If you're a parent, you're familiar with this challenge: children outgrow shoes very quickly. That can become a serious problem for whole communities that are too poor to afford to replace children's shoes often. That's why Kenton Lee invented The Shoe That Grows.
It's a sandal that comes with snaps in the front, back, and sides. It can expand to 5 shoe sizes. The shoes comes in small and large varieties, so two pairs of shoes can meet a child's footwear needs from the ages of 5 to 15.
Because International, the charity which distributes these shoes, has a motto: practical compassion. It appears that they've found a way to exercise precisely that.
Etsy seller David Mueller of Leipzig, Germany designs and builds furniture that looks like it belongs in Tim Burton's classic film The Nightmare before Christmas. The pieces, such as this bookshelf made to look like a bat cave, are built with birch plywood. They're perfect for an offbeat home. You can see more pieces here, including mirrors, cabinets, and coat racks.
George Takei played Lt. Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek television series. He recently sat down with Neil deGrasse Tyson, a celebrity physicist and host of the Star Talk radio show. In their conversation, Takei described his audition for Star Trek and meeting Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the show, for the first time. He shares a funny story about how he responded when Roddenberry mispronounced his name.
Robotic hands need to be able to securely grasp and move objects with different shapes without breaking them. Festo, a German automation and controls company, has developed a new type of device to do so. The FlexShapeGripper has a silicone cap on the tip that can be sucked in or released. It's inspired by the amazing natural grappling capacity of a chameleon's tongue.
This video shows the FlexShapeGripper in action, picking up objects of different sizes and shapes, including glasses, car keys, and ball bearings. Festo envisions it as useful for industrial robots that can be used for different tasks without requiring complex mechanical alterations.
Jenn of Epbot attended MegaCon this past weekend in Orlando. There, she spotted these great cosplayers who mixed two gems from the 60s: Star Trek and Gilligan's Island. The three hour tour has turned into a five year mission for the Skipper, Gilligan, and Ginger. They've equipped themselves appropriately with the boat's radio as a tricorder, a clamshell communicator, and bamboo phasers. You can see more of Jenn's cosplay photos here.
The 1997 hit song "Barbie Girl" by Aqua imagined life inside the Barbie universe, complete with plastic houses and endless parties. That's pretty much life in the Russian Army, as these troops testify. They march to the steady cadence of the old pop song, singing:
I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world Life in plastic, it's fantastic. You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere. Imagination, life is your creation. Come on Barbie, let's go party!
This is great! It's easy to get trapped in an airport for a few hours longer than you anticipated. You could read a book on your mobile device. But if you're bored of that, then you can go to a Dungeons & Dragons stand. A professional Dungeon Master (this is a career that exists) would have pre-generated characters and quick, one-shot adventures ready.
It's the perfect way to kill time. It's fun, interactive, and interpersonal. I suspect that during peak hours, a large airport would have plenty of bored gamers looking for a role-playing game and willing to pay for it.
The Scarlet Knight is the mascot of Rutgers University in New Jersey. The red-plated knight rides a horse at college football games. Lord Nelson, a horse that carried that knight for many years, passed away on Sunday at the age of 42.
Lord Nelson began his career as a police horse, joining the mounted unit of the university police in 1978. After many years on patrol duty there, he began to carry the Scarlet Knight at football games. At a 1994 football game against West Point, Lord Nelson broke loose and dashed across the field. A referee penalized him for unsportsmanlike conduct. This is the only time that a horse has received such a dishonor.
Marie Hunt of Spring Green, Wisconsin was supposed to graduate from high school in 1928. But she had to drop out of school after the eighth grade in order to take care of her younger siblings. Later, she worked as a store clerk, a childcare provider, and owned a business with her husband.
In 1892, Lord Frederick Stanley, the 16th Earl of Derby, donated a great silver cup the best hockey team in Canada. It has been ever since a treasured prize in that sport. But the shortsighted Lord Stanley did not anticipate that future generations of hockey fans would look toward trophies as a food source.
Bruce Thomson is an industrial design professor at Humber College in Toronto. He assigned his senior students to design a distinctively Canadian car. Dimitri Timtchenko responded with not a poutine-fueled truck, but a snowmobile. In Canada’s far north, people of the First Nations often depend on snowmobiles for daily transportation. Those who are confined to wheelchairs are largely out of luck. So Timtchenko designed a snowmobile that is wheelchair-accessible. Jalopnik quotes him:
"I just started brainstorming about how recreational vehicles could be useful in some way, and it trickled down to the fact in the Arctic regions, the Inuit there just can't function if they're in a wheelchair."
