Category: Weird Science

Laser pointers are cool, especially the bright ones that you can use for popping balloons and harassing the cats on the next block over. After a while all that gets a bit boring though and you need something new and cool to do with your laser.

What’s cooler? A flame thrower or a freeze ray? I prefer flame throwers, even though they’re not literally as cool. But which would win in a fight? The Backyard Scientist decided to test it out. He constructed a homemade liquid nitrogen “freeze ray” that uses the pressure of the nitrogen turning from a liquid to a gas to create a powerful cold spray.

I can think of few stranger corporate collaborations than that of a major automaker and a major tequila maker. But that’s exactly what’s going on between a Ford and Jose Cuervo. You see, engineers at Ford have figured out a way to convert old agave plants into car parts.

Scientists at the University of Southeast Norway apparently have nothing better to do, so they released microorganisms into a Pac-Man-style maze made out of fluid to observe how the single-celled euglena (Pac-Men) avoid their predators, the multi-celled rotifers (Ghosts).

One of the latest amazing robots to come out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) is based on a Salamander. It can mimic the way a salamander moves, on land or in the water.

I’m sure you have heard of multi-core processors before. You’re probably reading this on one right now. But, I’m pretty sure you’ve never heard of anything like this. Engineers at UC Davis have developed a CPU called KiloCore, which has 1,000 cores.

A company called Star-ALE hopes to create the most awesome aerial display ever seen in the skies over Tokyo as part of the opening ceremony of the 2020 Olympic games. Fireworks just won’t do for a celebration of such epic proportions.

James Young, a man from the UK was in a freak accident with a train a few years back that led to him losing his left arm and leg. James was an avid video game player and he happened on an ad from game firm Konami looking for an amputee to try out a slick new prosthetic arm.

Robots can do all kinds of cool stuff, but hand control could still use improvement. For the most part, roboticists have not been able to give their creations the same kind of finger dexterity as humans.

It doesn’t matter if you fear a Terminator style robot executioner or an insane “I’ll wear your skull” type of Saturn 3 Hector robot overlord, right now we are safe because robots can’t walk worth a crap.

A group of Chinese scientists were on a field trip to the Guangxi Zhuang region of China in 2014 and discovered this gigantic bug. The beast is 62.4cm long, or a bit over two feet. It looks like some sort of irradiated friend of Godzilla to me.

Farts are funny, but they don’t smell funny. “Silent but deadly” isn’t just a saying, it’s a true fact. That’s why someone has invented a line of scented pills designed to make your farts smell like pleasant things – like violets, roses, and even chocolate.

DARPA has awarded contracts for a new program it’s calling “Gremlins.” But before you get all excited about the government funding murderous creatures that start as adorable Mogwai that turn bad if you feed them too late at night, DARPA’s Gremlins are unmanned flying drones that can be launched and recovered by a C-130 in mid-air.

I live in a more rural area so I don’t have the hatred of pigeons that some city dwellers have, you might not find this quite as adorable as I do. A company has released a small flock of ten pigeons flying about London for the next few days wearing tiny and adorable backpacks.

If there were ever a reason to put Forrest Gump on the ISS, this would be it. NASA sent up a pair of special paddles to the space station that allow astronauts to play ping-pong with water globes.

Toshiba is showing off a robot that will be performing a task that no human can safely do themselves. Sometime next year, this big crane-like robot will be lowered into the cooling pool of Japan’s Fukushima reactor 3 building where radiation levels are too high for humans to go.