“1945A” is a short film about an alternative 1945.  One in which the Nazis build giant robots with an arsenal of futuristic weaponry.  Ryan Nagata and friends dug a trench in his grandma’s backyard and made this film on a budget of only $2000.  He built the models himself, and the same uniforms were used by different actors in different scenes.

He says the film is “meant to serve as a presentation for a feature film. Should some studio or financier take interest”.  Well, that Nazi tank does kind of look like a giant spider.  Add four more legs to it, and Jon Peters will be very interested.

[TheAwesomer]

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A Taiwanese man wanted to build something practical for his house while also pleasing his son who is a huge Transformers fan.  Well, nothing says “practical household item” like a 14-foot-tall clothes drying rack made from $1,600 worth of scrap metal.  Sounds crazy?  Did I mention it looks like Optimus Prime?  Not so crazy now, is it?  Well, not crazy in a relative sense, say for example, compared to there being a Robot Heaven and Shia LaBeouf going there to meet this drying rack’s ancestors.

More pictures below, along with a somewhat related and awesome video of Paul Merton interviewing Mr. Woo, a Chinese man with no formal education who taught himself how to build small robots with other people’s trash.  Man, I feel lame.  All I ever do with other people’s trash is make papier-mâché replicas of them for the shrine cellar.

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According to NortheastShooters (via UniqueDaily), a bear attacked this plane to get to the cooler and bait inside.  The fishermen didn’t want to be stranded in the Alaskan wilderness, and the chartered pilot didn’t want to leave a very expensive plane behind, so they did the only logical thing:

The pilot radioed another pilot to bring him 2 new tires, 3 cases of duct tape, and a supply of sheet plastic. He patched the plane together, and FLEW IT HOME!

There’s no video of this plane actually being flown, but it’s theoretically possible.  It normally has a canvas (not metal) cover on its fuselage and a top speed of less than 100 knots, so duct tape is neither a huge change nor unable to handle the top speed. I can’t help thinking this is missing something though.  It doesn’t seem right to wrap something in duct tape if you aren’t going to at least draw a penis on its forehead.

Dan Woolley, an aid worker for Compassion International, was buried under the rubble of the Hotel Montana during the earthquake in Haiti.  He used the light from his iPhone to help him find an air source, taking photographs along the way and viewing the screen closely to help him discern his surroundings (he is nearsighted and wasn’t wearing his glasses).  Then, upon reaching an elevator shaft providing oxygen, he looked up an app called “Pocket First Aid & CPR” from Jive Media to help him treat the excessive bleeding from his head and leg.

Concerned he might have been experiencing shock, Woolley used the app to look up what to do. It warned him not to sleep. So he set his phone alarm to go off every 20 minutes.  Once the battery got down to less than 20 percent of its power, Woolley turned it off. By then, he says, he had trained his body not to sleep for long periods, drifting off only to wake up within minutes. [CNN]

He also kept a journal to leave messages to his wife and two kids in case he didn’t make it.  But he did make it out alive, unlike I would have after burning through the battery playing Peggle and filling a journal with drawings of cats, all of them with thought bubbles reading “Haiti sucks”.  At least I still have better survival instincts than this guy.

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Scientists at Stanford have found a way to produce bendable, lightweight batteries and supercapacitors using ink, paper, carbon nanotubes, and silver nanowires.  The nanotubes and nanowires are mixed with ink and painted onto a piece of regular printer paper, which is then dried in an oven.  The end result is thin, low-cost, and very flexible, just like your sister.

The paper supercapacitor may last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles – at least an order of magnitude more than lithium batteries. [...] Cui had previously created nanomaterial energy storage devices using plastics. His new research shows that a paper battery is more durable because the ink adheres more strongly to paper. [...]  What’s more, you can crumple or fold the paper battery, or even soak it in acidic or basic solutions, and the performance does not degrade. “We just haven’t tested what happens when you burn it,” he said. [...]
Cui predicts the biggest impact may be in large-scale storage of electricity on the distribution grid. Excess electricity generated at night, for example, could be saved for peak-use periods during the day. Wind farms and solar energy systems also may require storage. [Stanford]

I’m totally going to paint all six sides of a room with this stuff and pretend I’m James Woods’s's’s wife in the Quitters, Inc. part of Cat’s Eye.

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No, this isn’t another post about what to do with a square meter of epidermis, this is about concrete cloth, the winner of the Material of the Year Award from Material ConneXion.  It’s a concrete permeated canvas that can be formed and tacked down as easily as a thick cloth, but once exposed to water (including rain and seawater) it becomes a waterproof, fireproof, bullet-resistant concrete surface that lasts for 10 years.  They’re now using it for lining ditches; reinforcing pipes, gabions, bunkers, and sandbag walls; creating shelters; and making impromptu driveways and helipads.  They would also be using it to make Hello Kitty sculptures and trap people inside an Arby’s, if they were cool like us.

The three ads below show the cloth in action.  The first and last video show its multiple civil engineering and military applications.  The second video shows how they make a 269 square foot (25 square meter) inflatable shelter using two people without any special training.  It takes less than an hour to set up, is ready to use in 24 hours, can withstand the pressure of being covered with earth, and has a sterile plastic liner that makes it possible to be used for emergency medical relief.  Or, it could make a really great porn cave in the backyard.  I’m just sayin’.

[Banner pic via MAKE]

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