"What usually happens is you're sent down to a warmer village—you just can't live up there. So I wanted to design a vehicle to allow these people to function within these villages."
Texas-style barbecue is, of course, the finest in the world. The best of this emerges from my father-in-law’s backyard pit.
But other barbecue methods, with the exception of Memphis-style, are edible, if not enjoyable. Among them is the asado style of the southern cone of South America. Barbecue dinners in this style, When on Earth informs us:
. . . consist of embutidos (chorizos, black puddings, and the like) and varieties of meat grilled over charcoal made of native trees. The meat cooked for asado is not marinated but only salted.
Margaret Seabrook is 75. Eileen Mason is 92. They live in Swindon, Wiltshire, UK. Both of them use mobility scooters. The two ladies were returning home from a lunch club meeting when a mugger tried to grab Seabrook’s possessions in the basket of her scooter.
Ms. Mason said, “Oh, no you don’t,” throttled her mobility scooter, and rammed the mugger as hard as she could. The Daily Telegraph reports what happened next:
The would-be thief was knocked to the ground before the great-grandmothers, both of Swindon, Wiltshire, sped off. […]
"Something in me just told me to turn so I squeezed the accelerator and turned and he went flying. He was so evil looking. We go to the lunch club every week on our scooters and nothing like this has ever happened before.
"We went through the war and all the bombings. We won't let a weasel like that hold us back. I would stand up for myself again if I needed to, but hopefully I won't need to. We will carry on as normal though - he hasn't put us off."
Once, dogs lived in peace. They slept at the feet of their humans, ate from the tables of humans, and enjoyed belly rubs on demand. It was a golden age for all canine kind.
But then the robots came: bizarre things that flew in the air, hovering menacingly over dogs. They were not normal featheries. No, these creatures were not alive like you and I. But still they moved as though they were.
In 1957, the United States began secretly developing a new type of aircraft. This was the Atomic Age, when nuclear energy seemed to offer unlimited energy in numerous ways. Nuclear reactors provide enormous potential, which is why America put them into submarines and aircraft carriers at this time. It seemed only reasonable to apply this power to aircraft.
Scientists envisioned the Supersonic Low Altitude Missile as a drone that would travel at 2,500 miles per hour over the Earth, dropping multiple hydrogen bombs over the Soviet Union. It would not need to refuel, as conventional aircraft do.
The US had already experimented with putting a nuclear reactor inside a modified B-36 bomber. But the shielding necessary to protect the crew from radiation created weight problems. So developers went in a different direction: a nuclear-powered drone aircraft. Steve Weintz writes for Medium:
While the nuclear aircraft program wrestled with complicated plumbing and tons of shielding, the SLAM project dispensed with the crew and pursued a simple but scary idea—the nuclear ramjet.
A ramjet is a jet engine that moves so fast, the air entering its combustion chamber becomes hot and dense enough to ignite fuel. The resulting explosion of hot gas pushes the ramjet—and its attached vehicle—to supersonic or even hypersonic speeds.
Though simple in design, a ramjet is tough to build and operate. Rockets and conventional turbojet engines must first accelerate a ramjet-powered aircraft fast enough before the ramjet can kick in. Ramjets also require special materials to resist intense heat and pressure. And they gulp fuel like a drag racer.
But if made small, light and tough enough, a nuclear reactor could solve the fuel consumption problem and give a ramjet-powered vehicle enormous range.
It's a great idea. Unless, of course, the nuclear reactor explodes:
Suppose the guidance system failed and a missile roared over friendly territory? If the range-safety officer destroyed it in flight, you still had a supersonic nuclear mess on your hands.
Even if the missile worked as designed, it also violated the recently-signed Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty. An open-cycle engine like the nuclear ramjet exhales radioactive air and dust-sized bits of nuclear fuel as it roars along, and no technology available then or now could clean it up.
Though one scientist who worked on the project described it as "like zany science fiction," the nuclear ramjet soon became obsolete. New intercontinental ballistic missiles could accurately deliver their payloads within minutes--a much shorter period of time than the nuclear ramjet drone offer.
