We strongly recommend that you do not use this method to get in touch, as it were, with the Earth. But as this video shows, it is technically possible to run over eight or 10 feet of red-hot lava and emerge with your limbs intact. Someone tell those kids pretending the floor is lava that it's safe to get off the couch!

Evie Sobczak is a young science rock star who has already done more in her 16 years than most of us will in our entire lives (I KNOW, I should speak for myself):

For a fifth-grade science fair, Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick. In seventh grade, she generated power by engineering paddles that could harness wind. And in eighth grade, she started a project that eventually would become her passion: She wanted to grow algae and turn it into biofuel.

And she totally did. Sobczak engineered all of her equipment herself, creating a totally chemical-free way to grow algae, extract the oil, and use it as biodiesel. Plus, her process produced as much as 20 percent more oil than current methods, which could make algae biofuel cheaper. She recently won first place at Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair for her process, which is a big deal because, as Sobczak says, “It’s like the biggest science fair ever.”

If you've ever wondered whether water improves with age like a fine wine, wonder no longer: The answer is "nope." Scientists found water in Canada that had been trapped in veins of rock 1.5 miles underground for at least a billion and possibly as much as 2.64 billion years. In the name of pure research, one of the discoverers took a taste. It was gross. Mystery solved.

Unlace your bodice, put down your bastard sword, and stop trying to genetically engineer that goat into a unicorn -- it turns out all you need to experience the thrill of living in a fantasy novel is to look at this map of place name etymological origins.

Google, that little company that makes quirky tweaks to its logo for various holidays (oh yeah, and the biggest media enterprise in the world), has launched a whimsical yet maybe actually helpful project: balloons that serve as internet hotspots for developing areas. It works like this:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark -- except it’s actually France and the rotting you smell is old newspapers. At least, that’s what the Bard would’ve written if he knew about these plans for a Globe-like theater made of recycled paper. Paris-based Studio Andrew Todd created the design for this project as part of a sustainable theater design competition exploring the “intersection of sustainability and performance.” Reports Inhabitat:

The bales of recycled paper used to construct Studio Andrew Todd‘s theater will consist of old magazines, newspapers and office paper. The colorful bales will be stacked and assembled in a circular form on the scaffolding shelves, creating a thick wall that deflects exterior sound from the performances going on inside ...

If you constantly have the nagging sense that you have too much money and too many wheels, your problem may be that you commute on a normal-person bike instead of a self-balancing electric unicycle from Hammacher Schlemmer. Luckily, for only $2,700 you can solve all these problems at once!

Remember how there used to be pay phones all over New York City, and now there basically aren't? What happened to them all? Photographer Dave Bledsoe discovered that they crawled under the West Side Highway to die.

This will make you really glad you're looking at your computer and not out the window:

Taylor Shellfish Company, an oyster hatchery in Quilcene, Wash., is trying to combat ocean acidification by putting a sodium carbonate solution in the water. First having drugs in the water was bad, and now it’s ... good? Jeez, Nature, MAKE UP YOUR MIND.

Oyster hatcheries are dropping the equivalent of Tums and other antacids into water to make it easier for naked mollusk larvae to build their shells... [O]cean waters [are] turning ever more corrosive as they absorb a fraction of the carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the atmosphere. The acidification, in turn, makes it harder for oyster larvae to build their shells.