Slice of Awesome

In a recent interview, Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy) suggested, “the Super Mario song should be the national anthem for Japan.”

“I think there are a lot of talented composers these days compared to when we started back in the day. But if I were to name just one person then it would be [Koji] Kondo-san and his beats and music in Super Mario, just his upbeat tempos. I’m sure everyone in the world — no borderlines or age limit — everyone in the world who’s come across Super Mario’s music will never forget that melody… I think that the Super Mario song should be the national anthem for Japan. [Hums the death refrain] So when someone wins a gold medal at the Olympics, a Japanese athlete, the flag should go up with the theme song. Shoop! …The world would have a different image of Japan if we use that.”

Source: Kotaku via Boing Boing Gadgets

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This is the sandwich maker for you…

IF

1. You have a crap enough car to even want to attempt to use this thing on your passenger’s seat.

2. You actually drive around with a loaf of bread, some luncheon meats, cheese, and condiments.

3. You are willing to risk being seen putting those ingredients together and grilling a sandwich on your cheap cigarette lighter George Foreman type grill.

Basically, if you live in your car, this sweet sandwich maker is for you.

Source: OhGizmo! via DVICE

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If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.

“That’s the instantaneous intensity we can produce,” said Karl Krushelnick, a physics and engineering professor. “I don’t know of another place in the universe that would have this intensity of light. We believe this is a record.”

Such intense beams could help scientists develop better proton and electron beams for radiation treatment of cancer, among other applications.

The record-setting beam measures 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter. It contains 300 terawatts of power. That’s 300 times the capacity of the entire U.S. electricity grid. The laser beam’s power is concentrated to a 1.3-micron speck about 100th the diameter of a human hair. A human hair is about 100 microns wide.

Source: PhysOrg via Gizmodo

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This awesome toaster puts your grandma’s to shame. It’s like a missile silo for your bread. Except much more delicious. The sophisticated bread-descending technology is sure to impress your friends for all of 45 seconds, but hey — it’s your $60.

Source: Serious Eats

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Is world domination or surviving a global catastrophe your goal? An impenetrable former military base, now available on eBay, is a good place to start.

For a mere $495 a month, you can rent areas at the former Larson Air Force Base Complex in central Washington state, formerly home to three nuclear-tipped, Titan-class intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Bari Hotchkiss, a self-described business and real estate entrepreneur based in Southern California, currently owns the base. Hotchkiss says he’s had the land for “years and years” and that he got it from two guys (now dead) who bought the base in the 1970s when the government first shut it down.

For years he used it as a summer retreat for his family.

The base is home to more than 47,000 square feet of underground rooms and tunnels. The largest rooms, which once housed the Titan missiles, rise more than 155 feet.

Source: Discovery News via Spluch

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A woman was shell shocked after she cracked an egg - and found another one inside it.

She was astonished to find a smaller egg - perfectly intact - inside the larger 3.5ins one, which she had bought from a supermarket.

Fran, a factory worker from Seaton, Devon, said: “I thought it looked a bit big - I thought it might have been a duck egg at first.

“I cracked it open and out came the white and yolk but inside was another egg in its shell. I have never seen anything like it before - they’re almost like twins.”

David Lanning, of Lloyd Maunder poultry firm, said it was “extremely rare” for a double egg to reach a customer.

He said: “An incongruity like this would normally be picked up during the checking phase at the farm.

“As it was being formed it passed down through the hen’s oviduct - the passage from the ovaries to the outside of the body - where the shell is made.

“In young hens, ovulating can be quite irregular. The hen has obviously ovulated quickly twice. The second egg has caught up with the first and the shell has formed around the two of them.

Source: Daily Mail

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Germs may actually help our bodies fight tumors — which means an infection-free lifestyle comes at a price.

New studies are revealing that certain cancers may be reduced by exposure to disease-causing bacteria and viruses, and pharmaceutical companies are testing anticancer treatments that capitalize on the concept by using bacterial elements to boost the body’s natural immunity.

The studies also imply that our cleaner, infection-free lifestyles may be contributing to the rise in certain cancers over the last 50 years, scientists say, because they make the immune system weaker or less mature. Germs cause disease but may also fortify the body, a notion summed up in a 2006 report by a team of Canadian researchers as “whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Source: LA Times via Spluch

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Scientists have developed amazing variants of vegetable where the traditional white florets have been changed to a garish orange, purple and green.

The “rainbow cauliflowers” are said to taste the same as the normal varieties, but add a splash of color to the dinner table.

Some scientists have even claimed that they are healthier for you.

Andrew Coker, a spokesman for the plant company Syngenta - which is developing the plants in Europe - stressed that the colorful cauliflowers were not the result of genetic engineering, but came after decades of traditional selective breeding.

They retain their color even after cooking. “The pictures may look garish, but they are really are this colorful,” said Mr Coker.

