The wait is finally over for those eagerly anticipating the release of the flame-throwing robot dog announced by Ohio-based Throwflame last summer. Meet the Thermonator, hailed as the “first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog,” now available for purchase at a price tag of $9,420.
The Thermonator is a quadruped robot equipped with an ARC flamethrower affixed to its back, capable of being fueled by either gasoline or napalm. Boasting a one-hour battery life and a flame-throwing range extending up to 30 feet, this cutting-edge creation also offers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for seamless remote control via smartphone.
Japanese space company Astro Live Experiences (ALE) is set to create the world’s first artificial meteor shower, according to reports from CTV News. ALE’s meteor shower will be designed to be visible from the ground and is scheduled to take place in 2023.
The company will use a satellite to release small pellets into the atmosphere, which will burn up as they re-enter, creating the visual effect of a meteor shower. ALE founder and CEO Lena Okajima said in a statement, “We’re targeting the whole world, as our stockholders come from different countries and regions.”
The company plans to debut the artificial meteor shower during the opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were delayed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, ALE postponed the event again, citing the need for additional testing and refinement.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
Everyone wants to know what it’s like to fly, and the BMW Electrified Wingsuit brings that fantasy to life. This concept product allows you to soar through the sky at 186 mph without any restrictions while offering a compact and light design. To make this possible, the electric wingsuit boasts BMW technology and uses a chest-mounted rig for power. It offers 15 kW of grunt between two carbon impellers.
The transition from Old English to Modern English was a process, not an event
Changes in language don’t occur overnight, though slang terms come in and out of use relatively quickly and new words are invented while others fall into disuse. The rules of grammar you learned in school are the same ones your parents were taught and what your own kids will (or do) use. A few new words are tossed in the mix every few years to keep things interesting (remember the uproar when “ain’t” was added to the dictionary?).
The transition from Old English to Middle English to Modern English was a process rather than an event — the rules didn’t all suddenly change on May 24, 1503. Before the Normans invaded England in 1066, the people living in Britain spoke Old English or Anglo-Saxon. Some of the words from that time are still with us — the ones of the vulgar four-letter variety. Old English was so unlike Modern English it’s fair to view it as a foreign language. For example, here are the opening lines of the poem Beowulf:
Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum
þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon
hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon.
I’m completely lost. Something about a garden, maybe?
Modern English translation as follows:
Listen! We — of the Spear-Danes in the days of yore,
Plus smart glasses from Google, transforming drones, AR clothing and other patents from Big Tech.
It’s the weekend! Time to switch my digital avatar’s outfit from a suit to lounge pants. I don’t actually live in VR yet (though I did try working in it this week), but a new patent from Amazon might make that a reality sooner rather than later. The company’s also working on drones that could get deliveries to me even quicker than its other drones, and Facebook is working on making immersive videos work on any screen in my house. Who needs to go outside when I can bring the entire world to my couch? Big Tech’s patents this week seem very on board with me staying at home as long as I want to.
And remember: The big tech companies file all kinds of crazy patents for things, and though most never amount to anything, some end up defining the future.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that over a third of Americans who took its survey reportedly misused household cleaners by using them on their fruits and vegetables in the attempt to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Calls to poison control centers regarding disinfectants and household cleaners reportedly went up since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Thirty-nine percent of respondents reported engaging in non-recommended high-risk practices with the intent of preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, such as washing food products with bleach, applying household cleaning or disinfectant products to bare skin, and intentionally inhaling or ingesting these products,” the CDC report read.
No matter how they may make you feel, licking your gadgets and electronics is never recommended. Unless you’re a researcher from Meiji University in Japan who’s invented what’s being described as a taste display that can artificially recreate any flavor by triggering the five different tastes on a user’s tongue.
Years ago it was thought that the tongue had different regions for tasting sweet, sour, salty, and bitter flavors, where higher concentrations of taste buds tuned to specific flavors were found. We now know that the distribution is more evenly spread out across the tongue, and that a fifth flavor, umami, plays a big part in our enjoyment of food. Our better understanding of how the tongue works is crucial to a new prototype device that its creator, Homei Miyashita, calls the Norimaki Synthesizer.
It was inspired by how easily our eyes can be tricked into seeing something that technically doesn’t exist. The screen you’re looking at uses microscopic pixels made up of red, green, and blue elements that combine in varying intensities to create full-color images. Miyashita wondered if a similar approach could be used to trick the tongue, which is why their Norimaki Synthesizer is also referred to as a taste display.
