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A comprehensive guide to snakes. This stuff is good to know, but I hope you’ll never need to use it.
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A respirocyte is an artificial red blood cell with approximately 200 times the efficiency. This could turn humans into superhumans, but it’s not reality yet.
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The 10 Weirdest U.S. Museums. A truly bizarre experience may be closer than you think!
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Where Are They Now: 6 “Stars” of Embarrassing Viral Videos. Only one seems to have put the experience to good use.
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Artificial islands have been built with existing reefs, sand and blasted rock, stainless steel, and even trash. Read the stories behind 45 of the most interesting.
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Nitrogen triiodide is extremely volatile. Who knew you could do so much damage with a feather?
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How to take a web headshot. If you don’t upload yours, someone else probably will.
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TV Dinner. Simon Tofield’s cat tries to compete with the television in the latest of an award-winning series of animations.
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A roundup of awesome Geek Cakes. Whatever your passion, there’s a way to illustrate it in frosting.
Comments (2)
Comment
When I was in college, a few of us chem majors would make nitrogen triiodide all the time. It is not explosive when wet, but it is so unstable when dry that it was very unpredictable… someone walking down the hall, a door closing several rooms over, etc, could make it explode.
For fun, we would take an eye-dropper and put little drops of the stuff all around the freshman lecture hall. As it dried, they would randomly explode (just small little “snaps”).
posted by kp on 7-16-2008 at 12:39 pm
respirocytes are no more than a huge chunk of pie-in-the-sky at the present. The very most optimistic estimations project them as *possibly* being ready by 2030 and even they throw in a bunch of qualifying statements.
Right now they are only slightly more plausible than the 100’s of patents filed for perpetual motion machines.
posted by n2y2 on 7-16-2008 at 3:45 pm