New research has suggested that a person's high intake of sugar - more than any other factor like obesity and aging - is a big reason for diabetes:

The study's four authors, including Robert Lustig of the University of California-San Francisco, examined data on sugar intake and diabetes prevalence in 175 countries "controlling for other food types (including fibers, meats, fruits, oils, cereals), total calories, overweight and obesity, period-effects, and several socioeconomic variables such as aging, urbanization and income."

For each bump in sugar "availability" (consumption plus waste) equivalent to about a can of soda per day, they observed a 1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence. This is a correlation, of course, and correlation does not necessarily equal causation. On the other hand, as the authors note in a lay summary, this "is far stronger than a typical point-in-time medical correlation study."

"No other food types yielded significant individual associations with diabetes prevalence after controlling for obesity and other confounders," the PLoS article states. "Differences in sugar availability statistically explain variations in diabetes prevalence rates at a population level that are not explained by physical activity, overweight or obesity."

Michael Mechanic of Mother Jones reports: Link

Pirate Leg Pencil Sharpener

Avast, thar matey. Be ye lookin' fer an office supply worth stealin'? Behold th' Pirate Leg Pencil Sharpener from th' NeatoShop. 'Tis be a pencil sharpener that looks like a scurvy pirate wit' a wooden pegleg. 

Be sure to check out th' NeatoShop fer more great Office Supplies and fantastic Pirate items. 

Link

(YouTube link)

This wave features billiard balls swinging from different lengths. They each hypnotically swing in their own little arc, making wonderful waves patterns together to the sounds of Moonlight Sonota.  See a couple more of videos that show what this looks like from the side at mental_floss. Link 

When 78-year-old Marion Webster found that her prized flower garden was destroyed, she concluded that there could only be one culprit: a ninja squirrel trained by her despised neighbor to enter her garden and wreak havoc.

[One neighbor said] 'She is very proud of her garden and she got it into her head that someone had it in for her and was jealous of her flowers.

'She put up a big metal gate, extended the height of her fences and made the place into a fortress.

'Then she became convinced a resident had trained a squirrel to enter her garden after dark and tear up her flowers but everyone thought it was a joke.

It has now escalated to become a police matter. From the Daily Mail: Link

Image: Squirrel Underpants from the NeatoShop

Jason Heuser has done it again. His latest presidential art features Bill Clinton defending America while straddling an alligator and smoking a cigarette. Notice the lipstick on the collar, the gaping fly, and the saxophone strapped to his back. Oh yeah, Ronald McDonald makes an appearance in the background. This print is available for sale at Heuser's Etsy shop. Link -via The Daily Dot

Previously: Presidents Kennedy, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.

Most felons try to bust out of jail, but not this one! Here's an ex-con who sneaked back into prison for a day of fun and socializin':

Yonkers resident Matthew Matagrano, 36, was arraigned in Manhattan on Saturday on charges that he impersonated a Department of Correction investigator.

Officials say that for at least a week, Matagrano used phony credentials to get into multiple city lockups, including Rikers Island and the Manhattan Detention Center, where he mingled with inmates for hours. [...]

It said that when questioned, Matagrano had admitted to arriving at the jail at around 3:30 p.m. and gaining entry by showing a gold shield and saying he was an investigator from the department's intelligence unit.

According to the complaint, he stayed until 11 p.m., giving cigarettes to inmates and smoking with them in a common area. He is also charged with stealing a radio from an office while inside.

Link

But..there's nothing to cause the shadow! What's going on here? Biologist Joe Hanson explains:

An insect like a wasp or a water strider can rest atop the water, held up by surface tension. This means that the cohesive force of the water molecules sticking to each other is stronger than the force of the bug being pushed down by gravity. This works because it spreads its weight out over a large surface area (like snowshoes).

That creates a slight indentation in the top of the water, changing the direction that the light coming down is refracted and re-directing it slightly sideways (that’s where the bright halos around the dark areas come from). And what’s the absence of light? 

