awesome duuuuuuude

Chris Knight's avatar

There is a girl who can discern different Star Wars characters while blindfolded by putting them in her mouth and sucking on them.

I never want to have to write a summary sentence like that again.

Sophia Heesch, a teenager from Germany, was recently on a TV show in that country called Wetten, dass…? (translated into English it’s “Wanna Bet…?”) demonstrating her… talent. Sophia, without looking at it, can be given a Star Wars LEGO minifigure and just from sucking on it and feeling with her tongue, can tell whether the minifig is Han Solo or Yoda, and even more unusual characters like the ASP Droid.

Here is the clip of Sophia showing off her amazing powers!

Wetten, dass…? is a German game show, so apparently Sophia won some money. Remember that next time you yell at your kids for putting toys in their mouths 😛...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Heaven only knows how many alternative energy schemes have been proposed over the years, only to watch all of ’em that come to mind fail to deliver the promised goods of cheap, clean power.

But having read about it for the past few weeks, and now seeing what was unveiled yesterday by the company, I think there’s a LOT of potential in what Bloom Energy has come up with.

Imagine ten years from now, having a brick-sized energy server supplying all of the electricity to your house. No power lines or anything. A few weeks ago my house went 22 hours without power during a severe winter storm, along with 43,000 other people in this county. That would be a thing of the past, along with monthly bills from the power company.

Well, possibly. PCWorld’s website has ten questions about the Bloom Energy Server that lots of folks will ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

So you might be asking “Who is Jessica Watson?”

I’ve been following Jessica Watson‘s journey with great interest since it began this past October. At 16, this young lass from Sydney, Australia is endeavouring to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat, alone and unaided. She left the harbor in Sydney on October 17th 2009, headed on an easterly track that went north and back across the Equator. On January 14th Jessica rounded Cape Horn (her first sighting of land since taking off) at the southernmost tip of South America and began the Atlantic Ocean leg of her 23,000 nautical mile journey.

Sometime today – if she hasn’t already – Jessica Watson should be conquering Cape Agulhas on the southern tip of Africa and enter the Indian Ocean. Then once she gets to Australia she merely has to sail around Down Under and get back ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Mike Dobson – AKA Robotic Solutions – is known far and wide for his genius at cooking up contraptions with LEGO bricks and the LEGO Mindstorms robotics packages. Dobson has now applied his mad skillz toward his latest creation: the CubeStormer.

This thing looks scary. Sorta intimidating like the Voight-Kampff machine from Blade Runner. But set your faces to stunned y’all: the CubeStormer can solve any Rubik’s cube puzzle on its own in twelve seconds or less, and sometimes even in less than five seconds!

Check it out…

Read more about the CubeStormer here....

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Chris Knight's avatar

David Morris (left) is someone I’ve been honored to have as a friend for many years now so I know of what I speak when I say this: David Morris is like the Chuck Norris of renaissance men! This guy does everything, including competition roller skating and (along with his wonderful wife Gretchen) being active in the Theatre Guild of Rockingham County.

David and I first met because of our mutual love for astronomy. But David, being David, took his passion to the max and pulled off what most amateur astronomers only dream of: his very own observatory! Here’s an excellent write-up in today’s News & Record about David and his homebrewed facility, which he has christened Smithstone Observatory....

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Chris Knight's avatar

Think your iPhone or BlackBerry is the wave of the future? Feh! Behold the marvelous technology of 1913, represented by E.C. Hanson’s “automobile wireless telephone”. With his buggy outfitted with two telephone poles and various high-voltage insulators, Hanson could make calls from the road up to 35 miles away.

Technologizer has a fun lil’ read up on their site about Hanson’s “cell phone” and fourteen other innovations that were decades ahead of the curve. Like Thomas Edison’s idea to print a 40,000 page book that would be only two inches thick, using ultra-thin metal plates instead of paper.

(Thankfully that one didn’t see production. Lord knows that I have enough trouble with papercuts 😛 )...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This subterranean house in Vals, Switzerland is just the sort of place that Bilbo Baggins would have loved had he been able to blow his loot on such conveniences as digital satellite television and outside lights…

The house, designed by SeARCH and Christian Muller Architects, includes “all the facilities a common house has, such as a guest room, an entertainment area, but also ‘specialized’ interiors like an underground pathway. The entrance is a wide oval opening that you are driven to by some traditional stairs made in stone. Large windows make it noticeable and draw attention to the inside décors- that is when the people living there are up for some company.”

Dig down here for more photos of this amazing house!...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Jay Rob took an old-school Star Trek phaser gun toy, cannibalized the innards of a Blu-ray player to get at the laser diode, and pulled off one of the kewlest hardhacks I’ve ever seen. The result: a phaser that seriously works!

Okay, it doesn’t actually disintegrate anything and there’s no “stun” setting… but Jay’s phaser is powerful enough to pop balloons from across the room.

Watch it in action…

And if you’re of the tinkerin’ sort, Jay has posted detailed instructions on how you can build your own “phaser”.

Great job Jay! Now, can you get to work on constructing a real working lightsaber? 🙂...

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Chris Knight's avatar

The picture on the left shows what used to be a piece of rattan wood. It’s now almost exactly identical to human bone tissue, after a battery of treatments thunked-up by some brilliant Italian scientists. It’s as strong as real bone material, and what’s more it transplants much better than current bone replacement procedures and is porous enough for blood and nervous tissue to wind its way through.

Mash down here for the rest of the story from the BBC....

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