Russians who were looking forward to whale penis leather seats for their $1.45 million bulletproof SUVs are crying in disappointment, and pointing their fingers at environmentalists and Pamela Anderson for this grave injustice.

While the Prombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition SUV comes with gold trim, gauges encrusted with diamonds and rubies and three bottles of premium vodka, Russian millionaires will have to do without ultra soft and luxurious penis skin.

Here’s a snippet of the absolutely brilliant press release put out by Leonard F. Yankelovich of Dartz, the Prombron manufacturer.

ARMORED CAR WITHOUT PENIS. LET’S SAVE THE WHALES.

One month ago DARTZ presented uberluxury armored car with whale penis interior – PROMBRON’ (ex.RussoBaltique), lot of people name this car as DARTZ.KOMBAT. As the world’s resonance was very huge and DARTZ got lot of angry e-mails from Greenpeace, WWF and also Pamela Anderson, DARTZ make strong decision to stop their plans regarding such interior.

We have no any ideas to kill the whale or something like that. All we want – to make just luxury car. Real luxury car which will be world number one car. We just looking for most expensive products for this car – and that’s why we choosed whale penis leathure when we checked it is most of most. After wave of protest we realised our mistake and make a decision not to use natural leathure at all.

We will focus on world most advanced nanotechnologies to achieve interior highest quality using artificial materials which also was never used for cars. We want to tell our hello to all whales: “Our Sea Brothers! We all know that earth are stand on three whales – we will keep You live! We don’t Earth fall down to Ocean!”

Yes, we all know that earth are stand on three whales. Therefore, the world thanks you, Dartz, for making such a selfless sacrifice.

Link [JamesList] via [Wired]

Photo credit: JamesList

“Darling, you look fabulous! What’s your secret?””

“Well, I’ll tell you… I swallowed a tapeworm and I’ve never been thinner!”

Allowing a disgusting parasite that can reach up to 25 feet long to grow inside your intestines isn’t exactly a reasonable way to lose weight. Yet, the Tapeworm Diet exists, and who else but Tyra Banks featured it on her circus of a talk show on Monday, exposing this vomitous idea to millions of people across the country.

From Ecorazzi:

According to Diet Review, “[The Tapeworm] secretes proteins in our intestinal tract that make our digestion of food much less efficient. A less efficient digestive systems means that you can consume more calories through your food since your “body guest” is also noshing on them for his own growth purposes. Some scientists estimate that those infected with a single tapeworm can lose up to one or two pounds each week.”

Healthy eating? Blah. Exercise? Who needs it! Just swallow a parasite and continue hitting KFC for lunch and dinner. Tyra even had a guy on that sells the worms over the Internet; despite an FDA ban on the practice. Said one woman on Twitter, “I’m still undecided on Tyra Banks’ Tapeworm diet. I don’t know if its a great or just plain ridiculous.” Undecided? What the hell is wrong with people?

And Tyra actually found two women who said they were willing to ingest a tapeworm to lose weight, despite the risks. You might ask, “Who are these people?” But, hey, this is America.

It might sound like some kind of hoax, but it’s for real – check out the comments at Diets in Review. Some of them are clearly tongue-in-cheek (and the diet has an unlikely 52% approval rating), but there are also commenters asking for information on where to get a tapeworm they can swallow. Amazing.

Link [Ecorazzi]

Imagine carefully feeding your beloved and faithful dog a healthy diet that will help him grow fat and juicy, eyeing him one day and declaring, “Yep, it’s time to eat the dog.” That’s what two professors at Victoria University in New Zealand are proposing we consider – sort of – after finding that our choice in pets causes our carbon footprints to balloon out of control.

From the Dominion Post:

The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created bypopular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.

“If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around,” Brenda Vale said.

“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”

In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.

They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.

Despite the title of their new book – Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living – Brenda and Robert Vale don’t really want you to serve Fido burgers at your next cookout. They are urging people to consider taking herbivorous food animals like goats as pets instead of dogs and cats.

The carbon footprint of our pets is probably something that most people haven’t really thought about, but while dogs and cats may not provide food or eat the most earth-friendly diets, they provide comfort and companionship that most people aren’t willing to give up. And, it’s highly unlikely that cities are going to begin allowing people to keep cows in suburban backyards or geese in their apartments.

Though some people can get away with having goats, chickens and rabbits as pets, not all of us can or want to – and an important way to offset the impact of dog and cat ownership is to adopt unwanted animals at shelters instead of buying from breeders. (And be sure to spay and neuter!)

