Neatorama reader Darren Ballingall created this 3D Space Invaders Flash Game:

I thought you guys might be interested in this version of space invaders I created in flash. It's a 3D version with a few different arrangements of the levels.

A lot of the sounds are done from memory so forgive me if they're not quite right.

I tried to make it as simple as possible and as close as I could remember to the original from the version I had when I was a kid.

I've played other remakes of space invaders but they didn't have the same retro feel.

Actually, it was quite challenging to play Space Invaders in 3D!

http://www.pixelfalls.net/kongzilla/folio/3DspaceInvader09.swf - Thanks Darren!

Katherine "Kerry" Close, a 13-year-old 8th-grader from Spring Lake, New Jersey, won yesterday's Scripps National Spelling Bee and took home $42,000 in cash and prizes.

The winning word? "Ursprache", which means a language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages.

Link

Found at Bits & Pieces.

Artist Donna Pardue of Austin, Texas, makes amazing sculptures out of apples, "the archetypal fruit" because:

Although the apple represents some of our most powerful emotions and beliefs— all that is most wholesome, Eve's apple was the instrument of the original sin and therefore, the cause of aging and mortality. The Norse goddess of immortality, Idun, had a box of magic apples, which the gods ate every day in order to keep themselves young. Other references to the apple occur in the tales of King Arthur and Avalon (the place of apples) and the Brothers Grimm character, Sleeping Beauty, who fell into a deathlike sleep after eating an apple with a magical poison.

Because the sculptures are made of fruit, they decay almost instantly:

When fresh, the sculptures have a transluscent quality, almost marble-like in appearance, but this lasts only an hour or so. They begin to take on a brown, bruised quality, then a soft leather-like quality and finally begin to wrinkle. After a year, they have shrunken and wrinkled considerably and have taken on a warm brown color.

This particular one is called "Adam Ate Most of It".

http://www.donnapardue.com/torsoinstalled.htm - Thanks Yayo!

In a move sure to generate controversy, a company that makes RFID tracking tags suggested that its product can be injected into living tissue of immigrants and guest workers to track their movements:

Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has proposed implanting the company's RFID tracking tags in immigrant and guest workers. ...

Silverman was being interviewed on "Fox & Friends." Responding to the Bush administration's call to know "who is in our country and why they are here," he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace. He added, "We have talked to many people in Washington about using it...."

http://www.livescience.com/scienceoffiction/060531_rfid_chips.html - via J-Walk Blog

Hannah Greely made this marvelous-looking dog welcome mat, titled "Muddle", from coconut fiber and silicon glue.

Link - via WMMNA

The RoboCup World Championship, the nerdy equivalent of soccer's World Cup in Germany, has a lofty goal: to create androids that can beat soccer's human top players by the year 2050. And oh, do a little artificial intelligence research, too.

This year, 350 teams from around the world will compete for the title of best soccer-playing robots. The picture above is Team Osaka's VisiON NEXTA, the best humanoid of the 2005 competition.

Link | PopSci Article

I've seen these cute photos of a tiger and piglets circulating round the Net before, but I didn't know the background story until now:

Sai Mai, a 26-month-old female tiger, plays with baby pigs at a zoo in Chonburi province, 80 km (50 miles) east of Bangkok, Thailand on May 7, 2003. The Royal Bengali tigress was born in captivity and breast-fed bya female pig for four months after her birth.

Link - via Jaf Project

Michael Salter built this very cool robot sculpture out of styrofoam!

http://www.copyrightsalter.com/situnk_6.html - via WMMNA

The robotic hand mimics the movements of a person's real hand, based on real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brain activity. It marks another landmark in the advance towards prosthetics and computers that can be operating by thought alone.

The report said the specimen weighed more than 10,000 pounds, making it three times the size and weight of an armored dinosaur called Gastonia....

"It will be the largest, heaviest armored dinosaur found on the planet so far," Director of the CEU Prehistoric Museum Dr. Reese Barrick said.

Barrick said no other animals would have been able to get its claws under the dinosaur's armor.

MC Escher Balcony (1945) in Lego:

MC Escher Relativity (1953) in Lego:

MC Escher Belvedere (1958) in Lego:

MC Escher Ascending and Descending (1960) in Lego:

MC Escher Waterfall (1961) in Lego:

I think the originals were made by Andrew Lipson (www.andrewlipson.com), but his website has been down for ages....

Top 10 Signs You're at a Redneck Wedding:

10. Rehearsal dinner held at Hooters

9. Instead of "Friends of the bride or friends of the groom?" ushers ask "Ford Or Chevy?"

8. Bridesmaids: Pink Tube Tops
Groomsmen: Travis Tritt T-Shirts

7. Phrase "I Do" replaced by "I Heard That"

6. Tender rendition of "The Wedding Song" performed by Pinkard & Bowden

5. When the minister asks "Who giveth this woman to be married"... some guy in the back stands up and hollers "Earnhardt!"

4. Reception conversation includes the phrase, "So what have you been doing since Hee Haw, Mr. Lindsay?"

3. Snack trays at reception: Vienna sausages and Nacho Cheese Doritos

2. Plans for the honeymoon evening include tickets to the monster truck rally

....And The Number One Way To Tell If You're At A Redneck

1. Sign in front of the church: No Shirt... No Shoes... No Problem!

Found at the always-entertaining MissCellania.

This Pi Pie was made by Flickr user megpi on pi day (3/14). Fantastic!

Link | Apparently, there's a lot of pi pies on Flickr: Link

A trio of German scientists modelled chemical molecules, some shown above, using balloons! I suppose they're popular at parties...

Link - via Make