Gadget Crunch » Seriously, WTF?

Octabong Means Beer Fun for Eight

doug — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:54:29 +0000

Hailed as the invention of the decade by, ah, Us, it’s the Octabong. Revolutionizing the beer bong industry, this exclusive bong features eight - that’s right, eight - compartments for a truly communal drinking experience. One-inch diameter flexible PVC tubes allow eight drinkers to throw back their favorite beer in the race champions. The college dorms (and boardrooms throughout Silicon Valley) will never be the same.

Get the Octabong at BustedTees

Jetman Uses His Body as Flight Controls

doug — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:21:02 +0000

I know this clip is old, but I stumbled on it and it was too cool to pass up posting. This dude, Yves Rossy, created a wing he could wear on his back and strapped four small jet engines to it. I know the result sounds like something you’d see in the turn of the century silent films where the dude takes a header off a pier, but oh no. This guy actually flies. A real like jet-man. He uses only his body movements and position to steer himself. At first the clip sort of looks like a controlled free fall, but keep watching. The jet engines offer lift and he’s able to control where he’s going. Pretty damn cool.

XCOR’s Lynx to Bring Space Travel to the Masses

doug — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:43:12 +0000

A small company from Mojave, CA is poised to bring space travel to the general public. Well, the rich public. XCOR Aerospace recently announced that it’s Lynx suborbital spaceship will be ready for flight in 2010. The Lynx is the size of a small private aircraft and will carry two passengers to a height of 200,000 feet above the earth’s surface.

The Lynx Mk. 1 is a single stage suborbital spacecraft. I can reach Mach 2 on it’s ascent and will give passengers about 4 minutes of ‘micro-weighlessness’ on the edge of space before gliding back to earth. The entire trip only lasts 30 minutes and goes for about $100,000 USD. No word on if the TSA makes you take off your shoes before getting on board.

Man Grows Back Finger

Staff — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 06:51:58 +0000

Man regrows finger that was accidentally cut off in model plane propeller. The man used a regenerative powder given to him by his brother, a research scientist.

That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine.

“It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth,” said Badylak.

Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and “direct” them to grow.

“Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do,” Badylak explained. “It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever.”

[via CBS News]

Is Global Warming A Hoax?

Staff — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:28:03 +0000

Thousands of scientific ocean robots suggest that ocean temperature has not warmed up at all over the past four or five years

Everybody from Al Gore to Arnold Schwarzenegger have preached about the effects of global warming but is the planet actually warming? We know that the global average air temperature near the Earth’s surface rose about 1-2 degrees during the last hundred years but what does that equate to in the grand scheme of the planet? A hundred years is a small fraction in the billions of years the earth has been around. Instead of just measuring the air temperature, scientist have been monitoring the oceans for changes, but what they have found is to the contrary.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

So if these ocean robots are actually giving accurate data, then where is all the heat going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it’s probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

In actuality, the scientist really can’t explain this missing heat at all. Is it too soon to tell if global warming is real? There is no disputing that what people do effects the environment. China and India build coal-burning plants like they are going out of style. We are too dependent on foreign oil. The list could go on and on, but are you really sold on global warming? Is it possible that we humans have done so much damage in the past 50 years? Or is the current rise in temperatures just a natural blip that has occurred many other times in the history of the Earth, we just weren’t around to notice.

[via NPR]