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The Goodyear Blimps have been around since 1925, when The Pilgrim was launched with 60 hp worth of air-cooled radial power. Today, the company is preparing the newest generation of their Zeppelins developed by Zee Germans.

ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik's design offers better maneuverability and greater speed. Not like the old ones had problems in this department, because if you've seen The Junkman, you know that a Goodyear Blimp can almost land on Sunset Boulevard. Built at Goodyear’s hangar in nearby Suffield, the new fleet will use an aluminum and carbon fiber frame wrapped in a polyester envelope supplied by DuPont. 297,527 cubic feet of helium will take them to the clouds.

During its long operational history, Goodyear has built and operated more than 300 lighter-than-air vehicles, including two large rigid airships – the U.S.S. Macon and U.S.S. Akron. As of today, there are three blimps in the fleet in the USA:

• Spirit of Goodyear, based in Suffield Township, Ohio near Akron
• Spirit of America, based in Carson, California
• Spirit of Innovation, based in Pompano Beach, Florida

Excited to see the new ones in the sky?

Photo credit: Goodyear and ReneS

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At one point or another, who of us hasn't risked losing a finger by opening a pair of scissors and using them as a quick, impromptu knife? It turns out they're a pretty good way to open taped boxes without horribly slicing what's inside, so Quirky took the idea and created a pair of scissors called the Sheath that's actually safe to use as an improvised knife.

When fully opened a groove in the handle stashes one of the scissor's blades making it safe to hold and letting you repurpose the lowly crafting tool into a formidable slicing apparatus. Quirky hasn't quite nailed down a price for this little innovation just yet, but they are putting into production. And even if the charge an arm and a leg for it, it's still better than accidentally losing an arm or a leg using a traditional pair of scissors like this. [Quirky]

This image hasn't been photoshopped or digitally altered in any way. So why is the shadow so out of sync with the frisbee thrower's action?

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At InSight Crime, a blog that follows organized crime in the Americas, an analysis of the news that Zetas cartel leader Miguel Treviño has been captured by authorities. The short version: expect more violence in the near term.

PayPal just made 56-year-old Chris Reynolds a quadrillionaire. Yes, a quadrillionaire. For a little while, anyway.

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The staff at The Woodlands Resort north of Houston, Texas is serious about giving its guests exactly what they want. Redditor DecentDudeDustin gave specific instructions when reserving a room. The staff carried them out precisely. Scroll down to see how.

Link -via Daily of the Day

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Temar Boggs of Gable Park Woods, Pennsylvania, heard that police and firefighters were frantically searching his neighborhood for a kidnapped 5-year old girl. He and his friends got on their bikes and joined in the search. During their search they encountered a driver behaving suspiciously:

The car was on Gable Park and turned around when it got near the top of a hill toward Millersville Pike, where Boggs said several police officers were gathered with the kind of cart used to carry an injured football player off the field.

The driver, an older white man, then began quickly turning onto and out of side streets connecting to Gable Park, Boggs said.

The neighborhood is something of a maze; many of its streets are cul-de-sacs.

Boggs got close enough to the car to see a little girl inside. Garcia was nearby.

The driver looked at Boggs and Garcia, then stopped the car at Gable Park and Betz Farm Road and pushed the girl out of the car. The driver then drove off, Boggs said.

Boggs said he didn't see where the car went.

"She runs to my arms and said, 'I need to see my mommy,' " Boggs said.

Boggs scooped the girl onto his shoulders and began riding the bike toward home, but then decided that wasn't safe, so he carried her and walked back while Garcia pedaled along, guiding the bike Boggs had been using.

Link -via Robb Allen

(Photo: Lancaster Online)

We've featured quite a bit of extreme dog grooming, but it's hard not to when it's an artwork that combines some of our favorite TV shows and movies with adorable animals. This wonderful Simpsons creation was created by Catherine Opson and in case you're wondering, Homer is on the pup's other rear leg.

