Yeah, yeah, the Large Hadron Collider is in no real danger of accidentally opening up a black hole that swallows the world when it’s finally fired up on August 7. We know. But still, we sometimes like to pretend it is, and this is where Cern’s LHC cooldown status website comes in. Using it you can track the current temperatures of its 1600+ superconducting magnets in real time. But what should you be looking for?
NASA has been forced to check its math after a 13-year-old German boy wrote to tell them their calculations for the probability of an asteroid hitting earth were incorrect. Agency bosses had predicted a one-in-45,000 chance of an interstellar object bringing an end to life as we know it; that was until teen Nico Marquardt told them that the figure was closer to one in 450.
Now I don’t want to alarm you, but there just happens to be a binary star about 8,000 light years from us that’s on the brink of exploding. Not a big deal normally, but this one happens to have its pole pointed right at us, which means that if it explodes in a gamma-ray burst it could shoot a beam of destructive, ozone-layer-melting gamma rays at us all Death-Star-like.
Here’s a video of Andy Rubin, the Android head honcho at Google, showing off a build of the new mobile OS on a touchscreen phone to the BBCs Darren waters. It’s interesting, with things like DoomQuake and Google Maps Street View looking pretty great, especially on a phone running at 300 Mhz (half of the iPhone’s processing power). It’s not perfect, but it’s also not ready for prime time, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on some of the janky-looking elements of the OS. Thoughts? [BBC via BB Gadgets]
We are not strangers to a crazy BBQ design or two, but this BFG BBQ—think Doom weapon, not friendly giant—takes the proverbial biscuit. Spotted on Flickr, and the work of an unknown Texan, the grill stands 19-feet long, has a 36″ x 60″ primary grill and a 12″ x 36″ secondary grill. The handle houses a fire box, while the front sight and range star logo enclose dampers. Check out the gallery for some more awesome shots.
DOOM is on the iPhone! Hoorah! The iPhone was worth the $599 after all! Well, almost. The game runs, but it can’t be controlled and it’s lacking audio of any sort.
Think of it as a Hello World app but with satanic monsters attacking your defenseless body. We do, however, very much look forward to blasting away hellspawn with the touch of a finger. A middle finger. [iphoneworld]Thanks everybody!
