And While We're At It, How About A Hand Held Laser Rifle?

This 5kW laser rifle is designed to be used in the demolition of nuclear power plants. The video below shows it zipping through steel.

Want to know more? Click on this link to read all about it.

Light Sabers Anyone?

First, you start with a Graflex flash handle....

Here a neat article from Phys.org on a new form of light/matter that scientist have just created that just might make light sabers possible.

The article discusses the work by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic to coax photons into binding together to form  a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical.

Fun Time! Why Our Universe Is 3D!

500-Square-Feet Small House With A Loft

Vancouver builder Smallworks claim they build beautiful, small homes. The houses I see on their website certainly meet that claim. Among their designs is a 500 square foot, one and a half story mini-home, called the West Coast Modern, that feels open and spacious. It even has a garage.

Below is a short video of a West Coast Modern built by Brendon Purdy and Akua Schatz, which they share with their two young children.

Preparing Your Family For Unforeseen Emergencies

What would you do if you were faced with a real disaster, something you'd have to run from? Would you be prepared?

From Tiny r(E)volution comes an article about having a plan and provisions to be able to jump and run. An emergency bag for each member of your family is essential and the concept that two items equal one and one item essentially equals none, is a maxim. Redundancy is key.

The article goes on to list the categories of items you'll need and the items in each: water and food, tools and supplies, clothing, first aid and personal items and if you have children, a kids bag.

Its a well thought out article and the ideas contained could mean the difference between life and death. Don't forget IDs. Also,as mentioned, the SAS Handbook is a very good thing to have.

Travel Photo of the Week

Burning Man 2013

A Guide To Surviving Burning Man For First Timers

Over on Slashdot, Bennett Haselton has written a guide for first time "burners" so that they can easily survive their first experience at the Burning Man festival.

He writes: "While nothing can really 'prepare' you for your first time at Burning Man, there are a few simple steps that can eliminate a lot of the stress. Unfortunately it can be hard to get information out of the 10-year veterans about how to do things the easy way (some of them probably view the 'easy way' as 'ruining the whole point'). So here's some advice instead from someone who just got back from their first time, and who likes to take the path of least resistance."

Here are his suggestions, in brief....

1. You can fly to Reno Airport and take the Burner Express shuttle to Burning Man, instead of driving.

2. You can rent a bike from one of the other camps at Burning Man rather than bringing one yourself. (Bringing one might be the easier option if you're driving there, but not if you're flying.)

3. You can pay dues to a camp that will provide food, water, camping space, a place to store your trash (if you didn't know, there are no communal trash dumpsters at Burning Man), sometimes electricity, and sometimes access to a shower, rather than trying to arrange for all of those things yourself.

4. If you just need space for one person to sleep, you can buy and bring a single-occupancy tent. You don't need to build a home-made shade structure out of PVC and tarp.

5. If you have lower-than-average heat tolerance, buy ice from the ice vendors to make your own ice water, and carry a water spray bottle.

Head on over to Slashdot for the full skinny. With clear advice like this, I just might finally go.

Space Has An Empty Hole One Billion Light Years Across

There's that big hole now.

There's a great big hole in the universe with nothing in it and when I say nothing, I mean not even dark matter.

Radio astronomers have found this enormous gap, nearly a billion light years across and it's challenging the existing theories of how our universe was formed.

Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues of the University of Minnesota had been studying data from the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, and discovered the void by accident. "One morning I was a little bored, and said, 'why don't I look in the direction of the WMAP cold spot'," says Rudnick.

The void, about 6 billion to 10 billion light years from us, is considerably larger than any found before. Until now, no voids larger than 80 megaparsecs wide have been found, making the new hole 40 times larger than any previously discovered.

Rudnick also believes this confirms the existence of dark matter. Head on over to the article in New Scientist to find out why.

Shakespeare In The Original Pronuciation

And you thought you knew what that was.

Fun Time! A Caketrope Inspired By Tim Burton!

Most Influential Emotions On Social Networks Revealed: Anger Spreads Faster Than Joy

Once again, from MIT's Technology Review.

Now that you've learned how to make your message go viral, you'll have to deal with the backlash.

"Backlash?!?" I hear you exclaim. Yes, because it seems that messages that produce an angry reaction spread much faster than those that produce the feeling of joy. The article goes on to describe the work of Rui Fan and his colleagues at Beihang University in China and their reseach on Weibo, a Twitter-like service that is popular in China.

And if you're thinking, "Well, that's China and we're different," just consider the online reaction to Ben Affleck getting the role of Batman.

Make Your Message Go Viral Like You've Always Dreamed

Actually, this is how you do it. You figure it out.

Have you always dreamed of having a viral hit on YouTube or any of the other social media platforms, that catapults you to instant fame and riches even greater than grumpy cat?

Well, MIT's Technology Review has a great article on how to do just that.

It seems that the US military has figured out that it is a "seed" group of people that starts the whole ball rolling and they've found a way to identify this seed group. When infected, it can spread a message across an entire network. They say it can be done quickly and easily, even on relatively large networks.

