The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound, circa ‘72.

January 20, 2012, 1:20pm

A German company, GFD Gesellschaft für Diamantprodukte, has developed a plasma sharpening process that permits use of industrial diamonds in razor blades. The revolutionary blades will last some 1000x longer than current razors. They combine the hardest material in the world with the sharpest possible cutting edge. Margaret Thatcher would be proud. Quoth the beard: Don’t cry for me, because I’m already dead. From the July issue of Shaving Stuff.

October 17, 2010, 10:20am

October 06, 2010, 1:09pm

Happy New Year from SMJ.

January 04, 2010, 2:52pm

September 24, 2009, 9:54am

Half-assed British paleontologists discovered the remains of a Belemnotheutis antiquus (lit. “Old Hairy Squid”) during a dig at a Victorian excavation in Trowbridge, Wilts.

They cracked open what appeared to be an ordinary looking rock only to find the one-inch-long black ink sac inside.

After realising what they had stumbled across, the researchers got completely fucked up. They then took a small sample of the black substance and ground it up with an ammonia solution.

Remarkably, the ink they created was good enough to allow them to draw the squid-like animal and write its Latin name.

August 25, 2009, 8:33am

This 29-page checklist, mounted on a metal wristband and including this mildly dirty cartoon, was worn by astronaut Charles Duke during the Apollo 16 lunar surface exploration.

Thanks to @kevrotti.

July 21, 2009, 10:14am

A former boutique storefront in London has become the temporary home of the U.K.’s “first walk in cocktail.” For a mere £5 an hour, a British culinary team allows you to “climb into plastic suits and enter a venue where beverages will be pumped into the room as a vapour cloud”.

Lucky ticket-holders to the sold-out event are encouraged to “breathe responsibly” before stepping into an alcoholic fog for up to 40 minutes – long enough to inhale a fairly stiff drink.

The Guardian noted that “as far as taste goes, this is the real deal,” with some mouthfuls of air “sweeter with tonic and others nicely gin-heavy.” They cleverly concluded that, “With no sentient ice cubes able to confirm it, one can only assume that this is what the inside of a G and T feels like.”

Via BLDGBLOG.

April 21, 2009, 9:39am

I know the staffers are hesitant to disrupt the subtle genius of random juxtaposition that currently is page 1 of shitmyjorts. Fuck that. I’m breaking open the floodgates with a this P-791 Hybrid Airship, a.k.a the STEALTH BLIMP. Gaze upon it and dispair.

March 10, 2009, 11:21am

Launch of Saturn V, the archetype for all phallic rocket designs, for the Apollo 11 mission. From every angle. Keep in mind that this rocket is over 110m tall and 10m in diameter. That’s approximately the same height as a 35 story building, bitches. The rocket weights ~3k tons or 6.7 million pounds and it could carry a payload of an additional 50 tons to the moon.

Design of the rocket begun in 1961 and it was first launched in 1967. The construction phase alone took nearly 1.5 years. My latest box design took nearly that long. In my defense, it does have nearly seven sides. NASA was pretty fucking awesome back then.

February 10, 2009, 2:40pm

I want to take a moment out from the petty name calling and out Jortsmanship that typically fills the pages of this site. Below is a picture of the sharpest object known to man, a tungsten needle. While it looks like a tasty raspberry, those berries are in-fact individual atoms. The lighter colored ones with elongated features, those atoms moved around while the image was being captured with the Field Ion Microscope (FIM). This is for serious, I found it on the internets.

January 27, 2009, 3:57pm

The world’s most under-engineered Can Crusher. It’s portable, practical and can be used on just about any cylindrical object.

January 27, 2009, 8:34am

“In October 1971, a US submarine, Halibut, visited the Sea of Okhotsk off the eastern USSR and recorded communications passing on a military cable to the Khamchatka Peninsula. Halibut was equipped with a deep diving chamber, fully in view on the submarine’s stern. The chamber was described by the US Navy as a “deep submergence rescue vehicle”.

The truth was that the “rescue vehicle” was welded immovably to the submarine. Once submerged, deep-sea divers exited the submarine and wrapped tapping coils around the cable. Having proven the principle, USS Halibut returned in 1972 and laid a high capacity recording pod next to the cable. The technique involved no physical damage and was unlikely to have been readily detectable.

The Okhotsk cable tapping operation continued for ten years, involving routine trips by three different specially equipped submarines to collect old pods and lay new ones; sometimes, more than one pod at a time. New targets were added in 1979. That summer, a newly converted submarine called USS Parche travelled from San Francisco under the North Pole to the Barents Sea, and laid a new cable tap near Murmansk. Its crew received a presidential citation for their achievement. The Okhotsk cable tap ended in 1982, after its location was compromised by a former NSA employee who sold information about the tap, codenamed IVY BELLS, to the Soviet Union. One of the IVY BELLS pods is now on display in the Moscow museum of the former KGB. The cable tap in the Barents Sea continued in operation, undetected, until tapping stopped in 1992.”

via @fas.org

January 19, 2009, 1:01pm

This is why the “Scientists totally getting high” tag was invented. From the ever-insightful L.A. Times, of course.

Bees, not unlike some starlets we can think of, can become addicted to cocaine, according to a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The Times’ Thomas H. Maugh II reports:

Researchers led by entomologist Andrew Barron of Macquarie University in Sydney trained a hive of bees to forage at a nearby supply of sugar water. Then they applied minute quantities of cocaine to the backs of foragers.

He and neuroscientist Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois found that the bees’ dance remained tightly controlled, providing accurate directions to the food source. But the insects now demonstrated an unusually strong response to food, acting as though a weak solution of sugar water was a much better food source and communicating their findings much more enthusiastically to hive-mates.

The Australian bees developed a tolerance to the drug and even experienced withdrawal symptoms when deprived of it — their abilities to learn new tasks (like distinguishing between scents) was severely impaired, said the research team.

So will honeybee rehab become a hot new trend — the flea circus of the 21st century?  Only time will tell.

January 14, 2009, 3:14pm