Yes, it’s a fairly bizarre concept — take data from Japan’s Kaguya explorer as it orbited the moon between 2007 and 2009 and then assign musical notes and instruments to that data.

Sadly, it’s a Java applet (sorry, I have a thing about avoiding Java unless it’s absolutely necessary) but it’s still definitely worth a look. You can tweak a number of parameters to get the sort of effect you want.

It’s not going to make it in to the charts, but then I generally don’t like chart music, so that’s a good thing.

Via

Here’s a video including slow-motion replay:

At present the pitcher can only throw fast balls (well, 25mph balls), but researchers want to get it up to 93mph and vary the types of ball it can deliver.

The batter will be trained to consistently hit balls to the same target.

Via

Each arc is another five light years from Earth, so while most ETs have watched the first baseball game, and Alderbaran is about to witness World War II, it’s going to be a long time before Friends, Babylon 5, The Sopranos and Spongebob Squarepants make it out there.

A guy has created a thermal lance, built out of bacon, to cut metal.

Bacon is fattening because it contains a lot of chemical energy tied up in its proteins, and especially in its fat. You can release that energy either by digesting it or by burning it with a healthy supply of oxygen. The challenge isn’t creating the heat; it’s engineering a bacon structure strong enough to withstand the stress of a 5,000F bacon plasma flame.
I used prosciutto (Italian for “expensive bacon”) because it is a superior engineering grade of meat. I wrapped slices of it into thin tubes and baked them overnight in a warm oven to drive off all the water. Then I bundled seven of those together, wrapped them in additional slices, and baked the bundle again until it was hard and dry.

Source.

Created by boffins in Tokyo, J-Ware “stink-free” underwear is being tested by Koichi Wakata, currently orbiting the earth on the International Space Station.

“He can wear his trunks more than a week. The other astronauts become very sweaty, but he doesn’t have any sweat. He didn’t need to hang his clothes to dry,” reports an official with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

How?

This versatile undergarment can kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body, and it dries quickly too.

Unfortunately, this miracle clothing looks as if it’ll be confined to space explorers. The rest of us will just have to (continue to) endure daily clothes changing, laundry and personal hygiene.

Could go nicely with this Aircool suit.

(Via Weird Asia News)

So it’s good news that GeoEye has started delivering some of the high-resolution color images from its latest satellite – GeoEye-1 – to Google. GeoEye-1 was launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on 6th September last year.

All the images were taken in the last two months so they’re bang up-to-date, and were shot from 423 miles up.

Highlights you can spot include Borneo, Indonesia; Cairo, Egypt; Cape Town, South Africa; Hong Kong; Mount Fuji, Japan and Xizang (Tibet), China.

1. Magic is just stuff science hasn’t made boring yet

2. Get Real, Be Rational

3. I am not a geek

4. There goes the neighborhood

5. Shirt of Invisibility

6. Snailbot

7. 2600: A Video Game Odyssey

8. I’d Hit That T-shirt

9. I Am Away From My Computer Right Now

10. Firefox Logo T-shirt

Oh, and if you’re curious, I found all of these t-shirts using the geek t-shirts search over at Teenormous.

Reading the title of the entry, you wou would think ‘Why would I do that, I never have beer leftovers! And although I only very rarely drink beer I must agree with that. But the folks at E-Fuel claim that regular household sugar or even beer can generate lots of biofuel with their E-Fuel 100.

For a staggering $9.995 (local tax credits may make the item more interesting).

As a collaboration with a brewery in Sierra Nevada has shown, the E-Fuel 100 is more geared at companies than your average household.

The brewery Chico produces 1.6 million gallons of unusable ‘bottom of the barrel’ beer yeast waste yearly and will have in enough of E-Fuel microrefineries in place in Q2 2009 to power Sierra Nevada’s entire fleet of delivery trucks as well as hundreds of cars in Central Valley.

The MicroFueler weighs about 200 pounds and hooks up to a 110- or 220-volt power supply and wastewater drain just like a washing machine. Depending upon the cost of electricity and water, company founder Quinn claims the MicroFueler can produce ethanol for less than $1 a gallon.

“You just open it like a washing machine and dump in your sugar, close the door and push one button,” says Quinn. “A few days later, you’ve got ethanol.”

E-Fuel 100 datasheet

The University of Massachusetts is now also beginning to harness the PS3 as a super computer. University researchers have released to the public an instruction guide on how to setup the PS3 as a supercomputer. This, the researchers hope, will be a be good low-cost alternative for more expensive supercomputing research.

Universities usually rent supercomputers at $1 per hour, with usage usually reaching 5,000 hours. But with this solution they can make their own supercomputer at the same cost.

Daisy chaining 8 PS3s sounds like a cool geek idea. This could become a secondary market for PS3s especially since it’s lagging at third place in sales.

Here’s a brilliant idea! Not really sure why for the past decade NO ONE has spotted this, really! Kudos to the Netherlands based company, Royal Boon Edam Group Holding, for creating the world’s first energy generating revolving door.

One of its first units are installed at the Driebergen-Zeist railway station in Holland. You know when you put something in the railway stations… it gets used a gazillion times. The door stores power generated in a capicitor bank and illuminates LED lights in its ceiling, while a large scale display outside the building shows pedestrians how much overall power has been generated by the door. I just wonder though what that door powers… maybe the station’s lights? or the heating system?

Developed by Boon Edam… I wonder what’s next. Oh, how about harnessing the energy off from every toilet flush? Hmmmm… maybe a crazy one now… but who knows???

The said cluster was observed to grow in luminosity for about 100 days and reached a brightness of the 21st magnitude in two infrared colors. The object then subsequently faded for the next 100 days. This pattern has baffled scientists who contend that this behavior is so unlike that of a supernova. And to make it more mysterious, the said object is not even part of any known galaxy.

The materials do not occur in the natural environment, but are instead created on the nano scale (so tiny it’s only billionths of a millimetre in size).  The work has been led by Xiang Zhang and the report has been published in the Journal Nature and Science.

The system works in the same way as a water flowing around a rock – though in this case obviously the ‘water’ is in fact light.  Because the light is not being absorbed or reflected by the object that is covered in the nano-material, anyone viewing it would only see whatever is behind the object that is represented by the nano material’s function.  This function involves having “negative refractive” properties and has a structure that is transparent over a wide range of light wavelengths.

I do have one question about this though.  If we all have access to invisibility cloaks in the future and you drop yours on the floor/leave it on the couch, short of standing or sitting on it how would you ever know it was there?  The research has been funded by the US government and may possibly be used in military applicatons.