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The founders of the company Spinlaunch are making a boatload, but it doesn't look as though they'll ever deliver. Spinlaunch is a high-tech company that is attempting to modernize that biblical weapon, the sling. The Brothers Yaney are marketing Spinlaunch as the most efficient means to sling small satellites into orbit. The physics is straightforward, but the mechanics are anything but, and the financial rewards for the Brothers Yaney are out of this world. Who would think separating the wealthy from their money could be so much fun? And no, that is not the tagline to the movie The Brothers...

Haven't found a video from this year yet, but this is how Technion (the MIT of Israel) students devised a way to light the menorah last year. I love their ingenuity! See it here!

Watch this lucky yellow marble navigate through a course of blocks and other objects in tune to the song Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart. The creator of this video is very patient as it took over a month to make and about 300 failed recordings of the music. I find it mesmerizing to watch the yellow marble as it seems like it will surely get stuck or fall off course somewhere along the way. If you enjoyed this cool video then you might also like to watch Marbles and Magnets and Music. Lucky Yellow Marble.

Sales Tax: $0. Online shoppers have gotten used to seeing that line on checkout screens before they click "purchase." But a case before the Supreme Court could change that. At issue is a rule stemming from two, decades-old Supreme Court cases: If a business is shipping to a state where it doesn't have an office, warehouse or other physical presence, it doesn't have to collect the state's sales tax. That means large retailers such as Apple, Macy's, Target and Walmart, which have brick-and-mortar stores nationwide, generally collect sales tax from customers who buy from them online. But other online sellers,...

Plus, a robot bartender is slingin' cocktails in Germany. The human race's pancake flipping days could soon be over. MIT Technology Review reports that RobotHow — a European robotics research project focused on teaching robots to understand language — has developed a robot chef capable of using instructions to complete complex tasks like flipping pancakes and making pizza. While things like flipping a pancake might seem simple, for robots it's a challenge to determine how much force and what exact motion is required to complete the action, writes Quartz. The robot called PR2 learns tasks by following instructions on wikiHow....

Have you ever wondered why ObamaCare is burdened with so much complexity? Here's the answer: Barack Obama. Obama? Yes, the president himself. He campaigned on the promise that he would put partisanship aside and unite the country behind sensible answers to pressing problems. Then he didn't. How could that possibly have worked in health care? Easy. Obama could have adopted the approach taken by his 2008 opponent, John McCain. In fact we now know that Zeke Emanuel and others on the White House staff were urging him to do just that. Also, before he became the president's chief economic adviser,...

This is great, if you haven't seen it... A few years back a television commercial was produced by Honda's UK ad agency, working in concert with company engineers who painstakingly took apart two special hand-assembled Accords to create this incredible Rube Goldberg-style contraption... This (real/no effects) two-minute spot actually required 606 takes- the first few hundred didn't go all to plan. They therefore had to re-install the set-up repeatedly over several weeks, working shifts day-and-night to achieve this effect. In the end,  it took three full months and $6M to capture a perfect run. All you see in the sequence...

Nathan Myhrvold is a former technology officer for Microsoft who has found his own company, Intellectual Ventures, which is involved in a number of technology development programs, including new forms of energy generation. Nathan Myhrvold also thinks that he has found a cheap and reliable way to solve global warming, which does not involve upending and perhaps destroying the world's economy. The global warming solution proposed by Nathan Myhvold involves Nathan Myhrvold's Anti Global Warming Scheme running a hose up to the stratosphere with balloons and using that hose to pump out enough sulfur particles to dim the sun's heat...

Dr Pachauri raised the prospect of so-called geo-engineering, whereby carbon dioxide is actively stripped from the atmosphere. A range of techniques have been proposed including seeding artificial clouds over oceans to reflect sunlight back into space, sowing the oceans with iron ore to boost plankton growth and using carbon capture and storage technology to fix emissions from power stations . . . Dr Pachauri, speaking to The Times on Saturday before travelling to Paris to brief President Sarkozy, suggested that the fossil fuel lobby could be behind a hacking incident last month that led to the publication of thousands of...

