04.16.09
Motherf*ing snakes on a plane
Four escaped pythons grounded a Qantas plane.
The pythons escaped from the cargo hold of a Boeing 737-800 during a flight from Alice Springs to Melbourne. The snakes couldn’t be found, so the plane was fumigated to kill the snakes.
03.18.09
T-Rex of the ocean
“Predator X” is a 50ft sea creature that hunted the seas 150 million years ago.
An international team of paleontologists have found the partial skull of this new species of pliosaurs on the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. According to the researchers it had a bite force of 33,000 pounds. This is more than 10x that of any animal living today (and at least 2x that of a T-Rex).
A 2-hour documentary on the expedition will be shown on the History Channel on March 29.
03.16.09
Prosthetic USB finger
01.24.09
May the “Force” be with you… for $90!
This fall toymaker Uncle Milton will let you test your Jedi abilities with “The Force Trainer”.
A wireless headset (that can “read” your mind via EEG) lets you manipulate the height of a ball in a clear cylinder with your mind.
Anyone remember the scene from Back To The Future: Part II where Marty McFly shows two kids (one of them Elijah “Frodo” Wood) in the 80’s Cafe how to play a videogame? After Marty shows them there is an electronic gun involved Kid#1 says: “You mean you have to use your hands?”
11.12.08
Batman vs Batman
A city named Batman is suing Warner Bros. for royalties regarding The Dark Knight.
Huseyin Kalkan, the mayor of Batman, a city in southeastern Turkey, is accusing the producers of “The Dark Knight” of using the city’s name without permission.
“The mayor is prepping a series of charges against Nolan and Warner Bros., which owns the right to the Batman character, including placing the blame for a number of unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate on the psychological impact that the film’s success has had on the city’s inhabitants.”
for more info go to Variety
08.11.08
If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible
This quote by Chuck Palahniuk might soon be possible. A team of Scientists led by Xiang Zhang at the UC Berkeley managed to render small objects invisible with the use of so called metamaterials.
The magic word here is negative refraction. In nature there are only materials with a positive refractive index. Until now 3D-metamaterials with negative refraction have only been reported for microwaves.
This week Nature and Science are publishing two articles about metamaterials that work in the near-infrared and visible light range.
Of course we are still far away from a cloaking device á la STAR TREK, but the future comes only one day at a time.
05.15.08
That’s the way the cookie crumbles
A Michigan Girl Scout sold 17,328 boxes of cookies this year.
15-year old Jennifer Sharpe from Dearborn set up her shop on a street corner and sold cookies every day, with help from her mother and troop leader, Pam Sharpe.
Jennifer’s Troop 813 raised about $21,000 in cookie sales. And they plan to use the money for a 10-day trip to Europe.
P.S. according to girlscouts.org the best-selling Girl Scout Cookies are:
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25% Thin Mints
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19% Samoas/Caramel deLites
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13% Peanut Butter Patties/Tagalongs
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11% Peanut Butter Sandwich/Do-si-dos
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9% Shortbread/Trefoils
03.19.08
Waterbeds make cows udderly happy
Ohio farmer Bill Timmons installed waterbeds for his cows. It cost him nearly $40.000, but apparently it pays off.
Daily milk production has gone up more than 20% in only two weeks. Timmons’ explanation: “You take care of them and they’ll take care of you.“
Visit Fox News for more.
Interested in buying one of those beds for your cows? Just go to Advanced Comfort Technology, Inc.
01.22.08
Bigfoot on Mars?
An old snapshot taken by Mars Rover Spirit seems to contain a mysterious figure walking downhill. Take a look at the picture and judge for yourself if it’s really an alien or just an odd rock formation.
check the dailymail.co.uk article for more and a higher resolution image of the above.
EDIT: I tracked down the original NASA image, you can watch it here (Resolution: 12756 x 3487, Size: 5.6MB); the “formation” is indeed visible on the lower left side, so at least it’s not a Photoshop fake
12.23.07
Tinker Bell in the sky
A rare case of a triple merger of galaxies bears a resemblance with J.M.Barrie’s Tinker Bell.
Through near-infrared VLT (Very Large Telescope) observations it was possible to identify the triple merger nature of the galaxy known as ESO 593-IG 008 (or IRAS 19115-2124). It was previously merely known as an interacting pair of galaxies at a distance of 650 million light-years.
The object was dubbed “The Bird”, but it also bears a resemblance with the fairy Tinker Bell from James Matthew Barrie’s novel Peter Pan.
The “wings” itself extend more than 100,000 light years, the size of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
