Orange County Choppers Builds Its First Electric Motorcycle
Orange County Choppers, the New York-based custom motorcycle shop, is famous for its loud, raked-back choppers. The shop is also the scene of the TLC reality show American Chopper. Recently, OCC worked with Siemens to develop an electric motorcyle:
On Wednesday, Siemens, the electronics and electrical engineering global powerhouse, unveiled the Smart Chopper it commissioned from the renowned custom motorcycle outfit. Siemens claims the bike has a 60-mile range and a 100 mph top speed. An onboard charging unit can be plugged into any 110-volt socket to charge the bike in five hours, and Siemens says it’ll charge in as little as one hour when plugged into a higher-voltage station. A single-speed, clutch-less transmission delivers the power from a 27-hp electric motor.
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Cat Saves Man from Burning Home
With most “pet saves family from fire” stories, it’s easy to assume that the pet woke someone up because it wanted OUT of the house. In this case, the cat came in from outside, and it didn’t even live there!
Engineer Andrew Williams was asleep when the fire broke out at his bungalow in Bracknell in Berkshire.
As black smoke filled the property, his neighbour’s cat Hugo came through a cat-flap and raised the alarm by clawing at the father-of-two’s face.
Rescuers said that the fire could have killed Mr Williams if he had not been awoken by Hugo. A smoke detector had been moved during work on the bungalow.
Hugo had been in the house before, and was in fact a regular visitor. He was not in the habit of clawing Mr. Williams’ face. Link -via Arbroath
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Science
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Giant Planet Orbits Backwards
Astronomers with the Wide Area Search for Planets have discovered a planet, dubbed WASP-17, that is twice the size of Jupiter. That makes it the largest planet ever discovered. Unlike any other planet discovered so far, it orbits opposite to its star’s direction of rotation. Astronomer David Anderson from Keele University:
“Newly formed solar systems can be violent places. Our own Moon is thought to have been created when a Mars-sized planet collided with the recently formed Earth and threw up a cloud of debris. A near collision during the early, violent stage of this planetary system could well have caused a gravitational slingshot, flinging WASP-17 into its backwards orbit.”
But why is WASP-17 so big? The discovery team suggests that have been subjected to intense tides as it travelled in its strange and highly-elliptical orbit, causing it to become stretched and bloated.
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Man Builds Batmobile Go-Cart
Ebay user tully712 made a go-cart modeled after the Batmobile in the movies Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He’s selling plans for it and a license to build it. The bidding currently stands at $29.88. More pictures and videos at the link.
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Happy Birthday, Wizard!
The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz premiered 70 years ago today at The Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. It didn’t premiere in Hollywood until three days later. In honor of the occasion, mental_floss brings you some Oz facts, such as how the color musical version came to be made after several movies had already used the story. Link
Previously at Neatorama: Movie Trivia: The Wizard of Oz, and The Wizard of Oz: The Short Version.
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Duck has a Sandal
Lucky the duckling is very lucky to have been adopted by an orthopedic nurse after she broke her leg, which left her with a right foot that bent the wrong way. Alison Morgan of Newport, Wales, performs physical therapy on the leg and had a special duck sandal made for Lucky by cobbler Kelvin Reddicliffe. The sandal protects Lucky’s toes from irritation and further damage.
Mrs Morgan is now trying to raise the £500 needed for an operation which entails Lucky’s right leg being broken again and set correctly. Since the damaged leg is now seven millimetres short, Lucky will also have rods inserted around it to lengthen the limb a small amount every couple of days until it is in line.
‘It is quite complicated but it works on humans and the vet is quite confident it will work,’ added Mrs Morgan.
‘Lucky is a real character and full of life. That is why I didn’t want to go with the first vet’s opinion about being put to sleep.
‘She loves having a cwtch (Welsh for a cuddle) and is as good as gold.’