A shadow! You can see Hanson's illustrative diagrams at the link.

Link | Photo: unknown

It's larger than the human cage in Hong Kong, but not by much. If you're looking for a cozy place to call home, look no further than the human locker in Tokyo, Japan. Yours for $600 a month!

Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku has the story: Link

Don't you just love it when there's plenty of people to whom you can pass the buck? You should know by now, the more people you email at once, the slimmer the chance that they'll see it, pay attention to it, or respond to it. From CommitStrip. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Avengers, artist Michael Mateyko created this awesome minimalist poster featuring Earth's mightiest heroes. See if your favorite character is there: Link - via Geektyrant

Don't throw out that old kitchen sponge! We still need to make Alaska and Hawaii. Jeffrey Allen Price turns used kitchen sponges into map pieces:

 “I started accumulating them and have had the idea for many years to make a U.S. map out of used sponges." Jeffrey says, "It was a kind of metaphor for American being used up and dirty. I wanted every sponge to be different. When I go to the grocery store to replenish my sponges I look for different colors, patterns, textures that once I’ve finished using would become my latest creation.”

Artist's Website -via Junkculture

Don Donagher fell of a horse and broke his pelvis while on vacation in the Cayman Islands. He got airlifted back to Florida, and that's where orthopedic surgeon Dr. Daniel Chan of Memorial Regional Hospital put him back together. Dan was so happy that he decided to thank the good doctor with a bit of publicity:

Donagher was so grateful for his care he paid for a plane sign that reads "Dr. Daniel Chan is the man! Thanks Memorial staff. Don."

"Well it's always a nice gesture from a patient but obviously totally unnecessary, but Don's an interesting guy," said Chan ...

Link

Phrenology Head Hinged Case

Spring is nearly here and that means it's time to get your head in the right place and get organized. Let the NeatoShop help with the Phrenology Head Hinged Case. This beautiful ceramic storage case is shaped like a Phrenology Head. It is the perfect item for those who feel they lack the mental faculties to easily find their keys or other small precious belonings. With the Phrenology Head Hinged Case these important things can always remain safely in your head.    

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Home Decor items. 

Link

Please paint me dinosaurs drawing people in a dinosaur art class.

Jim will paint it! Make a request, and he'll render it completely in Microsoft paint. However, Jim has a bit of a backlog now that word is getting around, so your suggestion should be particularly funny or challenging to move to the front of the list. The dinosaur above was the first entry on his Tumblr site.

Please paint me Bill Murray catching a bank robber using only his charm while members of the Tokyo police force shield themselves behind him?

You can see the requests have become more challenging and detailed! So far, Jim has painted three pages of silliness. 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]

The street art collective Combo pastes fun all over Paris. A thought: maybe Episode VIII should be a European art film shot in black and white.

Link and Official Website -via Street Art News

Forget color pairings and snack on these: Pantone food pairings by Minneapolis-based graphic designer and illustrator David Schwen. I wonder what Pantone Bacon tastes like ...

David wrote:

“As a designer, you’re constantly picking color chips and pairing them up with one another. A while back I had an idea of making Pantone chips out of real household objects—sponges, cardboard, and the like. But while I was finishing up a poster design, I had taped two Pantone chips together to see how they looked next to one another. Instantly I thought of how people pair food together, and that was that. Pantone pairings.”

View the rest over at Schwen's Instagram page: Link - via Instagram Blog

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

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

(Video Link)

The driver of this Subaru Impreza does a nice spin. Hopefully he'll also do a flip the next time he needs to pass slower moving traffic.

-via Jalopnik

One hundred years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated. The day before, the National American Woman Suffrage Association staged a parade in Washington, DC in support of voting rights for women. Around 8,000 people marched (almost all women), with 20 floats and nine bands.

