SENZ storm umbrella

Designed by TU Delft students. Smart design, still strange that no one else made a storm proof umbrella before. How it all got started...

Nice Anti-Gun Ad

Failed condom

I really hope, that the ones who use this condom get aids and not a baby. Otherwise it proves Darwin's theory isn't working anymore on the human species.

Creative advertisements with use of everyday objects

I Want One!

A Pygmy Jerboa.

More...

Nevada Test Site

This is the area where the US did a lot of nuclear detonation tests.

View Larger Map

Notice the biggest crater at the top. That's Sedan Crater, and at 390m it is the largest man-made crater in the United States. It was created to study the use of nuclear weapons for mining and cratering. It released the most radioactive fallout of any test in the US. This is the explosion that made it:

Damien Walters Gymnastic and Parkour Skills

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Hippeastrum Timelapse

I made another timelapse, too bad I couldn't finish it nicely because I needed my camera for a different timelapse. 34 hours capturing, 1 image per minute, 25fps playback. High-res under title.

Live Oystercatcher Webcam

Press play |> on the player (needs windows media player)

http://tjeld.uib.no/ The Oystercatcher is one out of very few shorebirds that actually feed their young. This is also a condition for successful breeding on roofs up to 30 meters above the ground. In Bergen the adults feed in the parks near the building where they breed, and bring the food for their young. It seems that they mainly deliver Earth-worms Lumbricidae sp. to the chicks. The chicks stay on the roof until they are more or less able to fly.

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haematopodidae

Mac vs. PC

We all know the sometimes funny yet often incorrect Mac commercials don't we? If not check this short series. But this one is kinda funny:

Fear and Loathing: The Board Game

A boardgame based on the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Hubble floats away from the Space Shuttle Atlantis

PhysOrg: The Hubble Space Telescope has been with us for nearly two decades. In that time, its breathtaking images have captured people’s imaginations and its groundbreaking science has revealed some of the many secrets of our universe. This morning, at precisely 8:57 a.m. ET, a carefully orchestrated maneuver was carried out 350 miles above the Atlantic coastline of Africa, marking the successful end of the fifth and final shuttle servicing mission. [...] Thanks to new gyros, new batteries, new thermal blanketing and new science instruments, Hubble is poised to peer deeper into the cosmos than ever before. Spectacular images and data should start flowing from Hubble in about three months, after controllers have checked out and calibrated each of the observatory’s instruments and systems.

Slap Chop Auto-Tune

The internets took this original infomercial and mixed and auto-tuned it.

Cloud Timelapse part 2

Yes, another bloody cloud time lapse I made! Cybrbeast, I will use your music suggestions next time, they didn't really fit with these clouds imo so I used some corny Bach sounds. Please click title for full resolution.

Star Sky Timelapse - Milky Way

HD version under title.

The Clock Clock

The Sand Dancer

It's a bit long, but you don't have to watch it all to see the amazing art this man makes without seeing it from above.

Dwarf Planet Impact

Most of you have probably already seen this animation, but I promised to post it for mr wiggles and it should be on our blog anyway because it is all pretty. Not sure how realistic it is. It's in full YoutTubeHD under the title.

why no to talk to the police

He talks kinda fast but he's also fairly funny and insightful

Minim

This is a Nice game:

You need to range atoms to created molecules, its "almost" like the real thing.

Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat: The Story

One of the internet memes that's been playing around. The Key Board Cat.CNN did some high level investigative research ;) and dug up the story behind the cat.

The best of Key Board Cat And the site that aggregates all Keyboard Cat videos, but most of them aren't that good. We now have a meme channel.

Top 10 Illusions of 2009

The three pink- and blue-colored parallelograms are the same. All blue lines are equal in length; all pink lines are also equal. Box B is simply Box C rotated counterclockwise. But the three parallelograms look different, and boxes B and C look different. Our visual system assumes that the diagonals in A and C are foreshortened and “stretches” them perceptually. The pink lines in B should be foreshortened and stretched, just as they are in C. But our visual system doesn’t stretch a horizontal quite as much as it stretches a diagonal.

Most of the illusions (including the number 1) are animated on the site. Also check out the finalists of previous years in the menu on the left.

Space Telescopes Herschel and Planck ready for launch

Let's hope this €1.5 billion (€3 per European) ESA project will have a safe trip :) Here some details for the space telescope/cosmology folks ;) Info from wiki and ESA website.

