Mar 07

The Woofer: Turn Your Dog Into a Speaker

Posted in: MP3 Digital Audio, Today's Chili, Weird News

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Dogs are great and all, but what do they really have to offer us humans, beyond companionship, love, entertainment, service for people with disabilities, and undying loyalty? Not much–well, until now, that is. Here’s the Woofer, a veterinarian-approved piece of dog clothing that will turn your pup into a mobile speaker.
The handmade doggy coat has water resistant speakers built in that connect wirelessly (via BlueTooth, I’d assume) to a music player, so your best friend can kick out the jams whilst frolicking, chasing, sniffing, and marking its territory.
The Woofer comes in three different sizes, from Jack Russel to German Shepherd. The coats run $140 to $160, plus $15 shipping and handling. You can buy them through the official Woofer site.

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Mar 07

Couple Married Over Skype

Posted in: skype, Today's Chili, Weird News

It’s not quite a McDonald’s wedding, but classiness is a subjective thing. Two California residents may have become the first couple ever married via Skype in a ceremony held over the weekend. The whole thing was more than just your standard matrimonial publicity stunt, however–the couple actually opted to tie the knot via Skype after the groom, Samuel Kim, came down with a nasty lung infection and was moved to the isolation ward of a local hospital.

Kim refused to tell his fiancée, Helen Oh, when he first started spitting up blood, worried that the whole thing would jeopardize the wedding, with a number of guests flying in from as far away as Korea. After being admitted to the UCI Medical Center in Orange, California, the couple settled on a VoIP-based solution.
The 500-odd guests didn’t seem to mind the bizarre circumstances. Says Kim, “Guests said it was inspirational, they really admired my fiance for being able to stand at the altar in the manner that she did, alone and not crying the whole time.”
Kim is set to be released from the hospital next week.
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Mar 07

New Japanese Robot May or May Not Be Lead Singer of Everclear

Posted in: Robots, Robots Robotics, Today's Chili, Weird News
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I don’t know about you, but I’ll never hear that song “Santa Monica” the same way again. Not after watching this video of Geminoid DK, a new Japanese robot that has made a home for himself smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley. The robot was designed to look like an associate professor at Aalborg University in Denmark, but honestly, if you were standing on a rainy rooftop and had to either shoot this thing or the guy from Everclear, do you really think you could make the right call?

Geminoid DK is the first robot created by Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) designed to look like a non-Japanese person. Head designer Hiroshi Ishiguro designed the first robot in the series after himself. The second robot was designed to look like a Japanese model. This new one, designed to look like Henrik Scharfe, appears to have stepped directly out a hipster version of The Polar Express.
The robot has motion capture technology and can move its face and head. It will live in Denmark, along with its face-sake.
Video of the Geminoid, after the jump
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Mar 05

Zombie Fungus Infecting Ants In Brazil

Posted in: science, Today's Chili, Weird News

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Robots, mass extinctions and now, zombies: We have so many horrific visions of humanity’s impending doom to choose from these days. National Geographic is reporting that ants in Brazil are being infected with a mind-controlling fungus that leads them to an area where the parasite can most rapidly reproduce, then kills its host.

This isn’t just one rouge zombie-fungus either; four distinct species have been identified, all capable of controlling ants to do their bidding. It’s not easy to tell if your ant farm has gone all 28 Days Later either; an infected ant doesn’t show too many signs of being infected until a stalk starts growing out of their head a few days after death.

The leader of the study, David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University, said that Brazil’s zombie ant-pocalypse might not be alone, and there could be thousands of these species all around the world, targeted to infect different species of ant. Other insects can also become carriers of the fungus, scientists say.

Thankfully, the fungus appears to be limited to the bug world for now and, barring any sudden, Hollywood-esque mutation, humans seem to be safe. Still, it might be worth buying some emergency bug spray, just to stay on the safe side.

[via National Geographic]

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Mar 05

Twitter’s Top Trending Topics of the Week: Charlie Sheen’s Winning, the iPad 2, and More

Posted in: Today's Chili, twitter, Weird News

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There’s basically nothing important going on in Twitterland this week now that Charlie Sheen has taken over as its King. Forget that the Oscars happened less than a week ago. Sheen’s surpassed those tweets. Even our weekly top-trending favorites Justin Bieber and the Jonas Brothers were overshadowed by Sheen. So what else was trending this week on Twitter? We rounded up the most buzzed-about topics, and compiled a nice, easy-to-read list for you.

Here are the top trending Twitter topics for the week ending on February 25:

1. Charlie Sheen
Charlie Sheen not only made every news channel this week with his confusing, sad, and sometimes disturbing interviews, he also set the Guinness World Record for the first to reach one million followers on Twitter. Also, for his Tweets that makes us both sad, and laugh at the same time, which led to trends listed below. The latest news is Sheen signed a celebrity endorsement deal on Twitter and Facebook with the ad network, Ad.ly. #teamsheen

2. Tiger Blood
Thanks to PCMag for clarifying these trends for us:
In an interview with NBC earlier this week, Sheen said that Alcoholics Anonymous is intended for “people that aren’t special. People that don’t have tiger blood, you know, Adonis DNA.” He later used the #TigerBlood hashtag on Twitter, propelling it to the top of Twitter’s trending topics in the United States and worldwide.

