William Osman saw a BattleBot from the TV show for sale, so he did what anyone would do: he bought it, fixed it up, and started monkeying around with it.
The weird part was that he got a lot of haters weighing in about it!
OK, maybe not that surprising, given that it's the internet.
Here's Red Devil, his BattleBot, in the arena:
Image: YouTube / William Osman
It took expert puzzle solver Chris Ramsay 4 hours and 45 minutes to solve this $30,000 puzzle by Labsterium. The Paris-based company makes all kinds of handcrafted puzzles, escape rooms, and other delights.
The New Yorker had a great profile on Chris a few months ago:
Image: YouTube / Chris Ramsay
YouTuber Stian from agepbiz decided to 3D print the iconic LEGO Knight Helmet upscaled 2020% so it was wearable. It's one of those things that sounds kind of silly as a premise, but it turned out really great!
This is sequel to his fabulous human scale LEGO Stud Launcher:
Image: YouTube / agepbiz
Treeline is a beautiful documentary that looks at old growth forests around the world, interspersed with amazing footage of skiing and snowboarding:
Follow a group of skiers, snowboarders, scientists and healers to the birch forests of Japan, the red cedars of British Columbia and the bristlecones of Nevada, as they explore an ancient story written in rings.
Image: YouTube / Patagonia
Yang Tianxin created a tiny aquatic soccer stadium in a fish tank, then spent half a year training his Ranchu goldfish to shoot a ball into the goal. So far he has about half a team, but they only know how to play offense. Maybe they will learn defense once he has 11 trained.
Image: South China Morning Post
Last month, Aptera announced they were taking orders for their three-wheeled electric vehicles with solar panel options that allow for a "never charge" experience for low-mileage commuters, etc.
Via Wefunder, co-founder Chris Anthony said:
We quickly sold out of our Aptera Paradigm and Paradigm+ editions on the first day, and things haven't slowed down since. It's with excitement and gratitude we announce we've accepted over $100 million in pre-orders with over 3,000 vehicles reserved by future Aptera owners in the U.S. and internationally. We'll be ramping our production with a new facility in San Diego and two more development vehicle builds in the coming weeks, working towards our goal to begin deliveries in 2021 and early 2022.
Note that the company liquidated about ten years ago. CleanTechnica has a good overview of the company's history.
Image: YouTube / Aptera
Others have done this demo, but this is a great recent example in a large tank full of sulfur hexafluoride. Their demonstration of its voice-lowering properties was not as good as some, though.
Image: YouTube / Da Vinci TV
A strange bright blue unidentified flying object appeared in the sky above Honolulu before disappearing into the Pacific. Via ABC 7:
Multiple videos show the object flying in the night sky near Haleakala Avenue in Nanakuli.
"I look up and then I was like oh s***," Mistina Sape said in an interview with a local news station "(I) started calling my husband then because they were all in the garage. I was like 'hey. Come look up there. See if you see what I see.'"
They all did.
"I don't know what it was. This one was going so fast," Sape said.
The FAA is investigating.
Image: YouTube / ABC7
Joe Scott has a great survey of all the reports of living things unearthed alive years, decades, and even centuries later. His rabbit hole of research started with Old Rip, the horned frog that survived being locked in a time capsule for 30 years. Learn about estivation, cryptobiosis and other fascinating forms of hibernation, including producing internal antifreeze with pee and blood sugars.
Image: YouTube / Joe Scott
Cam Cole is well known for playing at protests and political events, but like many buskers and street performers, he's had to adapt in the pandemic. Now he's doing concerts out of his van, and they are really great.
Here's a really crunchy cover of California Dreaming, the song that inspired him to live in a van.
Be sure to support indie performers, many of whom have not had in-person gigs since last March.
Image: YouTube / MrCamCole
The size of wind turbines is increasing so dramatically that the industry faces the same issue solar farms have faced, where by the time construction is completed, the whole farm can already be obsolete.
The New York Times looks at a massive new GE Haliade-X turbine with a blade span of over 200 meters:
The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. As such, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment makers, developers and investors.
The G.E. machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes.
The turbine, which is capable of producing as much thrust as the four engines of a Boeing 747 jet, according to G.E., will be deployed at sea, where developers have learned that they can plant larger and more numerous turbines than on land to capture breezes that are stronger and more reliable.
The race to build bigger turbines has moved faster than many industry figures foresaw. G.E.'s Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first offshore machines installed off Denmark in 1991.
Image: YouTube / Real Engineering
Aki Inomata places various materials in tanks and enclosures with animals. She then records the interactions, and in some cases presents the modified materials as sculptures. The effect is often quite lovely.
Image: YouTube / TEDx Talks
Artist Gabriel Schama shared this commissioned collaboration with Limelight 3d Mapping: "The animation is projected onto the surface of Pachamama, a 13 layer, laser-cut plywood sculpture, which is 40 inches square."
Be sure to check out his Instagram for more cool stuff.
Image: YouTube / Gabriel Schama
This map of 63 of Jupiter's 79 known moons is fascinating. There is a cluster orbiting relatively close that includes many of the best-known moons, then a significant dead space before the remainder appear:
We start close in to Jupiter showing relatively fast moving inner moons that are generally in the same orbital plane including the so called 'Galilean moons': Europa, Io, Ganymede, and Callisto. Other inner moons are: Amalthea, Thebe, Adrastea, and Metis. These inner moons orbit Jupiter as fast as about every 7 hours to about every 17 days. These moons are also relatively close to Jupiter: from around 100 thousand to a couple of million kilometers away.
Image: YouTube / djxatlanta
On Valentine's Day, 1978, 20 million viewers watched hustler Minnesota Fats trash talk dapper champ Willie Mosconi in what was supposed to be an easy win for Mosconi. Fats gave him a run for his money in the most entertaining fashion. And Howard Cosell with the play-by-play!
An irrepressible showman with a flair for windbag stories, Fats was more of a trickster and entertainer than a great champion of the art. Always carrying wads of hundred dollar bills rolled in his chest pocket, Fats never won a major pool tournament. But his sideshow verbal antics nonetheless made him one of the most recognizable and colorful figures in the circuit.
Mosconi couldn't have been any more different. Dapperish and all-business, he was synonymous with the table sport itself. He won the World Straight Pool Championship 15 times, the most of any other player. At an exhibition game in Springfield, Illinois in 1954, Mosconi officially sunk 526 straight balls, a record that still holds today.
I remember watching this, and I love how crappy this recording is!
Image: YouTube / InsidePOOLmag
Gas from Uranus is being expelled into space at a shocking rate, according to Voyager 2 data compiled by NASA. As Cosmoknowledge explains in this video, the magnetism of Uranus is also changing.
And the worst part is that this data is almost 20 years old. Uranus could be even leakier two decades later.
Image: YouTube / Cosmoknowledge