposal“?

I don’t think it’s a question of bailing out, necessarily. In Germany, Italy, and France, they protect bookstores and publishers. It is widely practiced in parts of Europe. I don’t think that’s outlandish. But people have mixed feelings about the government doing anything right now.

I haven’t thought about it but I’m sure there are things that can be done. There might be tax breaks, there might be limitations on the monopolies in the book business. We haven’t gotten into laws that should or shouldn’t be done in terms of the internet. I’m not sure what needs to happen, but right now, nothing’s happening.

The press doesn’t deal with the effects of e-books as a story. Borders closing down is treated as a business story. Where we are in Westchester during the summer, you’d think that’d be a bookstore haven, and there’s nothing. And that’s not unusual. I don’t think we can be the country we’d like to be without literature.

Link

Awkward autocorrections and wrong recipients are normal--even superheroes experience them! Why aren't they saving the world? The blog Texts from Superheroes shows us that they're too busy texting each other.

Link -via Nerd Approved

Daniel Høgh and Justina Šniukštaitė built this elaborately-detailed and terrifying costume based on Imperial Fists Terminator Captain Tancred from the game Warhammer 40K. Imagine running into the guy in the dark! Read more about it and see a video of the cosplayer in action at Technabob. Link  -via Metafilter

See more pictures at Facebook. Link

A foggy day in Beijing, China? Nope! Just smog. Redditor jdk shares some photos of how bad the air pollution has become over there: Link

A home carved into a cliff face has many advantages: it's climate-controlled, easy to defend, and sturdy. It takes quite some time to build, but once it's done, many generations can use it. Cliff homes exist all over the world. Environmental Graffiti introduces us to ten places with cliff dwellings, such as China’s Guyaju cliff dwellings, pictured here, that were built over 1,000 years ago and include hundreds of rooms and even stables for horses. Link -via the Presurfer  

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Pfctdayelise)

Need coffee but don't have any money? Some cafes have the solution: suspended coffee, a donation scheme where patrons can buy a cup of coffee for themselves and another cup for a complete stranger. The second cup is claimed at a later time by someone who cannot afford it themselves.

Caffeine fix and a good deed? It's coming soon to a Starbucks near you. The BBC's Suraj Patel explains in this video clip: Link [auto-starting video]

POLL: Would you buy suspended coffee for someone else?

• Yes - Caffeine is for everyone
• No - Get a job, hippie!

Commander Chris Hadfield continues to send awe-inspiring photographs back from the ISS. This is the city of Berlin at night, in which you can still detect the historical divide between East and West due to the different lighting. Berlin has more old-fashioned gas streetlamps than any other city in the world, and they give off a yellowish glow. In the past few years, the city's plan to replace the gas lamps with more efficient electrical lights has sparked a controversy with those who want to preserve the city's history. Link  -via Laughing Squid

"Basically, the sperm whales had huddled together like logs, creating a protective wall
against the orcas." - Shawn Heinrichs

Photographer Shawn Heinrichs of Blue Sphere Media was on a boat off the southern coast of Sri Lanka when he saw something you don't see every day: a pod of sperm whales battling a pack of killer whales.

“We saw the water churning on the horizon,” said Shawn Heinrichs, a photographer and filmmaker who was in the area looking for blue whales. Heinrichs and his colleagues steered their boat toward the patch of white water. As they got closer, they saw an enormous dorsal fin slicing through the water — a killer whale trademark — and then noticed the group of sperm whales, clustered together in a defensive stance.

At that point, Heinrichs did what many of us would not do: He jumped in.

“I grabbed my camera and slid off the side of the boat,” he said. “There was a frothing, dark pile of shapes ahead of me. When I drifted away from the boat, the largest orca in the pod made a beeline for me but veered off at the last moment and dove deep.”

Nadia Drake of Wired has more: Link

Einstein Wallet

Is your current wallet just not geeky enough for you? Upgrade it to the Einstein Wallet from the NeatoShop. This fantastic bi-fold wallet is a great way to pay homage to your favorite theoretical physicist. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Wallets, Purses, & Coin Bags. 

