The Nerf Vulcan is definitely awesome—but it is not as cool as it could be. Manapotions have developed a hack that adds an LED round counter and a 500 round-per-minute firing capacity.

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Using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Dr Massimo Marengo--from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics--and Dr Dana Backman--from the SETI Institute--are claiming that there's a solar system which is a younger twin of our own, just 10.5 light-years from us. Nothing surprising, really, until they tell you that the star is called Epsilon Eridani. Which just happens to be, hold your tinfoil hats on, the legendary home star of a certain Mr. Spock. According to Marengo, they have a pretty good idea of how it looks like:

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How does one design a propulsion system that combines a full-scale turbine engine and a Constant Volume Combustion (CVC) engine that is capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload up to 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours? DARPA has released new details on how they plan on tackling this issue with their Vulcan engine--a ramjet / scramjet hybrid that will take an aircraft like the Falcon HTV-3X from 0 to Mach 4 with a traditional turbine engine, then kick in the CVC to push it to Mach 6 and beyond.

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It looks like a prop from the latest Dr. Who series, it clamps down with the deliberateness of a Vulcan, and it feels... well... not too bad. The Powernic finger-pressure massager is a pretty serious apparatus, and in the wrong hands it could probably do quite a bit of damage. Good thing there's a touch-sensitive manual override on the side. The little vibrating LED capsule can be used by itself, if you're into that. As you can see in the vid, I favoured the full-on claw. [Semi Y&J]

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