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John Gill and Gary Arold of Hurley, New York built a compressed air cannon in 2006 that can fire a pumpkin (but they prefer squash as ammunition) up to a mile away. Adam Bosch writes in the Times Herald-Record:

The cannon is mostly used on weekends to attract people to Gill's Farm Market on Route 209 in Hurley, but sometimes the guys get together at the 1,500-acre farm and blast it when nobody's around. Just for fun.

They've shot pumpkins, scuba tanks and a basketball filled with corn and foam insulation. They once scattered some geese by accidentally shooting into the flock. Then there's the time they shot a bowling ball more than a mile.

"The first time we shot a bowling ball, that's was probably the worst thing we ever did," Arold says. "It kept going and going and going."

Link via CrunchGear

Photo: Norfolk Southern

Norfolk Southern's NS 999 electric locomotive runs entirely on 1,080 12-volt batteries and produces 1,500 horsepower. From the company's press release:

NS 999 is an entirely electric locomotive that uses a lead-acid energy storage system comprised of 1,080 12-volt batteries to operate in railroad switching applications without the use of a diesel engine and with zero exhaust emissions. The plug-in locomotive also can regenerate dynamic braking energy through a system provided by Brookville Equipment Company. The recovered dynamic braking energy continually replenishes the energy storage system, and uses this recovered energy for tractive effort in rail operations. The batteries are carefully monitored and controlled through an elaborate battery management system to assure safety and maximum battery life, and when fully charged NS 999 is able to operate three shifts before recharging is required.

Link via Popular Science

Image: Victoria Reynolds

Artist Victoria Reynolds creates paintings of raw meat, such as the above "Flight of the Reindeer", an oil on panel from 2003. A native of Texas, she got her BFA at the University of Oklahoma and her MFA at the University of Nevada. Reynolds now lives in Los Angeles and has exhibited in the U.S. and Europe.

Link via MAKE

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Like many products appearing on high fashion runways, these one-of-a-kind products are not very practical -- other than the fact that they can be eaten. The French-language video above shows many of the items available at a 2004 exhibition by fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier. At the time, Suzy Menkes wrote in The New York Times:

Surrounded by crinolines and corset dresses sculpted out of wickerwork (think bread basket) and stuffed with round and shapely loaves, the French designer emphasized the finesse it had taken to create the show at the Cartier Foundation for contemporary art (until Oct. 10). The exhibition includes a sculpted dress with two brioches to create Gaultier's famous pointed-bosom gown for Madonna and a Kelly bag, lovingly shaped and baked, to celebrate his current role as designer for Hermès. Add umbrellas, hats and the signature matelot stripes re-created with inky dye.

Link via Urlesque (where there are pictures of clothes made out of chocolate) | Designer's Website

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The Fire Spy Robot, developed by the South Korean firm Hoya Robot, can be thrown into a burning building, roll through fire, take pictures, and inform firefighters outside of the conditions inside. In addition to reconnaissance duties, it can tow a water hose and spray the fire:

The little two-wheeled robot can roam through the blaze spraying water from a fire hose and looking for trapped people. Its onboard light and camera helps firefighters pin-point people before they enter the building themselves. The robot also gives them enough information to decide on the safe routes, and quickly develop a rescue plan.

The Firefighters Assistance Robot is a small device resembling a miniature tank and measuring just 12.5 cm in diameter and weighing 2 kg. It can travel at 1 foot per second and withstand a fall of over six feet. It can also survive temperatures as high as 160 C (320 F). The operating time of the robot inside a burning structure is up to 30 minutes.

Link via Popular Science | Company Website

(YouTube Link)

This Volkswagen commercial is about one effort to get people to take the stairs instead of the escalator (presumably for the exercise). The company turned a staircase at a Stockholm subway station into a piano and videotaped how travelers responded.

via Urlesque | Commercial Credits

Image: Kurtsystems

For centuries, people have trained race horses by making them pull heavy weights. But after Mehmet Kurt lost a horse due to overtraining, he decided to create a training vehicle that was safer and could be adjusted for individual training needs. Natalie Avon writes in Popular Science:

The horse isn’t pulling the four-and-a-half-ton, $427,000 vehicle. Rather, the vehicle keeps pace with the animal, and trainers fit the horse with equipment such as an electrocardiogram machine, oxygen masks and movement sensors to monitor its performance. They can then subtly regulate the horse’s speed for optimal training.

http://www.kurtsystems.com/index.htm via Popular Science

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Bunker, a short film by Paul Doucet, is about a woman alone in a bunker beneath Paris after a nuclear war. Marie pleads over her radio for someone to respond to her. Finally, a voice answers.

Dialogue in French with English subtitles. Run time: 10 minutes. Content warning: foul language.

via io9

Google's doodle for today is a barcode, in honor of the 57th anniversary of its invention. Nick Collins writes in The Daily Telegraph about the history of this label:

Granted to American inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver three years after it was filed, patent number 2,612,994 was for a pattern of concentric circles, rather than the set of straight lines used today.

