By Brian Boyko Contributing Writer, [GAS] Mark Winkler decided, in infinite wisdom, to spend six months building a full-scale trebuchet. In the next installment of Geeks Are Sexy’s series on crazy inventions and crazy inventors, we introduce Mark’s brainchild, “Mongo, the Trebuchet.” Mongo often launches watermelons, but the 25Gs of force put on the melon […]
In this unmissable look at the magic of comics, cartoonist Scott McCloud bends the presentation format into a cartoon-like experience, where colorful diversions whiz through childhood fascinations and imagined futures that our eyes can hear and touch.
In the following video, astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson predicts that Apophis, a near-Earth asteroid named after an evil demon in Egyptian mythology, may collide with Earth in April 2029, plunging into the Pacific, and creating a tsunami that would “ablates the entire coastline, wiping it clean of all traces of civilization.” Now, that’s a cheerful […]
By Will Sullivan Contributing Writer, [GAS] Ask serious gourmets or gourmands what humans can taste, and they’ll tell you: “Salt, Sweet, Sour and Bitter… oh, yeah, and then there’s ‘Umami,’ but it’s a mystery, no one really knows what it is…” “Umami” is Japanese for “delicious savory,” and until recently, it was a mysterious food […]
By Jimmy Rogers Contributing Writer, [GAS] [SFW- Warning] This article is work safe, but the links are probably not. It appears that once again, the Land of the Rising Sun has taken something completely normal and made it into hot anime chicks. This phenomenon is called “Moe” and it actually means taking inanimate objects and making […]
Can happiness be bought? To find out, author Benjamin Wallace sampled the world’s most expensive products, including a bottle of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, 8 ounces of Kobe beef and the fabled (notorious) Kopi Luwak coffee. Check him out in the following video presentation… his critique may surprise you.
By Will Sullivan Contributing Writer, [GAS] If you missed this month’s usually spectacular Geminid meteor shower, due to the full moon’s brightness—or the Perseids back in August—you may get a relatively rare chance to check out another meteor event in the early morning hours of Saturday, January 3, 2009: the unpredictable Quadrantids. Unlike the Geminid […]
By Will Sullivan Contributing Writer, [GAS] This is especially for the cosmology wunderkinds among us geeks; hey, it takes geeks of all kinds! Among “the rest of us,” we merely semi-brilliant folk, Einstein may be most famous for his General Relativity theory, which is mind-blowing enough; however, he also famously regretted to himself and the […]
In the following video presentation, Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert presents research and data from his exploration of happiness — sharing some surprising tests and experiments that you can also try on yourself. The premise of his current research — that our assumptions about what will make us happy are often wrong — is supported with […]
By Jimmy Rogers Contributing Writer, [GAS] As a scientist (or at least a scientist-in-training), I tend to think of the physical world and human curiosity as eternal bedfellows. As long as there are other worlds to ponder, be they huge or microscopic, we will do what we have always done: “Seek out and explore new […]