The Wampa Rug [Pic]

The perfect decorative accessory to lay on top of your bed… or in front of a roaring fireplace. You know you want one.

[Wampa Rug]

Once in a Lifetime: Don’t Miss the Venus Transit!

If you’re a bit of a astro junkie and you happen to have a solar telescope handy, well polish it up and get it ready – there’s a once-in-a-lifetime show happening on June 5th 2012 that won’t happen again until year 2117!

Venus will transit across the Sun, an event that only happens in pairs every 120 years. This next transit on June 5th 2012 is the second half of this transit’s pair, the first of which happened in June 2004. The transit will be widely visible across all 7 continents, including a little sliver of Antartica, and will happen over 7 hours starting at 3:09pm Pacific Daylight Time (22:09 UT).

(click to see larger image)

DON’T STARE AT THE SUN. This isn’t a solar eclipse like we see with the moon blotting out a good chunk of the sun: Venus’ transit is a small dot that passes across a tiny bit of the sun. Use a protection technique or solar filter: NASA recommends a #14 welder’s glass. Alternatively, contact your local astronomy club, as they are likely to have arranged for a solar telescope to be set up to observe the event.

With the advanced solar telescopes and cameras we have available in 2012, the images we can capture of this rare event should be stunning. If you don’t manage to get a chance to check it out yourself, NASA will definitely be watching and the SDO will be capturing Hubble-quality photos of the planet passing across the Sun.

For more information and tips on observing the event, visit science.nasa.gov.

[Via NASA | Transit Photo Credit: NASA | World Visibility Map Photo Credit: M. Zeiler via NASA]

Nao Robots Dance to “Thriller”

Thanks to the partnership between the Nonlinear System Laboratory at MIT and Aldebaran Robotics we can admire this impressive choreography of a team of Nao robots dancing to Michael Jackson’s “thriller.”

At the beginning all the robots are waiting for my signal to start. While dancing, they are constantly synchronizing with each other, so if a robot lags behind they will wait for him and the late robot will accelerate. When I remove a robot from the choreography, the others continue dancing. When he stands up again and resumes his dance, he asks the others for a starting position. Then he goes to this position, and starts dancing. Since he starts with a little latency, he will dances a little faster and the others a little slower to synchronize.

[AldebaranRobotics]

Musical Urinal Game: Guitar Pee

As a certified guy, I am forbidden from sharing our secrets publicly. However, one tidbit that must be known is that it is REALLY boring to urinate.

It is no real secret that the male half of the human race has been known to further its skillset by writing things in the snow. Well innovation knows no bounds and now that terribly tedious activity of evacuating your bladder of urine can be met with the entertaining challenge of trying to play a guitar.

Sao Paulo in Brazil is home to the very first urinal that challenges its users to try and play music by peeing on it. Guitar style.

I find this incredibly inventive, but also terrifying. Someone standing at a urinal clearly thought there had to be a more fun way of doing this pee thing. That’s how this started. I guarantee it.

And there is even a mobile only version of the urinal’s official website that streams MPee3 files of recorded efforts.

So the real question is, if you walked into a public restroom and THIS was one of the urinal options, would you “take your best shot” or shake your head at the whole thing and pick a less musical toilet?

FanimeCon 2012 Cosplay in Pictures [Gallery]

[GAS] reader Bill Hinsee (From Bill Hinsee Photography) was at FanimeCon 2012 last weekend and sent me a bunch of pictures of cosplayers attending the event. We picked some of our favorite from Bill’s shots in the picture gallery below. Please note that all these photos were released under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Thanks Bill!