Captain Brian Bews ejects from his CF-18 fighter jet during a practice flight at the Lethbridge County Airport, Alberta, on July 23.

Video. Via Instapundit.

Most of her face was gone. There was just this gaping hole where her eyes and nose and most of her mouth had been. I thought she was dead. I just figured this was going to be another homicide scene. Then I saw her fingers start to move – ever so slightly. And it looked like she was trying to breathe through the wound in her face.

The story of Chrissy Steltz, whose face is held on by magnets. Via Metafilter.

Construction of the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, or Hoover Dam Bypass.

Photographed by Jamey Stillings.

Speaking of things festive, here’s the world’s smallest snowman. At just 0.01 mm across, he’s slimmer than a human hair. Strictly speaking, he’s also made of tin.

The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide (or 0.001 mm), is ion beam deposited platinum.

The object was built by Dr David Cox of the National Physical Laboratory’s Quantum Detection Group. The video below should give you some idea of just how small the snowman is.

Faithful in sentiment, if not materials or size.

Slowed down fire-breathing. 

High resolution here.

The astronauts were more than excited to feel the ground, though standing on it was too hard for them after spending so many days in the state of weightlessness.

After 191 days, Soyuz TMA-11 and its three human occupants returned to Earth from the International Space Station, landing in Kazakhstan, April 19, 2008. A partial separation failure caused a ballistic re-entry that in turn caused the spacecraft to land 475 km from its intended landing site. The occupants, Yuri Malenchenko, Peggy Whitson and Yi So-Yeon, were assisted by local residents who discovered the charred spacecraft resting in their fields.

This is the showreel of Damien Walters. I’m not sure what to call what it is he does. But he does it very well.

(h/t, Anna)

Now here’s a thing. Aniket Chindak holds the unofficial world record for ‘limbo-skating’, a feat that involves trundling under low bars and a range of other obstacles – say, 57 parked cars – while sprawling so that no part of the anatomy is more than eight inches above the ground.

“The hardest thing is to go fast enough before I bend down, because that’s how you can skate under so many cars at once,” the six-year-old explained. Needless to say, Aniket has rivals to contend with, among them, seven-year-old Zoey Beda, aka the Roller Limbo Princess.

More ephemera tomorrow.

What’s the word for something that’s impressive and disgusting?

Via.