Steve Vigneau had a lot of toothpaste, so he decided to find out what would happen if he mixed them all together into one minty concoction.
Apparently, “this multi-sample toothpaste concoction didn’t taste bad, but was overwhelmingly mint backed by a few other unidentifiable herbs. Even after rinsing my mouth a number of times the taste still lingers, but this matches my experience (and complaint) with all of the Colgate, Crest, etc toothpastes I’ve tried in the past.”
It’s amazing what some people will do in the name of science!
[Nuxx.net - 23 Tubes, 1 Bowl]
[Via: Zoomdoggle]
At the end of the original version of The Italian Job (yes, this will contain a spoiler so don’t read on if you haven’t seen it) the gang is left perched atop a cliff in their bus, with them at one end and their gold at the other. (Literally, a cliffhanger.) Knowing that it would be impossible for them to get to the gold without tipping the bus off the cliff, they make the wise decision and abandon hopes of endless riches.
However, the Royal Society of Chemists wasn’t convinced that the gang needed to leave without the best of both worlds, and created a competition to see who could come up with the best solution.
In the end, John Godwin came up with an idea that’s as genius as it is plausible, and won himself a trip to Turin with the following solution:
Break the windows at the back to reduce weight; break the windows at the front inwards to save weight; hold one gang member upside-down out of the window to deflate the front tires and stabilize the vehicle; drain the rear fuel tank through an access panel at the bottom of the bus; gang members leave one by one from the front, collecting stones to replace their weight; keep adding stones until someone can safely go to the rear to retrieve the gold.
Easy, right?
In addition to John’s entry, more than 2,000 people submitted their own ideas, so be sure to visit the RSC website for more, or download Godwin’s PDF if you’d like to see all the science behind his daring gold rescue.
[RSC - Italian Job Competition]
[Via: Autoblog]
What does it take to create a tiny, man-made star that will trigger a thermonuclear reaction inside of a laboratory?
How about a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the entire United States into one-billionth of a second.
Not impressive enough for you?
Then how about this: The resulting explosion should produce 10 times the amount of energy used to create it, or more than 10,000 times the electric generating power of the United States!
The structure that will house this experiment, which is located in the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, covers an area roughly the size of three football fields, and the infrared laser that will cause the explosion will travel through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers in order to create a beam that will be 10 billion (yes, with a b) times more powerful than a standard household light bulb.
Let’s just hope they’ve got some bright minds working on this project, because otherwise we could bite off more than we can chew with our own man-made star.
[National Ignition Facility]
[Via: Neatorama]
Flickr has collected almost ninety million geotagged photos, and for every geotagged photo they have up to six Where On Earth IDs, which are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was take: the neighborhood, the town, the country, and so on up to the continent in a process called reverse-geocoding.
Eventually they got to thinking: If they plotted all of the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would there be enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place?
Apparently the answer is yes, and though it’s not a perfect representation of the place, it’s definitely getting pretty close.
As a gift to the Flickr community, they’ve even made these 150,000 (and counting) WOE IDs with proper (-ish) shape data available via the Flickr API.
It might be a fun toy right now, but give it a few years and add in all of the data from geocoded cell phone photos, and this just might be the future of cartography as we know it.
[Flickr Code - The Shape Of Alpha]
