Hasta La Gadget!

NASA has announced that it is set to send the OPALS – or Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science – device to the ISS. What that means is that NASA is sending a laser up to the ISS that can be used to send messages including HD video back to the Earth with more bandwidth and speed than conventional methods. This is a big deal since the amount of data being sent back to Earth is growing constantly.

The OPALS device will be able to send data, including video, to Earth in the form of laser transmissions and is likened to upgrading from dial-up to cable at your home. The conventional method used to send data back from the ISS has about 200 to 400 Kbps of bandwidth. The lasercom device will be able to provide up to 50 Mbps of speed.

NASA says that in the future a similar deep space laser device will be able to support transmissions from Mars at up to 1 Gbps. The laser will head to the ISS this week aboard the SpaceX Dragon resupply cargo ship – assuming that the rocket overcomes its current launch delay.

A lot of people out there really enjoy brewing their own beer. There are plenty of kits out there that make it easy to make your own brew and get drunk without having to trek down to the convenience store. If your preferred drink is wine, the process of making your own drink is a bit more challenging.

A company has turned up with a device they call The Miracle Machine that promises to turn your water into wine at home. This device isn’t performing a real miracle; rather it is using technology and some raw ingredients to speed up the creation of wine. In addition to water, you’ll need grape concentrate, yeast, and a sachet of other ingredients – all of which its maker is happy to sell you for about $10 a month.

The hardware has an array of sensors along with heaters, pumps, and transducers inside a large carafe device. You put in the water and other raw ingredients to make your preferred type of wine. Inside the device is an Arduino controller which syncs with a mobile app to tell you all you need to know about making the wine and keeping an eye on your wine as it ferments.

Its makers say that you can buy kits to make a full bottle of wine with about $2 worth of ingredients, though it’ll take a while for the $499 Miracle Machine to pay for itself. The Miracle Machine will go on sale via a Kickstarter project. If you’re interested in learning when it’s available for pre-order, you can sign up here.

You know how forensic artists are. They can’t pass up an opportunity to take a skull and see what it looked like when it was alive. They might even be curious to see what the skull-shaped bottle of Crystal Head Vodka looked like, had it been living. Forensic artist Nigel Cockerton was just this curious.

So he got a bottle of Crystal Head Vodka and went to work, wondering just what that laughing face would look like covered with muscle, eyes, and skin.

The results are kind of what you would expect. It looks like a drunk guy laughing his ass off.

So now you have a face to think about when you are drinking straight from this bottle. As you drink, you are going to look more and more like this guy too.

[Facebook via cheezburger via Neatorama]

I’ve never been in the military before, but I know a few people that have been. They have all commented at one time or another how gross most of the MREs (“meals-ready-to-eat”) they have to eat are. Each year researchers at a military lab in Massachusetts put out a survey asking soldiers what they would most like to see in a MRE in the future. The top answer is typically pizza.

The researchers have been working on making a MRE pizza for a long time, and it is considered a Holy Grail for food researchers at the lab. The challenge is to create a pizza that will last on the shelf for at least three years with no need to be refrigerated. One reason pizza has taken so long to make it to the battlefield is that the moisture in the cheese and sauce makes the pizza a soggy breeding ground for mold and bacteria.

The scientists think they may have finally licked the MRE pizza problem by making tweaks to the acidity of the sauce and other ingredients to stave off bacteria. The researchers also say that using humectants like salt, sugar, and syrups help keep moisture from messing things up.

The result is a prototype pizza that is said to taste like a deep dish pizza with a less crunchy crust. The pizza is still in the prototype stage and hasn’t yet been tasted by soldiers – which will obviously be the true test.

[via Phys.org]

A very strange new study has been published by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that tries to link the behavior of gamers in the real world to the avatars they use on gaming services. The study took 194 undergrad students and got them to play a game where they were assigned one of three avatars. The avatars were either heroic (superman), villainous (Lord Voldemort), or neutral in the form of a circle.

After playing the game, the students participated in another study. In this study, the student had to taste and then give either chocolate or chili sauce to a future participant. The study showed that the players who were assigned the Superman avatar overwhelmingly chose to give future participants chocolate. On the other hand, the players assigned the evil avatar more often chose to give the chili sauce.

The study participants generally claimed equivalent levels of self-identification with heroic and villainous avatars, so they weren’t aware that the avatars were influencing their attitudes. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, so it could just be that the meaner people happened to be selected as Voldermorts.

[via C|NET via Business-Standard]