Illustrator Christoph Niemann looks at the identification of leaves in a whole new way. In Bio-Diversity, see a collection of leaves from trees you never knew existed, like the Fast Forwood and the Alder Ego.
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Can’t decide what kind of pie to serve after Thanksgiving dinner? Make them all in one pie pan! Cakespy experimented with pecan, apple, and pumpkin pie recipes to make this triple threat. (via Unique Daily)
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What would Earth look like if it had rings like Saturn? In a word: stunning.
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In Japan, Hall’s Cough Drops will cause ugly little birds to sprout from your chest. Since this what they pay to advertise, it must be a good thing.
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Popular Mechanic’s Guide to the Perfect Deep-Fried Turkey. Not just a recipe, but a detailed explanation of why it’s the best way to cook your Thanksgiving bird.
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Golden retrievers + atoms = science! Sixteen very well-behaved dogs explain the structure of atoms in a manner even my youngest child can understand.
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You can Eat Like the Pilgrims this Thanksgiving, but it might not be like any normal holiday meal you’ve ever had.

Tonight’s season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm doubled as a Seinfeld reunion show. Now that we’ve caught up with Jerry, George, Elaine & Kramer, here are a few Seinfeld quizzes we’ve run over the years. The “Ten Years Later” quiz is about guest stars who went on to bigger/better things; “George Costanza’s Jobs” does not include his recent foray into iPhone App development.

[Click on any banner to take that quiz.]

by Terri Schlichenmeyer

From Celery Jell-O to chocolate French fries, here are ten foods that didn’t have a very long shelf-life.

1. Coffee-Flavored Jell-O® (Celery, Too!)

In 1918, the makers of Jell-O introduced a new flavor: coffee. Its release was ostensibly based on the logic that, since lots of people like to drink coffee with dessert, they’d be game for combining the two after-dinner treats. Not the case. The company soon realized if anyone wants dessert coffee, they’re going to have a cup of it. In fact, if anyone wants coffee at all, they’re going to have a cup of it. Not surprisingly, this realization came about the time they yanked the product off the shelves. Coffee wasn’t Jell-O’s only misstep: Cola-flavored Jell-O was sold for about a year starting in 1942, and for a brief while, the clear, wiggly dessert was sold in celery and chocolate flavors, too.

2. Reddi-Bacon

Any company smart enough to bless mankind with sprayable whipped cream—the sort that promotes direct-to-mouth feeding—has got to know a thing or two about immediate gratification. But sadly, the makers of Reddi-wip® were unable to meld their keen understanding of human laziness with one of processed meat. They figured, if you’re cooking breakfast in the morning and you’ve got a hankering for bacon, why dirty up a pan you’ll only have to clean later? The solution: foil-wrapped Reddi-Bacon you could pop into your toaster for piping-hot pork in minutes.

While it seemed perfect for the busy 1970s household, the absorbent pad designed to soak up the dripping grease tended to leak, creating not only a fire hazard, but also a messy (if not totally ruined) toaster. Ultimately, the product lasted about as long as it took to cook; the company scrapped it before it went to market nationwide.

3. Cereal Mates

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Sure, bad blood and a shared border may be all two teams need to spark a rivalry, but a really bizarre trophy doesn’t hurt, either. Let’s find out how well you know which teams are fighting for giant axes and phones this fall.

Take the Quiz: College Football Trophies

In case you weren’t obsessively refreshing mentalfloss.com all week, here’s what you missed:

1. The Nautical Roots of 9 Common Phrases, by Mark Longo
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2. 9 Tasty Foods Named After People, by Ethan Trex
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3. Run Your Life With Flowcharts! by Miss Cellania
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4. 7 False Acronyms, by David K. Israel
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5. Why Are Barns Usually Red? by Matt Soniak
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6. 6 Multi-Purpose Wonder Bras, by Linda Rodriguez
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There’s a never ending supply of websites featuring pets doing silly, amazing, cute or preposterous things. Why? Because we obviously cannot get enough of them! (there’s a thesis paper in there somewhere, I can sense it). In any case, here’s another one, found by Whitney: Sad Pets in Costumes.
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Sleeping in your own bed after a long trip, being able to carry all the groceries from the car in one swoop, that miracle of science when the amount of toilet paper left on the toll is the exact amount you need – these are just some of the quietly awesome things in life, but here are a whole bunch more: 1000 awesome things.
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We can now officially say “there are plants who have more personality than you!” Apparently, plants have a social life, too
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A beautiful and haunting site: the Suitcase Exhibition: “When Willard Psychiatric Center in New York’s Finger Lakes closed in 1995, workers discovered hundreds of suitcases in the attic of an abandoned building.  Many of them appeared untouched since their owners packed them decades earlier before entering the institution.”
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Feeling fishy? Check out one of these 7 Over-the-Top Aquariums. I am chuffed to see my own Georgia Aquarium here in Atlanta is featured – and yes, those grouper really are that huge!
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When desiring to become an Evil Overlord, there are certain things you should remember: be sure your ventilation ducts are too small to crawl through; never utter the sentence “but before I kill you there’s just one thing I want to know” to the hero; if you have usurped your brother’s power and kingdom, dispose of him and don’t just keep him locked up in a dingy cellar that anyone could access! Of course, these are only a few of the 100 Things any good genre savvy overlord would do.
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I don’t know if anyone else remembers those commercials the NFL used to do toward the end of the season where they would feature fictional pre-season conversations about players who were “certain” to blow up (who turned out to be duds), or teams who were losers (but ended up going almost undefeated), but I loved them. In that same vein, Page 2 looks back at 12 of the least-prescient athletic predictions of the past half-century.
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If you’ve never seen the classic short “Powers of Ten,” I’ve got a treat for you. Created in 1968 for IBM by Charles and Ray Eames (yes, of Eames Chair fame), the film has a very simple premise: start at a static scene, then start zooming out, at one “power of ten” per ten seconds — for example, from 10² meters to 10³ meters. As we zoom out, we see the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and so forth. Once we reach 10²⁴ meters (the size of the observable universe), the camera then begins a faster zoom-in…and goes beyond the original scene, into the microscopic scale and beyond.

For me, “Powers of Ten” is an educational touchstone — it’s a film I was shown several times in science classrooms, and to this day, I find it captivating in its simplicity and power. All you do is zoom way out and zoom way in — the universe is just a matter of perspective.

For more, check out “Powers of Ten” on Wikipedia, and the official “Powers of Ten” website.

(Thanks to Kottke.org for pointing to this YouTube clip!)

Each photo in this quiz contains two famous actors from one movie. You don’t have to ID the actors, or the characters they played, but you do have to name the movie.

Once you think you’ve got it, type the full name of the movie into the blank box under the photo. And, yes, we know a lot of these look pretty funny, lo-tech, and all that. It’s part of the fun of it! I hope you get as many laughs out of it as I did making it. Truly the most giggles I’ve had putting together one of these quizzes!

Take the Quiz: Movie Actor Mashup Time!

If you have any connections to Egyptology or mummies at all (work in a museum? Have an archaeologist ancestor?), be careful on Sunday. Sunday is the anniversary of the day King Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened, unleashing a powerful curse upon all who dared disturb his eternal slumber.

I mean, if you believe in stuff like that. Here are nine people who might make you believe, and one who should have been a direct recipient of Tut’s wrath but got off with nary a scratch. Now, like any good urban legend, the tale of Tut’s curse has expanded to epic proportions over the years. Some of these are probably exaggerated versions of what really happened… but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

1. Lord Carnarvon, the man who financed the excavation of King Tut’s tomb, was the first to succumb to the supposed curse. He accidentally tore a mosquito bite open while shaving and ended up dying of blood poisoning shortly thereafter. This occurred a few months after the tomb was opened and a mere six weeks after the press started reporting on the “Mummy’s Curse” that was thought to afflict anyone associated with disturbing the mummy. Legend has it that when he died, all of the lights in the house mysteriously went out.
2. Howard Carter, who discovered the existence of the tomb, gave a paperweight to a friend, Sir Bruce Ingham, as a gift. The paperweight, appropriately (or inappropriately, I suppose) consisted of a mummified hand wearing a bracelet that was supposedly inscribed with “Cursed be he who moves my body.” I’m sure “and severs my hand to use it as a trinket” was implied. Ingham house burned to the ground not long after receiving the gift, and when he tried to rebuilt, it was hit with a flood.

3. George Jay Gould was a wealthy financier who visited the tomb of Tutankhamen… and fell sick almost immediately afterward. He never really recovered and died of a high fever a few months later.

4. It’s said that Lord Carnarvon’s brother, Audrey Herbert, suffered from King Tut’s curse merely by being related to the financier. Herbert, having had no such problems before, became totally blind. It was mistakenly believed that his rotten, infected teeth were somehow interfering with his vision, and had every single tooth pulled from his head in an effort to regain his sight. Needless to say, it didn’t work. He did, however, die of blood poisoning as a result of the surgery, just five months after the death of his cursed brother.

5. Hugh Evelyn-White was so terrified of the curse that he killed himself before Tutankhamen could. Supposedly – I’ll tell you that I couldn’t find a super credible source to back this one up, so it’s possible that the story of his death has been embellished over the years. Evelyn-White was an archaeologist who helped during excavation. After seeing death sweep over his fellow crew members in 1923, Evelyn-White wrote “I have succumbed to a curse which forces me to disappear,” and hanged himself. One account says he wrote this in his own blood, but take it with a grain of salt. (more…)