Photo: penner42 [Flickr]
Now here's a truly scary Halloween pumpkin - at least for all you geeky Xbox 360 gamers anyhow. Behold the Red Ring of Death pumpkin, made by Alan Penner of Geek and Proud blog! Notice the winking emoticon mocking your hardware failure ...
Now this is the perfect shoe rack for people who like to kick off their footwear (like me!): the Kickit shoe rack/bench by Matthias Furch and Kai Ertel. The shoes that you fling off your feet will be caught by giant bristles and stored there till you need 'em again.
Link - via BB Gadgets
From Australian comedians Merrick Watts and Tim Rosso of The Merrick & Rosso Show, here is "Almost Transformers," a skit where they imagine what the Transformers would be like if they were household appliances.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Geekologie
Photo: Karen Focht
Here's the cutest animal photo you'll see today: Sarabi the mommy giraffe nuzzling her hours-old newborn baby at the Memphis Zoo! http://www.commercialappeal.com/photos/galleries/2008/oct/10/new-baby-giraffe-memphis-zoo/
You can now vote for the baby's name at the zoo's website. Your choices are Sesi (sister), Zuri (beautiful), or Shani (marvelous) - all are translated from Swahili: Link
Sailors call this "dead water," a mysterious condition where a ship sailing in open ocean suddenly slows down for no obvious reason.
Now, scientists have recreated the effect in the lab and captured it on video:
Research has already shown that dead water occurs when an area of water consists of two or more layers of water with different salinity, and hence density – for example, when fresh water from a melting glacier forms a relatively thin layer on top of denser seawater. Waves that form in the hidden layer can slow the boat with no visible trace. [...]
It is the boat itself that initiates the wave – water from the layers below is dragged upwards to fill in the gulf its wake. That sets up an oscillation in the boundary between the layers, which gradually grows as the boat moves forward.
The wave gains size and speed until it, and the trough in front of it, eventually catch up with the boat and sapping its energy before the wave breaks against its side, Mercier says.
Link (with video)
From our pal and favorite cartoonist Adam "Ape Lad" Koford, here's the original defition of "Facebooking."
Imagine going faster than a bullet from a handgun ... on land! Here's the Bloodhound SSC (stands for Super Sonic Car) that is designed to travel faster than 1,000 mph (1610 km per hour) or Mach 1.4:
The vehicle's driver will be wing commander Andy Green, a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, who set the current speed record of 763 mph with Thrust SSC in October 1997.
The three-year mission will be led by Richard Noble, who also project-led the Thrust SSC and himself held the world speed record between 1994 and 1997.
Noble said: "The next three years are going to be tough, testing and damned exciting."
The wheels on the jet- and rocket-powered car, which will be 12.8 meters long and weigh 6.4 tons, will spin at more than 10,000 times per minute.
Link | Bloodhound SSC website - Thanks cjdavis3!
Ever got your car towed ... by a motorcycle? Behold the Retriever, a modified Honda Goldwing 1800 cc motorcycle that can tow most types of passenger cars. The Retriever, made by Swedish company Coming Through, has one distinct benefit: it can squeeze in between cars stuck on the road in a traffic jam caused by a broken-down car ahead.
http://www.comingthrough.se/main.php?lang=UK&page=pro - via The Red Ferret Journal
A Japanese city planner must have really, really, really liked manholes. Behold a quiet, unassuming street in Tokyo's Setagaya ward with the unique world record of being the manholiest street in the world:
Poor planning? Engineering gone wrong? Unconventional street decor? Whatever the explanation, this quiet residential street in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward boasts perhaps the highest manhole density in town, with 85 of them scattered along a 200-meter stretch of pavement. Fans of the curious street call it “Manhole Ginza.”
Link - via Bit & Pieces
Previously on Neatorama: Japanese Manhole Covers
Here's the ugliest/cutest baby you'll see today: a baby echidna!
