Awesome Science

Listen and watch in amazement as this Faraday-suit wearing DJ takes on a half-million volts of electricity from a pair of Tesla coils in this performance by Arc Attack at Maker’s Faire 2010.

In this new Mythbusters-esque show on Spike, professional stuntmen and scientists risk their lives to replicate accidents to try and figure out what actually happened. The pilot airs Tuesday 4/27.

Segway inventor Dean Kamen shows off his robotic, prosthetic arm, “Luke” on The Colbert Report. Amidst serious discussions about replacing vets’ lost limbs, Colbert still infuses a bit of humor.

This engineered coffee from Funranium Labs is “super-caffeinated”. Currently available only for “direct hand-off” in the SF Bay area, they’re working on a way to ship this stuff soon.

This girl likely has a line of geeks 3.0 x 10^8 meters long waiting to marry her: watch as she balances 15 books, recites pi to 100 digits and solves a rubik’s cube … simultaneously.

We’ve featured Tesla art before, but ArcAttack’s Dorkbot SXSWi performance puts a spring spark in our step; it uses two “singing” coils with 1/2 million Volt sparks and a Faraday suit.

Spend Spring Break on the fourth planet courtesy of NASA: watch the most accurate simulated flyby of Mars ever, using HiRISE data with 0.25 m resolution and no vertical exaggeration.

And you thought you’d never use math in real life: the Inverse Graphing Calculator does all the work for you, but you’ll get an asymptotic high when it translates words into equation.

Touchscreens get a touch outdated with Chris Harrison’s Skinput, which turns your arm and hands into an input surface; a bio acoustic armband detects pinches, taps, and scrolling.

Geek density reaches critical mass with The Poetry of Reality, the fifth installment of the Symphony of Science series; it features 12 scientists including Feynman, Hawking, and Sagan.

It’s not as tangible as MIT’s Flyfire project, but Julia Yu Tsao’s Curious Displays is just as viscerally amazing with 1/2″ blocks that operate independently yet cohesively form a UI.

Can’t separate your glu from pyru or your Co-As from synthase? Stanford students rap out human metabolism with Oxidate It Or Love It, set to songs by 50 Cent/The Game and Jay-Z.

MIT’s Flyfire forms 2D/3D shapes on the “fly”; each pixel is actually a micro helicopter that synchronizes its motion with fellow self-organizing helis to form a swarm of smart pixels.

Sound gets seen in a big way in the awesome Atlas V launch video above; the SDO rocket breaks the sound barrier (1:50) in the middle of a sun dog, creating a visual sonic boom.

Media speculation about black holes swallowing the earth is pure pseudoscience, but this press conference reveals that there are other dimensions to the Large Hadron Collider’s Secret.

Minkowski disciples may think of 4D as time, but most mathematicians agree that this 4th Dimensional Space t-shirt is as good as it gets; flatlanders could get hurt staring at this tesseract.

John Hunter’s Quicklauncher is a 3,600 ft. underwater space cannon placed near the equator that can be easily swiveled since it floats; it’ll shoot satellites 13,000 mph at only $250/lb.

From fusion reactors to genetically engineered pets, What’s Next’s Trends & Tech Timeline is a mind-blowing look into the future; it starts in present day with predictions up to 2050.

Fun and logic need not be an empty set with the bOOleO Logic Card Game; you’ll start off with a row of binary numbers and try to build a logic pyramid using AND, OR, XOR, and NOT cards.

The CERN crew replaces street cred with geek cred and lays down the laws of the universe in this Black Hole Rap; we just love it when LHC lyricists make pseudoscience evaporate.

Microsoft aims to go controller-free with a patent for EMG-sensing devices–in short, a muscle-computer interface that plays MP3s or even play Guitar Hero with your forearm electrodes.

Using a PlayStation Eye and the open-source structured light scanning project, Kyle McDonald’s 3D Capture at 60fps is a work in progress but still mind-blowing; more: DIY, videos.

The Complete National Geographic packs every NatGeo magazine (120 years worth) in high resolution onto a single 160 GB external drive; too pricey? Get the DVDs for $60-$70.