Link [The Dominion Post]
Photo credit: HahaStop.com

The never-ending parade of amazingly strange “green” inventions continues even through the recession with bizarre inventions that will make you ask, “why?” Some are awesome – like reusable tote bags that turn into Mexican wrestling masks (WIN!) while others will have you scratching your head in confusion, like male floral fascinators.

Trendhunter has a great gallery of 30 weird eco innovations, some more earth-friendly than others. Here are some of our favorites:

We’ve all seen floral fascinators and hair accessories for women, but Nissa Quanstrom’s ‘Green Streets’ shoot turns the tables and lets men wear flowers on their faces as well.

By adding an image of a Mexican wrestler on the bag, the sack looks super-radical when filled. Now what happens when it is empty? The Eco Warrior Bag is the best reason to have a costume party! Put that bad boy on your head and you have a night of hilarity ahead of you.

Designed by Australian industrial designers Ben Landau and Brittany Veitch, each Bio-Accessory includes a living organism that is supposed to create a ‘mobile natural environment.’ The idea behind the Bio-Accessories is to have nature within an urban setting.

Japanese wood design company Sasaki Kogei has created stunning, eco-friendly wooden guns. The gun is a replica of a Smith and Wesson model 2 Army gun. The company also offers another eco-friendly wooden guns including the 357 Korutopaison.

Check out the other 26 weird inventions over at TrendHunter.

Link [TrendHunter]

When you look at adorable, fuzzy bunnies, do you think, “Gee, these suckers would make the perfect biofuel to keep me warm this winter!”? If so, you might want to go in for a psychiatric evaluation – or move to Sweden, where they’re actually doing just that.

Apparently, bunnies are such a huge nuisance in Stockholm parks, officials not only kill them by the thousands every year, but ship their bodies off to a biofuel facility so they can keep Swedes warm and cozy all winter long.

From Scientific American:

Converting the rabbits to fuel is the company Konvex, a subsidiary of the Danish company Daka Biodiesel, which makes automotive and heating fuels from vegetable and animal oils and fats. The Swedes have a variety of similar efforts, including turning slaughterhouse trimmings into biogas, a methane fuel that runs taxicabs in Linkoping in southern Sweden.

Bunnies, despite a felicity for breeding, are not quite abundant enough to be a reliable fuel so Stockholm also ships dead cats, cows, deer and horses to the plant for processing, Tuvunger told Der Spiegel. No word on whether the remains of man’s best friend are also keeping Swedes warm this winter.

Hey, don’t get us wrong. Using a waste material for fuel = WIN. However, there’s something messed up about killing cute, innocent little creatures by the thousands and then burning their bodies for warmth. It’s not like these are the killer rabbits of Monty Python.

And, perhaps these bunnies should not be a waste material in the first place – because there are better ways of dealing with an overpopulation problem than mass murder.

Link [Scientific American]

Trees are not always our friends. Just ask Sonny Bono… oh, wait, you can’t. Because A TREE KILLED HIM. Well, you can ask Michelle Childers, the woman who miraculously survived being impaled in the neck by a wayward tree limb that was hell-bent on destruction.

Childers was enjoying a leisurely drive on a rural road in Idaho on September 5th with her husband when a spruce tree crashed through the passenger side window of the vehicle. All she felt was a “strange pressure” as her husband told her she’d been impaled.

They drove to a nearby lodge for help, and a helicopter transported her to the hospital where the tree limb was safely removed after 6 hours of surgery.

The photos and video are a gruesome reminder that just about anything, no matter how innocent it may seem, can be deadly. Watch out for that tree!

Link [The Huffington Post]

In Europe, you can get a liter of milk for 20 (Euro) cents. That doesn’t even begin to cover dairy farmers’ expenses – and to make a point, they’ve dumped millions of liters of the cow secretions into a field. The mass dumping was just the latest move in a protest that has also included blocking deliveries and holding back supplies.

From Reuters:

They blame both the European Commission and local governments and about 7,000 liters of milk was dumped in front of German agriculture ministry buildings in Bonn on Saturday.

Leaders of the protests say they want the European Union to freeze planned increases in production quotas and on Wednesday they demanded the creation of a pan-European institution to regulate the demand and supply of milk.

“It is really sad that we have to throw away the milk,” Romuald Schaber, president of the European Milk Board, said at a demonstration in Belgium where protesting farmers watched hundreds of tractors spew milk over fields.

“Our demands were not heard by the politicians.”

