Bright black-and-red butterflies that flit across the sunlit edges of Amazonian rain forests are natural hedonists, and it does them good, according to genetic data published May 16 in the journal Nature.

An international consortium of researchers at UC Irvine and elsewhere discovered that different species of the Heliconius butterfly are crossbreeding to more quickly acquire superior wing colors. They also have a surprisingly large number of genes devoted to smell and taste.

The use of color to attract mates and fend off predators is widespread in daytime-loving butterflies, while night-flying moths are famous for having large antennae to sniff out potential mates’ pheromones. Thus, researchers predicted that because they’re such visual creatures, the butterflies would not be able to smell or taste very well.

“Instead, we learned that they have a rich repertoire of genes for olfaction [smell] and chemosensation [in this case taste],” said UCI biologist and article co-author Adriana Briscoe.

Delicate antennae contain smell receptors, she explained, and the butterflies’ tiny feet hold taste buds.

CONTINUED at Science Daily.

This is the Horizontal Shower from luxury bathroomer Dornbracht. You just lay on the stone pedestal like you’re about to be sacrificed for a plentiful harvest, then let the six water jets soak your body, flooding your ass with cleanliness and washing away any rogue buttcrumbs like paper boats in a stream. Holy shit I should start writing product descriptions.

The shower comes with a controller they call the eTool, which lets you direct the flow from the various jets, and choose between various programmed patterns kind of like a massage bath. You can also use the eTool to regulate the water temperature and intensity.

Or you could, you know, lay down in a regular shower like I do. Sure it’s not as glamorous and way more soap-scummy, but so what? IT’S CHEAP. Plus if you plug the drain with a toe and let the bath fill up your penis will float. Medical fact!

Source: Geekologie.

A pair of skulls dug up in a Florida backyard aren’t linked to an unsolved murder mystery after all — they’re ancient artifacts that could date back to as far as 1200.

When the skulls, belonging to a 10-year-old boy and an adult male, were discovered in January, investigators thought they might be dealing with a 1970s murder case, according to MyFoxOrlando.com. But archeologists say the bones show signs of being from Peru or South America, and are actually centuries-old, from between 1200 and 1400.

“The mystery is how they ended up there,” medical examiner Jan Garavaglia said, according to ABC News. “We don’t have any way of finding out.”

Garavaglia, host of “Dr. G: Medical Examiner” on the Discovery Channel, is working with archeologists from the University of Florida to learn more about the skulls’ history, according to MyFoxOrlando.com.

She says the skulls featured an “Inca bone,” linking them to the Incan culture of Peru, according to ABC News.

What’s not clear is how the skulls made it from South America to Winter Gardens, Fla. …

CONTINUED at NY Daily News.

This is an actual whiskey flavored lube from the gluttons over at Epic Meal Time. Apparently they’re convinced whiskey is a desirable smell to have smeared all over your privates. SPOILER: It’s not. Unless you’re in a relationship with another manly dude (I’m thinking a gay biker/bear type here), chances are your lover doesn’t want your junk smelling like f***ing whiskey. Piña colada, absolutely, but only because piña colada is the best smell in the world, especially for car air fresheners.

Source: Geekologie.

A new leaked document reveals the exact layout and plans for the next Formula One circuit, the Grand Prix of America in New Jersey. The map explains some of the many challenges in bringing F1 to the New York metro area.

You can view the master plan in full here.

The track runs clockwise, starting along the Port Imperial Ferry Terminal on the Hudson in what will be the pit straight. The cars make a 90 degree left for Turn One, then quickly transition into the right-handed Turn Two. The cars then turn up to the great feature of the track: thePalisades.

The Hudson is banked on New Jersey by this massive rock formation — up past the George Washington Bridge, it forms a sheer cliff of exposed rock looking down on the river. Down at the track, it accounts for 150 feet of elevation change. Elevation change, traditionally, is what makes a track great and it has been seriously lacking from Formula One circuits built in the past fifteen years.

CONTINUED at Jalopnik. More photos at link.

Because what fun is sitting back and enjoying a game, Korean gamer Yoshichan beat Diablo 3 in 12 hours and 29 minutes with “368 Lifetime Kills, 412 Elite Kills and 168,481 gold as a Barbarian on normal difficulty”. Since then, at least two other groups of Korean and Chinese gamers have done it in 7. Wow, this is NOT how you get your money’s worth. Just saying, I’m 52 hours into Skyrim and haven’t even made it to Whiterun yet. Are there really even dragons in this game?

Source: Geekologie.

In news that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s worn an eyepatch for a week straight pretending to be a pirate, doctors in Australia are now claiming a haircut that covers one of your eyes makes that eye lazy because it doesn’t do anything but stare at your stupid hair all day long.

Optometrists Association of Tasmania education director Andrew Hogan warned that amblyopia, the medical term for lazy eye, can result from obstructed vision caused by hair.

“If a young emo chap has a fringe covering one eye all the time, that eye won’t see a lot of detail,” he said. “And if it happens from a young age, that eye can become amblyotic.”

Want a cool emo haircut but not a lazy eye in ten years? Here’s what you do: punch yourself in the face as hard as you can. Don’t stop until you don’t want the haircut anymore.

Source: Geekologie.

This car runs on the ultimate emissions-free fuel: air.

In 2007, Mumbai, India-based Tata Motors signed a licensing deal with Motor Development International, a French design firm. The idea was to build a car that could run on compressed air. Now Tata says it has tested two cars with the engines. The next step is setting up the manufacturing plants to actually build them.

Compressed air engines aren’t a new idea. The first models were proposed more than a century ago, and they were used in the mining industry for decades before electric motors became commonplace. Even now, compressed air powers all kinds of tools, notably the pneumatic impact wrenches in auto body shops.

