Super Bowl viewers were rubbing their eyes at the sight of a TV spot pairing CBS late-night host David Letterman with longtime NBC archrival Jay Leno, plus media magnate Oprah Winfrey.
Appearing early in the CBS-aired game Sunday, the ad depicted Letterman and Leno glumly sharing a couch watching the Super Bowl, with Winfrey seated between [...]

“Wolf jumping over fence”
The Natural History Museum’s wildlife photographer of the year has been stripped of his £10,000 prize, after judges found he was likely to have hired a tame Iberian wolf to stage the image of a species seen rarely in the wild.
 

The contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the worlds premier visual illusion research community. Visual illusions are those perceptual experiences that do not match the physical reality. Our perception of the outside world is generated indirectly by brain mechanisms, and so all visual perception is illusory to some extent.
The study of [...]

Our pick goes to this hella holy fella.

Guinness World Records are searching for the people’s choice of the decade. Having shortlisted a top 100 from every record set in several categories during the past 10 years they now want the public to vote online for the best.

The man with the most body piercings is [...]

Here’s looking at you and you and you and…

This camera, made by the Nagoya Institute of Technology, has 158 lenses — more than any other camera in the world, according to Guinness World Records. It was made by associate professor Yojiro Ishino and his students in order to take 3D pictures of a flame. The [...]

Here’s a competitor in the 6th Robo-One Gate dance competition, held in Tokyo in November 2009. I wonder if the rules require the robots to look like scary cyborg schoolgirls?

Meeting Milo
Serious groundbreaking technology here. I have always said that motion controls for gaming, no matter what tech you used to derive your motion control, was a complete dead end for gaming, unless someone developed a revolutionary method to make it essential for gaming.

Every year the World Economic Forum picks a couple dozen or so up-and-coming technology startups from around the world and dubs them Technology Pioneers. In the past, Technology Pioneers have included Google and Mozilla. Last year, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove joined the club.
Today, the World Economic Forum is naming 26 Technology Pioneers for 2010. They [...]

The goal of the Green Life competition was to produce ecologically friendly solutions that were design-centric without looking completely unrealistic. One of the top three winners accomplished that feat by designing the “shelf.”
 

All Over The Planet In Seven Years! 

55-year-old Indian citizen Kashi Samaddar has completed an almost-seven year trip around the world. He has visited all 194 countries in the world, thereby setting a world record.
He spent £350,000 to visit every country on earth in the shortest time possible and thereby earnt himself a mention in the Guinness [...]

Featured Invention at the Colorado Inventor Showcase 2009
The Steam Viper was invented by 15 year old Philip Hartman from Loveland, CO. The Steam Viper will be the very first windshield cleaning/deicing wiper system to utilize the power of steam.
 

The Irish accent has beaten its French counterpart as the world’s sexiest.
Men with an Emerald Isle brogue came top in a poll of 5,000 women worldwide, while the French accent only came fourth, just ahead of Australian.
Italian was second. In third place was the Scottish burr. English was sixth and Swedish was seventh, with Spanish, [...]

DARPA is holding a competition to find ten large weather balloons. Winner gets $40,000!

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad [...]

A pet shop worker has set a new world record after stuffing 16 Madagascar hissing cockroaches – each more than 6cm long – into his mouth.
Sean Murphy, of Lansing, Michigan, US, shattered the old Guinness World Records score of 11 to secure the new mark.

Image: Anne Cavanagh and Dave McCarthy
The Wellcome Image Awards are given annually for achievement in scientific imagery. The 2009 winners were announced this week in London. Among those winners was the above image showing:
…the synthetic polymers used to coat a drug, either to target the release of the drug in a specific part of the [...]

Simply amazing
Master juggler Michael Moschen performs his incredibly famous, jaw-dropping piece where three balls and a triangle become a musical and visual work of art. (2nd video after the jump)

Researchers from Kitasato University in Tokyo have been awarded this year’s Ig Nobel Biology Prize for demonstrating a method to reduce kitchen waste by more than 90% by using bacteria derived from Giant Panda excrement.  Professor Fumiaki Taguchi, who shares the prize with fellow researchers Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei (both from the Kitasato University [...]

The Cocoon, which would ‘grow’ its own meals, won the Electrolux competition
A controversial cooker that ‘grows’ meat and fish by heating animal cells in your kitchen claimed first prize in the Electrolux design competition.The invention, called Cocoon, could develop food with the make-up and nutrients of real meat. (Pics and video)
 

The latest version of the T5000 biosensor from Ibis Biosciences
Medical detective work may have just gotten a lot easier.
Just how difficult it is gets highlighted every time an infectious disease sweeps the globe, as the new strain of swine flu did earlier this year. Current methods of testing for disease-causing microbes are pretty effective at [...]

Fame on four wheels

A century old record has been broken after Inspiration, a twin-finned car that looks like a prop from Thunderbirds, achieved an average speed of 139.84mph on two runs over a measured mile, at Edwards Air Force Base, California. That may not sound fast when a car has already broken the sound barrier, [...]

For the 2nd year running, the winner is Chicago
Sinking property values, high unemployment and prices, and poor environments add to the pressure felt by residents in these metros.
Few enjoy their commute. Just ask Stephen Dinwiddie, M.D., a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago.
“I think anybody who, like I do, commutes on the Kennedy on a [...]

Ddalgi now works for Edward D Jones.

A five-year-old parrot in South Korea has proved smarter than human investors in a stock investment contest. Ddalgi (Korean for strawberry), from Papua New Guinea, finished third in the six-week contest which ended on Wednesday, said Paxnet, an online stock market information provider. The bird competed with 10 stock [...]

The Urban Mole
It’s 2020, and cities are so overcrowded that it’s impossible to deliver packages. UPS trucks have nowhere to double-park, and obnoxious bike messengers can’t even ride on pedestrian-jammed sidewalks. How, then, can important parcels reach their destinations in a squalid megalopolis of the future?
 

So small yet already incredible!
Yes, it is a commercial for Evian Water, but a very funny and amazing one that will go down in the history books for its style and ingenuity. Second video after the jump.

Fun at 1600 meters!

A tightrope walker in China has broken a world record after crossing a wire suspended 1,607 meters above sea level.
As if that isn’t hairraising enough, this video also captures the moment Ahdili Wuxiuer broke a second world record by climbing over his pupil Saddar in the middle of the wire.
(video after jump…)