I won't spoil the fun by revealing how this works, so head on over to the linked article to start your headlong plunge into celebrity and fortune.

Travel Photo of the Week

Crested Butte, Colorado

You should click on this one to see it full size. You really should.

Did A Four Dimensional Black Hole Birth Our Universe?

Yeah, that's our universe there in the wisps.

Now here's a interesting notion. The current explanation for the existence of our universe is the Big Bang theory, that everything spewed out of an infinitely hot and dense singularity in space. What if that's not the case? For one, it is difficult to explain why our universe is such a uniform temperature, because even given tens of billions of years, that's still not enough time for that to occur.

“For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” says Niayesh Afshordi,who is an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

Afsordi and his colleagues have proposed that our three dimensional universe is the result of a hypershere, the event horizon or brane, of a four dimensional black hole and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion.

There are still some problems with his theory, but Afsordi is currently refining his model. Here's a link to the Nature article for more details.

MekaWorld Container Homes

MEKA is a Toronto based company that produces attractive modular habitats based on shipping containers. They currently offer five home sizes ranging from 320 square feet ($52.5k) up to 1280 square feet ($189.2k). Larger structures are achievable through the design's modularity. The company also produces buildings for commercial use.

Burning Man On The News Hour

Fun Time! GIFs Made From Parts of Renaissance Paintings!

Want to see more? Click here.

Verizon Is Evil

A piece from Bill Snyder on Infoworld describes Verizon's plan to turn the internet into cable TV. That's right, Verizon is fighting in court to end the Federal Communications Commission's policy of Net neutrality, which would begin the process of changing the economic model of the Web into a pay per view model.

Right now, you pay your internet provider and then go wherever you want. Verizon and its allies want to charge websites to carry their content to your connected device. You then pay by the bit.

Even if they lose this case, we all know they won't stop until they get what they want and that's the day I'll sign off the internet.

3D-Printable Mini Spectrometer

The Tricorder Project has a sneak-peek of a spectrometer they're working on. It's going to be small, inexpensive and 3D printable.

Travel Photo of the Week

Cordillera Del Paine Mountains, Chile

A New Van Gogh

Sunset at Montmajou

Need I say more?

Land Liberation Project

There are a group of people, young and old, families and singles, living nomadically in tipis in Southern Oregon, moving seasonally from the high mountains of the Cascade-Siskiyous, to the valley below. Their desire is to live a simpler life. They've been doing this for almost six years and they are about to be evicted if they can't raise $300,000 to buy the land by October 1st.

The 190 acre tract is about to be sold and they are raising money on Indiegogo. They intend to protect the land in perpetuity with a conservation easement, so it will never again be sold or owned by an individual again.



Thanks Lloyd!

Virgin Galactic Tests SpaceShipTwo

Last Thursday, Virgin Galactic ran the second test of their commercial spaceplane (how I love using that word, spaceplane, without it referring to something fictional), SpaceShipTwo.

Around 8am PDT, it took off attached to the WhiteNightTwo carrier and climbed 46,000 feet before being released and igniting its own rocket to ascend to 69,000 feet.

SpaceShipTwo reached a speed of mach 1.43 before descending back to the Mojave landing site at 9:25 am. The pilots, Mark Stucky and Clint Nichols, reported a "flawless flight."

Virgin Galactic has already accepted $70 million from 580 individuals for their own taste of space.

Fun Time! How To Make HUGE Bubbles!

What Marketers (Think They) Know About You

Most people are concerned about the amount of information marketers and business (not to mention the NSA) can glean from their internet usage, Now there is a way of seeing what consumer data has been collected on you.

The company Acxiom has a website where you can input your name and see what companies think they know about you. I use the phrase "think they know" because not all the data is correct. That's why you might be receiving junk mail about heavy metal concerts when you only like the opera.

You can also change the information on this site so you can stop getting notices about tickets to the next Black Sabbath tour.

Here's a link to the New York Times article this comes from.

Warming World Lets Insects And Disease Expand Their Reach

Here's more bad climate news courtesy of the BBC by way of the science journal Nature.

It seems that as the planet warms, insects and diseases are moving towards the poles from mainly tropic and subtropic habitats. Researchers at Exeter and Oxford have measured this movement at about two miles a year. As things heat up, that movement can be expected to increase.

This doesn't only meant that diseases such as malaria will spread. Global food security is also threatened as crop pests and other pathogens make their way further north and south.

Travel Photo of the Week

London at night.

Common Nutrient Just Might Keep You Sharp Into Old Age

Doesn't this look yummy?

A short article on Natures's website discusses an experiment showing that eating certain foods can help slow cognitive decline.

Now, I'm not much on soybeans and fermented soybeans even less so, but the experiment clearly shows that consumption of this and certain other foods rich in polyamines can help keep a brain healthy. At least a fruit fly brain.

Now the research will start on mice and humans. In the meantime, I just bought some wheatgerm, which is also rich in polyamines. I can stomach that.

What Happens If You Stop Going Outside

More cool ASAP science. It's Labor Day. Go outside.

The Original LEGO Patent

Behold true coolness.