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How To: Make a Paper Crossbow

Quite often I work on projects that require a lot of waiting around for glue or solvents to dry. It was in such a time that I came up with this little crossbow. I saw that some of the top search engine requests were how to make paper weaponry, and yet there were few results worth viewing. I then sat down and got to work. This crossbow uses tension on bent tubes of printer paper to throw a pencil or pen a very respectable distance, upwards of 50 feet. Paper tubes when bent in such a way would ...

How To: Defeat SSL in Practice with SSL Strip

SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It's an encryption standard used on most sites' login pages to avoid their users' passwords being packet sniffed in simple plain-text format. This keeps the users safe by having all of that traffic encrypted over an "https" connection. So, whenever you see "https://" in front of the URL in your browser, you know you're safe... or are you?

News: Robotic Ghost Knifefish Is Born

Researchers at Northwestern University have hatched a robotic replica of the ghost knifefish, an amazing sea creature with a ribbon-like fin, capable of acrobatic agility in the water. The fish is distinctive in its ability to move forward, backward and vertically, but scientists didn't understand its vertical movement until the creation of its robot replica, GhostBot (shown below). They now know its vertical propulsion is caused by two waves moving in opposite directions, crashing into each ...

News: IBM's “Watson” Supercomputer Demolishes World's Top Jeopardy Players

A testament of man vs. machine will air on February 14th, 15th, and 16th when IBM's supercomputer "Watson" is pitted against the world's fiercest Jeopardy players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, for a chance to win a cool $1 million. It took researchers four years to build Watson, a machine mastermind the size of ten refrigerators and equipped with complex algorithms capable of decoding the complexities of the human language (no small feat). Watch below as Watson kicks ass in a practice round ...

News: Functional LEGO Snow-Eating Beast

The Stilzkin Indrik is a mighty, mini LEGO Russian crawler, capable of lugging heavy loads over snowy terrain: "It has a large contact surface, which prevents it from sinking into the snow. It offers great traction on almost any surface, and loads of torque to get out of tight spots."

How To: Build a Mini Altoids BBQ

Instructables user vmspionage demonstrates how to make a tiny bbq grill with an Altoids tin "powered by a standard-sized charcoal briquette and capable of cooking a full-size hot dog (cut down to size) or smaller hamburger patties with ease." Impressive design and execution. You Will Need:

News: Vincent LaForet's "The Cabbie" - Shot on 7D

There's an old joke that shooting with available light meant using every light available on the truck.  Fortunately, with Canon's new generation of HD capable DSLR's, the term "available light" means what it ought to.  Vince LaForet's work with HDDSLR cameras is a great example of using both ambient and specular light present at locations in order to not only expose an image but effectively telling a very visually compelling story. Check out "The Cabbie", the first in the installment of Canon...

How To: Build a Simple Redstone Adding Machine in Minecraft

Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. There are many amazing redstone builds, but probably the pinnacle of redstone technology is the redstone calculator. The ability to turn simple game mechanics into a real-life calculator is one of genius, pioneered by some very clever Minecrafters many months ago.

How To: Install Linux to a Thumb Drive

Let's face it, CDs and DVDs are a thing of the past. We no longer use them as a storage medium because they are slow, prone to failure in burning, and non-reusable. The future is flash memory. Flash memory is cheap, fast, and efficient. Eventually, flash drives might even replace discs as the preferred prerecorded selling format for movies.

Cocktail Couture: Robotic Booze Generating Dress

Meet DareDroid: sexy nurse, geek couture and mobile bartender, engineered into an all-in-one technologically advanced garment. Created by fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht, hacker Marius Kintel, and sculptor Jane Tingley, the team calls themselves the Modern Nomads (MoNo), and their series of garments fall into Wipprecht's invented family of "Pseudomorphs". Pseudomorphs are tech-couture pieces that transform into fluid displays—which is exactly what DareDroid does.

News: OMG! World's Strongest Beer!!

What is the Strongest Beer in the World?? Long live the Queen and move over Sean Connery because the Scottish have done it! The strongest beer in the world belongs to a company called Brewdog out of Fraserburgh. The beer is called Tactical Nuclear Penguin and has an alcohol content of over 32% -WOW! That is more than many hard alcohols and its creator warns it should be drunk in "...spirit sized measures." This means no 12oz. bottle for this mother of all beers. Instead try a 2oz. shot glass!

Printable Tactile Astronomy: How to "See" Outer Space if You're Blind

Have you ever felt the desire to reach out and touch a galaxy? Or "feel" those stunning nebulas and planets you see in Hubble photos? As alluring as it sounds, it's safe to say the odds of your whim coming true are nonexistent. You'd have to travel about 6 earth years and spend millions of dollars building your own personal spacecraft to get close enough to actually wave your hand through one of Saturn's rings. But in an attempt to help the blind "see" what they're missing, some semblance of ...

News: 1.3 Million Dollar Surgical Robot Folds Paper Airplanes, Gives Manicures

Here's a two-in-one "tutorial" for you today; how to fold a paper airplane, and how to execute a belated St. Patrick's Day manicure. Just follow along and do as the da Vinci does—our adroit instructor is a surgical robot, with a hefty price tag of approximately 1.3 million dollars, plus several hundred thousand dollars in annual maintenance fees. In truth, the da Vinci doesn't have the brain power to dictate the folding of a simple origami plane, nor does it know how to paint orange and green...

How To: Get Rid of All that Space Junk

How about a laser? One that is strong enough to nudge debris out of earth orbit. That's what NASA contractor James Mason wants to do, and his lab simulations suggest that the idea is possible. Mason wants to use a 5kW ground-based laser and a ground-based 1.5 meter telescope to spot potentially hazardous space waste and shove it off, by about 200 meters per day of lasering. It's kind-of like air traffic control for near earth orbit.

News: Making Ordinary Objects Extraordinary

Kevin Van Aelst creates witty visual "one-liners" by recontextualizing everyday, ordinary objects. With a few simple tweaks, the viewer recognizes a roll of tape as the ocean or reads gummi worms as chromosomes or understands mitosis through the use of sweet, sugary donuts.

News: Hello Emily. Goodbye Pamela Anderson.

There is little design artifice to this device. This EMILY (Emergency Integrated Lifesaving LanYard is a $3500 robot-lifeguard purchased for Malibu lifeguards. Remote-controlled and capable of 28 mph, product testing confirms that EMILY just might be smarter than David Hasselhoff and more buoyant than Pamela Anderson.