That field is seriously going to stink like hell for a while – and imagine all the hormones seeping into the soil. What a waste. Ironically, over in Britain, there’s a milk shortage, with British farmers saying they simply can’t meet the demand for milk. Dairies and supermarkets in Britain have to import millions of liters a day from abroad, but apparently that’s not enough to help out the angry European dairy farmers.

Link [Reuters] + [Times Online]
Photo credit: BBC

A trail of light sparkled through the sky on Wednesday night, observed by some skygazers who marveled at its beauty. Was it a shooting star, or some other romantic celestial occurrence? No. It was astronaut piss.

Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery were merely dumping water and urine out into space in preparation for a landing attempt on Thursday. Poor weather forced them to postpone, but the Discovery safely landed in California on Friday.

From Space.com:

The light show Wednesday was aided by an unusually large amount of water being dumped all at once – about 150 pounds (68 kg), said NASA spokeswoman Kylie Clem. Discovery had just undocked from the International Space Station the day before, and had not been able to unload waste water during the 10-day visit.

“It would have been a large quantity because we don’t do water dumps while docked to the station now,” Clem told SPACE.com in an e-mail. “That is a fairly new restriction over the last couple of flights in order to prevent potential contamination of the Kibo module.”

The Kibo module is a new Japanese-built research lab on the space station that includes an external platform to expose science experiments to the space environment. Water dumps from a docked shuttle could potentially pollute the experiments.

So, why would dumping water cause a shimmering light trail in the sky? When astronauts dump waste water, it usually freezes into a cloud of tiny ice droplets. When the sun hits them, the ice turns into water vapor and disperses in space.

It’s probably safe to say that piss has never been so pretty.

Link [Space.com]
Photo credit: Painting by Scott Listfield via BOOOOOOOM; Inset: Space.com

It sounds like something out of a bad horror flick: “Bizarre Tongue-Eating Parasite Discovered Off Jersey Coast!” But that’s an actual headline from Treehugger and they’ve got pictures to prove it. This ghastly little critter attacks a fish, burrows into it, eats its tongue and then proceeds to live in its mouth.

From Treehugger:

While the isopod, a kind of louse, has been known to exist for a while now, discoveries of live specimens is rare. The BBC reports that “Fishermen near the Minquiers – islands under the jurisdiction of Jersey – found the isopod, a type of louse, inside a weaver fish.” So no, the tongue-eater wasn’t found in that Jersey. The Jersey Shore is still tongue replacing creature-free, if you stateside Northeasterners were worried about the thing ruining your late summer vacationing.

Not that you’d have to be too concerned anyways–the isopod isn’t a threat to humans in the slightest, though it’s reportedly vicious, and can deliver quite a little bite. One of the fishermen who found the creature described it thus: “Really quite large, really quite hideous – if you turn it over its got dozens of these really sharp, nasty claws underneath and I thought ‘that’s a bit of a nasty beast’.”

A bit of a nasty beast, indeed. This thing is pretty sick, but it’s also yet another amazing example of the vast variety of creatures that exist on this planet.

Link [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Clever Cherry

It’s like the treehugger equivalent to Christians seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in everything from concrete walls to grilled cheese sandwiches: an eerie feminine face in a melting glacier that appears to be crying a river of tears.

The image was captured on the Austfonna ice cap in Norway by marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan while on an annual trip to observe the glacier and the wildlife that live in the area.

From The Daily Mail:

A glacier expert has confirmed the ice cap carrying an image of Mother Nature ‘crying’ has been continually shrinking by as much as 160 feet every year for several decades.

Jon Ove Hagen, a member of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) and professor in geosciences at Oslo University, Norway, has been studying the Austfonna ice-shelf since 1988.

Mr Hagen, 59, said: ‘Austfonna, at over 3,000 square miles, is by far the largest ice cap in Svalbard and one of the largest in the Arctic.

‘Retreat of glacier fronts at Austfonna over a 12-year period average a frontal retreat of about 160 feet-per-year.

‘The geometry of the ice cap is changing. The fronts are retreating, the lower parts are getting thinner, with a thinning rate of about three feet-per-year while the interior of the ice cap is thickening with about 1.6 feet-per-year.

‘The ice cap is losing about 1.6 cubic miles of ice every year.’

It’s rather eerie, no doubt about it, and it probably will end up on global warming protest posters within days. But let’s not turn this into a quasi-religious thing, eh? The general public thinks we’re quacky enough as it is.

Link [The Daily Mail]