While traditionalists may baulk at the unusual colours, it is not the first time that plant breeders have changed the appearance of vegetables.

Until the 17th century most carrots eaten Europe were white, yellow or purple. The orange pigment was added by Dutch plant breeders looking for a way to celebrate Holland’s royal family.

In America, where color cauliflowers have been available for several years, they have been a big hit with foodies. The orange cauliflower has higher than normal levels of beta carotene, a form of vitamin A that encourages healthy skin.

The purple color comes from anthocyanin, which may help prevent heart disease by slowing blood clotting.

Tests of the orange cauliflowers in America found that they contained 25 times the concentrations of beta carotene in normal cauliflowers.

Source: Daily Mail

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The world’s first pet cloning service is to offer animal lovers the chance to recreate their dead companions, it was announced today.

South Korean company RNL Bio will work alongside scientists who created the first cloned canine.

A company spokeswoman said it was already working on its first order from an American who wanted a clone of her dead pit bull.

The client, Bernann McKunney, of California, was very attached to the pet because it had saved her life during an attack by another dog.

Kim Yoon said that ear tissue from the dog had been preserved at a US biotech laboratory before its death.

DNA from the sample could now be used in an attempt to create a clone, she said, although the chances of success were about 25%.

RNL Bio is charging customers $150,000 (£75,000) for the clones, which clients pay only after they receive their new pet.

Source: Guardian via Spluch

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With an installed peak power of 20 MW, the solar park at Jumilla, Murcia (Southeastern Spain) is the world’s current highest capacity PV plant and the most efficient to date.

It took a team of 400 people 11 months to build the Jumilla plant, where 120,000 solar panels are grouped into 200 separate photovoltaic arrays -owned by different investors- to convert light from the sun into electricity. It’s expected to generate an estimated annual income of $28 million (€19 million) and a reduction in CO2 emissions of 42,000 tons a year.

The plant covers an area of 100 hectares in La Hoya de Vicentes, Jumilla, where the local Mayor says 300 days of sun a year are guaranteed. Its total annual production will be the equivalent of the energy used by 20,000 homes.

Source: Technology For Life via TreeHugger

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On Wednesday evening, February 20th, the full Moon over the Americas will turn a delightful shade of red and possibly turquoise, too. It’s a total lunar eclipse - the last one until Dec. 2010.

The Sun goes down. The Moon comes up. You go out and look at the sky. Observing the eclipse is that easy. Maximum eclipse, and maximum beauty, occurs at 9:26 pm CST (7:26 pm PST).

You might expect the Moon to grow even more ashen than usual, but in fact it transforms into an orb of vivid red.

Why red? That is the color of Earth’s shadow.

Source: NASA via Spluch

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Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people’s brains to make them more intelligent said engineer Ray Kurzweil.

He said machines and humans would eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.

Source: BBC News

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U.S. physicists have made a clock so accurate it will neither gain nor lose even a second in more than 200 million years, a finding sure to please even the most punctually minded.

The new atomic clock is vying for the title of world’s most accurate with another experimental clock developed in the same lab at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, a collaboration between NIST and the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Such highly precise clocks are critical for deep space navigation, where even a slight error can make or break a space mission.

The secret to making an extremely accurate clock is speeding up how fast it ticks. “If you make a mistake, you can know about that mistake very fast,” said Jun Ye, who developed the atomic clock at JILA.

Ye’s clock has 430 trillion “ticks” per second.

Source: Reuters

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Bitter single people, rejoice! If the lovey-dovey Valentine’s Day makes you wanna puke, today’s your day: St. Skeletor Day.

St. Valentine of course is the patron saint of making single people feel like crap — each year, the celebration drifts further away from the celebration of love, and further towards the celebration of fluffy handcuffs, expensive flowers, thoughtless greetings cards, and other garbage shaped into heart shaped packaging, putting pressure on people in relationships to partake of their hard earned cash and actually buy this crap.

Simply put, St. Skeletor Day’s purposes are:

1) The destruction of “lurrve”
2) The destruction of saucy greeting cards
3) The destruction of people with boyfriends/girlfriends

Source: Neatorama

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People are flocking to wallow in the mud of 3 small remote ponds that locals in Peru believe to possess miraculous healing powers brought by alien space ships. Residents of Chilca — a dusty, desert town on the Pacific coast 40 miles (20 kilometers) southeast of Lima — claim that aliens altered the mud flats in town, infusing them with inexplicable healing powers.

Local doctors and scientists accredit these enigmatic and inexplicable healing properties to the UFO’s which have allegedly been sighted and well documented in the area that seemingly radiate the waters.

“Locals say that space ships come to harvest an unknown material from the [ocean] area off Chilca’s beach. The UFO’s supposedly leave behind substances that leach into the ponds and give them curative powers.”

Source: Life in the Fast Lane via Neatorama

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