Link -via Unique Daily
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Street View of a Racetrack
The Google Street View photographs of Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, California were taken during a race! Unfortunately, the photographs don’t go all the way to the finish line. Link -via reddit
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The Color of Dinosaurs
Scientists thought they’d never know what colors the dinosaurs were, since fossils are rock-colored and even recently-discovered mummified scraps of the animals are faded. Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale, was researching fossil feathers when he discovered that melanin granules survived in their original shapes and patterns, which can be compared with existing feathers to determine their original color.
Perhaps the most surprising and most exciting application of this research is that it may allow us to predict the colors of many dinosaurs.
“These include many of our most well loved dinosaurs,” says Prum. “Like velociraptor, the dinosaur that chased the kids around the kitchen in Jurassic Park, was actually fully plumaged.”
While these dinosaur feathers were not used for flight until the appearance of the transitional species Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, they were probably useful for warmth. Prum says we could even learn more about the color of one of the most famous dinosaurs of all, Tyrannosaurus rex.
“In the classic mural The Age of Reptiles in the Yale Peabody museum, they depicted T-rex, which is one of the iconic, huge, bipedal, meat-eating dinosaurs,” he says. “Recent fossil discoveries have shown that the closest relative of these huge tyrannosaurids actually had tiny skin appendages or fossil feathers—’dino-fuzz.’
Link (with video) -via Metafilter
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Caffeine vs. Calories
This infographic shows you which products (mostly coffee drinks) have the least and most caffeine and calories by plotting them on a graph, with some familiar foods on the left for reference. This is why I drink black coffee (lower right) and don’t eat Big Macs (upper left). Link to full-size version. -via Digg
(image credit: Flickr user mkandlez)
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This Was Painted by a Six-Year Old
Remarkable talent, don’t you think? Kieron Williamson of Norfolk, UK didn’t draw anything a year ago, but now he’s had first gallery exhibition:
Spurred on by images on the Internet and in art books – and the postcard-perfect outdoor studio that’s all around him in Norfolk, on England’s east coast, Kieron Williamson has churned out a succession of landscapes and village scenes that have critics decades older raising their eyebrows.
“I was the youngest in the class,” recalled Kieron of his only formal training ever. “Everyone else were grownups.” Asked whether that bothered him, he told Roth that during class, he simply “didn’t think about ‘em.”
Link and link via J-Walk Blog
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Math Mom: If I've Told You N Times, I've Told You N+1 Times
Katie would make one great math mom!
Math Mom: If I’ve Told You N Times, I’ve Told You N+1 Times
I can practically hear my mother’s voice saying "if I told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times." Well, for this shirt, we’ve boiled the adage down to its mathematical terms.
Now buy the shirt, stand up straight and go clean your room! Link
More math and geektastic science T-shirts from the newly spruced up Neatorama Online Store (work in progress, mmkay?):
- Integral of 1/Cabin = Log Cabin
- Geometry is For Squares
- Math Puns are the First Sine of Madness
- I Love Math (in Queen’s English)
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Periodic Table Sweater
All you science-lovers on Neatorama should appreciate this great sweater featuring the Periodic Table of Elements. The sleeves feature fungi and bacteria names. The creator made it for her husband, a microbiologist working in the pharmaceutical industry.
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Musical Tea Pot Plays Your Tune
This musical kettle is designed by Naoki Kawamoto in an effort to “redesign soundscape.” It will play your favorite tune when things get heated up and begin boiling.
Link Via BoingBoing
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Dwarf Mini Pony
This pony is an American miniature horse born with a dwarfism gene. For reference, there’s another picture of little Koda compared to a normal horse on the website. He goes to about the knees of the stallion. I couldn’t resist posing this image with the huge eyes though.
Koda is so small that he is often mistaken for a battery-operated soft toy.
Standing at 59cm tall, if Koda the horse wants an equal he has to turn to the vetinary cat for company.
