The cardboard bicycle - just the right amount of crazy

Israeli designer Giora Kariv had his mind pretty much blown when he heard about someone who created a cardboard canoe - and then he decided that he was going to make a cardboard bicycle...


The project might well have been scuppered if he'd listened to the engineers he consulted: they told him that it was impossible. But he couldn't let the concept just die in his mind - and his wife said that if he didn't at least try, he'd drive himself mad, then her, then his kids.


Good thing he listened:

"Impossible", huh?

The resulting bike is strong (the video below illustrates how strong), water-resistant, looks like it's made of plastic, and can carry riders up to 220kg (that's 485lbs!). And the production cost is just $9 - the cost to the consumer is estimated at $60-$90 depending on what parts are added on.


Take a look at this awesome bicycle in action:






Thank goodness there are people like this in the world, who are unwilling to give up in the face of being told their plans won't work!

Teachers Dancing Behind Students

We were linked to this video by our awesome friend jessartisan - the teaching faculty of Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public School in Worcester, MA getting down and funky, during what appears to be the filming of a student documentary...

Our favorite is the bald-headed guy with the goatee - he really gets into it! Wish we had teachers like this at our schools when we were the kids' age...

3D printed chocolate brain... yummy!

Inition, a 3D-printing company based in the Shoreditch district of London, England, recently decided to have a little play with the MRI scan of a colleague's brain: They used the resulting data to create a chocolate replica!

Mmmmm.... brains.

What's more, they even went to the trouble of providing a how-to on the process, over at Instructables, together with a Creative Commons-released copy of the MRI scan in question, which is rather nice of them.

The Zombie Apocalypse probably just became more delicious.

(Side note: I was going to use "Brains are quite rich in cholesterol" as a headline, quoting Laura Shigihara's lyrics from the game Plants vs. Zombies, but it turns out that even milk chocolate doesn't actually have that much "bad" cholesterol, so that made a mess out of that idea.)

Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing out this awesomeness!

TARDIS for sale or rent...

It's inevitable, when you have a talent contest, especially something like Britain's Got Talent, that there are going to be... unusual acts. For example, why haven't they buzzed off that snarky so-and-so who sits at the end of the panel each week?


Well, this is definitely unusual: Martyn Crofts appeared on BGT with a saucepan on his head, and - without any electronic wizardry - proceeded to parody "King of the Road" as a Dalek.

And, sure enough, that nasty man on the right-hand end of the desk still needs buzzing off...


Thanks to BoingBoing for sourcing that little nugget!

You know what you can do with your tweets? (NSFW)

One of the authors of this blog (i.e. not the one typing this right now) just said, "Social media is a toilet". And nothing illustrates this better, perhaps, than the creation of Shitter, which takes a Twitter feed of your choosing, prints out the tweets onto four rolls of toilet paper, and then mails it to you.

The tagline for Shitter is "Social media has never been so disposable". Enough said, I think.


Original source: Laughing Squid.

LEGO Star Wars Organ

This is possibly one of the most amazing LEGO creations I've ever seen - and I've seen a few. As part of a German promotion for the 3D version of The Phantom Menace, a couple of professional LEGO builders (Builders of Sound) created a huge rotating drum featuring scenes from the movie. Oh, and that drum also happens to be linked to levers which play the Star Wars theme on an organ!

Of course, you can't get an idea of how it all works without a video, so here you go:

Thanks to Nerd Approved for bringing this to everyone's attention!

Fun-running + zombies = awesome

OK, so I'm not what you'd call a fit person, but this is an idea I could totally get behind... In the Philippines, organisers of a 5km race in the Laguna Province decided to spice things up by turning the race into a zombie-apocalypse chase!

I don't think the zombies in the chase were chained up, though. (Picture source: Reuters/Nacho  Doce)

You can find out more about the crazy race over at the original Reuters article.