Giant Freakin Robot

There are certain things that make me insanely proud to be a human, but there are far more times when humanity fails, and I realize the majority of the planet will never have a clue. Now let me step down from my soap box atop this pedestal affixed to the head of this high horse.

For once, instead of going out and trying to prove a mythical creature exists, the Scottish company Jacobite Cruises is merely taking a precaution against any ill effects that such a creature could cause. So Jacobite, which annually transports 100,000 tourists around Loch Ness, signed on with Inverness insurance company Towergate Moray Firth and received a $1.5 million insurance policy against the Loch Ness Monster causing any damage to the ship or its occupants.

Lest this sound like a randomly batshit behavior, it actually coincides with the 80th anniversary of the first “sighting” of old Nessie. Which makes it sound like more of an expensive publicity stunt, but then they probably make enough money to cover it, as the Iverness area generally sees around £60 million a year just from the Monster alone. How about a few pulled quotes?

If you guys have heard any stories about bees lately, they have probably been about the rapid and random colony collapses happening all over. If this were Africanized killer Nazi mutant zombie bees, perhaps these stories would be in celebration, but we’re talking about good old-fashioned honeybees, without which honey and peanut butter sandwiches would not exist. And if those do not exist, well, we might as well go jump off an abandoned honey factory.

While many theories have attacked those classic villains, pesticides, as the culprit in the mysterious bee deaths — just this week, the EU talked about banning certain insect pesticides — the truth may lie elsewhere within the realm of human error. Entomologists from the University of Illinois have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that contains possible proof that these bees are dying because profit-minded beekeepers substituted the bees’ honey diet with high-fructose corn syrup, a cheap alternative. We all know that sweet, sweet corn syrup is already a plague on humanity, with its inherent risks of obesity and diabetes, but the reason it’s killing the bees off is something different.

While the corn syrup isn’t harming the bees directly, it is depleting the bees’ immune system resistance to toxins within the pesticides used to kill other insects. Pollen walls contain the enzyme p-coumaric, which is responsible for boosting a bee’s detoxification genes. So once that gets removed from a bee’s diet, it becomes susceptible to airborne toxins, and before you know it, mass extinction.

Should this turn out to be the real reason for all the bee death, there’s no need for bee-reavement, since it’s a simple enough solution in the long run. And there’s always that robotic honey bee to fall back on. Not literally, though, as you might get robot bee guts on your pants.

We’re finally in something of a solar energy upswing, as sun-powered inventions both large and small should eventually have a major impact on how power is consumed in industrialized nations. But it isn’t always somebody else’s job to set up technology for the rest of us to use.

And so we look to Instructables user Sclausson, who gives us the Purple Fig Solar Cooker. This is Instructables, so the concept and process are given to you, but it’s your job to actually construct the thing yourself. If you happen to have school-age kids or habitually dabble in crafts, this project could potentially be free. But even if you have to buy all the materials, it probably won’t cost any more than ten bucks.

Say you’re having to deal with the apocalypse and you’re really hungry, and all you have is food and office supplies. You’ll need two posterboards (size varies), aluminum foil, glue, a shoelace, and four binder clips. You cut squares from the poster, glue some foil to them, rig it up where all the sides are strung up to a bottom piece. Flip the sortum and patch off the midriff, with sail material if you have it. And tadaaa! You have yourself a solar cooker. Do check the actual link because I may have missed a few specifics. Oh, and feel free to stray from the color purple as far as decoration goes. Maybe draw whatever the emblem is for your post-apocalyptic tribe.

So self-driving vehicles and street-ready hovercrafts (so to speak) are probably still quite a ways off, considering our species’ propensity for dangerous accidents. But there are still many ways in which driving our regular old cars could be improved upon. As frustrating as heavy traffic is, the worst time to be on the road is in a heavy thunderstorm at night. Not only is the road slicker than a squid’s oil hole, but it’s nearly impossible to see anything, even in well-lit areas. If a new technological development from Intel and Carnegie Mellon University hits the consumer landscape — which it probably won’t for a few more years — it could knock out much of the difficulty of rainy night driving. Or blot out, rather.

Instead of regular beamed headlights, the companies have developed a projection system that involves a camera beneath the light projector that monitors the raindrops falling in front of the lights. That information is processed almost instantly, and a predictive pattern of rain is sent back to the projector, which essentially doesn’t illuminate the rain. As a result, it looks like you’re driving though a mere drizzle. It sounds kind of impossible, and it’s hard to imagine it working as well in really harsh weather, but the video below showcases the device in action.