Destroy the Earth for fun (and other cool stuff)

Since it's the weekend I thought we all could use something a bit more lighthearted. A good way to relax for the weekend. And what better way to relax than to drop a thermonuclear device on your neighbors house?

For years this has been out of reach of just about everybody (except for the US that one time. Go us.) But now you, too, can destroy your least favorite city from the comfort of your own house. Using the Nukemap by Alex Wellerstein, you select where you want the nuke to go, what size you want, and it shows you on an interactive map the level of destruction you plotted. Here's what it looks like if we hit DC with the biggest nuke in our arsenal:



Maybe human caused destruction isn't your preferred diversion. Maybe you like it better if our annihilation comes from the void of space. Well you're in luck! Impact: Earth! is a nifty web program developed by the Imperial College in London (and hosted in a better looking, more graphic form on Perdue's website). Kinda like the nuke thing, you pick where you want the meteor to go, and give it the variables (like composition of the asteroid, angle of strike, whether it hits water or rock when it lands) and it'll tell you the destruction. It will even tell you if you managed to knock the Earth off it's axis, or ripped a giant chunk out of it, in addition to the size of the crater you left.

Before we get blown up or smashed into oblivion, we're doing some pretty cool stuff in science. The first example of this is Taylor Wilson, who at 14 became the youngest person in the world to ever independently achieve fusion. Read this article for the whole story of how he started (and continues) to brew yellow cake in his garage. He intends to use his fusion know how to make it so that hospitals can make the necessary isotopes for treatment in house, instead of needing to fly them around the world, which would make it much easier to treat cancer. He also has dreamed up a possible application for scanners in airports that would detect bombs and nuclear material by beaming it with particles and seeing what happened on the other side.

Second, a pair of fellas have discovered that not having a pulse might not be a bad thing. Bud Frazier and Billy Cohn have developed what they believe may be the best replacement for the natural heart. All they had to do, they said, was get rid of the heartbeat.

One of the reasons artificial hearts are so difficult to make is that the beating motion, constantly forever is very hard on artificial materials. Small turbines implanted inside existing hearts have been helping patients with heart problems for years by giving the heart a little boost. They found, though, that some patients who had this procedure later had hearts that had ceased to function entirely, and yet were completely healthy since the turbine was enough to push the blood through their body. Might we be able to survive with no heart at all?

Ever had one of those times when you're in the grocery store check out line and the person two spaces behind you in line is talking so loudly on her cell phone that you can't concentrate on flirting with the hot cashier, and you tried to politely tell her that you didn't need to hear about why Timmy is, like, the greatest guy ever, but she just wouldn't listen so you finally had no choice but to bludgeon her to death with a jar of spaghetti sauce?

Yeah, me too. Fortunately, a couple of clever fella's in Japan have a better solution: Use a gun! A speech impeding gun!

"The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for some years that it is almost impossible to speak when your words are replayed to you with a delay of a fraction of a second.

Kurihara and Tsukada have simply built a handheld device consisting of a microphone and a speaker that does just that: it records a person's voice and replays it to them with a delay of about 0.2 seconds. The microphone and speaker are directional so the device can be aimed at a speaker from a distance, like a gun.

In tests, Kurihara and Tsukada say their speech jamming gun works well: "The system can disturb remote people's speech without any physical discomfort." "

Finally, what is possibly the coolest website I've ever seen in my LIFE, is this neat little gadget that lets you trace the route of your web info from any site to your computer. In seconds it'll show you, on google maps, how many jumps the Internet had to take to get from, say, the Chinese Government's website, to their servers and then ultimately to you (23 hops, 3 seconds, travelling 13,093 miles), or from Starbuck's website (23 hops, 20.8 seconds, travelling 10,445 miles), or from...