Their research began in 1948 after Mr Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard a local food chain boss asking one of the institute's deans to design a system for reading product data automatically.

Mr Silver and Mr Woodland, a fellow graduate student and teacher at Drexel, first tried using patterns of ink that glowed under ultraviolet light, but it proved too expensive and unreliable.

Mr Woodland then came up with the linear bar code, and later replaced the lines with circles so that they could be scanned from any angle. The pair patented their “bull’s eye” design the next year.

The barcode became widely used in UPC (universal price product code) format, and the first UPC-labeled item scanned by a reader was a packet of Wrigley's chewing gum at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio in 1974.

You can create your own personalized barcode with a tool in the links below.

Barcode Generator via Urlesque | History of the Barcode

Physicist John Hunter has proposed the construction of a 1.1-kilometer-long cannon that could fire a 450 kg payload into orbit. David Shiga writes in New Scientist:

The gun is based on a smaller device Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 metres long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometres per second.

Now Hunter and two other ex-LLNL scientists have set up a company called Quicklaunch, based in San Diego, California, to create a more powerful version of the gun.

At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described a design for a 1.1-kilometre-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometres per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit.

Pictured is a HARP gun, a Cold War-era device used to fire instruments into the upper atmosphere.

Link via Popular Science | Image: NASA

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Austrian composer Peter Ablinger digitized a recording of a child speaking and then programmed a mechanical piano to replicate the sounds. The video above is in German, but Hack a Day has provided a translation:

I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

The content of the speech is taken from the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009.

via Gizmodo | Composer's Webpage

Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that pharmacology researchers are developing a drug that could diminish the pleasurable effects of cocaine. Taking the drug might help addicts detoxify with greater success:

The vaccine itself does not destroy cocaine molecules, rather it induces antibodies that bind to it, making the opiate lose its ability to pass through the blood–brain barrier—and thus unable to trigger a high.

To test the vaccine's effectiveness in humans, researchers (with some help and financial backing from Celtic Pharma) enlisted 94 subjects who had enrolled in a methadone treatment program for opiate addiction—and who also regularly used cocaine—for a placebo-controlled, double-blind study. (They decided on this group because methadone programs historically have better retention rates than programs for cocaine abuse only.) One group received a placebo, another a low dosage of vaccine, whereas a third was administered a high dosage over a series of 12 weeks with five total injections.

More than half of the subjects in the high-dosage group (53 percent) appeared to have laid off the cocaine for more than half of the trial period, the researchers report after tracking traces of the drug in urine samples collected three times a week. Just less than a quarter of subjects with the low dosage had the same track record, according to the results published online yesterday in the Archives of General Psychiatry. A drop in cocaine usage across all groups may also be attributed to a curb in opiate drug consumption from the methadone treatment.

Link | Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Image:Chris Sims

Chris Sims of The Invincible Super-Blog created a gallery of Facebook status updates for superheroes at Comics Alliance. Among the featured heroes are Batman, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and The Punisher. Sims works in a comic book store, so he knows of what he writes.

Link via Urlesque | Writer's Blog

Image: University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

The image above is a computer-generated model of what a 3,700-mile wide sunspot looks like. It was created by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado for their ongoing efforts to understand the physics of sunspots:

"This is the first time we have a model of an entire sunspot," says lead author Matthias Rempel, a scientist at NCAR's High Altitude Observatory. "If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth's atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve. Our simulations will advance research into the inner workings of the Sun as well as connections between solar output and Earth's atmosphere."[...]

The new computer models capture pairs of sunspots with opposite polarity. In striking detail, they reveal the dark central region, or umbra, with brighter umbral dots, as well as webs of elongated narrow filaments with flows of mass streaming away from the spots in the outer penumbral regions. They also capture the convective flow and movement of energy that underlie the sunspots, and that are not directly detectable by instruments.

The models suggest that the magnetic fields within sunspots need to be inclined in certain directions in order to create such complex structures. The authors conclude that there is a unified physical explanation for the structure of sunspots in umbra and penumbra that is the consequence of convection in a magnetic field with varying properties.

Link via Popular Science

(YouTube Link)

Monty Python's Flying Circus debuted 40 years ago today. Marc Lee writes in The Daily Telegraph about the origins and development of the troupe:

Four decades on, the image of John Cleese’s increasingly hysterical pet-shop customer — pacamac buttoned up, hair plastered down, vowels strangulated — remains one of the most memorable in television history. No other comedy series has seared itself into the national consciousness quite like Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

And, if the sketches were ever to be placed in order of popularity, Cleese’s confrontation with the chirpily evasive Michael Palin — the shopkeeper who simply will not admit that the inert “Norwegian blue” is dead — would undoubtedly come top. Indeed, when Channel 4 counted down the 50 greatest comedy moments, the “Dead Parrot” sketch perched at number two, just below the, frankly, far inferior “Lou and Andy at the swimming pool” sketch from Little Britain.

The video above is of the classic sketch "Argument Clinic" -- my favorite. What's your favorite Monty Python sketch?

Link via Megan McArdle | Official Site | History of Monty Python | YouTube Channel