A compressed air car engine works in a way similar to the internal combustion version: Fuel forces pistons to turn a crankshaft and power the car. The difference is that in a compressed air engine, the pistons are moved by air and not gasoline. Researchers in Sweden have experimented with single-cylinder engines of this type.

The only problem is power. Air compression alone only gets a car moving to about 30 to 35 miles per hour. So to supplement that, the car could take in more air as it moves faster, using an onboard air compressor. The air compressor could be electric or, more likely, gasoline-powered. But even that would reduce emissions a lot, since the gasoline engine wouldn’t be running at lower speeds.

Range is also an issue. Like all vehicles, an air-powered car can drive only as far as the amount of fuel in its tank. And storing compressed air requires “fuel” tanks that are stronger than steel to contain the thousands of pounds per square inch necessary.

On the bright side, compressing air in such a tank is a lot less dangerous than natural gas or hydrogen. Then there is the issue of filling the car’s tank — most air compressors would take at least a couple of hours to do that.

Tata seems to be the only manufacturer that has committed to actually building an air-powered car. Honda unveiled an air-powered concept car in 2010, and a company called Zero Pollution Motors had promised to deliver one to the United States — but that was two years ago. (The company’s website domain is no longer in use.) If Tata is successful, it will go a long way toward reducing emissions in India — and perhaps freeing cars from fossil fuels completely.

Source: Discovery News.

SCIENTISTS claim this egg-shaped object is the final proof of life on Mars after finding it inside a meteorite from the Red Planet.

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted they could only have been produced by living organisms.

He added that they could not have been caused by contamination when they fell to Earth.

Prof Wickramasinghe, 72 — famous for controversial ideas such as that the flu virus and even life itself was brought to our planet by comets — said: “It is impossible to understand how carbon-rich particles of such uniform sizes and shapes got inside a rocky matrix if they are not relics of some algal species.

“Tissint was collected weeks after it fell, and terrestrial contamination seems unlikely. In any case the structures we found were on newly fractured surfaces, from the interior of the meteorite.”

The meteorite was named after the village where it came down in the Sahara desert in Morocco last July.

It was probably blasted from Mars when it was hit by an asteroid millions of years ago.

A piece of it was examined at the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology and Cardiff University.

PhD student Jamie Wallis, who was working with Dr Wickramasinghe, said: “All the indications are that structures such as we have found are evidence of life on Mars.

“The spheres are probably remnants of polysaccharide shells surrounding algal type cells.”

In 2009, a NASA team claimed they had photographed Martian organisms inside another meteorite that is kept in London’s Natural History Museum.

Their electron microscope showed a bumpy surface resembling a fossilised colony of microbacteria in a rock that fell from the sky in Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911.

The team from NASA’s Johnson Space Centre examined the space rock to support their claims in 1996 that Martian bugs had been found in a meteorite, ALH84001, found in Antarctica where it had been lying for thousands of years.

That discovery, which NASA later officially backtracked from, was considered so important that President Clinton addressed the nation on TV.

Earlier this month, another group of scientists claimed that the first two Viking probes that NASA landed on Mars in 1976 discovered life but failed to recognise it.

Source: The Sun.

Before reality TV, and even still to a very large degree now, the best known name associated with performance cars to the average person is Carroll Shelby, and with good reason. Shelby has been considered a legend in the field for decades, and his influence is still strong to this day. He died today at the age of 89, as a result of complications from an illness.

Carroll Hall Shelby was born in the tiny town of Leesburg, Texas, and suffered from poor health throughout much of his childhood. By his teenage years his health improved, and, according to stories, received a speeding ticket the very first time he was loaned his father’s Willys. His interest in moving very, very rapidly continued, as he served in World War II as a flight instructor and test pilot.

Before building the racing cars he’s known for, Shelby was a driver himself, racing for a number of teams throughout the ‘50s, including Allard, Aston Martin, and Maserati. In his last year of driving, 1959, he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans for Aston Martin.

But more than a driver, Shelby will be remembered as a man who built many, many fast cars. The first, and in many ways still most iconic Shelby came about in 1959, when Shelby obtained a license to import AC Ace cars from Britain. Shelby’s revelation was to replace the straight-6 Bristol engine with a Ford 260 V8 engine, creating a light, incredibly fast sports car. Shelby went on to work with all of the Big Three American car companies, producing such car as his Series 1 with GM mechanicals, the Dodge Viper, and the Ford Mustang Shelby line that is still in production today.

Shelby’s career hasn’t been free of controversy: Shelby’s company has been associated with firms that have allegedly used prison labor to build Shelby Mustangs, and prior to that, in the 1960s, Shelby was found to have skipped large blocks of VIN numbers on cars to give the impression many more were produced, to allow his cars to be eligible for homologated racing classes. In the 1990s, Shelby claimed to have found the “missing” chassis and frames, and began finishing and selling the cars. It was later discovered the “found” cars were, in fact, built from scratch. Interestingly, those cars, now called “continuation” cars, are still sold today as the CSX4000 Cobras. There have been other VIN-related issues, and sexual assault allegations against Shelby from last year.

Shelby has also had some stranger ventures, including a stint as a chicken farmer, founding aTexas chili festival, and once having a brand of deodorant named after him, Carroll Shelby’s Pit-Stop.

In recent years, health has been an issue, with Shelby receiving a heart transplant in 1991. The experience of the transplant was so powerful to Shelby that he started the Carroll Shelby Children’s Foundation to help children in need of organ transplants.

Carroll Shelby was truly a legendary figure, and he will absolutely be missed.

Source: Jalopnik.