On The Atlantic, a fascinating look into the life of Jeannie Peeper, diagnosed with an incredibly rare disease, fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, and how her and other people with extremely rare diseases help each other out online.

Peeper’s diagnosis meant that, over her lifetime, she would essentially develop a second skeleton. Within a few years, she would begin to grow new bones that would stretch across her body, some fusing to her original skeleton. Bone by bone, the disease would lock her into stillness. The Mayo doctors didn’t tell Peeper’s parents that. All they did say was that Peeper would not live long.

“Basically, my parents were told there was nothing that could be done,” Peeper told me in October. “They should just take me home and enjoy their time with me, because I would probably not live to be a teenager.” We were in Oviedo, Florida, in an office with a long, narrow sign that read The International Fibrodysplasia

Fabulous TED video starring Jay Silver, one of the creators behind MaKey MaKey, explaining how to turn regular, everyday objects into functional computer interfaces.

Jay Silver is the founder/director of JoyLabz and a Maker Research Scientist at Intel Labs. With Eric Rosenbaum, he's the co-inventor of MaKey MaKey. He also runs digital prototyping workshops for many companies such as IDEO and youth centers such as Computer Clubhouses.

Silver studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, where he was named Engineer of the Year. He was awarded a Gates Scholarship to earn a master’s in Internet Technology from Cambridge University. He also holds a master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Lab where he was an NSF Fellow. At MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten, he won a Lemelson Student Prize.

I love this idea by CineFix: create short 60 second renditions of popular movies done entirely like an old 8-bit videogame. Above, Iron Man, their first short.

Welcome to 8-bit Cinema!
No quarters required, just 60 seconds.
We present for your enjoyment: the original Iron Man movie retold in 60 seconds via old-school 8-bit technology.

What do you think? What movie should we do next?

Lengthy but excellent read by Kevin Kelly on what it would take to rebuild the world from scratch -- in other words, in order to get back to where we are, we'd need to build everything that came before it in order to get there in the first place. Kevin uses Dave Gingery as an example: "The late Dave Gingery was a midnight machinist in Springfield, Missouri who enjoyed the challenge of making something from nothing, or perhaps it is more accurate to say, making very much by leveraging the power of very little. Over years of tinkering, Gingery was able to bootstrap a full-bore machine shop from alley scraps. He made rough tools that made better tools, which then made tools good enough to make real stuff."

Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without

Incredibly creative and talented Diego Stocco took ordinary leaves and played them on a turntable to make a pretty funky little beat.

Recently I bought a turntable to use it for an experiment, but that didn't turn out as I was expecting.
Then, I noticed the equally spaced ridges on the plate and got an idea for something else.

For about an hour I recorded short musical phrases by rubbing leaves against the turntable (the type of leaf, angle, pressure and fold determined the sound), then I combined the different takes together. Every element comes from those recordings, including the bass, kick and snare sounds (shaped with EQ, compression and resonators).

Vandeyk's Machine for Riding is not only a beautiful racing bike, but clearly German from its engineering all the way down to the carbon fibre components. The bike's light weight, a meagre 870 grams, doesn't come cheap: it costs as much as a car.

VANDEYK goes Composite. We’re thrilled to present this asphalt machine. Engineered by our Formula 1 proven engineer Ralf Brand and fully manufactured in Germany by ax-lightness, this bike delivers the very finest in carbon fibre technology.
It’s a pure and balanced connection between rider and road - it’s the MACHINE FOR RIDING.
The visual language is reduced to a code, going as far as the downtube logo. No interruption, just a unity of machine hieroglyphic language and pure bicycle form

Very amusing video by Andy & Lisa featuring the various types of runs people engage in -- all in slowmotion of course -- when trying to catch their train. I'm that guy above.

On Gawker, incredible cellphone footage showing the Oklahoma tornado forming out of thin air and rapidly becoming a destructive force that pulverized everything in its path.

"He was worried it was going to come back at him and was searching for a way to scoot out it's way once he was able to gauge how insanely close it was to him," says his son, who posted the video on Reddit. "He hung in there, though. Unbelievable."

Why go to school when you can get all your medicine training through the Medical School Tumblr blog. I can do heart surgery now.

On the Samal Design website, a beautiful series of modern-looking watches made of cement. He also has some really cool pixelated glasses.

"Watchmaking, as I see is more than just a time measuring mechanism. It is the main male jewellery and should reflect the personality and strenght of its owner. I chose concrete, a noble, modern, honest and robust material, the stuff our megapolis are made of. My watches tell the story of an alliance of French creativity and Swiss technical performance, innovating in a field that has never been explored in watchmaking before.My designs are sophisticated in their simplicity and plainly contemporary..." Dzmitry Samal

Unsurprising for China, there's a thriving kidnapping business of young boys — 76,000 last year alone — to families looking for a son. Once such victim used Google Maps to locate the only landmark he remembered — two bridges — to find his real parents 23 years after he was taken.

