Don’t try this at home: In this video, crazyperson Theo grey lights a grill with the help of some liquid oxygen. Suffice to say it’s a bit of overkill, but just the kind of overkill we like. [Instructables via PopSci]

Most building demolitions are precisely planned and controlled. When they aren’t, a factory in Cankiri, Turkey, does a barrel roll through the streets. Oops! [Boing Boing]

Craig Simms over at CNet has the report that the Lithium batteries are now classed as dangerous, and Australia Post is restricting how they are sent. Lithium-ion batteries can still be sent by road, so long as they are “rated for 2 grams, 100-Watt-hours or under” (whatever that means). And although most Lithium-ion batteries fit that requirement, there’s another hitch in that batteries with more than four cells are considered not safe to send, which rules out a whole heap of laptop batteries.

As CNet points out, this could have a huge knock-on effect on grey importing of electronics as well. Of course, it still seems a bit weird that Australia Post won’t let you ship the batteries by mail, even though you can still carry them with you on a passenger flight, but at least nobody loses their testicles this way…

[CNet]

In what must be the most incendiary Mythbusters test to date, the show’s crew tried to flatten a car…using a 1,125kph, two-stage rocket sled.

Spoiler: The car doesn’t quite flatten. It fragments all over the desert.

Spoiler 2: Rockets move very quickly. Or as Adam Savage so aptly puts it, “When that second stage kicked in I was thinking ‘I’ve never seen anything go that fast’, and then I realised, actually that’s correct: I have never seen anything go that fast.” [via GadgetLab]

The segment was intended to discover whether it was possible, as the saying goes, to knock someone’s socks off. I don’t know about the socks, but the resulting explosion did manage to break windows throughout Esparto and toss one very suprised woman off her couch. Afterward, she claimed that the experience was “fun, really fun.”

What a trooper.

At any rate, the Mythbusters crew replaced all the windows that same day and the sentiment around town about the incident seems to be generally positive (despite the fact that no one in the town was informed of the taping beforehand). There is no word on when the episode might air, but I’m setting my DVR to record as we speak. Should be an interesting episode. [KCRA via Crunchgear]

That’s right, these people are blowing up a bus for science. In particular, they’re testing out new forensic cameras that are disaster-proof. In other words, cameras that can withstand the impact of being blown up in a bus, or other natural disasters like flooding and volcanoes.According to PopSci, the experiments were partically successful, in that 14 out of 16 of the camera chips were recovered from the explosion. The question now is whether or not the data on the chips will be readable…

[PopSci]