Echidnas and the Platypus are the only egg-laying mammals, known as monotremes. The female lays a single soft-shelled, leathery egg twenty-two days after mating and deposits it directly into her pouch. Hatching takes ten days; the young echidna, called a puggle, then sucks milk from the pores of the two milk patches (monotremes have no nipples) and remains in the pouch for forty-five to fifty-five days, at which time it starts to develop spines. The mother digs a nursery burrow and deposits the puggle, returning every five days to suckle it until it is weaned at seven months.
Cellar Image of the Day has more pics: Link
Photo: shadycam [Flickr]
Last May, artist Daniel Firman had an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He created this taxidermied (is that a word?) elephant, titled Würsa. The whimsical equilibrium is supposed to show what even a large thing like an elephant could do 18,000 km (~11,200 mi) above the earth.
Here's a pretty neat way of turning a ho-hum bridge into an amazing tourist attraction: turn it into a fountain!
The fountains at the Banpo Bridge were installed on September ninth and have since become a major tourist attraction. It has nearly 10 thousand nozzles ( more exactly 9, 380 ) on either side of the bridge that shoots out 190 tons of water every minute. According to the Seoul mayor, Oh Se-Hoon, the fountain bridge would help acknowledge Seoul as an eco-friendly destination amassing more tourists.
Freshome has the story (and video clip): Link - via Random Good Stuff, thanks Juergen!
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Most Beautiful Bridges in the World
A lot of people think that Faster-than-light (superluminal or FTL) travel is the stuff of kooky mad scientists-wanna-bes (indeed, Albert Einstein himself had declared that it is impossible).
I get a lot of submissions from crazy people claiming that they've discovered fundamental flaws in physics or that they've come up with a completely novel Theory of Everything, and those go straight to the junk pile. But when this came from an emeritus physics professor from Rice University, I was intrigued.
Here's Robert Haymes, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, wrote about FTL travel:
Presented below is a concept of how it might be possible to travel in space at speeds in excess of the speed of light in vacuum. It is presented now because of my firm conviction that immediate actions are necessary to Save Our Species; steadily increasing overpopulation of the planet Earth by humanity, coupled with a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, signals that we may soon wipe the planet’s surface clear of civilization, if not of life itself. One mode of salvation would be to establish self-sustaining branches of humanity on other planets. It does not appear that any other habitable planets exist within our solar system. However the Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, many if not all of which have planets orbiting them. Some of those planets are most likely habitable. Astronomers generally believe that these stars are separated by distances averaging a few light years. To reach them in practical amounts of time will require faster than light travel.
Link - Thanks Nancy! | Another interesting article: Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? by Philip Gibbs
John Escobar and colleagues at UCLA have shown that the simple act of peeling an ordinary sticky tape in vacuum generates enough X-ray to take an image!
"At some point we were a little bit scared," says Juan Escobar, a member of the research team. But he and his co-workers soon realized that the X-rays were only emitted when the kit was used in a vacuum. "We don't want to scare people from using Scotch tape in everyday life," Escobar adds.
This kind of energy release — known as triboluminescence and seen in the form of light — occurs whenever a solid (often a crystal) is crushed, rubbed or scratched. It is a long-known, if somewhat mysterious, phenomenon, seen by Francis Bacon in 1605. He noticed that scratching a lump of sugar caused it to give off light.
The leading explanation posits that when a crystal is crushed or split, the process separates opposite charges. When these charges are neutralized, they release a burst of energy in the form of light.
As long ago as 1953, a team of scientists based in Russia suggested that peeling sticky tape produced X-rays. But "we were very sceptical about the old results," says Escobar. His team decided to look into the phenomenon anyway, and found that X-rays were indeed given off, in high-energy pulses.
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081022/full/news.2008.1185.html | Gallery at Wired - via Boing Boing, Thanks Dave Bullock!
Photo: Carlos G. Camara, Juan V. Escobar, Jonathan R. Hird and Seth J. Putterman
It seems that the success of Guitar Hero has prodded video game makers to try and make copycat games of similar genre. Michael Moss of Quitting Time comics envisioned one such "products that never made it": Toilet Hero!
To be fair, based on experience, I can tell you that if you unclog a toilet, you're instantly a hero in the eyes of your wife.
