For your amusement, I present my sixth grade science fair project. This would be from 1976. This gadget will add two binary numbers together. (You can also subtract by making one of the numbers negative). I called it BASC-1 (Binary Adding/Subtracting Calculator). In this picture, you can see it adding 75 + 103 = 178 (1001011 + 1100111 = 10110010). The thing was built in a box I got from a surplus store that was used to view microfilm. (for you young-uns, back before the internet, they used to keep archive documents (like old newspapers at the library) on little pieces of film called microfilm, and you'd use a viewer to project it onto a computer monitor sized screen). BASC is built onto the transluscent projection screen.

Runbot is a two-legged robot that walks. fast. It's one foot tall and moves 3.5 leg-lengths per second, which is twice as fast as it's closest competitor, Spring Flamingo (developed at MIT). If Runbot were a human, it would be walking 10 feet per second. Runbot was developed at the University of Gottingen, the University of Glasgow and the University of Stirling in Scotland.

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Quaketronics is two brothers who make an inexpensive ($99) rig for shooting your own high-speed photographs. I met them at the Maker's Faire this last weekend (which was extremely cool, btw). This picture is of my son Alex popping a balloon.

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What is thomlex.com?
Thomlex is the Hunt family website.

What does "thomlex" mean?
It's a mash-up of the names "Thomas" and "Alex".

Who are those cute faces?
Why those are Alex and Thomas, of course.

Who runs this joint?
That would be Bill.

How to extract DNA (and RNA) from anything living using household materials.

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Build your own MP3 player that fits inside an Altoids gum tin. Charges its internal battery over USB and mounts itself as a drive, runs for 12+ hours on a full charge and looks very cool. Full instructions here, including schematic (they'll post source code soon), or they can build it for you.

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Yet another shameless plug for Bill's art. This one's called Bleak.

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Mechanical Engineers from Carnegie Mellon University built a robot that can sprint across water. The robot was built to emulate the motions of the basilisk lizard, an iguana that lives in the rain forests of Central and South America.

The inventors imagine a day when a more developed version of the robot could be equipped with biochemical sensors that monitor water quality; be deployed with cameras for spying, search-and-rescue or exploration; or be outfitted with bacteria to break down pollutants.

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Knitting machine constructed entirely from Legos. There's a video as well.

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Wake Forest University School of Medicine reports the first human recipients of laboratory-grown organs. Children and teenagers received bladders grown from their own cells. Since the engineered bladders were grown from the patients' own cells, there is no risk of rejection. The laboratory-grown organs showed improved function over time -- with some patients being followed for more than seven years.

Scientists are now working to grow 20 different tissues and organs, including blood vessels and hearts, in the laboratory.

(link seems to have moved here).