The water tower that turned into a house. It’s available to rent if you’re ever in Suffolk.
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“Your pee is making the fish turn female!” Endocrine disrupters in our waterways are leading to intersexual trout.
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If you can rig your Wiimote to do open your draperies, what else can you make it do? I’d rig one to take out the trash!
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Urban Legend ER. Everything you’ve been warned about happens at once (language warning).
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Even the most carnivorous guy will eat a salad if it’s served in a cup made of bacon! The method for making them is pretty cool, too.
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Photographs of the midnight sun in Norway. These are honestly gorgeous.
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Easy Ways to Improve Your Vision. Or at least slow the downhill slide.
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What would happen if our sun went out? It wouldn’t be pretty, at least to us.

I think we all have nights where sleep won’t come — despite flipping the pillow and persistent rolling over, it just doesn’t happen. What do you do when this happens?

Personally, I’ve developed only one good way to get to sleep: audiobooks. Now, I love audiobooks during the daytime, but sometimes I’ll buy a book that’s super-boring. For example, take the audiobook of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — immensely difficult to focus on during the day…but PERFECT for snooze inducement in the middle of the night! (If you don’t believe me, check out the free preview of the 41-hour Volume 1, available on iTunes.)

The best part of the audiobook cure is that, even if you don’t fall asleep, you might get some decent “reading” in. But aside from my own method, there are lots of great sleep aids suggested on the web. In fact, the Mental_Floss Blog has covered sleep medications, sleeping with pets, sleep disorders, why snooze buttons work for nine minutes, famous narcoleptics, and much more.

Blogger Mary Wheeler has suggested a series of cures for insomnia, including:

Sexing the alphabet: this involves going through the alphabet and assigning a gender to each letter. This was really interesting, yet sleep-inducing, to me the first 20 times I did it. [Note from Higgins: I think A is male and B is female. You?]

Sexing the numbers: Assigning a gender to each number. This is hard — each number, for me, anyway, can easily be male or female.

Categorizing things by color: thinking of all the things I can that are one color or another. This is a lot like a kid’s book, but is still harder than it sounds. I end up cheating and it will go like this: “trees, peas, pistacio ice cream, green tea, green book, green socks, green car …”

Saying a fruit or vegetable for every letter of the alphabet. This has been my latest game and honestly, I don’t think I’ve made it past “G” — this is how well I’ve been sleeping lately!

So let’s have it: what do you do to get to sleep?

In December, when the “Feel Art Again” feature on El Greco’s “A Lady in a Fur Wrap” was re-posted, reader Miss Nae requested a post on Caravaggio. So, today we’ll take a look at one of Caravaggio’s secular paintings from 1602, “Amor Vincit Omnia” (Latin for “Love Conquers All”).

1. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was actually born in Milan, and only moved to Caravaggio in 1576, when the artist was 5 years old, because a plague was ravaging Milan. If it hadn’t been for that plague, we would probably know Caravaggio by a different name today.

2. In the painting, the Roman god Cupid is portrayed trampling symbols of all human activities (music, literature, war, astronomy, etc.), illustrating a line from Virgil’s Eclogues: “Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori.” (In English, “Love conquers all; let us all yield to love.”) Some people believe the painting may have also been referring to Vincenzo Giustiniani, who commissioned it. The musical manuscript on the floor bears a “V,” and Giustiniani was accomplished in the areas of activity represented. In that case, the painting would also mean, “Vincenzo conquers all.”

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“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.”

With a great little ditty like that, how could I not stop by the Lizzie Borden house when I visited Boston/Providence last weekend? Thanks to your fabulous suggestions, it made the list of things to do on our little extended weekend vacation.

I felt kind of bad about dragging my friends to a maybe-haunted house where a possible psychopath might have killed her parents, especially since we only had a couple of days in the area (and the Boston-Providence area is obviously not lacking in things to do). But it turns out that I wasn’t the only one itching to see it – our lovely hosts Sam and Kylie had been meaning to get there ever since they moved to the area. By the way, if I mentioned her in the story, Kylie wanted to me to note that she is a great dancer. Just so you know.

Anyway, now I had justification, so we took off on Sunday morning (is that sacrilegious?) and made it to Fall River around noon. For those of you unfamiliar with the infamy of Fall River and Lizzie Borden, here’s the abbreviated story:
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Oooh! Hey, a book! Want a copy of this one? Then go submit a fact for our Amazing Fact Generator. Just leave a comment on this post with an amazing fact about outer space, your name and location. If the fact is both amazing and true, we’ll feed it to the Generator and credit it to you. The supplier of the most amazing fact will receive a copy of The Space Tourist’s Handbook: Where to Go, What to See, and How to Prepare for the Ride of Your Life.