Though the parade began late, it appeared to be off to a good start until the route along Pennsylvania Avenue became choked with tens of thousands of spectators -- mostly men in town for the inauguration. Marchers were jostled and ridiculed by many in the crowd. Some were tripped, others assaulted. Policemen appeared to be either indifferent to the struggling paraders, or sympathetic to the mob. Before the day was out, one hundred marchers had been hospitalized.

But the incident got a lot of press for the movement. The Atlantic has a collection of 24 photographs from that day. Link  -via Holy Kaw!

(Images: Library of Congress)

Code monkeys who attended the Waza 2013 conference in San Francisco had opportunities to learn how to do traditional crafts, such as quilting, origami and computer-controlled Zen gardening. The event organizers argued that these activities make people better coders:

At the quilting station instructor Maura Grace Ambrose encouraged participants to use their needles in different ways to get different stitches, teaching that one tool can produce different results based on your technique.

Teich believes those small lessons add up to make everyone better at their own craft, whether that’s coding or anything else. “If you’re just working with what you know, you have a very narrow view of the world, but if you can look at origami or printmaking, you’re going to be a better programmer.”

Link -via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

POLL: Do you think that crafting makes people better coders?

• Yes, because crafts help coders think differently.
• No, these are non-transferable skills.

(YouTube link)

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

Superman and Lois Lane Salt & Pepper Shakers

Could your kitchen decor use a little saving? Let the Superman and Lois Lane Salt & Pepper Shakers come to the rescue. This beautiful and useful set features the man of steel souring through the clouds with Lois Lane. The shakers are held together by magnets.  

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Salt & Pepper Shakers and fantastic Superman items. 

Link

Amy's panino* almost certainly tastes even better than it looks. She made it very easily. She just spread vanilla yoghurt on bread, added blueberries, then heated it inside a panini press. I want to try the same thing, but using a slice of blueberry cheesecake between the pieces of bread.

Link -via Tasteologie

*Today I learned that "panino" is singular and "panini" is plural.

It had to happen sooner of later: an interactive map of the world's cats. The Cat Map is an effort from the Zoological Society of London to promote the London Zoo’s new Tiger Territory. You can zoom in or out on the world map, and sort cats by age, gender, or color. Bring up information on a particular cat by clicking on a cat icon. I've been comparing the names of British cats to American cats, but I love the Eastern European cat names. Oh yeah, you can upload your cat to be added to the map! Link -via Geekosystem

The acronym DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. That term refers to technologies that permit copyright holders to prevent the copying or misuse digital content, such as ebooks, music files or software.

Some ebooks purchased by libraries from publishers will self destruct after a certain number of checkouts. Then the library must purchase another copy to again circulate that book. The DRM Chair, designed by Les Sugus at the University of Art and Design at Lusanne, Switzerland, works on the same concept. After the chair has been sat upon 8 times, electrical wires burn through the wax at the joints, causing the structure to fall over.

Link -via Hack A Day

(YouTube link)

You're just driving along, singing with your favorite toy perched on the dashboard, when you are waved over by a policeman. This ad for a voice-activated hamster is funny enough without understanding what's being said. Is it just as funny if you do? I don't know if I could be so laid back when a toy starts mocking a cop! You can buy the WoodyOTime toy here, if you can read Russian. -via I Have Seen The Whole Of The Internet

The Caped Crusader swooped down on Bradford, UK last week, capturing a criminal suspect and delivering him to a police station:

A man dressed as the caped crusader Batman has handed over a wanted man at a Bradford police station before disappearing into the night.

Police said the costumed crime-fighter marched the 27-year-old man into Trafalgar House Police Station in the early hours of 25 February.

The man was charged with handling stolen goods and fraud offences.

Police said: "The person who brought the man in was dressed in a full Batman outfit. His identity remains unknown."

As you can see from the photo, Mr. Wayne has let himself go physically, but his dedication to fighting crime remains unabated.

Link -via Geekosystem

Is Jawesome on my side? Let's just say that I'm on whatever side he's on. Mike Corriero painted this image of a character from the graphic novel Last Man Standing, which is being made into a live action film.

Link -via Ian Brooks