Link Via Split Sider

[Video Link] "My daugh-ter!" (Via Digg)

The International Campaign for Tibet reports that "Two Tibetan monks were shot in the head and several others seriously injured after Chinese police opened fire at a crowd gathered to peacefully celebrate the 78th birthday of the Dalai Lama in Nyitso, Tawu, eastern Tibet, on Saturday (July 6)."

In "Dungeons and Dragons, Satan's Game," we learn that D&D is a gateway to Satanism and human sacrifice. I remember being a young gamer in the early 1980s and meeting people who'd warn me about the peril it presented to my immortal soul.

D&D to a Fundie (via Christian Nightmares)

Paintball is coming ... Marque Cornblatt and his Game of Drones team have created a functional paintball drone that took paintball to a whole new level.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

While 3D printers of today are basically limited to plastics and resins, the holy grail of desktop fabrication is printing with metal. While we won’t be printing out steel objects on a desktop printer just yet, [Collin Ladd], [Ju-Hee So], [John Muth], and [Michael D. Dickey] from North Carolina State University are slowly working up to that by printing objects with tiny spheres of liquid metal.

The medium the team is using for their metallic 3D prints is an alloy of 75% gallium and 25% indium. This alloy is liquid at room temperatures, but when exposed to an oxygen atmosphere, a very thin layer of oxide forms on a small metal bead squeezed out of a syringe. Tiny metal sphere by tiny metal sphere, the team can build up metallic objects out of this alloy, stacking the beads into just about any shape imaginable.

In addition to small metal spheres, [Collin] and his team were also able to create free-standing wires that are able to join electrical components. Yes, combined with a pick and place machine, a printer equipped with this technology could make true printed circuit boards.

Even though the team is only working on very small scales with gallium, they do believe this technology could be scaled up to print aluminum. A challenging endeavour, but something that would turn the plastic-squeezing 3D printers of today into something much more like the Star Trek replicators of tomorrow.

Video demo below, or check out [Collin]‘s editing room floor and a vimeo channel. Here’s the paper if you’ve got a Wiley subscription.

Filed under: 3d Printer hacks

Few topics are more divisive than the subject of tipping. How much should we tip? Whom should we tip? And, most of all, should we even be tipping at all?

Over at Esquire, Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn points out six reasons we should get rid of the tipping system, including the fact that tipping is not only confusing but the percentage basis doesn't make sense.

Sadly, for many people tips are a sort of wage:

When you leave a bad tip, you are docking a person's wages. This may either be because you're confused about what's expected or because you're an asshole, and you really believe that your sea bass arriving lukewarm is justly punishable by making it a little harder for the guy who brought it to you to pay his rent.

Some think tipping encourages better service. What do you think? Should we eliminate tipping?

Why Tipping Should Be Outlawed | Esquire

(Photo: Reuters/Michaela Rehle)

It's shearing day down at the alpaca farm! Reuters photographer Michaela Rehle was on the scene in Regensburg, Germany to watch these adorable animals get their haircuts. You can view more photos in a slideshow at the link.

Link -via Ka-Ching!

Here's a brilliant experiment you can do at home if you've got yourself a lengthy chain of metal beads, and a container big enough to hold them. You just take one end of the chain out and drop it so that it drags the rest with it, and almost immediately you'll see it rise up out of the container like it's magically defying gravity.

It works even if you don't have a degree in magic, but how's that possible? The folks at BBC Earth Productions wanted to find out, so they pointed their high-speed camera at the mesmerizing effect, and got Steve Mould—who posted an earlier video of it occurring—to weigh in on what's happening.

Once again, physics has a fairly reasonable explanation that debunks the magic theory, but even knowing why it's happening doesn't make it any less fascinating to watch. So let's check out Steve's original video too:

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Want to play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe that's genuinely challenging and hard? Try "Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe," in which each square is made up of another, smaller Tic-Tac-Toe board, and to win the square you have to win its mini-game. Ben Orlin says he discovered the game on a mathematicians' picnic, and he explains a wrinkle on the rules:

You don’t get to pick which of the nine boards to play on. That’s determined by your opponent’s previous move. Whichever square he picks, that’s the board you must play in next. (And whichever square you pick will determine which board he plays on next.)...

