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We've seen the revolutionary Da Vinci Surgical System do amazingly precise movements before, including folding paper airplanes and playing Operation. In this video, surgeons at Southmead Hospital in the UK demonstrated its ability to make delicate cuts by peeling a grape. So far, there are only 1,032 Da Vinci robots in service around the world, but that number is steadily increasing as doctors find it useful.

Link -via Popular Science

All mutants go through that awkward stage when their mutations begin to affect their bodies. But it's okay! Don't feel bad about it and don't feel like you can't ask questions about what you're experiencing. Professor Xavier is here to help you with this handy guide. Click on the link to read the rest.

Link | Image: Caldwell Tanner

This funny mashup by an unknown cartoonist references the children's TV show Teletubbies and the horror film The Ring. The demonic Samara Morgan emerges from a different sort of television set.

Link -via Geekosystem | Image: unknown

Philadelphia-based artist Matthew Cox combines x-ray images and embroidery to show a clinical, scientific world below a colorful, artistic surface. Many of his works are portraits of pop culture figures including Snow White, Miss Piggy, and David Bowie.

Link -via Flavorwire

The blog Foogos displays the work of a brilliant advertising agent who makes logos out of food products, such as this very appropriate TMNT pizza. In the gallery, you can find other food logos, primarily those of superheroes and sports teams. The Philadelphia Flyers logo in roast beef and cheddar? Good choice!

Link and Gallery -via Comics Alliance

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Although the Imperial March from Star Wars has played on a floppy disk drive before, it's never been done this well. A blogger who goes by the name Silent explained how he did it:

The sound comes from a magnetic head moved by stepper motor. To make a specific sound, head must be moved with appropriate frequency.

FDD has a simple interface – the description may be found for example [ HERE ]. To move the head you need to activate the drive by pulling the DRVSB0 or 1 (depends on the cable you have and the connector – notice the crossover on the FDD ribbon cable) pin low and then falling edge on STEP pin makes the head move one step in direction dependent on DIR pin state.

An ATMega microcontroller is generating those frequencies and it makes the drives play music.

Link -via DVICE

In 1973, the government of the Northwest Territories, Canada, commissioned a comic book to address alcoholism in the indigenous population. The result was a series featuring "Captain Al Cohol", an alien who crashed onto Earth. The Captain has a drinking problem.

You can read the entire first issue at the link. I'm not sure if alcohol gives the titular character super strength, or causes debilitation. It's not clear whether he is a villain, a hero, or a victim. But the story, however bizarre, is certainly a product of the 1970s.

Link -via Nag on the Lake

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On Monday, Glen Suter did something most men only get to dream about: driving a couch faster than anyone else ever has. He set a Guinness World Record by driving a couch equipped with a 1400 cc motorcycle engine up to 101 miles per hour. This shattered the previous record of 92 miles per hour.

Link -via Jalopnik | Previously: World's Fastest Furniture

It looks like a pretty but not extraordinary illustration, right? Keep scrolling.



It's actually a series of sheets of bullet-proof glass suspended so that they look like a face when viewed from the right angle. Michael Murphy assembled this sculpture. This and other works by him are on display at gallery nine5 in New York City.

Link -via Colossal

Krang is a villain in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. He is also hungry. Would you be so kind as to give him a cookie?

-via Geekologie | Photo: Unknown

Don't worry, the Earth isn't that close! It was just inserted into the picture so you could get a sense of the size of this huge solar flare that emerged last Thursday. It was spat out by sunspot AR 1302, which is so big that you can see it with the naked eye.

Link | Photo: JP Brahic

Since it was Jim Henson's birthday, Mike Lica and Derek Lane-Waters of the 501st Legion (an organization of people who dress as stormtroopers) made these realistic Gonzo and Kermit costumes. I hope that they're just Rebel agents pretending to serve the Empire.

Link -via The Mary Sue

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Thundera is under attack by stupid Internet memes and the only weapons that can defeat them are even stupider Internet memes. In this video, Cartoon Network's MAD imagines the 80s cartoon ThunderCats the way that it thankfully never was.

-via Miss Cellania

Innovation sometimes permits us to solve problems that we didn't even know existed. For example, did it ever occur to you that chicken nuggets are not, by themselves, efficient vehicles for ingesting high-fat sauces? I certainly didn't think of it until I saw this picture of a new nugget designed by the food engineers of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. It's shaped like a scoop so that you can ladle sauce into your mouth, and then eat the ladle.

Link -via Gizmodo

The infinite monkey theorem proposes that a group of monkeys, or even a single one, could reproduce the collected works of William Shakespeare by hitting random keystrokes if given sufficient time. It is, however, hard to prove this theorem with an experiment that uses actual monkeys. So computer engineer Jesse Anderson created a simulation that successfully reproduced 99.9% of the Bard's published writings:

"The computer program I wrote compares that monkey's gibberish to every work of Shakespeare to see if it actually matches a small portion of what Shakespeare wrote. If it does match, the portion of gibberish that matched Shakespeare is marked with green," Andersen explained on his blog. "The parts of Shakespeare that have not been found are colored white. This process is repeated over and over until the monkeys have created every work of Shakespeare through random gibberish."

Anderson developed the project to test Amazon's web servers, but also to satisfy his curiosity of whether an infinite number of monkeys could randomly reproduce Shakespeare's work by pecking away on an infinite number of typewriters.

Link -via Geekologie | Photo by Flickr user Jemima G used under Creative Commons license