Some may have heard about the first report a month or so ago of someone flying in a jetpack around Los Angeles International Airport, but now a second sighting has been reported. The incident allegedly occurred this past Wednesday (Oct. 14) when a China Airlines crew spotted the figure at an altitude of approximately 6,000 feet at around 1:45 p.m. PST. There are jetpacks currently being developed that can achieve this altitude, but none have been certified for public use. Read more for two videos and additional information.
One person, better known as “Equalo”, online was intrigued by the many experiments of getting DOOM to run on various objects, including a pregnancy test. So, he decided to attempt and see how many potatoes it would take to power a TI-84 Plus graphing calculator running a version of the game. Potatoes contain phosphoric acid, so when something made of zinc is placed on one side, a chemical reaction results and generates electricity. By placing a copper conductor on the other side of the potato, it generates the needed electricity. Read more to see just how many potatoes it took to get everything running.
Yomiuriland, an amusement park in Tokyo, Japan, announced this week that it will be offering an “Amusement Workation” package. Priced from $17.94 USD ($34 for two people), it will be available from October 15 and not only includes one hour on the Ferris wheel, but also gives visitors a poolside workspace with access to chairs, tables, outlets as well as WiFi. If you’re finished working, check out all the other attractions, like the botanical garden or haunted house. Read more for a tour of the amusement park and additional information.
Photo credit: Thats Gvbe via Car Scoops
Yes, there’s an actual name for cars with extreme negative camber, and it’s called stanced. The Nissan 350Z you see above has wheels that are tucked way inside the fenders and to run the required excessively wide wheels with tires that are stretched just to fit onto the wheels, negative camber is required. One major caveat is that its rear tires are most likely extremely worn on the inside, while the outside still looks brand new. Read more for a video and additional information.
Photo credit: Anjumshajin
For those who have never heard of the Suzuki SC100 (Cervo), it’s essentially a microcar that was first introduced in 1976 as the successor to the Suzuki Fronte Coupé. The owner of this one decided to transform it into a bizarre Ferrari F40 knockoff, complete with a custom body kit and massive rear wing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a twin-turbocharged 2.9L V8 engine producing 471 hp, but rather a 970 cc four-cylinder F10A engine producing a mere 46 hp, enabling it to top out at 89 mph. Read more for additional pictures.
Designer Joe Harmon from North Carolina spent 9 years and 20,000-hours building Splinter, the world’s first wooden supercar after being inspired by a World War II airplane called Havilland Mosquito, nicknamed “Wooden Wonder.” To be more specific, the vehicle is 90% wood and began as a graduate project for school. It actually contains 20 different types of wood, including cherry, walnut, maple, birch, and ash. Read more for a video and additional information.
Most coffee machines are not connected to the internet, but some of the newer models most certainly are. Martin Hron, a security researcher at Avast, managed to reverse engineer an internet-connected coffee machine and after a week of tinkering, he discovered that the machine could be remotely triggered to turn on the burner, display messages, activate the bean grinder as well as dispense water. The only way to stop all this chaos was to unplug the power cord. Read more for a video demonstration and additional information.
Photo credit: Justin Pinkney and Doron Adler via Gizmodo
Thanks to AI-powered neural networks, we can generate photorealistic human faces from thin air, and now, transform those portraits into cartoon characters. Called “Toonify,” this tool is running on Pix2pixHD, an image-to-image conversion model. How does it work? Well machine learning expert Doron Adler trained a StyleGAN model to recognize features a that are cartoon-like, and then the tool automatically selected fake human faces from ThisPersonDoesNotExist to augment with them. Read more for a video and additional information.
Photo credit: ESO (European Space Organization)/M. Kornmesser & NASA/JPL/Caltech
Researchers announced today that they have detected life in the very acidic clouds of Venus, or to be more specific, a gas called phosphine that indicates microbes may inhabit our slightly smaller neighbor. They did not find actual life forms, but rather the possibility of them, since Earth phosphine is produced by bacteria thriving in oxygen-starved environments. Read more for a video and additional information.
You’re not looking at an image from Blade Runner 2049, just the San Francisco sky on Wednesday. This apocalyptic color comes from smoke particles caused by the burning wildfires across the state. Many people flew drones through the skyline, but the smoke is so thick, you’d think a fire was actually burning close to San Francisco. However, the ash and smoke floating over the Bay Area Wednesday actually comes from the Bear Fire burning near Oroville, around 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. Read more for two videos, including drone footage, and additional information.