Link Via Cute Overload
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Four Perfectly Round Circles
Look closely, can’t you see four perfectly round circles? Or maybe you’ll want to stand way back to see them. Don’t scroll up and down; that might make you queasy! -via I Am Bored
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Giant Carnivorous Plant Could Eat Rats
A new species of pitcher plant has been discovered in the Philippines. The giant pitcher (Nepenthes attenboroughii) lives high on Mount Victoria, and was reported by missionaries who were lost in the mountain area in 2000. An expedition to find the giant pitcher was held in 2007 by natural history explorer Stewart McPherson, botanist Alastair Robinson, Andreas Fleischmann, and three guides.
Pitchers create tube-like leaf structures into which insects and other small animals tumble and become trapped.
The team has placed type specimens of the new species in the herbarium of the Palawan State University, and have named the plant Nepenthes attenboroughii after broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough.
“The plant is among the largest of all carnivorous plant species and produces spectacular traps as large as other species which catch not only insects, but also rodents as large as rats,” says McPherson.
(image credit: Stewart McPherson)
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Stop Playing Homework and Do Your Video Games!
(YouTube link)
A quintet of kids from Seattle’s Marrowstone in the City program perform video game themes, with some embellishments from their friends in the background. Don’t miss the Pong segment! -via Buzzfeed
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Star Wars Y-Wing Bed
I can’t find out much information about this bed — just some pictures listed on a real estate site. Yup, it’s for sale at $364,900. Comes with a house in Visalia, CA and a guarantee of perpetual virginity, like the AT-AT bed.
Link via Topless Robot
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Donkey Kong Shelves
These shelves, inspired by the classic video game Donkey Kong, are the perfect place to store your valuable, fragile possessions.
Via CrunchGrear, which found it on a list of ten pieces of furniture inspired by video games. I think that this may be the original page for the Donkey Kong shelves, but it’s written in German (?), so I’m not sure. Would any Neatoramanauts like to take a stab at translating it?
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Origami Paper Crane Chandelier
The Origami Crane Lamp is a chandelier by Michele Varian, a New York-based fashion designer and interior decorator. It measures 58″ long is lit fluorescently.
Link via Nerd Approved
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A Human-Extracting Rescue Robot
A rescue robot that picks up victims and takes them inside of itself. What could possibly go wrong?
The Robocue is operated by the Tokyo Fire Department and used to extract people from areas where rescue workers can’t go safely. It then uses pincers to pull a person on to a conveyor belt and inside its protective walls. Video at the link.
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Dancing Caterpillars
Amateur photographer Desmond Cannon of Brae, Ireland caught these sawfly caterpillars eating through a leaf while sticking their rear ends in the air! He shot pictures of the tiny (less than a centimeter long) caterpillars as they ate through the leaf while holding their chorus line pose.
Geoff Read, head of reptiles and inverterbrae at Marwell Wildlife, near Winchester, Hants, said the behaviour was perculiar to sawfly larvae.
He said: “It is a defence mechanism. If you go too near them they rear up like this to try and scare off predators.
“It is only this family of caterpillars that do this – it’s incredible to see.”
(image credit: Desmond Cannon)
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12 Ways to Travel the World for Free
Money Hacker has a list of twelve ways to travel the world without paying. Some are for free lodging, some for travel expenses, so you may have to combine several tips to truly travel free -and none of these ideas involve joining the military! Link -via the Presurfer
(image credit: Flickr user sharkbait)
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World Record Bacon Sandwich
A bacon sandwich is good anytime, but August s the best time for BLTs, when local tomatoes are at their peak. At the fifth annual Tomato Fest in St. Louis, Tom Coghill and 90 volunteers put together a BLT that stretched 179 feet, two inches, breaking the world record for the biggest bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. They used 500 pounds of bacon, 1,280 pounds of tomatoes, and 100 heads of lettuce. Link -via Digg
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A Star Wars Zombie Novel
More awesome than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I don’t know yet, but the novel Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber looks promising. Here’s a synopsis:
When the Imperial prison barge Purge–temporary home to five hundred of the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, rebels, scoundrels, and thieves–breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space, its only hope appears to lie with a Star Destroyer found drifting, derelict, and seemingly abandoned. But when a boarding party from the Purge is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back–bringing with them a horrific disease so lethal that within hours nearly all aboard the Purge die in ways too hideous to imagine.
