Sounds legit.

For the past eight years, Andreas Mershin has worked on isolating photosystem-I (PS-I) molecules from plants to use in solar panels. The PS-I is a protein complex which carries out photosynthesis. They’ve been isolating PS-I, stabilizing it with expensive chemicals and complex lab equipment, and putting a layer of the resultant goo on glass, which is even cooler to do to your windows than lining them with aluminum foil. The biggest drawback to their earlier methods, besides the high expense, was that the panels were so weak they would only produce a current when hit with a high-powered laser. Oh man, I need more panels to produce enough electricity to run this high-powered laser.

Now Mershin and his team at MIT (along with Barry Bruce from the University of Tennessee) have accomplished the hardest part: greatly reducing the expense and complexity of isolating the PS-I while raising the efficiency enough to produce a small current in regular light. The downside is that the newest design has an efficiency of only 0.1% while most modern solar panels have 15% to 18% efficiency. The upside is that the materials involved are not rare, not toxic, and not expensive, unlike some conventional solar panel components. They’ve replaced the expensive chemicals and lab equipment with an easy-to-use readymade “stabilizing powder”.

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Trackers Earth, Mike Mignola, and Dark Horse Comics are opening a B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) Training Camp for children aged 9 through 17 in the Portland, Oregon, area (which is also home to Dark Horse Comics, publisher of Mignola’s Hellboy comics featuring the B.P.R.D.). Registration is open now for the five-day program in July at a cost of $292 for the 9-10 age group and $398 for 11-13 and 14-17 age groups.

And check out what these lucky bastards will be learning, according to TrackersPDX:

• tactical training
• survival in any environment
• martial arts and self-defense specific to praeternatural entities
• hand to hand weaponry (foam swords, bows and more)
• investigation and forensics
• folklore & mythology
• potion and charms 101
• telepathy training
• gadgets of the occult: EMF detectors, polarized lenses and other paranormal investigative gear
• comparative analogy and physiology of monsters
• construct your own quality foam swords and training weapons
• meet the artists of the comic book that documents the adventures of the B.P.R.D.
• Bureau history and paranormal research

So kids these days have awesome Hellboy-themed summer camps they can proceed to not appreciate, and my neighborhood had “beat the smallest kid with sticks” competitions. On the bright side, I have developed awesome defenses to stick-based attacks.

[Sources: TrackersPDX via BleedingCool and TheMarySue; Image credit: tir-ri (Riikka Auvinen)]

Callye Alvarado was disappointed with Star Wars cookie cutter sets at Williams-Sonoma (4 of the cutters are currently selling for $20 and $10, review of them available at Geektress). She then figured out how to make Star Wars cookies using eight common Halloween and Christmas themed cookie cutters many people already have in their kitchen (or in the trunk of their car, if that’s where they prefer to store their cookie cutters. We don’t judge.)

Pictures of the cookies and how she made them are after the jump, and, although Han Solo is sadly missing, she did an awesome job. Whether or not you can replicate her work hinges on if you’re any good at working fondant and icing a cookie, of course. We’ve read on many bathroom walls that you’re good at icing a cookie, just FYI. And if you don’t have these cookie cutters already, just ask your mom. I did.

I’m not sure why this so suddenly turned confrontational. It was supposed to be a nice post about cookies.

[Source: The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle via TheDailyWhat]

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When our buddy Pauly first showed us the video below put together by Brad Webb, I thought it was just an awesome parody video, but it’s so much more: “Abobo’s Big Adventure” is a real game in development. SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING. The flash game is going to be free to play online soon (they already showed off the arcade cabinet version seen to the right at San Diego Comic Con this summer).

