This is some pretty cool work by a father and his son — building a capsule holding a video camera and an i-Phone for location and retrieval, launching the whole works on a weather balloon to the stratosphere and safely back to earth, then finding it. (More awesomeness from Gizmag.)

This time, it’s about the patently obvious fact that a pregnant woman having a drink or two does no harm to her unborn child, the moronic posturing of health Nazis and governments notwithstanding. It’s both a blessing and a curse to be as brilliant as I am.

Carbon fiber bicycle rims have been around for a while now — but they’ve always been a challenge for braking, since they don’t offer the same “grab” from standard rubber brake pads as the old aluminum alloy rims do. So these cats at a company called Zircotec came up with a sprayed-on ceramic coating that […]

I’m going to have to check out Steven Johnson’s books — if they’re anything like as good as his Wall Street Journal article, “The Genius of the Tinkerer,” I’m in for some great reading.  I sure didn’t know this, for example: More recently, a graduate student named Brent Constantz, working on a Ph.D. that explored […]

It’s not just in the “global warming” arena that we’re assailed by the notion of some ironclad “scientific consensus.”  I’ve seen it thrown out in articles about high fructose corn syrup or bisphenol A being eeevil, too. Not all that long ago, there was a powerful “scientific consensus” about the cause of stomach ulcers — […]

Check out the motorcycle he built from the ground up — he welded his own frame and did the paint himself, among many other feats of gearhead supermanhood.

Here’s a useful skill to know. H/t to Gizmag.

I was reading a car magazine during my visit to my gearhead brother Rich’s house last weekend, and came across an article about a racing driveshaft… made of aluminum. I asked if he ever imagined when he got into that stuff 25 years ago that he’d live to see such a thing.  For anyone who […]

God bless Robert Cribb and the service he’s rendered society with his “Ogling Women a Natural Reflex.” My favorite bit is this: But if the socially repulsive act of staring at beautiful women is actually an artifact of ancient DNA, surely the trance-induced man should get a little latitude, no? Even criminal law acknowledges temporary […]

The Voyager spacecraft been out there for 12,000 days now.  That’s nearly 33 years of continuous operation, and it’s now traveled 14 billion miles. Maybe General Motors should hire some of the guys who built it.