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Planck is a space observatory designed to observe the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over the entire sky, using high sensitivity and angular resolution. Mass: 1900 kg Orbit: Lissajous orbit about the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system (L2), with an average amplitude of about 400 000 km. Objectives:

• High resolution detections of both the total intensity and polarization of the primordial CMB anisotropies;
• Creation of a catalogue of galaxy clusters through the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect;
• Observations of the gravitational lensing of the CMB, as well as the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect;
• Observations of bright extragalactic radio (Active Galactic Nuclei) and infrared (dusty galaxy) sources;
• Observations of the Milky Way, including the local interstellar medium, distributed synchrotron emission and measurements of the Galactic magnetic field;
• Studies of the local Solar System, including planets, asteroids, comets and the Zodiacal light.

Images:

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The Herschel Space Observatory is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission originally proposed in 1982 by a consortium of European scientists Mass: 3400 kg Orbit: Lissajous orbit about the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system (L2). Objectives: Herschel will specialise in collecting light from objects in our Solar System as well as the Milky Way and even extragalactic objects billions of light-years away, such as newborn galaxies, and is charged with four primary areas of investigation:

• Galaxy formation in the early universe and the evolution of galaxies;
• Star formation and its interaction with the interstellar medium;
• Chemical composition of atmospheres and surfaces of Solar System bodies, including planets, comets and moons;
• Molecular chemistry across the universe.

Images:

Strange Musical Instrument: Giant Contrabass

The contrabass saxophone (wiki):

More giant contrabass instruments (flute, recorder, clarinet, sarrusophone). Those are some giant instruments. Part 2 in the series of strange musical instruments, more to come (maybe).

A kick in the chest by Rutten or a car crash

What would you prefer?

F15 trail

the master of sound imitating: the Lyrebird

This little bird can't make his own songs, so he superbly immitates the sounds (natural and artificial) he hears around him and mixes it to a song. The song of every Lyrebird is unique, and used to entertain the ladies. He probably gets more success with his mixsongs, than me with my dancing skilzz

Also a story I found on the internet (of course not confirmed) is that this Lyrebird delayed the woodcutters work because he kept imitating the sounds of the fire alarm.

Awesome Time Slice Commercial

An awesome commercial making use of the time slice or frozen moment effect. It's a commercial for the silly Philips 21:9 LCD TV. Okay, you don't have black bars in widescreen movies with that TV, but you do have black bars on the side with any video that is less than 21:9 ratio.

Slow Motion HD Surfer

Like only the BBC can do it:

YooouuuTuuube

Click title for an example or try your own videos here: www.yooouuutuuube.com/. CPU intensive.

Amazing Time Lapse From a Ship at Night

From Flickr description (with more video): Assembled in Quicktime from 2000 still images taken by using a Nikon D700 in the "interval timer" mode. The camera was fastened to an outside rail and set to take a photo every six seconds. Quicktime then assembled the photos into a .mov file that plays back at 12 frames per second. So, one minute of movie time represents 72 minutes of trip time on the channel. The first half begins just below the Port of Houston Authority Turning Basin (the very end of the channel) and continues down to Green's Bayou. The second half takes us from there to Morgan's Point at the head of Galveston Bay. From there we still have 31.5 miles of channel across the bay to the pilot station outside the Galveston jetties. It looks incredibly fast, but we were actually only making 5-6 knots in the first half and no more than 10 knots in the open areas of the second half.

The Amazing Color Changing Card Trick

Gigapixel Aparment Buildings Photograph

This image of condos in Vancourver is over 1000 megapixels. which means you can zoom in to this range and let out your inner voyeur. Full sized zoomable photo here. There are three other gigapixel images like this on the site. Also check out gigapan.org which has many gigapixel panoramas. There is also a Gigapxl layer in Google Earth which has very beautiful images but only of American places. The images from Gigapxl were made with a true gigapixel camera as opposed by the stitching that is done by gigapan.

Zhao Liang Confirmed World's Tallest Man

The 27-year-old Zhao Liang is 2.46 meters tall -- 10 centimeters taller than Bao Xishun, who is recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world's tallest man. However, Zhao has not been independently measured by the Guinness judges.

Zhao's surgeon, Liu Yuchen with the Tianjin Anjie Hospital, said the Zhao will be able to walk normally two months after the surgery, but advised against participation in basketball exercises.

Zhao received a health checkup in the hospital before the surgery. Doctors measured his height under the media observation.

The doctor Liu said Zhao is in good health. He does not have any health complications related to his height.

More pictures... The tallest man who ever lived was Robert Wadlow at 272 cm.

Zombie caterpillars controlled by voodoo wasps

More @ NewScientist.

Animal photos by Igor Siwanowicz

This Siwanowicz got some nice photos of animals (mostly insects and reptiles).

here are 3 of my favorites: