The Carpuccino, built by the team at the BBC science show Bang Goes the Theory, runs on coffee grounds. These are burned and the resulting carbon monoxide powers the car:
The team calculates the Carpuccino will do three miles per kilo of ground coffee - the equivalent of about 56 espressos per mile.
The journey will use about 70 kilos of ground coffee which, at supermarket prices of between £13 and £26 a kilo depending on brand and quality, will cost between £910 and £1,820, or between 25 and 50 times the £36 cost of petrol for the journey.
Underfull is a prototype tablecloth design by Kristine Bjaadal. It has a hidden butterfly pattern that is revealed only when it is stained. Bjaadal writes:
This creates stories and can contribute in giving the tablecloth sentimental value – important in a society where we seem to have an increasingly superficial relation to the objects we surround ourselves with.
This video, entitled "Annihilation", shows stop-motion animation using Doritos chips. Its provenance is a mystery to me, but I suspect that it's viral advertising.
Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock made cameo appearances in all of his movies. YouTube user royvanderzwaan, a collector of Hitchcock films, assembled (almost) all of these cameos into one video.
This glass chandelier -- which looks to me like a big ball of fur -- was made by glass artist Robert Kaindl. At the link, you can see some simply amazing glasswork.
The blog Not So Humble Pie has a roundup of science-themed cookies. Among them is a picture of the cellular mitosis cookies (above) made by the blogger behind Reflections of a Science Teacher. Others were inspired by centrifugal governors, genome sequences, and a Sierpinski carpet.
reddit user Grimmlock started a clever comment thread. It's filled with nerdy variations of the classic 'yo mama' joke theme. A few samples:
Your momma's so fat that the probability that she is in an arbitrary point in a room is 1.
The woman who carried you in her womb for your gestation period and later expelled you from her vagina has such an excess of adipose tissue that one could reap cardiovascular benefits simply from taking a brisk walk around her person.
Yo momma is so fat, the recursive function int yourMom{ (return yourMom();} causes a stack overflow
Yo momma's so fat that when I used multiple integration to find the volume under her curves, it turned out she was a hypervolume and could not be graphed.
Link | Photo by flickr user Tobyotter used under Creative Commons license
deviantART user Martin Beyer imagined what Mr. Burns from The Simpsons would look like if he was depicted more literally. It looks like a sculpture, but Beyer actually used Zbrush to create a digital 3D image.
Japanese designer Yoshi Akai creates electronic musical instruments from unusual objects, such as telegraph machines and stylophones. One of his recent works is a three-channel, eight-step synthesizer that can be played by placing different colored LEGO blocks in various positions.
As though taking a lesson from the movie Mission Impossible, thieves broke into a Best Buy in New Jersey, rappelling in from a hole that they cut in the roof to hover over a spot obscured from security cameras. What did these highly-skilled thieves take? Just 20 Apple notebook computers. That's it.
"High level of sophistication," said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman. "They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out."
Employees discovered the missing laptops, as well as a gaping hole in the ceiling, when they arrived to work around 6:30 this morning.
The thieves left boot prints on the gas pipe, which runs up the side of the building in Monmouth Junction, Ryan said.
On top of the building, they used a saw to cut through several inches of rubber and insulation, then sliced a 3-foot-wide square in the metal roof, he said.
Researchers in Germany are trying to develop a cell phone that can read lips by measuring the electrical activity used in the muscles of the mouth while speaking, which is then converted into a computer-simulated voice:
The user can speak into the phone soundlessly, but is still understood by the conversation partner on the other end of the line. As a result, it is possible to communicate in silent environments, at the cinema or theater, without disturbing others. Another field of use is the transmission of confidential information.
For the transmission of passwords and PINs, for example, users can change seamlessly to soundless language and, hence, transmit confidential information in a tap-proof manner.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: US National Gallery of Art
The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface uses signals picked up by an electroencephalogram (EEG) to give commands to machines:
While the player imagines left and right hand movements, algorithms decode his brain activity signals in realtime into control signals for the pinball machine. The demonstration shows the cutting edge performance of a brain-computer interface system with regard of timing precision of the control signal. Other (slower) applications are developed for communication needs of e.g. paralized patients.
This bizarre video has been circulating the Internet for about a week or two. It appears to be a Russian man singing a wordless (even in Russian) nonsense song before a live audience. It is definitely an ear worm, so if you listen, be prepared to continue to listen to it for a couple of days.
Anyway, the meaning and origin of this video may finally be at hand. Blogger Justin Smith explains:
The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil', or, better yet, [Cyrillic redacted -- ed.]. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People's Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.
The song he is interpreting, "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home," is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words. I have seen a number of comments online, ever since a flurry of interest in Hill began just a few days ago, to the effect that this routine must have been meant as a critique of Soviet censorship, but in fact vokaliz was a well established genre, one that seems close in certain respects to pantomime.
http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2010/02/edward-anatolevich-hill.html via Urlesque
A young couple named Darino and Niko created a wedding invitation in the form of an 8-bit video game. To get the invitation, one must complete the game. At the link, you can view the groom version of the game and the game-appropriate packaging for the invitations.
Link via Gizmodo | Previously on Neatorama: 8-Bit Wedding Invitation
New Zealander Rudy Heeman made a hovercraft in his garage. When it hits seventy kph, it starts flying. Heeman homes to sell his invention at $13,000 USD per unit.