Link

Miniature art in cake form! These cake pops are only 2 inches square, but you can recognize ten classic album covers in them. They were made by Miss Insomnia Tulip on commission. See all ten of them at Eat Your Heart Out. Link -via Boing Boing

Richie Trimble rides tall in his 14.5-foot bicycle. He sees the world from 17 feet above ground, which gives him a unique view. It can't be easy balancing on a bicycle that has to be up against a building just  to climb on!

As a cinematographer in Los Angeles, it’s rare for Richie to make it out to bike rides. Two weeks ago, his calendar clear, he rode on The Safari Bike Ride where he met up with friend and fellow bike builder, Rick Hill. Richie tells me that “Rick makes the most awesome bikes.”

Richie challenged Rick to the tallest bike in LA – two weeks later, STOOPID TALL would be constructed. Richie was building it for Saturday night’s bike ride, C.R.A.N.K. MOB, to take it to the next level. It took him twelve hours to build, the final eight hours on the day of the bike ride.With only one Huffy beach cruiser frame, crank, handle bars, seat post and the fork as the rest of the bike is made by round and square steel tubing. The curves in the the round tubing were created from an upside down shopping cart and log on top. The chain alone is six and a half bicycle chains, that’s thirty-two and a half feet.  With no real tools or a flush surface, Richie used c-stands (usually seen being used on film sets), levels and small wedges, built by eye-ing it in his back yard. “I was skeptical it would even ride at all.”

But it did, as you can see from this POV video. Warning: may induce vertigo.

(YouTube link)

Read more about the bike called STOOPID TALL at L.A. Streets Blog. Link  -via Blame It On The Voices

I'm not sure if it's comfortable, but Ben Uyeda makes this chair look easy to build. He cut 18-inch logs and arranged them along an S-shape. Then he drove heavy screws through the logs and reinforced the back with steel brackets. This would be great for a cabin in the woods or the porch of a country home.

Link

(YouTube link)

Here we have a mind-blowing confluence of cute: a cat, dressed in a shark costume, riding a Roomba, chasing a duckling around. And if that weren't enough, the dog shows up, dressed in his own hammerhead shark costume. The top YouTube comment:

Art no longer has any meaning. This is the finale. The beautiful long take at the end, holding the tension, breaking the fourth wall, daring the audience with its audacity and self-relexivity. Beyond masterful. Simply breathtaking.

The only thing that could possibly beat this would be if a sloth, a koala, and a red panda were to have a picnic together. -via Tastelessly Offensive

Inspired by a kitchen lamp that appeared on That's '70s Show, Dominique made a hanging kitchen lamp that uses four food graters as shades. It's a clever design that's perfect for the kitchen of a serious cook.

Link (Translation) -via Recylcart

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

"What book did you always love?" What a great question! Let's take a look at 32 well-known people and the books they "always loved."

Charlie Chaplin: Oliver Twist

Mel Brooks: Crime and Punishment

 Barack Obama: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Steven Spielberg: Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans

Madonna: Gone With The Wind

John F. Kennedy: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, From Russia with Love, and John Quincy Adams

Dean Martin: Black Beauty (Dean only read one book in his life)

Morgan Freeman: Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp

Magic Johnson: Jack and the Beanstalk

Gloria Steinem: Little Women

Groucho Marx: Charlotte's Web

General Norman Schwarzkopf: White Fang

Elvis Presley: The Impersonal Life by Joseph Bennen, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, and The Bible

Angelina Jolie: In Search of the Real Dracula

Ted Kennedy: Lad, a Dog

Sammy Davis, Jr.: Wuthering Heights

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Breyer: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Willard Scott: The Little Engine That Could

Stephen King: Lord of the Flies

Larry King: Lou Gehrig, a Quiet Hero

Ronald Reagan: The Bible

Jim Carrey: Dr. Seuss books

Bill Clinton: The Dick and Jane readers and The Silver Chalice

Darryl Hannah: Horton Hears a Who

Tom Hanks: Crime and Punishment, all the books of Leon Uris, read The Hobbit in fifth grade (but not the LOTR trilogy)

Tim Allen: Curious George

John Lennon: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Wind in the Willows

Will Smith: The Alchemist

Hilary Clinton: Goodnight Moon

James Earl Jones: The Cat in the Hat

Lily Tomlin: The Shipping News

James Dean: The Little Prince

Okay, now it's your turn. What book have YOU "always loved?"