Only in Arizona

Arizona's Scottsdale gun club now offering pictures with Santa. Naughty kids better behave or they will be shot. Read story here in the Telegraph.

Lang Lang encores with iPad

You've gotta love this video of Chinese pianist Lang Lang playing encore on his Apple iPad, it really is amazing!

Only in Britain

This morning a trailer truck has apparently got into an accident on the M1 motorway outside London. Its cargo: 20 tons of Marmite, which was spilled onto the road. I'm guessing the road maintenance crew will be needing quite a few slices of toasted bread to clean this up... find news article here: I'm not making it up!

The (steady) robot will see you

Today some EU research agency has announced the launch into the wild of their latest creation: a surgical bot with a system that steadies the tremors of the operating surgeon's own hands by a factor of ten. It even gives haptic feedback! So cool!! Apparently the EU spends around 400m euros every year on robotics research... well who knew the EU still had 400m euros in it's coffers?? Now I'm feeling so confident financially I'll just go out and blow some cash right now!!

Fast Swiss

Former Swiss airman Yves Rossy has done it again: this time he flies his jetpack in a formation with a couple other Albatross jets above the Alps. Hang on to your 'chutes!

Race for fast computers

The excellent Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, has just published this great piece in The Daily Beast about the race between China and the USA to build the world's fastest computer. Apparently the boffins at the American national labs are worried about playing second-fiddle to their counterparts across the Pacific. This is a rather moronic pursuit in my view, since so far as I know neither side has really figured out how to write software for these silicon beasts. All this money would be better spent researching algorithms and computer languages as opposed to stacking more and more (poorly engineered) processors from Intel in the world's largest pile of pizza boxes. Conclusion: they're both losers.

Off to MARRS!

Your favorite neighborhood QB is baaaack!! after being lazy about blogging for so many months I was inspired by the awesome coolness of Nasa's latest mission to Mars to get back to typing about science, technology and anything exciting again. For those of you who are craving to know all about the latest rover soon to roll on the red planet, Curiosity, here's for you Nasa's dedicated site. And for all, please enjoy the MARRS classic old-school techno song above. Now get dancing!!