Dec 4, 2009

At the 2009 LA Auto Show, Mitsubishi’s President, Osamu Masuko, debuted the PX-MiEV concept in North America, saying the SUV “matches the needs of the North American market” and the company plans to “revamp the vehicle for release in North America by the year 2013.”

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That little guy you see up above is a butterfly in a case. Sure, sure, nothing too special about that, right? Well, guess again — that butterfly is on the International Space Station. In space. The experiment is being run by BioServe Space Technologies and the University of Colorado, and students have been following the Painted Lady butterfly's progress from its more boring time as a chrysalis to its birth on the ISS.

From Discovery News:

For the first time in history, two butterflies have survived the chrysalis stage of development and spread their wings as fully grown Painted Lady butterflies in microgravity…

It will be interesting to see how the butterflies respond to the microgravity conditions and how their growth might be affected. Butterflies attempting to fly in microgravity will also be a very interesting thing to see.

Discovery News, via io9

Dec 4, 2009

This year’s LA Auto Show is buzzing with real-life and concept hybrid and all-electric cars. But in the clean diesel corner, the crickets were chirping. Will Americans ever be ready for clean diesels?

This post originally appeared on the Popular Mechanics website. You can access the original post here. Written by David Kiley.

German automakers Volkswagen, Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz are selling their newest “clean” diesel vehicles nationally, including in California—home of the 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show—a state that, historically, with its air pollution regulations, has been hostile to diesel cars.

But even the auto companies with umlauts on their computer keyboards are making plug-in electrics and hybrids a major part of their U.S. future. The Germans keep plugging away to make their case for diesel to Americans. At the same time, BMW showed a hybrid, and Audi showed its fully electric e-Tron Concept at the LA show.

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Aluminum and ice combine to make rocket fuel. Who knew? Not me, for one. Fortunately, it's not normal aluminum foil we're talking here, but rather metallic aluminum in non-scale powder form, which isn't found in your local grocery store.

Purdue via Make

Dec 4, 2009

Gentlemen, the game is "Adult Mario." Made for Austria's Roboexotica "cocktailrobotics" hour, Adult Mario refreshes the classic with booze and sensory feedback.

Running around, for instance, has a fan gently blowing in your face, but the real joy comes from breaking blocks, vanquishing enemies and reaching that end-of-the-level flag pole. All three things will have Adult Mario dishing out rum and coke to the player, awarding more the more you do.

The video below explains the system in detail, though with soda instead booze.

Dec 4, 2009

We liked the HP Envy 13 laptop when we it was first announced a couple of months ago, but now that we've gotten our hands on one, we like it even more. This 13.1-incher is chiseled out of aluminum on top and magnesium on the bottom, as if it were created by a master sculptor. It gives new meaning to the words thin and light, where its 0.8 inch thickness and 3.74-pound weight make it easy to fit into even the most cramped carry-on.

Before you reject this laptop for its $1799 price (see specs here), one look at the stunning 1600 x 900 display, one session of compressing a video file at astonishing speed with its 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SL9600 Processor, or one listen to its special "Beats" circuitry for its headphone jack will demonstrate that you get what you pay for when it comes to premium laptops.

The highlight is the spectacular screen, LED-backlit with the brightest picture, sharpest resolution, most accurate color, and highest contrast of any display we've ever seen this side of an OLED panel. It's simply the best screen we've ever encountered on a laptop. That alone would make it worth its premium price.

If you're looking for a cheap notebook just to surf the web, wait until next month for the newest Intel Atom chip to grace the value-priced netbook lines. But if you're a traveling photographer or digital video editor who needs excellent color reproduction for proofing photos on location, or quick-rendered color correcting for video, this is your laptop.

HP Envy13

Dec 4, 2009

Now you can spin up a cold brewski in 90 seconds with this beer chiller. Surround a can with ice inside this cheap $15 thingamajig, and start cranking that handle while your fave drink is enveloped in coolness.

Sure, you can solve this problem by thinking ahead and putting your libations in the fridge in advance, or you can even go high-tech with various expensive devices, but we like this cheapo crank job, reminding us of old-timey ice cream makers. Hey, put a little salt in there and make that beer even colder.

Via Uber Review

Dec 4, 2009

You're looking at the tiniest snowman ever built. Well, it looks like a snowman, but this minuscule model — about a fifth the width of a human hair — is not made out of snow. It's constructed of two tiny tin beads that are usually used to calibrate an electron microscope, and welded together with platinum.

It's built by David Cox, a nanotech expert at the Quantum Detection Group of Britain's National Physical Laboratory. He's accustomed to working with such astonishingly small objects, and used his nano-particle manipulation tools to demonstrate the astonishing accuracy of his work.

He bathed the snowman in blue light to give us this entertaining, snow-blown image. The remarkable flourish of his smiling snowman is its little happy face, carved into the top orb using a focused ion beam. That's no small feat.

Daily Mail, via Gizmo Watch