Luo says he never gave up hope that he would one day be reunited with his biological parents. "Every day before I went to bed, I forced myself to relive the life spent in my old home," he told Fujian’s Strait News.

"Memories of home, in front of a small river...I am wearing a red sweater embroidered with a white swan that mother knit me," he recalled. Luo saved that sweater for many years, but when he was 13 years old, his home collapsed, erasing the only tangible memory he had of his family.

Throughout his adulthood, one particular memory stuck with Luo - his hometown had two bridges. Lucky for him, that was all the information he needed.

The deliciously culinary blog Fine Dining Lovers brings to attention the cheese grating business card. It's quite literally a tiny little cheese grater the size and packed with the info you'd expect on a regular business card. And probably more durable.

The Bon Vivant cheese shop have developed a range of business cards that double as mini cheese graters.

According to New York Magazine's Dan P. Lee, the real space age will begin next year when a spaceport in the middle of New Mexico, home to rocket planes that can take you to space for a meagre $200,000, will open.

Very far away, still sheathed in its massive launch-apparatus exoskeleton, one could make out Launchpad 39A, site of the historic Apollo 11 moonwalking blastoff, where Atlantis had also taken off to orbit the Earth, once more and finally, in 2011, marking the last in NASA’s 30-year-old shuttle program. The other surviving orbiters, Discovery and Endeavor, had already completed their extraordinary processionals to museums in northern Virginia and Los Angeles (the latter requiring hundreds of trees cut and roadways reconfigured to accommodate its size). A throng of personnel was on hand, those who had built and maintained and flown her, including some of the 7,000 whose jobs were ending with the program. With signs and T-shirts that read WE LOVE YOU

To determine how the Earth went from a lifeless rock to one teeming with life, Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology "have found one crucial clue: iron and RNA."

The team managed to re-create conditions of life on Earth 3 billion years ago and"revived" a function of RNA that may have subsided after the rise of DNA.

Life as we know it depends on the precise interplay of DNA, the double-helix molecular structure that safeguards genetic code, with RNA and proteins. But many scientists -- among them Francis Crick, who, with James Watson, discovered DNA -- have theorized that early life could have relied on RNA alone. The debate has been a chicken-and-egg affair for decades.

Researchers swayed by the RNA-first theory are intrigued by ribozymes, a type of RNA, discovered in the 1980s, that acts as an enzyme -- a role once thought to be exclusive to proteins. Its discovery was the beginning of a shift in the view that RNA was mostly a temporary replica of DNA that acted

Megan Garber of The Atlantic looks at the awesomeness that Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield has been in promoting the final frontier to a new generation of kids. Above, a revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Over the course of 144 days spent on the International Space Station (encompassing 2,336 orbits of the Earth and covering nearly 62 million miles), Hadfield didn't merely do his day job -- conducting more than 130 scientific experiments testing the effects of microgravity on masses of various types. He also helped to change our concept of what it means to be an astronaut in the first place. Hadfield is a space explorer in the Gagarin/Glenn/Armstrong model, but he is something else, too: just a guy. A guy who happens to be in space. Hadfield, availing himself of new technologies that are just beginning to be widely adopted, made space travel seem accessible. He made it seem

The This Is Colossal website brings to light these wooden pinhole cameras, crafted entirely by hand by Slovenian designer Elvis Halilović, called ONDU.

Forget your camera phone, filters, and “likes,” these tough little lensless film cameras are old school and completely manual, relying on direct exposure of light to film. The cameras come in six different dimensions and film sizes, from the more common Leica 135 format to a 4" x 5: film holder camera, and looking at the examples above they really do seem capable of making some beautiful photos.

Costing a whopping $27 for a bucket of 12 pieces, and brought into Gaza from Egypt using smuggling tunnels, buckets of KFC chicken and soggy fries make their way to waiting customers wishing to have a taste of the Western world denied to them.

“It’s our right to enjoy that taste the other people all over the world enjoy,” said the entrepreneur, Khalil Efrangi, 31, who started Yamama a few years ago with a fleet of motorbikes ferrying food from Gaza restaurants, the first such delivery service here.

There are no name-brand fast-food franchises on this 140-square-mile coastal strip of 1.7 million Palestinians, where the entry and exit of goods and people remain restricted and the unemployment rate is about 32 percent. Passage into Egypt through the Rafah crossing is limited to about 800 people a day, with men 16 to 40 years old requiring special clearance. Traveling through the Erez crossing into Israel requires a permit and is generally allowed only for medical

You've probably played GeoGuessr when we linked it last week, a game that puts you in a random place using Google Maps' streetview and asks you to guess where you are. Willy Staley of The New York Times has been playing the game and explains "the thrill of visiting Japan... and thinking you're in Ireland."

