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.
The Steam Boat Willy, a hovercraft powered only by pedal power, was built by Chris Roper and his friends at a University of London flight club. Weighing in at only 56 pounds, its lift fan can produce 17 cubic feet per second, giving it the capacity to move about even when powered by non-athletic people.
The Panzerbike is a German-built motorcycle with the engine of a T-55 tank inside. That's a diesel V12 with 620 HP. The bike is 19 feet long, 9 feet wide, and weighs nearly 5 tons. Actually, it's more like a tractor than a motorcycle, since the sidecar is built-in and it takes two people to steer. Still, Tilo Niebel and his friends at the Harzer Bike company created quite an impressive piece of machinery.
It's like a bear skin rug, but with a human. Artist Chrissy Conant made this self-portrait:
"Chrissy Skin Rug” represents my relationship to my parents. The rug is a silicone rubber cast of my bare skin. I position myself as a human rug on a wooden floor with an open mouth and eyes that gaze suggestively upward. Parental influences from childhood continue to suppress me, long after I have grown up and they have gone.
Four statisticians at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University have published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress on the subject of zombie epidemiology. It's entitled "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." It's a very math-heavy article, but their conclusion is straight-forward and dire:
An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.
Well, that was fairly obvious. But now there's hard science to back up common sense, and the academic community is starting to take the undead threat seriously.
Urlesque has compiled videos of unique accordion cover songs, including variations on the works of Britney Spears, Duran Duran, and Black Sabbath. Here's a video of YouTube user mattdallow playing "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones.
Esslam Zahra of Egypt mounted a retractable fifth wheel on the back of his car, set at a right angle to the other four wheels, in order to pivot into tight parking spots.
"Man With No Shadow" is a life-sized art installation by Makoto Tojiki. It consists of LED lights at the ends of wires of different lengths suspended from the ceiling. It made its debut this April in Milan at the international design festival Salon Satellite.
Hello from Earth! is a program by COSMOS, an Australian science magazine. Using the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, it will transmit Internet user-submitted messages to Gliese 581d, a potentially Earth-like planet approximately 20 light years away. You have until August 24th to submit your 160-character message. Registration is required.
What message would you send to this distant planet?
http://www.hellofromearth.net/gliese581d/home/index.htm via Geekologie
A recent study published in the journal Current Biology suggests that facial expressions may be culturally-bound, rather than universal:
University of Glasgow researchers enlisted 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians. They had everyone examine pictures of expressive faces that were labeled according to a recognized western system called the Facial Action Coding System. The faces were purported to be happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry or neutral, and the participants categorized them as such. Turns out the East Asians were less likely to categorize the faces by Western standards.
By tracking the subject’s eye movements, researchers concluded that Westerners look at whole faces. But Easterners kept their focus mainly on the eye region. So while Westerners may use their whole faces to show that they’re elated, Easterners may express that feeling mainly around their eyes. Which means that facial expressions are not a universal language. That’s a fact that international travelers are sooner or later forced to face.
At the age of six, Miko Andres from the Philippines is thought to be the world's youngest competitive practical shooter. Practical shooting is a sport in which participants shoot rapidly at multiple targets around an obstacle course. His father says:
"As a growing, normal kid, Miko is also into other children's games. He enjoys the company of his schoolmates.
"Miko is very young but is determined to excel in the practical shooting sport," says Mike.
"He has been taught a lot of discipline and respect.
"Miko, I and his team coach, constantly talk about the dangers of the sport and we are always reminding him that he is in a 'big boys' game and that safety of of the utmost importance."
Still in the concept stage, the Touch Color is a device that would allow visually impaired people to create two-dimensional art:
This innovative device comprises a Rainbow Picker in a form of a scroll wheel, which contains Braille dots that allows blind people to select a color from 24 available. After selecting a color, this device differentiates the colors by generating varied temperatures through LED bulbs. Then the user can paint on a thermal art board by using their fingers and the thermal-color display technology keeps the track of the lines and colors the blind artist is using.
There are more pictures and diagrams of this gadget at the link.
Orange County Choppers, the New York-based custom motorcycle shop, is famous for its loud, raked-back choppers. The shop is also the scene of the TLC reality show American Chopper. Recently, OCC worked with Siemens to develop an electric motorcyle:
On Wednesday, Siemens, the electronics and electrical engineering global powerhouse, unveiled the Smart Chopper it commissioned from the renowned custom motorcycle outfit. Siemens claims the bike has a 60-mile range and a 100 mph top speed. An onboard charging unit can be plugged into any 110-volt socket to charge the bike in five hours, and Siemens says it’ll charge in as little as one hour when plugged into a higher-voltage station. A single-speed, clutch-less transmission delivers the power from a 27-hp electric motor.
Astronomers with the Wide Area Search for Planets have discovered a planet, dubbed WASP-17, that is twice the size of Jupiter. That makes it the largest planet ever discovered. Unlike any other planet discovered so far, it orbits opposite to its star's direction of rotation. Astronomer David Anderson from Keele University:
"Newly formed solar systems can be violent places. Our own Moon is thought to have been created when a Mars-sized planet collided with the recently formed Earth and threw up a cloud of debris. A near collision during the early, violent stage of this planetary system could well have caused a gravitational slingshot, flinging WASP-17 into its backwards orbit."
But why is WASP-17 so big? The discovery team suggests that have been subjected to intense tides as it travelled in its strange and highly-elliptical orbit, causing it to become stretched and bloated.
Ebay user tully712 made a go-cart modeled after the Batmobile in the movies Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He's selling plans for it and a license to build it. The bidding currently stands at $29.88. More pictures and videos at the link.