For most of the country it’s pretty cold and gray this time of year and we could all use a little something to cheer us up, a holiday tune should do the trick. We don’t want just any holiday tune though, we want something geeky right? So how about this hilarious “Let it Snow” mash-up video featuring some of our favorite Star Trek characters.
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Amazon Prime Air Wants to Fly Things To Your House in 30 Min
In what could be one of the craziest and most brilliant ideas, Amazon has announced that they are working on a new delivery service called “Amazon Prime Air“. The new delivery system uses a small unmanned aerial robot to fly packages you order from Amazon directly to your house in 30 minutes or less!
This delivery option would be absolutely amazing if it could work properly. More consumers than ever before purchase items online, in fact statistics show that e-commerce alone has brought in nearly $289 billion in the U.S for 2012. There’s no doubt that the will be a huge demand for this type of service but whether or not it can be done remains to be seen.
Amazon admits that it will take many years for this service to get up an running on a commercial scale and that one of the first major hurdles will be lining up FAA rules and regulations, but the service could be up and running as soon as 2015. What do you think about this service?
Draw Circuits With a Pen
Creating basic circuits by hand is the best way to learn about how electronics work and using a breadboard has traditionally been the best way to do this, at least until now. Circuit Scribe is a kickstarter project that features a cool new ball point pen that uses a conductive silver ink which is perfect for drawing simple circuits. Utilizing just a Circuit Scribe pen, piece of paper, and a few electronic components like a LED light or a small motor, you can create just about any small project that you can imagine. This catchy idea has already pulled in $260,000, which is far beyond the set goal of $85,000.
This pen would make a great tool for children to use in the classroom to learn about simple circuits and there’s even a Classroom kit that includes 10 basic kits and a activity book. You can also buy just one basic kit for yourself to see what you can come up with. You can also get two larger kits, the Maker Kit and Developer Kit.
Each kit includes the Circuit Scribe pen which can be purchased separately for $20.
Here’s what’s in the Basic Kit (Cost $30):
- 2 LED Boards each with two (2) LED lights attached
- 2 Coin Batteries
- 9V Battery Connector
- 2 PIN which you can add Resistors, Capacitors, and Switches to
- Slide Switch
- Jumper Stickers
- BJT NPN Transistor
Maker Kit ( Cost $50):
- Includes Basic Components
- Maker Notebook
- RGB LED
- Photo Sensor
- Sound Buzzer
- Potentiometer
- 8 PIN ( NAND Logic Gate, 555 Timer, OP AMP)
- Stencil
- 9V Battery
Developer Kit ( Cost $100):
- 2 Basic Component Kits
- Maker Notebook
- 2 Sets of Maker Components and Developer Components
- 10 Magnetic Connection Cords
- USB Micro B Power Adapter
- Motor
- 2 DPDT Switches
- 10 DIY Solder Boards
LeVar Burton Explains NASA’s Martian MAVEN Mission
In this cool NASA Public Service Announcement, LeVar Burton tells us all about MAVEN’s mission and explains why it’s important. On November 18th, NASA has had a successful launch of MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission. The Atlas V rocket lifted off at approximately 1:30 P.M EST and is now on it’s way towards Mars to hopefully allow us to better understand why Mars has become so inhospitable and to possibly help us better understand our climate here on Earth.
We’re currently about 14,000 miles away from Earth and heading out to the Red Planet right now,” – MAVEN Project Manager David Mitchell-
NASA is trying to understand why most of the Martian atmosphere has disappeared and just how it lost all of it’s liquid water. Perhaps we can even answer the question we have all been really wanting to know, was there ever life on Mars? The only way to find out is to keep on studying our neighboring planet and to continue to dig deeper into the past of the great red planet.
Teardown of the Playstation 4 (Video)
This video is of Sony engineering director Yasuhiro Ootori tearing down the Playstation 4. Ootori leaves out no details as he takes the PS4 down to it’s motherboard and reveals the true guts of the system. The Playstation 4 was designed with the game programmers in-mind, that’s been the mission of the PS4 from the very beginning.
Even though the Playstation 3 was extremely powerful during it’s release, it was notoriously difficult to create games for, and that’s a problem since great games are what really make a console shine. The hardware capabilities of the Playstation have a lot of promise, especially with the inclusion of GDDR5, and it’s likely that we won’t see games utilizing the full power of the system until a few years from now but there’s still plenty to be excited about right now as trailers for some pretty rad PS4 exclusives begin to hit the web.
Thanks to WIRED for the video.