Category: Weird Science

I am willing to bet that growing up your dad thought it was funny to rip a smelly fart when you were sitting nearby. If you have someone living in your home that likes cut the cheese, you might want to play a trick on them this remote control that changes to random channels when they pass gas.

I like the idea of a hydrogen fuel cell. I can fill a small cartridge with hydrogen, and then power my gadgets from the fuel cell as long as my hydrogen source holds out. That means that I won’t need an AC outlet to keep my iPhone running.

A dude named foldsfive decided to recreate the entire original Star Wars trilogy in MS Paint, then converted to animated GIFs. He released his take Star Wars: A New Hope last month. This month, it’s The Empire Strikes Back‘s turn.

You’ve probably heard of Joby’s Gorillapod. It’s a great take on the classic tripod that doesn’t take up too much space, and works just about anywhere. Now, it turns out you can reuse your Gorillapod as an iPad stand too.

A couple of engineers from Dyson decided to build a balloon accelerator, which uses Dyson Air Multiplier fans to speed along a balloon on its merry way, kind of like what a particle accelerator does, albeit at a much slower speed.

These new noise-canceling headphones from Sensgard don’t need any power to operate, which is amazing, since most noise-canceling headphones and earphones do need some kind of electricity to make their filters work. The Sensgard ZEM headphones come with a simple amplifier.

While I don’t drink enough to need an actual t-shirt that has an integrated beer opener, I guess that for some people, this might be very handy indeed, especially during Spring Break. The flexible-armed robot on the BeerBot T-shirt actually makes me think of Bender from Futurama, which just started its sixth season on Comedy Central, and does not have its own beer-bottle opener t-shirt (yet.)

I tried my hand at metal detection when I was a kid. I quickly gave up after all I found were beer bottle tops, tin cans, and eyeglasses. I had hoped to find something awesome like pirate treasure or that Star Wars lunchbox I buried in the backyard with my Luke Skywalker action figure in it.

This Japanese supercomputer is supposed to be one of the most environmentally-friendly supercomputer arrays available. But is it just me, or is this the ultimate in cable management problems? This supercomputer system is called the Grape-DR and is composed of 64 pairs of Intel’s Core i7-920 processors and a board mounted with 4 Grape-DR accelerator chips.

According to the Telegraph, a remarkable experiment conducted at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejon, South Korea resulted in female mice “to reject the advances of their male counterparts and attempt to mate with fellow females.”

New York Times correspondent Amy Harmon interviews “Bina48” a robot who’s supposed to be a “digital backup” of a real person.

I really like this animation by German artist Surfap – based on the classic 8-bit NES game Super Mario Bros. I’m actually not sure how he achieved the effect, but the illusion makes it look like the game was painted on a concrete wall and sidewalk.

ShockSlayer is one of those guys you can rely on to crank out cool portable game consoles, and the (occasional light-up Zelda belt buckle) but it turns out that in his spare time, he likes to play with fire.

Apparently, the Japanese enjoy vending machines so much that they keep coming up with new things to sell in them. Take for instance, Dole, who has just announced that they will be selling bananas through vending machines in Japan.

While most of us agree that it will take a while before we have robots to do our chores, it looks like things are moving the right direction for all us slackers, thanks to this new butler robot, simply called HERB.

Everything’s in 3D these days, so why shouldn’t Tetris get the X/Y/Z treatment too? Researchers Peter Barnum Srinivasa Narasimhan, and Takeo Kanade at Carnegie Mellon University have come up with a way to project 3-dimensional images onto multiple curtains of water to form a volumetric display.