You're never too young to start building your vast swarm of robotic minions. Taking over the world requires a whole lot of robots. The sheer volume of robots needed means your first wave will have to be made of cheap materials. After they take over key resources, you can upgrade to Kevlar and titanium. But to start, let's make popsicle stick insect robots!
24th Street Theatre Saturday Explorer Series 2012 Saturday Explorer Series 2012
Electrical engineer Greg Leyh and company are currently creating a pair of 118-foot Tesla coils! The largest coil built to date is an 18-story tower constructed back in 1903 by Tesla himself, but Leyh has decided to not only recreate the huge coil, but double it in size. The project goes by the name of "Lightning on Demand" and is currently being constructed on an 81-acre plot in the Nevada desert. Once it's finished, the pair of coils will output 10 million volt acres 100 yards long—the size...
Nikola Tesla In my opinion, one of the most neglected inventors of all time. The names Edison and Marconi come to mind as familiar, but Tesla? Most think of a car. Few know that Tesla is responsible for alternating current, florescent lights, radar, remote control, generators that preform efficiently, the spark plug, and many others. The U.S Supreme Court declared in 1943 that Tesla, not Marconi, was the true inventor of the radio.
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 ...
Here's a nice little challenge for you to try this weekend. For those of you with Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, and are looking to make an easy 25G, this is for you. The 'How Pedestrian' achievement asks you to walk the entirety of the level "Halo". You know, the massive second level of the game. However, there's one big obstacle standing in your way, and that's where the Achievement Hunters come in. See, you have to grenade jump your way across a pretty large gap. I'd try to explain it, ...
Truly spectacular and one the most breathtaking DIY endeavors to grace the front page of WonderHowTo, a recreation of Pixar's UP house was launched to an altitude of 10,000 feet in a private airfield near Los Angeles this past week. The project was executed by a team of engineers, scientists and veteran balloon pilots—(meaning, please, Do Not Try This at Home).
Inspired by the vast and exotic geography of Iceland, Canadian-Hungarian artist Eszter Burghardt uses food and wool to reconstruct her memory of the landscape. The series, "Edible Vistas and Wooly Sagas", is molded from "poppy seeds, coco powder, coffee, milk, and chocolate cake crumbs" and Icelandic wool—there are endless herds of native sheep wandering the countryside. She then captured the dioramas with a macro lens.
Blacksmith Sage Werbock —also known as the Great Nippulini, "pierced weight lifting extraordinaire"—welded together this Star Wars Imperial Walker sculpture with a bunch of old computer parts and scrap metal. Currently listed on Etsy for $450, the AT-AT is artfully assembled as follows:
Surfing Magazine staff photographer Nathan Lawrence and Balaram Stack, Oliver Kurtz and Michael Dunphy descend upon Bocas Del Toro and Red Frog Bungalows for a surf trip of a lifetime. Nathan Lawrence is one of the best surf photographers in the world and he summed up the conditions over the week as ,"the best beach breaks I have ever seen in my life". This is saying a lot for someone who is payed to travel the world and snap photos of the best professional surfers in the world. look for the ...
Things You'll Need 5-20 lbs. grapes
What's the difference between a paper plane and a paper space plane? Altitude! About 125,000 feet to be precise:
Watch surfer Mark Visser take on a 30-40 foot massive wave off the famous Jaws reef break on Maui in nearly total darkness. Guided only by the LED lights built into his life vest and board, helicopters hovered overhead, filming the event. "It wasn’t until I saw the pictures I realized how big it was. This project has been two years in the planning and it was the scariest, but most exciting thing I have ever done. Riding in complete darkness meant I had to go off feeling. I had to zone out fro...
Getting the best deal on laminate flooring can take a little time to research all the choices on the market these days. The two basic choices you have these days are buying online or buying in your local market. Online merchants don't tend to carry the high overhead cost as your local flooring store. There are pros and cons when buying your laminate flooring from either place.
Lori Nix's teeny, tiny, incredibly laborious, detail-oriented dioramas are, in a word, insane. We've seen an amazing diorama or two... but these are eerily obsessive. And creepy- all the spaces are depressed, abandoned, and in terrible disrepair.
MIT students get to have all the fun... Mike Nawrot and Romain Teil constructed their fully-functional, homemade wooden roller coaster in just two weeks, aptly named the Reverse Cowgirl. We've seen lots of thrill-seeking backyard contraptions, but this one imprisons the rider in a freaky vertical position:
Kudos to Fred Keller and Judy Foster, of Anchorage, Alaska, for undertaking quite possibly the DIY project of the year. The retired couple spent 11 months converting a 1976 Mazda pickup truck into a gigantic radio flyer wagon car. "'I think the words I hear the most often is 'awesome' or 'cool' or people go by and give us a 'hi' sign,' says Foster. 'The wheels are made from hub caps and detergent bottles, and the steering wheel is the actual wheel from a wagon. The handle rises eight feet hig...
Back in 2000, photographer Vincent Laforet scaled the Empire State building, a 1250 foot journey that would make me wet my pants.
Here is prank that's fun for the whole family! Each Jackass guy except for Wee Man gets their own Port-O-Potty, completely filled with all kinds of poo and filth. Wee Man gets one of those Human Hamster Balls that you get into, also filled with poo and whatnot. All of the shitters are lined up one after another, like a row of dominoes . . . but they are not on the ground, they are all on platforms that are 6 or 7 feet high (just so when it tips over, it REALLY tips over). Now, back to Wee Man...
