Category: Crazy Stuff

The popular suffix beat out “Dark Brandon” and “quiet quitting” as 2022’s Word Of The Year

By William Hughes

Language is an ever-evolving and living thing; a social construct plucked from the minds of millions, with each hand that touches it shaping it in some small but ineffable way. And like all living things, it must, eventually, give way to the natural order of things, and do as we all are destined to do: Crap its pants, and then die.

As it happens, said ignominious death occurred, for the English language, just a few short hours ago today, when the American Dialect Society—a collection of “linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, authors, editors, professors, university students, and independent scholars”—decided to throw their combined academic acumen behind naming “-ussy” the 2022 Word Of The Year. 

In other news, we’re in hell now, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Continue reading… “American Dialect Society names “-ussy” its 2022 Word Of The Year, and there’s nothing we can do about it”

I’ve just recently started discovering water sports, and some of them are downright addictive. Kayaking seems to be a great way to unwind and work out at the same time, but riding a jet ski is ten times as exhilarating. Of course, there are plenty of other options out there if you’re keen to cool down on the water.

by Dragos Chitulescu 

You’ve probably seen at least one project developed by GrindHardPlumbing Cobefore. Over a year ago, we showed you one of their most ridiculous contraptions: a supercharged Barbie Jeep. 

And their work proves that you don’t need tons of cash to have fun. You just have to come up with a cool idea and get to work. You can be creative on your own, or you can even draw inspiration from these guys.

Some of their most insane projects over the years include a 2JZ-powered Lawn Mower, several Power Wheels cars with crazy engine swaps, and a rotary drift trike. 

But one of their most recent endeavors seems to have attracted a lot of attention from people across the world. Several months ago, the guys posted a video revealing a rather small package from Jetstream Adventure boats.

Continue reading… “Micro Jet Boat Is a Tiny Yet Exciting Contraption, Goes on Wild Joy Ride”

By Thea Felicity

Chinese scientists are making strides in moving objects with our minds by experimenting with real-time, remote, and wireless mind control of metamaterials. 

Inventing Real Life Telekinesis.

Telekinesis, or using your mind to move items at a distance, conjures up images of pure fantasy. However, behind the curtain of fiction, scientists are actually working on it already. But one way to make Telekinesis possible is to combine brain signal collection technologies with developing programmable metasurfaces (PM), the functionalities or operating modes of which may be switched or changed by on-site programming or pre-defined software. 

Nonetheless, the majority of extant PMs are wired to users, manually operated, and not real-time.

This new experiment suggests a solid framework for accomplishing ‘real-life telekinesis.’

Continue reading… “Real Life-Jedi? Chinese Scientists Invent ‘Real Telekinesis’ Using Programmable Metamaterials and Bluetooth”

by Leiden University

A piece of corrugated rubber can function as a simple computer, displaying memory and displaying the ability to count to two. Physicists at Leiden University and the AMOLF research institute in Amsterdam researching mechanical metamaterials publish about the computing rubber in the journal PNAS. “Simple materials can process information, and we want to find the principles behind that.”

Where other physicists use telescopes, microscopes or particle accelerators to study their subjects, Martin van Hecke and Hadrien Bense just use pieces of rubber, which they fold and film. This way, they have proven that even an extremely simple material is able to perform some sort of information processing.

A video by the researchers (both at Leiden University and AMOLF research institute in Amsterdam) shows a piece of corrugated rubber, slowly squashed from above using a press. First, the corrugations slowly bend along, but at a certain point, they snap, which means that they suddenly pop into another shape. Bense and Van Hecke decided to view these snapping points as “bits,” which shift from 0 to 1 as they buckle, and back to 0 when they unsnap

Using camera’s and a lot of Bense’s patience, they charted all the states. Things get complicated fast: one piece of rubber showing three bits can theoretically exist in eight states. Each bit flip means a transition to another state.

Continue reading… “A computer made of floppy rubber”