Category: Weird Science

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.

Space is a hard place for humans to survive. We constantly need water, food, and protection from radiation, and then there is the little fact that space has no air, food, or water just floating around for us to use.

I like to imagine that the scientists who come up with experiments sit around and think of the most awesome things they can do, even if they have little real world value. I bet there were back claps all around when one of them said, “Let’s put 3D glasses on a praying mantis!”

Researchers from The University of Tokyo’s Shinoda – Makino Lab have created a mind-blowing device that clones both images and low amounts of haptic feedback. In other words, it creates reflections that you can “touch” and can “touch” you back.

Robots will be the end of us all. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can begin figuring out the best ways to ingratiate ourselves to our new overlords. However, getting to our eventual robot death is going to be a long hard road, with a lot of pain.

Everything I know about surfing, I learned watching Blue Crush because Kate Bosworth. That is to say, I don’t know anything about surfing other than you stand on the board, and if someone gets on your wave you have to kick their ass.

See this dude right here? He’s not Lex Luthor. He’s NASA engineer Brian Muirhead. Brian says the plans that the Rebels fought so hard to get and the evil Empire worked hard to design and build are crap.

If you haven’t heard of the Hyperloop, you are missing something that will be awesome if it comes to fruition. Hyperloop is a very high-speed transportation system proposed by Tesla founder Elon Musk, that will carry people and cargo from place to place.

The smart man knows a bandage only hides his wounds. And University of Bath Professor Toby Jenkins is a very smart man. That’s why he and his colleagues from various UK universities and hospitals are working on a bandage that glows under ultraviolet light when exposed to toxins produced by pathogenic bacteria.

These tiny little crumbs look a lot like peppermints you’d use to freshen your breath after lunch, but you don’t want to eat these ones. What you see here are tiny spheres of a sort of latex liquid that are coated in calcium-carbonate nanoparticles.

My first glimpse at a hologram came back in the ’80s when I was in a mall in Dallas, Texas. It was a video game with holograms that had lots of mirrors was at the arcade and I thought it was awesome.

If Hector from Saturn 3 mounted the Atlas robot and had a baby, I think Diego-San is exactly what their love child would look like. It’s intensely creepy with its chubby-cheeked smiling face and mechanical body.

Robots are really cool, but before they can start selling robots that will clean our houses and tend to our kids, they have to perfect them and make them safe and robust. Part of keeping an expensive robot safe is teaching it how to fall without cracking its shiny metal butt open.

You won’t see me swimming in the lake or the ocean. I’m not fond of putting my face where animals poop and might bite me. You certainly wouldn’t get me to go on a night dive near the Solomon Islands where you have to use bright lights to ward off crocodiles that might want to snack on your soft innards.

Today when we build satellites, construction has to be done on Earth, the satellite is placed in a rocket, shot into orbit, and then goes through automated deployment all while we hope things work just fine.