This is how you make a hot tub, hillbilly style. Three guys from the prairies of Illinois turned an old stock tank sitting in the open air into a jacuzzi, and heated it up using quicklime, that scary caustic stuff that burns your skin off if you’re not too careful. A video of how they did it, using gas masks, tin baths and a lot of ingenuity, is after the jump.
How many times have you been walking around SoHo when you spot a robot celebrity trying to play it cool? You tap him on the shoulder and are like, “You’re the Robot from Lost in Space!” And then he turns around and…how embarrassing. It’s just a gumball machine with some hosing stuck to the side. Wait, no, it was the Robot from Lost in Space! See? It gets tricky.
newVideoPlayer("casio300fps_giz.flv", 475, 376,""); What’s the first thing we did with our Casio Exilim EX-F1, the Hiro Nakamura camera/camcorder that makes time stand still? We recorded a mini Cuisinart laying havoc to some tomatoes. Why? If you have to ask, you probably shouldn’t be here. The top vid is a view of the carnage at 300 frames per second. (As you’ll see, I call my food processor “Hitchcock” because it’s always keeping me in suspense.) Below, additional tomatoes get annihilated at 600fps and then 1200fps, with increasing detail, but decreasing resolution and light.
Evolution Robotics ViPR visual search technology is coming to the iPhone this June. ViPR allows you to take a photo of any movie, CD or book, send it to a server, and automagically get an email back loaded with information and links pointing to YouTube videos or iTunes Music Store links. It will also be deployed in Japan on KDDI’s au camera phones this Spring. As you will see in the iPhone demo after the jump, it works incredibly well, even when the object is partially occluded:
Think you’ve got what it takes to out-do Wing Commander Andy Green and the 1,228 kph land speed World-record set by Thrust SSC? Well, the team at North American Eagle may have a spot behind the controls for you: they’ve launched an open contest for the driver of their vehicle. The crazy red car looks a shade like an F-104 Starfighter, you say? Well, that’s because it actually is one. With wheels. For going along the ground, faster than the speed of sound.
We are very big fans of Rubik’s Magic Cube, even while none most of us have not solved it yet. Not even trying this one, really. Until today. Why I didn’t think about this before, I don’t know, but that felt oh-so-good. [Rubik in Gizmodo—thanks Carlitos]
When I saw this Bonanza banana, I thought of this. Eddie Murphy stuck one up a tailpipe, now you can stick a banana up your USB port—well, you can stick it wherever you like, it’s Friday and we’re all adults here. The fruity flash drive has an 8GB capacity, looks lovely, tastes rubbery, and is made by a firm called Hantat. [AVING via Pocket-lint]
Just the other day we were banging on about graphene, the new “wonder material” based on graphite, and now a British team has used it to craft the world’s smallest transistor. It’s just one atom deep and ten wide, and we don’t need to tell you that that’s teeny. In fact, it’s more than three times smaller than the 32nm transistors at the cutting edge of silicon-based microelectronics: so it looks like Gordon Moore’s law of transistor shrinkage has a bit of life in it yet.
Fans of space, high definition television, and watching-your-washing-machine-while-stoned rejoice! Honoring planet Earth and hoping to bring us closer to the awe that astronauts feel while watching or home planet, NASA is going to start transmitting crystal-clear HD video of Gaia taken from orbit—both totally silent and also with commentary.
Sanyo’s new Xacti isn’t much of a change over the previous version: mainly a new 8 megapixel CMOS sensor (versus the previous 6) and a “face chaser” mode. This maintains exposure and focus settings on people you’re videoing or snapping. There’s a new underwater shooting mode too, which corrects for blue-colour light effects, and seems sensible for a cam that can be taken down to 1.5 metres underwater for an hour. The rest of the camera remains the same, including the case and 5x optical zoom. Next time give us a waterproof HD version, eh Sanyo? Available in Japan at first, mid-May, for around $500. [Akihabaranews and Impress]
