Aerogel is the lightest and lowest-density solid known to exist; it weighs only three times that of air. It holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, including best insulator. It is 99.8% air, yet is incredibly strong structurally, and can support thousands of times its own weight.

Aerogel is used in various capacities by NASA.

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Build circuitry to put LED images on your bicycle wheels. Here pacman chases his ghostly friend.

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Mike Walters built his own Mellotron from a set of old Walkmans. The Melotron , invented in the early 60s, was the original sampler, playing one tape loop for each key pressed.

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Scott Haefner suspends a camera from a kite and takes some great aerial photography.

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Mazes cut into corn fields.

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A few posts ago, I linked to an article about micromarketing and the long tail. This link is a blog by the subject of that article and will soon become a book. The graph here shows the percentage of hit (gold, platinum and multi-platinum) records being sold as a percentage of all records being sold. That number is decreasing.

Chris Anderson, the author, proposes this trend will continue across all products that are marketed, with the result that people will buy fewer of the blockbuster products (like gold records or Tom Cruise movies) and buy more niche products.

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This fireplace is fed with water and electricity. The fireplace separates the water into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis, then burns the hydrogen (along with some of the oxygen for color), producing heat and water vapor. Yeah, it's far less efficient than just an electric heater, but it's mighty cool. Oh, one other hitch: it's priced at $49,900.

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Terragen is open-source software that generates high-quality nature scenes. On startup, it looks daunting with a ton of parameters to tweak and no clear usage path. But after following the tutorial for five minutes, I was creating scenes on par with this one.

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JP Brown built a robot out of Legos that solves the Rubix cube. This one's been around a while, but still mighty cool.

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USB drive with built-in LCD screen and fingerprint authentication. Plug it in to a computer and boot from it, then after authenticating, have access to a full OS and apps on the stick. Comes with Linux, Open Office and other apps.

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