And death is only the beginning.
The Purge’s half-dozen survivors–two teenage brothers, a sadistic captain of the guards, a couple of rogue smugglers, and the chief medical officer, the lone woman on board–will do whatever it takes to stay alive. But nothing can prepare them for what lies waiting aboard the Star Destroyer amid its vast creaking emptiness that isn’t really empty at all. For the dead are rising: soulless, unstoppable, and unspeakably hungry.
Schreiber has a blog, where you can find pictures of his zombified Storm Troopers staggering around ComicCon, promoting his book.
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The Ballad of G.I. Joe
(Video Link)
This touching song by Daniel Strange and Kevin Umbricht describes the private lives of G.I. Joe characters when they’re not busy fighting. Featuring Cobra Commander dancing and starring Sgt. Slaughter as himself.
Via Topless Robot
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A Bone-Anchored Hearing Aid With a Built-In MP3 Input
A new generation of hearing aids will be able to block out background noise and let users directly jack into music:
On Friday Mr Hughes had tiny titanium screws drilled into bone behind each ear during a 90-minute operation under general anaesthetic. Once the wounds heal and the screws have fused with bone, abutments will be screwed into the implants, and the processors, about the size of a postage stamp, are clicked into place.
Older-style hearing aids amplify all sounds, making it almost impossible for wearers to hear conversations in noisy environments. They also interfere with frequencies used by mobile and fixed phones and often emit high-pitched whistling sounds. But the newer processors, costing about $6000 each, shut out background noise, giving users up to 25 per cent better hearing, and can be attached directly to MP3 music players or wireless headsets for talking on the phone, Cochlear’s territory manager, Katrina Martin, said.
Link via Popular Science
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A Turnstile That Sprays You With Water
Still in the concept stage, the Watergate is an alternative to the turnstile. If you’re disabled, getting through a turnstile can be a challenge. That’s why designers Michael Tatschl, Sascha Mikel and Martin Schnabl came up with this solution. It would allow disabled people to get through, and spray everyone else with water.
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A Shower That Uses Waste Water to Grow Plants and Recycles the Rest
Still in the concept stage, the Phyto-Purification Bathroom and Shower would make your bathroom more environmentally friendly:
Using a natural filtering principle called phyto-purification, the bathroom becomes a mini-eco-system by recycling and regenerating the wastewater.
The water from the shower and the washbasin is filtered through an organic system before being re-used.
Phyto-purification is a natural water-recycling process which is commonly used in ecological purification systems.
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The Upside Down Forest
At the 50-acre Glacier Gardens in Alaska, designers added an unusual flair by uprooting more than twenty hemlock and spruce trees, flipping them over, and using the trunks as natural flower pots:
During the rehabilitation process, Steve was developing the lower landscaped gardens using a large piece of rented equipment to arrange the masses of soil, roots, plants, trees, and rock dragged down the mountain during the landslide. During the last few hours of equipment rental, the equipment was damaged while moving a large boulder. This boulder has become known as “Steve’s Rock” and is the centerpiece of one of the many waterfalls flowing through Glacier Gardens. Full of frustration about the large repair bill he was sure to see, he used the equipment to pick up a large tree stump and slammed the inverted stump into the ground trunk first. The tree stuck into the soft mud upside down and as the roots hung like the vines of a petunia basket, it only took moments before he had a vision of how to recycle the trees cleared from the development of the property: The Upside Down “Flower Towers.” Each flower tower is made by inverting spruce or hemlock trees with the root ball pointing towards the sky. The stock of the trunk buried 5-7 ft, netting on top, mosses laid down, and nearly 75 – 100 plants planted every year for guest enjoyment.
Official Website via Urlesque (where there are many marvelous pictures)
Image by flickr user John & Peggy Bromley used under creative commons license
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