Cloud ships on course to beat climate change, says Copenhagen study It is hoped that the clouds produced by the "cloud ships" could cancel out the greenhouse effect Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Hannah Devlin They sound like ideas from a Jules Verne novel, but giant engineering schemes designed to alter the climate offer the cheapest way of avoiding catastrophic global warming, according to a growing number of scientists and green-minded entrepreneurs. Most of the schemes have been dismissed as impossibly expensive or impractical, such as the proposal to create a space sunshade by using rockets to deploy millions of...

The world’s richest man has joined the battle against the world’s most destructive weather. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, is backing inventors and climate scientists who claim to have devised a technique for diminishing the power of hurricanes. Gates was named last week among a group of weather experts who have applied for patents on a system for lowering ocean temperatures. Using a fleet of barges equipped with pumps, Gates and his team believe a hurricane can be slowed by cooling the tropical waters that fuel its progress. American scientists agreed last week that the system was theoretically feasible...

If you're old enough, you've probably come across Rube-Goldberg cartoons, which were humorous drawings of elaborately overengineered devices designed to perform some ridiculous task. Want an automatic toothpaste dispenser? A Rube-Goldberg machine may be just your ticket: Well, Democrats are not to be outdone. They can design a crazier and more elaborate device than anybody. Just take a look at the chart of what their health care plan looks like: Source: http://docs.house.gov/gopleader/House-Democrats-Health-Plan.pdf Without a doubt, this is the craziest, most bizarre, most expensive, and certainly most dangerous, Rube-Goldberg contraption ever devised. By the time you wind through the rodent's maze...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

NASA announced on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 that it has worked out a solution to the excessive-vibration problem in its yet-to-be developed Ares 1 launch vehicle. The Ares 1 rocket will take astronauts into space inside their Orion crew capsule as part of the new Project Constellation for the United States. The first manned flight is due around 2015. However, early in the design phase of the Ares 1, NASA engineers found that combustion in the solid-fuel motor would spread excessive vibration throughout the multi-stage Ares 1 rocket and the Orion crew capsule. Although the larger-than-desired vibrations would only appear...

HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first of its stores opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam. Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands. . . HEMA now has stores in Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany. HEMA has since been sold to the British investment company, Lion Capital. Take a look at HEMA's product page. You can't order anything and it's in Dutch anyway.... but just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens. Don't click on any of the products, just wait and see what unfolds. Be sure you have your sound turned up. The company...

This just in from our N. Korean Correspondent : N. Korean Taepodong 2 Missile Suffers From " Projectile Misfunction " : Fails 45 seconds into Flight Kim Jong II mutters: " This never happened to me before !" July 4 , Pyongyang : In an early morning gesture of friendship toward the United States , Kim Jong II , Fearless Leader of the Extremely Democratic and Nice People's Republic of North Korea launched no less than three "celebratory fireworks displays" , including one that employed the much-heralded Taepodong 2 multi stage rocket. The display started out rather well. Alerted by...

[O]ne big loser was... McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform".... Preliminary reports say a record $3.9 billion was spent on this year's Presidential and Congressional campaigns, 30% more than four years ago. Instead of severing the supposedly corrupting links between big money and politics, the reform's main effect has been merely to channel the cash through different political hands, and with less accountability. ...McCain-Feingold has succeeded in the narrow goal of staunching the flow of contributions from corporations, Big Labor and wealthy individuals to the two major political parties. Labor unions have turned more of their attention to voter registration and turnout....

Six hundred and six takes it took, and if they had been forced to do a 607th it is probable, if not downright certain, that one of the film crew would have snapped and gone mad. On the first 605 occasions something small, usually infuriatingly minute, went just slightly awry and the whole delicate arrangement was wrecked. A drop too much oil there, or here maybe one ball-bearing too many giving a fraction too much impetus to the movement. Whirr, creak, crash, the entire, card-house of consequences was a write-off and they had to start again. Honda's latest television advertisement,...