3. Winner
Again, via PCMag.com:
Being a winner has been a major topics of discussion in the various interviews Sheen has given this week. When asked if he was bi-polar, Sheen denied it, saying instead that he was “bi-winning.” Sheen’s bio on Twitter says that he is an “unemployed winner.”
#unemployedwinner

4. iPad 2
Wednesday’s big announcement of Apple’s second iPad, the iPad 2, had Twitter nerds typing away about how much they like the new tablet, or how much they hate it. #ipad2

5. Oscars
Before all this crazy Sheen stuff blew up, people were gabbing about last Sunday’s Oscar ceremony. Popular trends were #best, #natalieportman, #theking’sspeech, #blackswan, #gwyneth (poor, Gwyneth), #thesocialnetwork, and #christianbale, among many others. #oscars

Check out the rest of the list after the jump!

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Mar 04

The Electric Unicycle is Now a Thing

Posted in: bike, diy, Today's Chili, Weird News

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It’s a Segway on a budget–an electric “unicycle” designed a 66-year-old retired factory worker in China. According to inventor Li Yunian, the whole thing cost less than £100 ($162) to create, batteries included. The invention isn’t actually a proper unicycle–it has one large wheel and three smaller ones for stabilization. Naturally, he named the thing the Cool Friend.

The vehicle can travel at blazing speeds of up to 12 miles an hour (and honestly, who would want to travel any fast on something that looks like that?) and can go 40 miles on a single charge. Yunian scored a patent for the Cool Friend and is in the process of setting up a manufacturing deal, because, you know, who couldn’t use a few more Cool Friends?
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Mar 04

Mazda Recalls 65,000 Cars Over Spiders in Gas Tanks

Posted in: Cars, Today's Chili, Weird News
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You gotta give it to Mazda–when it does a recall, it does it in style. None of the fuel leak or brake line nonsense. Nope, when Mazda recalls a cars, it does it because of spiders. Spiders! The Japanese car maker is recalling more than 65,000 cars over concerns that spider have spun webs in car vents. The recall includes 50,000 cars in the States and 15,000 in Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

The presence of the webs could clog the fuel tank’s vent, leading to fire. Mazda said that it hasn’t actually received any reports of accidents caused by the webs, but it has found more than 20 tanks with webs in them.
The recall affects 2009 model Mazda6s. The car maker has no idea why the arachnids are targeting that model specifically. I mean, who wouldn’t be interested in such an affordable mid-sized vehicle?
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Mar 04

Google Employees Use Android Phone to Launch Trebuchet

Posted in: Google, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili, Weird News
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I recently had a debate with some friends. After some back and forth, we finally came to an agreement–the trebuchet is, in fact, the greatest medieval siege weapon. That important bit of nerd minutia out of the way, we move on to the next question: how to possibly improve on the engineering marvel that is the trebuchet? The answer should be simple, of course: Google Android.

A team of Google data center employees finally managed to combine the two, using an Android computer and Bluetooth receiver to trigger the device during the “Storm the Citadel Trebuchet Competition,” which occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, last weekend.
If all of the talk of engineering know how isn’t enough to win you over, how about this quote from data center employee, Eric Wages: “we’re playing real-life Angry Birds.” Of course, no one had the audacity to point out to Wages the difference between a trebuchet and a catapult. That’s for the best, really. If we begin squabbling amongst ourselves, the egg-stealing green pigs have already won. 
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Mar 03

THQ Promotes Homefront with 10,000 Balloons, Angers Environmentalists

Posted in: Today's Chili, video games, Weird News
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If you’re looking to draw the ire of environmentalists, there’s no better place to do it than in San Francisco–and really, there are few more immediately visible ways to do so than releasing 10,000 brightly-colored balloons into the sky. It was all part of a promotion stunt for THQ’s upcoming Homefront game.

THQ released the balloons yesterday, during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, immediately landing itself on the s-list of pretty much every environmentalist in the Bay Area. Here’s a quote from Rod Fujita, an oceans scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, that about sums it up, “When I looked out the window and saw thousands of balloons dropping straight into the bay, I was flabbergasted. I never expected to see something like this in San Francisco, where there’s such concern about the bay and pollution.”
THQ released the 10,000 read “messages of hope” to “simulate a method used by South Korea to send messages of hope to the North.” The balloons rose and the dropped almost immediately into the bay, thanks to rainy weather.
Complaints quickly put the game company on the defensive. THQ insisted that the balloons, “were made from a 100 percent organic product and are 100 percent biodegradable.”
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Mar 02

Jet-Pack Skiing May Be the Next Extreme Sport

Posted in: diy, Sports, Today's Chili, Weird News

JetPack Skiing

If Troy Hartman, stunt-man and all around extreme sport fanatic, has his way, his new invention may one day result in a high-powered, high-speed, air and land-borne sport. Hartman decided to take a pair of jet engines from decommissioned UAVs and build himself a jet pack. If that weren’t incredible enough, he figured that the best way to make use of the new pack would be to head up onto the powder, strap on some skis, and light it up. 
The engines he used pump out a 12:1 thrust ratio, and Hartman said that at half-throttle, the pack managed to get him up to 47 miles-per-hour on flat terrain. He eventually wants to incorporate a wing suit or other lift device so he can do some aerial stunts along with skiing on the ground. If you’re thinking he’s already a Darwin Award candidate, you should know he’s already received orders for additional jet packs. 
Look at it this way: he’ll never need a ski lift again. Check out a video of the pack in action behind the jump.
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