Cat explains how to make this gothic Barbie bridal cake:
First thing to do is prepare the Barbie. I used Gel pens, but you can really use any art supplies you are comfortable with. I had a limited amount of time, so I did a minimal amount of make up. You should go to town with yours! Be creative!
Ahoy, landlubbers! These characters of Wayne Harris be o-the finest quality, so weigh anchor to his website right now for a merry yarn or ye be wantin' me to get me hook, savvy ye scallawags?
Yarr! Found via Drawn!, go there too or it's the plank for you, ye son of a biscuit eater.
Tim Davenport of the Wild Conservation Society and colleagues in Tanzania, Africa, just discovered a new genus of monkey - the first in 83 years!
Known locally as Kipunji, it stands at about 90cm (3ft) tall, is grey-brown in colour with off-white fur on its stomach and on the tip of its long curly tail, and has a crest of long hair on the top of its head. Adults have a distinctive call, described as a "honk-bark".
Gizmag has an interesting article about an electric Cinderella shoes with built-in stun gun!
The Electric Cinderella shoes idea began as part of Simona Brusa Pasque's thesis at the Interaction Design Institute in 2002 and was inspired by a beautiful woman who Simona interviewed for her thesis who wanted to be able to “intimidate her intimidators.”
She wanted to be empowered without losing her femininity, to have the freedom to be sexy without fear.
The shoes certainly achieve that, offering 100,000 volts of high fashion stun gun power which can be activated by a control on the matching necklace. The weapon is hidden and when the wearer taps on the matching necklace an electric spark is displayed in the transparent tip, warning the would-be assailant to back off. The weapon is designed for a one time use, in case of emergency, by breaking the tip of the shoe.
"Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot" is an experimental mechanism that uses a living Madagascan hissing cockroach atop a modified trackball to control a three-wheeled robot. If the cockroach moves left, the robot moves left. Infrared sensors also provide navigation feedback to the cockroach, striving to create a pseudo-intelligent system with the cockroach as the CPU.
Hunters on Bank Island in Canada's Northwest Territory shot this bear that turned out to be the world's first grizzly-polar bear hybrid:
Officials seized the creature after noticing its white fur was scattered with brown patches and that it had the long claws and humped back of a grizzly. Now a DNA test has confirmed that it is indeed a hybrid — possibly the first documented in the wild.
This is a rare deleted scene from "Star Wars: A New Hope". When Luke sees the Star Distroyer attacking Leia's ship high above the planet he races off to Anchorhead to tell his friends. When he arrives he finds his best friend Biggs is back for a visit. The two reconnect and Biggs tells Luke he's going off to join the rebellion. After this scene Luke goes home and helps his Uncle buy two new droids to replace the one that broke down at the beginning of this deleted sequence.
In case the clip above doesn't play, see:YouTube Link
This is the largest digging machine (or trencher or rotating shovel) in the world. It was built by Krupp and is shown here crossing a road in Germany on the way to its destination, an open air coal mine. Although at the mine the treads are unnecessary, it was cheaper to make the machine self-propelled than to try and move it with conventional hauling equipment. Some factoids:
The machine is 95 meters high and 215 meters long (almost 2.5 football fields in length)
Weight is 45,500 tons (that's equivalent to a bumper to bumper line of jeeps 80 miles long)
It took 5 years to design and manufacture at a cost of $100 million
Maximum digging speed is 10 meters per minute
Can move more than 76,000 cubic meters of coal, rock, and earth per day
Meet David Lucas, a farmer from Mildenhall, Suffolk, UK. He has been selling gallows to African countries with deplorable human rights records for about 10 years.
The execution equipment he says he sells ranges from single gallows, at about £12,000 each, to "Multi-hanging Execution Systems" mounted on lorry trailers, costing about £100,000.
Amnesty [International] said the export of gallows, which will be made illegal by an EC regulation in July, was "appalling".
But Mr Lucas said the trade was not sick and "business is business". He added some people deserved the death penalty.
Volkswagen has a new storage facility in Wolfsburg, Germany - the multi-story parking garage can store the same number of car as a comparable facility in the US, but takes only 20% of the space. The automated retrieval system also allows the cars to be selected and delivered in less time and without the potential of being damaged by the attendant:
Collecting your new car is an event in itself. "In a fully automated procedure, your new car is brought down to you from one of the 20-story Car Towers. Large signboards in the Customer Center show you when your turn has come. Then, you're handed the keys, your picture is taken, the glass doors open and your brand-new car appears. You're all set to go".
This was the first time I had attempted a prank like this, so I expected the control box to be locked, and the programming functions password-protected. I was wrong. First of all, the control cabinet had no lock. Swinging open its door, I found a deliciously inviting handheld keypad, then took a wild guess and pushed a button labeled STOP. The display on the control box flashed ENTER PASSWORD. I was about to give up in disgust when I noticed that someone had written the password in large Sharpie lettering above the box.
With only a few minutes of road sign hacking, I had programmed an homage to the 1951 sci-fi film The Day The Earth Stood Still, the phrase that was used to stop Gort, the robot in the film, from taking over the world.