Here’s how it works: you’re “dropped off” at a random spot within the Street View universe, with no hints about your location but what Google’s cameras have captured. It might be a bustling Brazilian city; it might be the middle of nowhere in Australia; it might be suburban South Africa. You have as much time as you like to explore the area — then you drop a pin on a map to make your guess. Your score is calculated based on the distance between the pin and the actual location. You get five turns.

The most you can hope for, usually, is that you get the country right, because more often than not, you’re dropped off in the middle of nowhere. Road

For the devoted cyclist looking for a beautiful mud guard that can survive the test of time and stil look good, this Kickstarter project for the Plume Mud Guard may be exactly what they were looking for.

Plume is a recoiling bicycle mudguard.
It hides in plain sight, and still looks great when it's covered in mud.
We're pretty excited about this.

Today, many mudguards are made from chunky, brittle plastic. They suck the life out of your bicycle and then they break.
We're not trying to be debbie downers here, but something needs to change.

Allow us to introduce Plume. Built from resilient materials like stainless steel, Plume will stay loyal for years. And when the ground is dry, it can recoil into a small circle under your saddle.
It's also super fun to use.

According to William Wan of The Washington Post, the most bizarre government job can be found in the China. Reportedly, there are officials "in charge of censoring pornography for the southern province of Hunan" who have "watched more than 700 pornographic DVDs from beginning to end."

“When you’re in this job, even if you don’t want to watch anymore, you have to keep watching closely,” said one worker, 70-year-old Liu Xiaozhen, who demonstrated his daily viewing routine with the bored, disaffected thousand-yard stare of a man who has seen it all, many times over.

Pornography in China — like prostitution and other sex-related commerce — is illegal but, increasingly, readily available throughout the country. In every city, hawkers can be found selling graphic DVDs on street corners alongside bootleg copies of the latest Hollywood blockbusters.

But official crackdowns are ordered up each year, an especially brutal routine for sex workers

The Open Culture website has this article listing over 500 classic movies -- from Westerns, to Indies all the way to Noir -- that can be watched online, for free.

Where to watch free movies online? Let’s get you started. We have listed here 500+ quality films that you can watch online. The collection is divided into the following categories: Comedy & Drama; Film Noir, Horror & Hitchcock; Westerns & John Wayne; Silent Films; Documentaries, and Animation.

Amusing video by BuzzFeedVideo giving us a quick rundown of everything you can do to piss off everyone in New York.

We're not sorry.

On The Week, Karina Martinez-Carter explains how the messages in fortune cookies are made and how their existence is -- unsurprisingly -- missing from China. Best of all, that "Fortunes also are tweaked based on client feedback. 'You will meet a tall, dark stranger' was removed from circulation when people complained they found it sinister."

The founders of Wonton Food and Yang's Fortunes both started off focused on other Chinese cuisine products. But each recognized the growing demand for fortune cookies and their baked-in aphorisms, and capitalized on it.

In 2005, The New Yorker profiled Donald Lau, who at the time was vice president of Wonton Food, Inc. and the person writing the fortunes. Lau scribbled off fortunes in between his other duties, gleaning inspiration from wherever he could find it — like signs in the subway, as The New Yorker recounts. Since then, the company has brought on freelance writers to supplement Lau's output of adages.

Lisa Yang, vice

On the Italian Ways website, a beautiful gallery of hand made skateboards created by "a young Milanese company" called Atypical.

Its craftsmen make cruiser boards by hand, creating unique objects with a combination of selected ash wood, design and functionality. Their models are inspired by the first surfboards from the 1960s and 1970s, and could very well fit into a postmodern Beach Boys video, or a metropolitan “Big Wednesday”.

The Junk Culture website has this gallery for a ready-to-brew calendar made entirely from pressed tea leaves. Best part, you can take one of the dates, drop it into hot water and make yourself a cup of tea.

You've probably read about the scientific seven minute workout, 12 exercises that, when done in sequence over the span of 7 minutes and requiring nothing more than your body and a chair, will provide "the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time." If you were curious in trying but weren't sure what to do and how long to do it for, the 7min website will give you all the steps needed.

Like a game of Russian Roulette, you can put your Facebook account on the stake with a spin of Social Roulette, a website that will possibly delete your profile if you lose. Considering how difficult it can be to delete your Facebook profile anyway, maybe this is the fastest way to get it done.

Everyone thinks about deleting their account at some point, it's a completely normal reaction to the overwhelming nature of digital culture. Is it time to consider a new development in your life? Are you looking for the opportunity to start fresh? Or are you just seeking cheap thrills at the expense of your social network? Maybe it's time for you to play Social Roulette.

Five years ago I submitted an article to CoN detailing how, during a bout of depression, I began a search for Mr. Muggs. Mr. Muggs, being the hero sheepdog of a series of books I read as a child at St. Gerard's Sedimentary Catholic School.