Victor Lopez, Farris Hodo, and Kevin Coon set a Guinness World Record by watching television for a full 86 hours, 6 minutes, and 41 seconds. They were allowed a ten minute break every two hours, but otherwise had to stay awake watching TV the whole time. These three men were the only successful contestants among an original 100 who were challenged to watch the entire run of the TV show 24:

But the bizarre couch potato feat was no walk in the park.

Just ask Raul Valle, 23, a contestant who attempted the challenge but was only able to hang on for 36 hours.

Valle told AOL News that the task wasn't all that difficult at first, but as the hours dragged on, his focus began to fade.

"The biggest issue was drinking water or coffee and then having to go to the bathroom right away. We had to wait for a break and couldn't just go whenever we wanted. I was just getting over the flu, too, so that didn't help. If I hadn't been sick, I think I could've lasted longer. I wish I had," Valle lamented.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Dan Steinberg / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Psychologist Patti Adank of the University of Manchester wondered if using an accent, even if it was affected, would make that accent more comprehensible. It did:

To find out how we can make sense of unfamiliar inflections, psychologists spoke to volunteers in an accent they’d invented. Some subjects were told to imitate the odd sounds. Others were told to simply listen, or to repeat the sentence in their normal voice. Turns out the mimics did better at deciphering the unusual exchange. The scientists say that simply moving your mouth like other folks do allows you to intuit their potentially eccentric speech patterns, and get what they say.

Link | Photo by Flickr user Hans Van Rijnberk used under Creative Commons license

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YouTube user Keshen8, whose work we've previously featured, is back with a second helping minifig-on-minifig mayhem. In an interview, Keshen8 described how he creates these scenes rather quickly:

Q1) How long on average does it take you make a film?
A) It really depends. My second “Dark Knight Trailer in Lego” only took one day, I actually released it the same day as the actual trailer came out, so if I really push myself then I can get things done really quickly. My sets also don’t take that long to make, I usually use cardboard because of a lack of building blocks, I seem to have a surplus of mini-figures though, I don’t know how that happened. The Lego Ultimatum on the other hand took a long time, I’ve had a few people saying how easy it is doing a shot for shot remake of a scene, but when it comes to something like Bourne it’s quite time consuming: getting the shot set up, moving/rebuilding the set to fit the frame, moving the Lego men just right to fit the one or two second shot, converting human martial arts into rigid Lego movement, and all the while physically moving your camera and set frame by frame to get the handheld effect. I can’t really say how long it all takes, because there are so many factors that come into play.

via Great White Snark | Interview

The design studio The Chair Ltd led by architect Michael CK Chan created this chair. Several in his collection have a lovely curved shape, like the above LC-018 lounge chair.

Link via Born Rich | Studio Website | Photo: Super Yacht Design

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If you've ever spent long hours knitting socks and sweaters, you've probably wondered if it would be possible for a machine to all of this work that you are forced to do by hand. Well, then, good news! YouTube user correx37 built such a device.

via Technabob

Chengdu Guosetianxiang is an amusement park in Sichuan, China. The park has erected an enormous and nearly life-size Gundam model. Well, presumably it's just a model and not a functional Gundam. It's 49 feet tall, which is 10 feet shorter than Japan's.

Link via Nerd Bastards | Photo: Photobucket user phoenixhth

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Eric Brevig made this fake alternate ending for the animated movie Yogi Bear. It parodies a scene in the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It may also be a reference to the Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law episode "Death by Chocolate."

via Geekosystem

A research team by Jianyu Huang (pictured) at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque claims to have developed the world's smallest battery:

It consists of a bulk lithium cobalt cathode three millimeters long, an ionic liquid electrolyte, and has as its anode a single tin oxide (Sn02) nanowire 10 nanometers long and 100 nanometers in diameter – that’s one seven-thousandth the thickness of a human hair.

The battery was made inside a transmission electron microscope, allowing the scientists to study it while it was charging:

By following the progression of the lithium ions as they travel along the nanowire, the researchers found that during charging the tin oxide nanowire rod nearly doubles in length. This is far more than its diameter increases and could help avoid short circuits that may shorten battery life. This unexpected finding goes against the common belief of workers in the field that batteries swell across their diameter, not longitudinally.

Link via Geekosystem | Photo: US Department of Energy

Pictured above is Pestilence Pony from the television show Robot Chicken. It was used for a particular sketch featuring the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation (6:1-8) as My Little Pony toys. Seth Green, one of writers and producers of Robot Chicken, is promoting an online petition to convince Hasbro to make these ponies.

Link via Popped Culture | Image: Cartoon Network

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The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis is the home of the Minnesota Vikings football team. It had an inflatable roof, but under the weight of eighteen inches of snow, it collapsed early this morning. Thankfully, no one was injured.

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YouTube user SterlingBreed captured this marvelous video. Keep Portland weird! via Geekosystem

Artist Paul O'Connor and his colleagues at the British art collective Undercurrents built a tiny solar powered movie theater in a 1960s-era travel trailer. Sol Cinema can seat eight adults and generally screens films with an ecological theme. The official website provides additional photos as well as a list of tour dates and locations in the UK.

Link via Technabob | Official Website | Photo: Sol Cinema

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Martin Spitznagel performed this ragtime medley of music from Super Mario Bros., Harry Potter movies, and Star Wars. Andrew Barrett and Tom Warner accompanied him on washboards. This performance took place at the West Coast Ragtime Festival in Sacramento in 2008.

via reddit | Spitznagel's Website

The design firm Rock Paper Robot made the Float Table. It's composed of 64 wooden blocks that are linked together with steel cable but held in form with opposing magnets.

Link and Video via Technabob | Photo: GizmoDiva

Andrew Young, a doctoral student at the University of Exeter, has a novel proposal about how ancient Britons built Stonehenge. He hypothesizes that they placed balls in grooved tree trunks to act as bearings for the heavy stones:

Young first came up with the ball bearings idea when he noticed that carved stone balls were often found near Neolithic stone circles in Aberdeenshire, Scotland (map).

"I measured and weighed a number of these stone balls and realized that they are all precisely the same size—around 70 millimeters [3 inches] in diameter—which made me think they must have been made to be used in unison, rather than alone," he told National Geographic News.

The balls, Young admitted, have been found near stone circles only in Aberdeenshire and the Orkney Islands (map)—not on Stonehenge's Salisbury Plain.

But, he speculated, at southern sites, including Stonehenge (map), builders may have preferred wooden balls, which would have rotted away long ago. For one thing, wooden balls are much faster to carve. For another, they're much lighter to transport.

Link | Photo: University of Exeter