I'm sure you've seen in The Parent Trap (or most likely on YouTube) a sleeping person set afloat so they wake up in the middle of a lake. I wanted to add a little more excitement to that concept. It would take a lot more preparation and skill, but ultimately we replace the lake with air. Pick your least favorite friend, wait until he's asleep, get him in a plane, strap him with a parachute, and film him as he opens his eyes to the earth thousands of feet below.
This article is a must read for all of you mediocre crossword enthusiasts who can only dream of meeting Will Shortz. (I put myself in this category.)
Another sweet boat this weekend (see yesterday's Zipper Motorboat), the Seabreacher X is a high-speed sub, fashioned after a man-eating shark. Built by Innespace, the submarine has a 260 horsepower engine, can speed through the water at 50 mph on the surface and 25 mph when diving, and best of all: the Seabreacher X can jump 12 feet into the air!
My best prank would be to tie a bunch of helium balloons to a chair and tie a really long rope to the chair (probably 20 feet high). Then tell someone the skit will be for them to get in the chair and the balloons will take them up and they won't know how to get down. Once they are up in the air and have no way to get down then you can throw things at them... like poop. And to top it off you could shoot paint ball guns at the balloons to pop them and let the person down.
Lock up your grandfather clocks; there's a new lady on the scene. Meet "365" by German designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, an electric grandmother clock that completes a two-meter (or six-and-a-half-foot) knitted scarf once every 52 weeks.
Kitschy kicks your thing? Try these self-lacing sneakers on for size. Inspired by the iconic Nike Air 2015s worn by Michael J. Fox's character in Back to the Future Part II, these shoes utilize an Arduino-powered force sensor and somewhat bulky pair of rear-mounted servo motors to pull themselves tight when offered a human foot. A switch reverses the process. Feeling ambitious? Head over to Instructables for complete instructions on how to build your own pair.
This summer if you are in New York get yourself in some rubber soled shoes, buy a timed ticket in advance and run to the rooftop of The Met for The Big Bambu. It’s green, literally. It’s made from one of the most sustainable materials around. And it’s even recyclable! And you can walk through it!
If you are born without any arms, you will figure it out. Somehow, I doubt Ren Jiemei needed sewing tutorials on how to thread a needle with her feet. But here it is.
INSANE what you can do with a truckload of packing tape. Viennese/Croatian design collective For Use/Numen uses the common junk drawer office supply to create massive, self-supportive cocoons that visitors can climb inside and explore.
Janelle Monáe is simply in a class of her own. Genre-bending beats, distinctive fashion sense (à la the fabulous Grace Jones), and sweet dance moves to boot. Whether or not Monáe falls within your musical realm, you've gotta admit: the tiny five-foot-tall singer is chock full of infectious energy and exceptional talent.
This year's fifth annual Maker Faire featured a fully articulated, fire-breathing animatronic dragon named Saphira (after the dragon from the book Eragon).
Sean Stiegemeier has captured absolutely beautiful timelapse footage documenting the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland:
I was shooting last Friday and for a particular shot I wanted a special on a product; I wanted it focused, but soft. Unfortunately we had run out of flags to cut it so my Key Grip came up with a great DIY solution: cut a hole in black wrap, put it on a stand a few feet away from the light (Dedo 400W HMI) and cover that hole with a light diffusion (Opal). The distance from the light guaranteed a defined shape while the diffusion softened up the light itself.
The Rivaldo is a famous soccer move named after the majestic Brazilian playmaker. Using fancy footwork, the Rivaldo rockets the soccer ball away from your opponent and spins it around so fast he won't know which way to go.
Recently I've become fascinated by vertical gardens. They're cropping up all over the place, whether it's in my neighborhood's newest hair salon or in San Diego as the beginnings of a new company. Vertical gardens have several cool advantages over horizontal ones:
Looking for a cheap & easy stylus (but not interested in using processed pork?) Adam Kumpf of design firm Teague demonstrates how to make a DIY soft conductive stylus for the iPhone, iPad, or any device with a capacitive touch screen. All it takes is a pencil and sock. Yes, it's that easy. "We've been experimenting with conductive foams and fabrics in search of a middle ground. Fortunately, it's quite easy to make a soft, conductive writing tool using some pretty basic materials. All you need...
This one smells like a fish story. It is not. Tuesday April 13, Dave and I got up to surf westward at 7 in the morning. First rate waves. Headache cold water....sun blocked by the cliffs. Fast, clean, beach break. 3-4 foot sets, mostly lefts. About 15 dolphins swam by. Blase blase. We always see dolphins. But then some bigass whale with barnacles breaches. We are speechless. It is about 20 feet from us. We follow it for about thirty seconds and pinch ourselves. Have-you-ever? No...
Scott Balogh is an amazing surfer and obsessed with showing you the best surf places...mostly cause he wants to get 6 good hours every day. Red Frog is eco certified, which means it uses rain water, and the internet connection is spotty. But this is a plus. you feel like you are on a tropical island...and you are. Only access by motor boat. Scotty loves nothing better than to roast the obnoxious surfers by cutting a rooster tail 1 feet from their surf board. "I roasted that brazilian j...
The age of personal flight has finally arrived. You can now purchase your very own jet pack for the extremely high price of $75,000. The Martin Aircraft Company Jetpack gets 30 miles to the tank, sails along at 60 mph, and can reach heights of almost 8,000 feet. Oh, and bonus: since it weighs less than 254 pounds, you won't need a pilot's license to operate. Previously, NASA's Wicked Cool Take on the Classic Jetpack.
Find out how to tone your legs with help from Men's Health. In this video, learn the "barbell squat" exercise, which will work your lower body and core muscles. It's a great leg workout.
Google Street View has civilization well covered, but what about the great outdoors? Street View now travels via snowmobile in the unpaved Canadian wilderness, just in time for the winter games.
