Competing a grueling marathon isn't challenging enough for some runners. Woman's Day has a list of ten marathons, some of them run under brutal conditions. The picture above is from Greenland's marathon. Others featured include a marathon run up and down the steps of the Great Wall of China, one that starts at 17,000 feet above sea level, and another run at the Dead Sea.
http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Health/Fitness-Exercise/10-Extreme-Marathons.html via The Presurfer
When I was six, my mother sewed a piece of velcro on an old blue towel. That was my Batman outfit. This is better: a functional set of motorcycle leathers modeled after the Batsuit in the movie The Dark Knight. Put one on, hop on your Vespa, and relish the attention. Because nothing impresses people better than wearing a superhero costume.
http://www.universaldesigns.ca/UDR/ID/IDjacket.html via Geekologie
Problem: photocopiers are expensive, uncomfortable, and generally can't support the weight of an adult human.
Solution: the iBum by Tomomi Sayuda:
This project came from "impact" brief. My initial concern was the news about a naked British streaker who jumped into the Japanese Emperor's palace moat. I was interested in the principle of the news, which is showing embarrassment without big harm for fun. For me, impact means positive and humorous reaction. I decided how to represent this principle. This idea development took the longest time of my four projects. I was brainstorming in many ways with some practical developments since October 2008. Finally I came up with the idea of scanning people's bum.
I think that we should all take a moment to thank the engineers of this world, without whom we would not be living in this modern, technological paradise.
I haven't been able to track this product down to an online vendor, including the official Cheetos website, but this delicious photo is going all over the intertubes. If I can find it, and some Mountain Dew-scented cologne, I'll be ready to hit GenCon in style.
Urlesque has a post full of mashups of Disney animated movie trailers, such as the above mix of Sin City with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, as well as Kill Bill with Beauty and the Beast, and Pulp Fiction with Alice in Wonderland.
The pop culture blog Urlesque has a post full of mariachi band cover songs, such as the above "Sweet Home Alabama". Others include "Beat It" by Michael Jackson, "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen, and "Zombie" by the Cranberries.
GatgetHER has pictures of and links to seventeen bizarre and/or clever kitchen gadgets, such as this nose-shaped egg separator. The others gadgets include a device that turns a hard-boiled egg into a cube, one that shears the kernels off of a corn cob, and an espresso machine that looks like a medieval torture implement.
A promotional shirt for Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles. Looks like an ordinary and rather plain t-shirt, right? But flip over the front and pull it over your head....
And you're wearing a zombie mask! Strangely, they don't make this shirt in a women's style.
I'm thinking that Neatorama needs to create one of these. Neatorama logo on the front, flip it up, and you're wearing an Alex mask.
They don't make robotic destroyers from the future like they used to. Or perhaps I should say, they won't build them like the used or, or will do better in the future than they had done in the more recent future. Anyway, this terminator proved to be less sturdy than what we're used to seeing:
19-year-old Sean Stanley Smith was arrested on the Nevada border after he was spotted by a motorist wandering around the highway nude. He was ordered by police to stop but proceeded into a nearby casino - where he was then tasered in front of a group of children. Smith claims he was a Terminator sent back in time from the future.
Andew Chase is a photographer who creates mechanical sculptures of animals and photographs them in different poses. This cheetah is his latest creation in preparation for his photo book Trionic Morphatractable Engineer.
This development from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Science Institute in Germany has made the creation of human skin much cheaper:
The basic skin production system, which Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft hopes to start selling next year, can produce 5,000 little swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around $49 to produce, far less than the current cost.
The system, which should be available in 2010, is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product. So far, this project has generated 19 patents for Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
Potential applications include not only helping burn victims, but replacing lab animals in product safety testing. Also, robots probably won't have to forage as much for the taste of human flesh.
There are forty weapons from forty cult films in this poster. Can you identify what movie each one came from? If so, you can win a contest. But save yourself from eye strain and view a larger version at the link.
The 1,323-pound Greenbird windcraft broke a land-speed record:
The wind may be restless, but the fastest air-powered ground vehicle is surprisingly steady as it sails over the dusty ground. Called Greenbird, it was developed by English engineer Richard Jenkins and the U.K.'s largest private green electricity supplier, Ecotricity. On March 26 in a dry lakebed in California, the craft broke the world land-speed record for wind-powered vehicles by more than 10 miles an hour, setting the new record at 126.2 mph. Greenbird uses a solid, vertical sail—shaped like an aircraft wing—to capture the wind. The craft's unique low-drag design, coupled with the power of "apparent wind" (a combination of true wind and the wind force created by forward motion), allows it to travel at up to five times the true wind speed.
The largest book in the world is a photo collection entitled Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Kingdom. It measures five feet wide by seven feet long, weighs 133 pounds, and is 122 pages long. It was written by MIT scientist Michael Hawley to raise money for education in that very poor nation. Amazon is currently selling it for $30,000.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00016CAZ6?ie=UTF8&tag=oddee-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00016CAZ6 via Oddee
