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

Truth in labeling -- this t-shirt tells readers exactly what chemical elements they can expect to find inside.

Link via Kinda Unique

As a kid, I couldn't hack at my friends with a real sword, so we used cardboard tubes to fence. Who knew that it was an actual sport? The Cardboard Tube Fighting League has competitions all over the world where people come together to play and show off their homemade cardboard armor.

Official Website of the San Francisco Branch

Link via The Presurfer

WebUrbanist has pictures of 61 clever, elegant, or funny wine labels, such the Barossa Grenache pictured above. Perfect for Valentine's Day!

Link via The Presurfer

(YouTube Link)

This faux trailer presents Super Mario Bros. as the classic war movie The Inglorious Bastards (or possibly the new Quentin Tarantino remake). It's called The Inglorious Plumbers and was produced by Nick Murphy.

Via Popped Culture

All of the original information for this gadget is in Japanese, so I can only offer CrunchGear's translation and the better-than-nothing Google Translator. It shoots 200 rubber bands in 10 seconds and takes 10 minutes to load. Apparently in Japan, shooting rubber bands is a competitive sport.

Link (where there's a video)

Granted, it's not as useful as the USB missile launcher, but this 150x microscope could come in handy around the office. It's currently available only in Japan, so you may have to content yourself with the missile launcher for now.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: The 10 Weirdest USB-Powered Devices