Last week’s most amazing fact about television was supplied by TMo. Thanks to him, we now know that “In Mike Judge’s King of the Hill, the Mexican soap opera Peggy watches, Los Dias y Las Noches, was spun off into a live-action pilot with a priest/assassin protagonist. Fox didn’t pick up the show.” TMo wins a copy of Dick Van Patten’s Totally Terrific TV Trivia. We’ll be in touch about delivering the prize.

And if you need your fact fix, go take a few hits from The Generator.

Can you name (and spell) Canada’s 10 provinces and 3 territories?

Take the quiz.

Here’s a little something to get you sufficiently pumped…

After the quiz, come back and tell us how well you know Canada. And remember, we’re still in Beta mode with the ‘Name x in y minutes’ genre.

We’ve been reading about China’s construction plans for years, and wondered whether all those huge buildings will be ready in time for the 2008 Olympics. Now those buildings are opening for business, one by one.

Beijing Airport

Beijing Capital International Airport’s new Terminal 3 will officially open tomorrow (February 29th). It is the world’s largest airport building with over ten million square feet of interior space. In fact, it is the second largest building in the world! Designed by Foster+Partners, it went from plans to opening day in less than four years. Ten villages were displaced to make room for the terminal. But don’t blame the Olympics; the old airport configuration was already straining under the load. Even this dragon-shaped design will be inadequate in another ten years or so.

Beijing National Stadium

The Beijing National Stadium is expected to be completed next month. Designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, it is sometimes called the “Birds Nest”, for obvious reasons. It has an official capacity of 91,000, but will likely hold 100,000 for the Olympic opening ceremonies. (image credit: Tee Meng)

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I don’t know why, but it took a long time to admit this to myself: I really love horror movies. Sure, there are legions of schlocky crap-fests hardly worth fast-forwarding through (as with any genre), but every once in while you find the one that tickles just the right nerve — exactly where you didn’t realize you were vulnerable — and I just really enjoy that. When I was a kid it was all I read: Stephen King’s entire catalog I consumed one hot summer; I even wrote ghost stories and spine-tinglers of my own (hidden forever in a very deep drawer, along with everything else my pen produced in the eighth grade). So it was only natural that one day, despite a years-long detour into “serious” literature (darn English major) I should again be fascinated by warlocks and werewolves and things that seek brainy sustenance in the night.

But the zombie most of all. It’s strange, because zombies don’t have nearly the range of personality that werewolves or vampires have (or even Frankenstein’s monster, for that matter), and they don’t do very much aside from shamble about and search for living folks to munch on. But there’s something so very other about them (to use an overused pseudo-academic term); they’re a walking incarnation of death, who not only threaten to kill us but confront us with the fact of our own mortality in its most gruesome form. (They’re also usually a harbinger of societal collapse, as in 28 Days Later, I Am Legend and so many others … and I love me some end-of-world scenarios.) (more…)

An interesting study used MRI technology on the brains of jazz musicians while they played. Certain areas were turned on or off when they began to improvise, leading to some insights on creativity.
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You may have noticed the similarities between the 2008 presidential campaign and the final season of The West Wing. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.
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The “T. Rex of the Ocean” was the biggest sea reptile on record at 50 feet long. The new pliosaur species is nicknamed The Monster.
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Would you take an offer of the perfect mate if you knew that you’d only have limited time together before this person died? Help Chad Orzel with this hypothetical situation before Friday.
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Spiderman gets lost, wanders into the set of the X-Men. That kind of thing will break your concentration.
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Can scientists dance? You bet they can, especially when they are illustrating their dissertations!
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See an awesome collection of creative bookshelves. I want them all!
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How To Win a Duel. In the case of Lord Bruce and the Earl of Dorset, all they achieved was a place in history.

If you’re just joining us, every day this week, I’m presenting a specific challenge. Your job: come up with the answers and hold onto them! Why? Because on Friday, you’ll need them to solve a short puzzle. The first person to email in the correct answers and successfully show how you arrived at them (thus the title: How Did You Know?) wins a choice of any t-shirt or book from our store.

As with our previous challenges, I definitely encourage you to work in teams. Email your friends, send around each daily challenge, conspire, work together, whatever it takes to make sure you’re armed with the right answers going into Friday’s puzzle.

In case you missed Day 1 of this feature, check out Monday’s challenge here. Day 2 is right over here. And here’s Day 3.

Today we’re getting back to the aperture-style challenges that I mentioned on Day 1. On each page you’ll find an image that was extracted from an album cover. Name each album and the artist/band that recorded it.

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