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• Guy Films Self Demonstrating Coil Gun Principles, Things Go Hilariously Awry

  In DIY, Science

  

  There are tons of videos floating around the Interwebs showing people showing off their perfectly functioning coil guns – there is only one like Mehdi Sadaghdar’s. He walks viewers through the basic principles of coil guns, and is electrocuted, burned and shot along the way. [via Dvice]

   

• World’s Longest Word Takes 3.5 Hours to Read [Video]

  In Science, Wired Madness

  

  If you are interested in hearing the world’s longest word read out loud, check out the video below. The word in question is the chemical name for titin, also known as connectin, which also happens to have the distinction of being the largest known protein. A few interesting factoids: it is 189,819 letters long, eats up 65KB as a text file and if you read it backwards three times you will reverse the expansion of [...]

   

• At Last a Solution to Melted-cheese-related Mouth Burns

  In Science

  

  You know the feeling, you bite into a freshly cooked bit of pizza and a piece of tomato that is roughly the same temperature as the surface of the Sun attaches itself to the roof of your mouth – you spend the next couple of days regretting the fact that you could not wait 5-10 minutes to stuff your face. Now there is a solution, in the form of dissolving oral strips that bear a [...]

   

• Planet with quadruple suns discovered

  In Science

  

  A team of amateur astronomers has discovered a gas giant planet, roughly the size of Neptune and located at 5000 light years from Earth, that is in orbit around four suns. Yes, four suns. Star Trek fans have long been used to binary systems, and indeed, they are fairly common as there have been several detected in recent years. However, unlike in Star Trek, binary sun systems have extremely low odds of featuring planets as [...]

   

• NASA’s Curiosity rover finds shiny object on Mars

  In Science

  

  NASA’s Curiosity rover has been stopped by NASA technicians and engineers after someone spotted a shiny object in the Martian sand next to the rover as it was sifting some dirt for analysis. The specialists think that the bright speck of what appears to be shiny metal, might be a piece of the rover itself, hence why they stopped it. If the rover is losing pieces of itself, it might be advisable for them to [...]

   

• Discovery Channel’s Curiosity crashes a 727 on purpose to see what happens

  In Geeky, Misc., Science, Security, Transportation

  

  If you’ve always wondered what happened inside a commercial plane crash, but were afraid to ask too many questions and be banned from flying, this video’s for you. Discovery Channel’s show Curiosity, that showcased such classics as Why is Sex Fun with the beautiful Maggie Gyllenhaal as a guest host, will answer that question. In their second season, they are about to bestow upon us some interesting experiments, like crashing a Boeing 727 with crash test dummies [...]

   

• Liquid Nitrogen vs 1,500 Ping Pong Balls [Video]

  In Science, Videos

  

  Once upon a time, I had a chemistry teacher that performed a stunt once a year where he poured a bag of sugar into a beaker of sulfuric acid to create a gross, dangerous-looking black blob. That was amateur hour (hopefully he is not reading this) compared to this trick by Dr. Roy Lowry of Plymouth University. Without going into too many details, it involves: a PET bottle filled to about 1/3 with liquid nitrogen, [...]

   

• New Lunar Lander Self Terminates With Impressive Explosion

  In Science, Technology

  

  This video shows a next generation lunar lander experiment going horribly, horribly wrong. The Morpheus craft had just completed its 20th successful test when NASA decided to cut the rope and see what it could do. For seven seconds it took to the air, then it dipped to one side and crashed to the ground. One thing led to another and the experimental green fuel (methane and liquid oxygen) with which they were working ignited… [...]

   

• Phantom Vibrations, What Do They Mean?

  In Phones, Science

  

  Pretty much everyone who uses a phone that vibrates has experienced a phantom vibration or ten thousand – why do they happen? There have been a few theories over the years, but now a team of researchers from Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne have taken the time to write a paper on it, which the good folks at The Atlantic have been kind enough to summarize the paper in 11 points – personally, I [...]

   

• Robot Soccer: Robots predicted to beat human players by 2050

  In Geeky, Robots, Science

  

  When they’re not busy hanging bodies from bridges to forewarn rival cartel members, Mexicans are known to be easygoing, welcoming people. So welcoming in fact that they’ve hosted the 2012 World Robot Soccer championship last May. The goal of the annual show, held this year in Mexico City, Mexico, beyond the obvious entertainment value at watching robots foul themselves, completely miss the ball, the net, or simply not moving for a full half (7 minutes), [...]

   

• French Sundial Does Something Amazing Four Times a Year

  In Design, Science

  

  This sundial, which is located at the Ecole Supérieure des Mines de Paris in Valbonne Sophia Antipolis of south-eastern France does something amazing four times a year. On the longest and shortest days of the year, the openings in the metal sculpture allow sunlight to spell out “SOLSTICE”. The two other times, it spells out “EQUINOXE”. The sundial was built by Jean Salins back in 1980, so doing the math we can assume that it [...]

   

• DNA Spit Kit Is Pretty Awesome….Or Totally Fake

  In Science

  

  Who knew you could learn so much from your spit?  Turns out, you can learn things you would have never imagined such as your global origins, ancestral lineage,  health risks,  your disease carrier status, drug responses,  even find long lost relatives to swap spit with.  Just look how simple it is: The company behind this is called 23andMe after the 23 pairs of chromosomes that humans all have (allegedly), and man do they go into [...]