Itsy bitsy spiders outside this building's glass panels, exposed to the elements — twenty four storeys from the ground!
The title says it all. And it’s right here.
NASA had us all on the edge of our seats last week when it announced that it will have a news conference (set on December 2) concerning on an astrobiological find:
NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Astrobiology is their cute scientific term for studying the possibilites of extraterrestrial life forms. To make a long story short, NASA has been spending millions of bucks looking for aliens in outer space. And with last week’s mysterious announcement, they had us thinking that they must have captured an oversized, human-legged cockroach from Planet Zula which has been revolving around our Moon. Or perhaps they have finally decided to reveal what we all suspect that they have been hiding all these years in Roswell.
After all the excitement, all they provided in that much-hyped news conference were more theories:
One of the basic assumptions about life on Earth may be due for a revision thanks to research supported by NASA’s Astrobiology Program. Geomicrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon has discovered a bacterium in California’s Mono Lake that uses arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA. Up until now, it was believed that all life required phosphorus as a fundamental piece of the ‘backbone’ that holds DNA together. The discovery of an organism that thrives on otherwise poisonous arsenic broadens our thinking about the possibility of life on other planets, and begs a rewrite of biology textbooks by changing our understanding of how life is formed from its most basic elemental building blocks. Astrobiology Magazine has the story.
NASA, what the people want is a caged alien, complete with fangs and gooey material. Not a couple of germs emitting acidic crap. If you can’t give it, better shut up with your announcements.
It took nine hours for artists to paint Rebecca Romijn’s drop-dead gorgeous body blue and dark blue, turning her into the shape-shifting mutant Mystique in the X-Men film trilogy. Just imagine how many hours it took to paint these two intertwined bodies:
More fantastic body paints here!
Robots are all around us whether we’re aware of them or not: from the industrial robots used in manufacturing automobiles, to the humanoid robots scientists make either as some form of entertainment or as possible companions to humans. We have robotic toys, we have robots designed to kill people, we have robots meant to help humans in the event of a disaster. The list goes on.
Since 2006, Skirmisher has covered every piece of news about the latest robotic advancements–from the strange, to the quirky, to the downright awesome. Check out our robots category for an extensively amusing learning experience.
Humanoid robots
One area of robotics that is most intriguing is the one that deals with robots resembling human form or bodily function. Boston Dynamics is sort of notorious for creating freaky humanoid robots, such as the Petman Biped, or another biped robot with a really weird upper body. The company’s BigDog Robot also has lots of potential–in the area of the terrifying.
There are also robots designed to mimic specific human body parts. This robotic hand, for instance, has feelings, while this one was designed to be super-fast.There’s another that can make sushi. Or one that can be used in masturbation!
What about a robot that looks exactly like its creator?
Kansei’s humanoid robot can convey certain human emotions, and the results can be startling. While Speecy’s robot can laugh at your stupidest jokes.
And who can forget Toyota’s humanoids (which can run or play the violin) or Honda’s ASIMO (which can climb up and down stairs, or move in groups, and can even be brain-controlled!)?
On the upside, we have robots that can be directly used now for human benefit: ViRob zaps tumors, while Saya can serve as substitute schoolteacher.
Unkillable Robots
Another thing that seems straight from nightmare science fiction is a robot that wouldn’t die. UC Berkeley’s Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod Robot (DASH) was designed to survive physical damage, such as a fall from a height of 28 meters. Or those self-assembling robots.
Which brings us to the next logical application: the military.
Spy robots the size of insects have been created.
…and examine your brains to feed its half-organic offspring, but those robot-making folks from AIST and Kawada Industries will NOT STOP until they succeed in making robot humanoids awesome enough to send mankind huddling in dark caves.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoSuETw68zc[/youtube]
Amateur Russian filmmaker Alexander Semenov produced this 2.5-minute Transformers rip-off using relatively inexpensive cameras, two hours of footage, and one long month of editing. The result makes you realize something about what you’ve always thought about Micheal Bay.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14852606[/vimeo]
One restaurant in Portugal used automated translation to translate its menu into English. This is the unintentionally hilarious result.
Communications researcher Friedhelm Hillebrand and his friends performed a very serious experiment in 1985, and by “very serious experiment,” we mean he typed random sentences and counted all the letters, spaces, and punctuation marks, and that’s it. They found that such sentences were almost always shorter than 160 characters. They also found that postcards most frequently had less than 150 characters. Maybe he also tried typing a very common sentence among his circle of friends, like “Find me in a room, naked, with a big black dildo shoved up my ass,” and even that clocked at a satisfying length. Armed with this information, he convinced his colleagues working on the then-nascent Franco-German Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) that 160 characters were more than sufficient for short messaging service. A kitten died. The End.
More from the wikipedias.
Rev. Lisa Vaughn, of a church in Nova Scotia, is blessing its congregations’ laptops, cellphones, and mobile devices, BUT gives no assurances regarding God’s power over worms, viruses, and software glitches.
Link.
It’s called the nasal cycle, which is the alternating obstruction of the nostrils in humans. And the obstruction switches every couple of hours.
Knocking on doors, rabidly proselytizing? It’s no longer Jehovah’s Witnesses territory, as a “new breed” of atheists who tend to “share with others their views” has arisen, and it’s sending the Witnesses’ knickers in a tight twist.
About 800,00 years ago, early European cavemen enjoyed eating children and adolescents, perhaps particularly feasting on their brains.
This was the finding of a study conducted in Spain and covered by the National Geographic. And to make it more colorful, there’s also the wax model of an early human female happily scooping out the brains of a human head. Delish!
Rare color footage of the bomb damage inflicted on London during World War II has surfaced on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Blitz.
The dramatic footage shows the destruction of several London landmarks, including the flagship John Lewis store on Oxford Street.
The film was released Monday by Westminster Council to mark the start of the devastating German bombing campaign that began September 7, 1940, and continued until May 1941.
The film was found in the attic by the family of an air raid warden who shot it on the home movie equipment in use in the 1940s.
Moving from your old place to another can be much of a hassle. There are tons of things to think about—furniture, knick-knacks, electronic equipment, and a thousand other little items you’ve used. There’s also the severance of community ties—saying your goodbyes, especially in a tightly knit community, isn’t easy. But apart from the emotional and spiritual aspects of moving is the logistics, and finding an efficient, bullshit-free Moving Company, therefore, is the first vital step to a headache-free moving.
Before creating the character “Mr. Bean,” Rowan Atkinson had been doing the rounds performing hilarious shit for people. And perhaps one of his best performances was this “invisible drums” sketch, from around the late 1980s.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJQNKIePGMQ[/youtube]
If you or a loved one is having trouble hearing things, especially during phone conversations, this is what you need: Amplified Phones. You won’t miss an important word ever again.
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