(YouTube Link)

Onwards is a simple and elegant short film about a runner. It was created by James Jarvis and Richard Kenworthy and sponsored by Nike.

Official Website (where there's a full screen, high resolution version)

via The Presurfer

There's an article in Popular Mechanics describing the history of pinball. Did you know that pinball used to be illegal in many places in the United States?

Pinball was banned from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s in most of America's big cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, where the game was born and where virtually all of its manufacturers have historically been located. The stated reason for the bans: pinball was a game of chance, not skill, and so it was a form of gambling. To be fair, pinball really did involve a lot less skill in the early years of the game—largely because the flipper wasn't invented until 1947, five years after most of the bans were implemented (up until then, players would bump and tilt the machines in order to sway the ball's gravity). Many lawmakers also believed pinball to be a mafia-run racket, and a time- and dime-waster for impressionable youth. (The machines robbed the "pockets of school children in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money," New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia wrote in a Supreme Court affidavit.)

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4328211.html?nav=RSS20&src=syn&dom=yah_buzz&mag=pop

(YouTube Link)

Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who creates sand drawings in front of audiences. Here she is performing on Ukraine's Got Talent:

Here, she recounts Germany conquering Ukraine in the second world war. She brings calm, then conflict. A couple on a bench become a woman's face; a peaceful walkway becomes a conflagration; a weeping widow morphs into an obelisk for an unknown soldier. Simonova looks like some vengeful Old Testament deity as she destroys then recreates her scenes - with deft strokes, sprinkles and sweeps she keeps the narrative going. She moves the judges to tears as she subtitles the final scene "you are always near".

Link via TigerHawk

(YouTube Link)

Concert Hands is a gadget designed to replace traditional piano instruction by controlling the user's hand and finger movements:

The software takes the song file and converts it to a proprietary file system where the controller box distributes the signal to the wrist pilots and finger sleeves. The finger sleeves are placed on all fingers of both hands and the user’s wrists lay gently on the wrist pilots. When the music begins the wrists pilots guide your hands across the piano to a specific location and the finger sleeves receive a pulse to indicate which key to press. The idea is after a period of time the repetitive motions and signals will develop muscle memory within the end user and enable him or her to play their favorite songs on their own.

Link via DVICE

Zombaritaville is a Seattle-based blogger who writes parodies of popular songs, reimagining them as zombie-themed.  Here's a passage from the lyrics for his song "Rippin' Off Your Skin", based on Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind":

How many lobes must a ghoul gulp down
Before he eats the whole brainpan?
How many skulls must a sniper nail
Before her rifle has jammed?
Yes, n' how many bites must I take of this guy
Before I've digested his hand?
The zombies my friend, are rippin' off your skin
The zombies are rippin' off your skin

Yes, n' how many folks must cease to exist
Before it's called a "killing spree"?
Yes, n' how many years in this mall can we subsist
'Til we're forced by bikers to flee?
Yes, n' how many towns must shamblers infest
Before they all turn to debris?
The zombies my friend, are rippin' off your skin
The zombies are rippin' off your skin

Other songs that he's rewritten include Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler", Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U", "Jack & Diane" by John Mellencamp, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen.

Link via Boing Boing

Image by flickr user ingridjee used under creative commons license

Sadly, this product is currently out of stock -- toilet paper always runs out at the worst possible moment. But when it's available again, it will shine a light into the darker recesses of your bathroom. Normally on sale for £4.99.

http://www.thumbsupuk.com/products/Glow-in-the-dark-toilet-roll.htm?id=2&subid=0&prodid=630&cc= via Nerd Approved

A laboratory at Nucleix, a life-sciences company, was able to manufacture DNA that would be accurate enough to pass forensic scrutiny:

"You can just engineer a crime scene," Nucleix founder Dan Frumkin told The New York Times. "The current forensic procedure fails to distinguish between such samples of blood, saliva, and touched surfaces with artificial DNA, and corresponding samples with in vivo generated (natural) DNA," Frumkin and co-authors wrote in a recent Forensic Science International: Genetics study that announced the technological achievement.

Fortunately, the company offers a solution: one particular methyl group appears in naturally-occuring DNA, but not in Nucleix's product.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=lab-creates-fake-dna-evidence-2009-08-18

This summer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a barrier and pumping station designed to protect New Orleans from flooding. The pump will be capable of moving 150,000 gallons per second:

The $500-million station—the newest installment of a $14-billion federal project to fortify the Big Easy against the type of fierce storm the city sees once in 100 years—will protect the 240,000 residents living in New Orleans, a high-risk flood area because of its nearby shipping canals. The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway is one of the city’s most trafficked industrial waterways, but it provides a perfect path from the Gulf for a 16-foot storm surge to flood homes and businesses. When a major storm threatens, the waterway’s new West Closure Complex will mount a two-point defense. First, operators will shut the 32-foot-tall, 225-foot-wide metal gates to block the surge. Then they’ll fire up the world’s largest pumping station, which pulls 150,000 gallons of floodwater per second. And unlike the city’s notorious levees, the WCC won’t break when residents need it most. “This station is designed to withstand almost everything,” including 140mph winds and runaway barges, says Tim Connell, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’s project manager for the complex.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/saving-new-orleans-worlds-largest-water-pump

Although it's not as stylish as the UFO Cap Umbrella, the Umbrella Shoulder Holder lets you keep both hands available. Just plug your umbrella into one end and wrap it around your shoulder.

Link (in Japanese) via DVICE (in English)

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba in Japan have broken the record for the number of calculated digits of the constant pi:

The T2K Tsukuba System is a 640-computer cluster with a processing speed of 95 trillion floating-point operations per second. The T2K calculated a total of 2,576,980,377,524 decimal places in 73 hours 36 minutes, which is a small fraction of the 600 hours taken by the previous record holders—Hitachi and the University of Tokyo—who calculated only 1.2 trillion places.

Link

The Soviet-designed An-225 -- the world's largest operational aircraft -- was originally designed to transport the USSR's space shuttle. That program is long gone, but one An-225 just broke the world record for the heaviest airlift of a single object. It transported a 53 foot long, 187.6 ton generator from Germany to Armenia on August 11. Because the An-225 can (hypoethetically) transport any object up to 33 feet wide, 230 feet long, and under 275 tons, the generator's size and weight didn't cause any problems.

Link via Gizmodo

The Arkeg combines two necessities of life: beer and arcade games. For a mere $4,000, you can have a chilled 5-gallon keg, a 24-inch screen, and a console loaded with 104 classic video games. It also comes with a slide-out keyboard and two USB ports.

Now if only some clever inventor could combine it with the automatic pancake-making machine.

Link via DVICE

Gizmodo has a photogallery of ten extraordinary cameras, such as the the above picture of the world's largest camera. Constructed in 2006, it consisted of a modified aircraft hangar at the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. The resulting silver emulsion print was three stories high and ten stories long.

Link

Puppet Rodeo
(Atom Films Link)

Puppet Rodeo is a silly new short film by Kevin Maher about puppets riding dogs in a rodeo.

Via Urlesque

Researchers at Toyota and Tohuku University in northern Japan have announced progress in their efforts to extend the charge in the batteries of electric vehicles:

Existing lithium-ion batteries have a cathode that contains graphite and polycrystal lithium cobalt oxide with the graphite improving the performance of the cathode but also requiring space that could be theoretically used to store more lithium ions.

The researchers say it will take up to ten years to develop a cathode with no graphite and single crystals of lithium cobalt oxide but that the end result is a powerful battery for electric cars, which can store 10 times more electrical charge. As a result, electric cars could travel ten times farther than they can today.

Link