bats
Gadgets
Players Wouldn’t Use Performance-Enhancing Reebok Vector O Bat
11:50PM Dan Nosowitz | In America’s pastime, where honour and fair competition reign and unfair advantages are never tolerated, there is no place for the “aerodynamic” Reebok Vector O baseball bat. After all, ballplayers would do anything to avoid besmirching their sport! More »
Entertainment
‘Spacebat Tribute’ Video Will Make You Cry Like ‘We Are the World’
4:00AM Jesus Diaz | I just wanted to hug you one last time, you little furry space hero you! More »
Random Stuff
Shuttle-Riding Bat Dies The Most Glorious Death Imaginable
11:40PM John Herrman | On a cool spring eve March 15th, 2009 a bat, crippled and wistful, clung to the Space Shuttle Discovery as it was thrust toward the great beyond. Goodbye and godspeed, my magnificent Spacebat. More »
Screens
How To Repair Your Plasma TV With a Baseball Bat (NSFW)
7:52PM John Herrman | That rumour that Australian toilets flush the other way isn’t true, so lets start a new one: In Australia, you can fix things by beating them. See you in my children, new trivia meme! (AU:Um, looks like our US cousins are a little confused about us here in Australia. Firstly, the water does flush the other way, and secondly, everyone knows that you fix things by giving them a strong whack… it’s the Australian way!) More »
Gadgets
Air Force Wants Bat-Senses In Micro Spy Drones For ‘Urban Combat’
2:15AM Kit Eaton | We’ve seen bat-like drones, and even heard of genuine bat weaponry, but now the Pentagon is after micro UAVs with genuine echolocation bat-senses, for real. The Air Force has just awarded a new contract to develop swarms of micro drones that use bat-inspired echolocation for navigation through the complex airspace in urban environments cluttered with trees, wires, buildings and poles. Test flights are due by 2010 apparently. And if the idea of hordes of tiny, flapping military spy drones fluttering though the air doesn’t creep you out, you’re clearly not in the Halloween spirit yet. [AviationWeekDanger Room] More »
Toys
Baseball Bat Can Break Lego Minifig Legs
9:20AM Jesus Diaz | Believe it or not, there are no baseball bats in the Lego universe. Why? Probably because a minifig could use one to break another minifig’s plastic cranium. And we all know that you can’t use weapons in Lego’s universe, much less break minifig craniums. This is why Brickarms, the dealer of All Things Violent for Lego minifigs, has released the baseball bat weapon, including a psychopath minifig posing with it for their publicity shots: More »
Science
Wind Turbines Murdering Bats By Popping Their Lungs
9:00AM John Mahoney | On the list of ways to go, having your lungs explode is definitely on the gnarlier side. Too bad for bats in treehugging locales, though, because that’s what’s happening to them, due to a pretty serious error with their awesome echolcation systems crossing with the seemingly benign forces of Bernoulli’s principle put into motion by the turbines’ huge spinning blades. Ouch all around. More »
Gadgets
Ultrasonic Batgoggles Turns You Into Steampunk Batman
8:53PM Gizmodo US Edition | Giz reader and Batman-wannabe Suneth Attygalle has built these cool, albeit a bit goofy looking, ultrasonic batgoggles. As you can see in the video, they allow the wearer to detect the proximity of objects using just US$60 in components, including welding goggles, a microcontroller, and ultrasonic sensors. More »
Gadgets
CIA Animal Tech: Bats, Cats and Rats As Covert Operatives
4:20AM Wilson Rothman | I was surprised to learn that the CIA has had a long though not always fruitful relationship with the animal kingdom. In Spycraft, the authors describe many clever animal-assisted devices, from the dead-rat dead-drop pouch to the “acoustic kitty,” a cat with a remote listening system embedded in its body. And what’s this about the 1 million bats the CIA’s precursor, the OSS, were gonna use to firebomb Tokyo during WWII? More »
Gadgets