This lends the game a strategic element. You can’t just focus on the little board. You’ve got to consider where your move will send your opponent, and where his next move will send you, and so on.

The resulting scenarios look bizarre. Players seem to move randomly, missing easy two- and three-in-a-rows. But there’s a method to the madness – they’re thinking ahead to future moves, wary of setting up their opponent on prime real estate. It is, in short, vastly more interesting than regular tic-tac-toe.

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe (via Kottke)

Cell culture lines are cells, taken from donor tissue, that have been divided and separated over and over and over — providing researchers with reliably identical "families" of cells that can be used to biomedical research. Some, like the now-famous HeLa line, are derived from cancerous tissue and replicate indefinitely. Others, like WI-38, will only divide a set number of times (in the case of WI-38, it's 50), but new cells can be frozen at any point and stored. When you thaw them out later, they'll pick back up dividing from the point in the 50-division cycle where they were when frozen.

WI-38 is a particularly important cell culture line. Used extensively in the development of vaccines, these are the cells that helped create the vaccine for Rubella, a disease that, just a few decades ago, used to kill and maim many fetuses whose mothers' became infected. Between 1962 and 1965, it's estimated that rubella infections caused 30,000 stillbirths and left 20,000 children with life-long disabilities.

But WI-38 is controversial. That's partly because the cells that founded the line came from the lung tissue of a fetus that was legally aborted during the fourth month of pregnancy by a woman in Sweden in 1962. At Nature News, Meredith Wadman has a fascinating long read about the moral and ethical issues surrounding WI-38. This isn't just about the abortion question. Also at issue: Did the fetus' mother consent to tissue donation? And are we okay with the fact that she and her family have never received compensation, despite the money that's been made off selling WI-38 cell cultures?

Medical Research: Cell Division by Meredith Wadman in Nature News

This one totally slipped under my radar, but I quickly remedied it with an immediate purchase from Steam. Painkiller: Hell & Damnation has received a new set of DLC called Heaven's Above. What does it do? Turns the FPS into a top down co-opable shooter.

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In what reads to be an astounding example of wrong, Texas is set to execute its 500th death-row inmate this Wednesday. Lincoln Caplan, at the NYT, blogs a very compelling case to stay this execution, "Texas’s death penalty system is notorious for its high tolerance of ineffective counsel for defendants, overly zealous prosecutors, and racial discrimination in jury selection. The case of Kimberly McCarthy, the woman scheduled for execution, seems tainted by all three."

Hey geeks! Only a few days left to get a copy of the new book! If you've ever wanted a signed version of one of the older books, this is also a way to do that. Thanks!

jones_supa writes "This discovery comes nicely alongside the celebration of FreeBSD's 20th birthday, for all the UNIX nerds. The operating system powering the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a Sony spin of FreeBSD 9.0. It's not a huge surprise FreeBSD is being used over Linux, in part due to the more liberal licensing. The PlayStation 4 is x86-64 based now rather than Cell-based, which makes it easier to use FreeBSD. BSDs in general currently lack manufacturer supported full-feature AMD graphics driver, which leads to the conclusion that Sony and AMD have likely co-developed a discrete driver for the PS4. Some pictures of the development kit boot loader (GRUB) have been published too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Oh god we're getting close to SDCC.

We understand the concept [Jean] used to create a 3D scan of his face, but the particulars are a bit beyond our own experience. He is not using a dark room and laser line to capture slices which can be reassembled later. Nope, this approach uses pictures taken with several different focal lengths.

The idea is to process the photos using luminance. It looks at a pixel and it’s neighbors, subtracting the luminance and summing the absolute values to estimate how well that pixel is in focus. Apparently if you do this with the entire image, and a set of other images taken from the same vantage point with different focal lengths, you end up with a depth map of pixels.

What we find most interesting about this is the resulting pixels retain their original color values. So after removing the cruft you get a 3D scan that is still in full color.

If you want to learn more about laser-based 3D scanning check out this project.

[Thanks Luca]

Filed under: digital cameras hacks