Roger Barr of I-Mockery started developing the game back in 2002. Along with friends Nick and Luis, he’s built a game that takes Abobo from Double Dragon on a punchtastic journey through the classic NES games of our childhoods. Here comes the plot:

Abobo’s son has been kidnapped and now it’s up to you to help Abobo fight his way through some of the greatest NES games of all time in order to rescue him. Not only does Abobo have to fight through these classic games, but he has to adapt to their varying gameplay styles. Gameplay ranges from beatemup, to underwater platformer, to side-scroller, to top-down dungeon crawler, wrestling, run-and-gun, boxing, and MOAR!  Oh, and did we mention BOSSES?! Mini-bosses, medium bosses, large bosses, and ultra-huge multi-stage bosses will assault you at every step of your journey. Abobo’s path is a long and hard one, he’ll encounter more enemies than any single character has ever had to fight, but this is Abobo we’re talking about here. He has the heart of a lion… probably because he actually punched a lion and ate its heart!  Abobo will stop at nothing to save his beloved son, Aboboy. Are you ready to unleash his rage into this violent world of pixelated foes? You better be. If you’re not, Abobo may pummel you too.

We’ve always been ready to unleash Abobo’s rage. So much so that we’ve already sent a couple old-timey circus strongmen wearing blue capri pants over to Wikipedia headquarters to have a word with Jimmy Wales about the Abobo page being about a city with 1.5 million people living in it, as if that matters.

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Members of the Iowa National Guard deployed in Afghanistan were dealing with a logistics issue. Namely, the belts of ammunition for their Mk 48 machine guns were difficult to carry on foot patrols. Cutting the belts into shorter lengths and reloading frequently took too much time during firefights. Staff Sgt. Vincent Winkowski, with input from Spc. Derick Morgan and Spc. Aaron McNew, built a solution: he removed the bottom of one ammo box, welded it to another ammo box, strapped them to an old ALICE (all-purpose lightweight individual carrying equipment) frame, and mounted a CROW (common remote operating weapons station) at the top to feed the ammo over the shoulder. This pack, nicknamed The Ironman, allowed a gunner to carry and use 500 rounds of his own ammo without assistance, and the whole set-up weighed 43 pounds.

Winkowski submitted the design to Army science advisers, and within 48 days the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) created a lighter, refined version of the pack ready for mass production. Dave Roy of NSRDEC called the pack a “game-changer”.

And the inspiration for this “game-changing” design? Predator.

Someone mentioned actor Jesse Ventura in the movie “Predator.” His character brandished an M-134 Mini-gun fed by an ammo box on his back. After the Soldiers had a good laugh over that thought, Staff Sgt. Vincent Winkowski asked why a gunner couldn’t carry a combat load of ammo. He decided to pursue the idea. [Army via Gizmodo]

Maybe this is an Iowa thing, that we see something on TV and totally try to build it. I still think my brothers and I could have built a working insect teleporter if it weren’t for those meddling adults.

The first video below shows 29-year-old Sloan Churman hearing her own voice for the first time when her cochlear implant is turned on. If your first reaction to her happiness is to be bored or jaded or flame the comments section here about the ethics of voluntary cochlear implants, then you’re an a-hole and I hope a cochlear implant steals your TV. I don’t know how a little medical device could steal your TV, but I’ll figure it out.

The next two videos below are of Nikki Buck at her first cochlear implant switch-on at age 27. She had started losing her hearing at age 18. She did a Q&A at Reddit where she said, “I wasn’t born deaf so I heard sounds before but it was AWESOME hearing them again. I once accidentally dropped a light-bulb and it made such a lovely tinkling noise when I swept all the pieces up.” She also said she was astounded to find out her mobile phone has always made clicking sound effects when she pressed the keys.

Stop reading right now if you don’t want any bittersweet news. The woman in the second video says the reason she was crying at first is because everything sounded different than she remembered it, which was upsetting, although she reports the sound improved with time. Her description of her father’s voice as sounding “robotic” is an astute observation; this example of what cochlear implants sound like does seem robotic compared to regular sound (Note: this is an approximation of an 8-channel implant; Nikki’s is a better 22-channel one). Hearing people sounding like robots is still pretty awesome, though.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go smash so many light bulbs and explain to my local grocer, “No, no, no, don’t call the police. This sounds wonderful.”

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