We’ve been documenting the extremely neat, super creepy quadrocopters for some time, so we all know they’ll aid the machines in overthrowing humanity some day, but now they can do so without taking up much space. Arnaud Taffanel, Tobias Antonsson, and Marcus Eliasson have helped the robot revolution along a smidge by creating the CrazyFlie, a miniature quadrocopter.

The adorable little mechanical spy weighs only 20 grams and measures 8 centimeters from the end of one motor to another. The quadrocopter runs on a Cortex-M3 CPU that takes input from an accelerometer and uses a couple of gyroscopes to keep balance. The quadrocopter is controlled by a 2.4Ghz radio transmitter, uses a small 110 mAh LIPO battery pack from an R/C plane and uses a PC to handle the telemetry. Head on past the break to check out a video of the tiny little spy copter in action.

In the never-ending chase to improve returns on stock portfolios, several are turning to Twitter as a guide to their investing. Chief among them is doctoral student Timm Sprenger, at the Technical University of Munich, who has launched a new site called TweetTrader that allows investors to see in real-time the projected stock sentiments from tweets.

While this could easily be dismissed as a cash-in fad, there is some research to back it up. Sprenger himself wrote a paper on the subject, as reported by GigaOm:

According to Sprenger’s research, the sentiment rankings that his system extracted matched the ebb and flow of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fairly closely, and appeared to predict movements in the market by more than a day. The researchers said that any investor who bought or sold using their analysis in the first half of 2010 would have achieved an average rate of return as high as 15 percent.

The idea is that with millions of people constantly tweeting, TweetTrader reckons that some of those tweets will be about stocks and aggregates accordingly. The result is an overall temperature for the market — bearish or bullish — and some stock-specific information, all taken from tweets. If it operates in a manner similar to the methodology outlined in his research paper, then it is also looking for the best investment information, which Sprenger found was retweeted more often by Twitter users.

Sprenger is not alone in his findings, as others have sought a link between Twitter and stock returns.

NASA scientists performed a test to find out how nuclear winter would affect the environment and modeled a war involving one hundred Hiroshima-grade bombs, which, as a scary side note, is around 0.03 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal. The scientists predicted that the explosions and subsequent fires would move about five million metric tons of black carbon into the lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere. The odd thing is that in NASA climate models, this black carbon absorbed solar heat, which was predicted to reduce average global temperatures by 2.25 degrees Fahrenheit for two to three years after the black carbon took over the sky. Even after ten years, NASA’s climate model predicted that the global average temperate would be 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than what it was before the nuclear war.

Of course, agriculture wouldn’t be doing so well, there’d be about ten percent less precipitation for up to four years after the the war, and the ozone would be decreasing more quickly. Oh, and you know those human things? They wouldn’t be doing to well either.

Another interesting tidbit NASA found from their morbid research, is that even a regional nuclear conflict, rather than a global one, would have some kind of negative global impact.

(National Geographic via The Reference Frame)

YouTube user mattinbrooklyn posted a video of the revolutionary Shaving Helmet, a terrifying helmet hiding four shavers on an automatic track underneath. At about 51 seconds into the video, the camera pulls away from the test subject, making us skeptical of the cleanly-shaven outcome, considering the test subject could’ve easily taken the helmet off and shaved his head via other means while the camera was focused on the fella giving the explanation. Either way, we know two things: 1) God no, and 2) A certain someone probably watches Family Guy.

Update: Fake.

(via Gizmodo)

You can’t have an indestructible robot army bent on overthrowing the human race without indestructible robot arms, and the engineers at DLR have brought us one step further on that road. The latest profoundly unnerving piece of tech from the German robotics lab is a fully articulated robot arm that can manipulate objects, flip the bird, withstand glancing blows from a hammer, and get creamed with a metal baseball bat, all without missing a beat. Granted, this is pretty neat in principle, and a sturdier robot arm means a sturdier robot butler/more capable indentured robot assassin down the road.

But it’s a bit troubling for anyone who is planning on having to battle legions of robots for their very lives in the next 20 years or so. Which is to say, people who are prepared for the inevitable future.

(via Robots.net)

We live in a time of wonders. People can communicate wirelessly from nearly anywhere on the planet, can fly from Asia to Austin in a day, and can buy a bride from a website.

Why then must we dispense ketchup as we have done for centuries? With our superior human intellect and mastery of the mechanical, can we not do something about the plight of millions who must squeeze ketchup over their own food? Can we not join hands, and with one voice demand that science give us a mechanical contrivance for the dispensing of delicious hot-dog toppings?

Actually, we might have to wait a while on that one.

(Urlesque via The Daily What)

Have you seen this masked man, Seattle?

First reported in November, a man wearing an exceedingly well-made superhero costume has been stalking the streets of Seattle, looking for crime to fight. Like in Kick-Ass, except real. He calls himself Phoenix Jones, and apparently, he has actually prevented a crime.

“No, I don’t think astronauts have been given an adequate chance to celebrate Christmas in the past. This is really a tribute to them.” – Rocketry Enthusiasts

I think we can all agree that after the emotional, physical, and psychological exertion of spending the holiday season eating, decorating, shopping, and defending yourself to your own family, a fitting release would be to attach rocket launchers to your Christmas tree and send it flying into the air, preferably into an open field. Launch begins around 1:15, though it’s definitely worth hearing the setup.

(via Laughing Squid)

Designed by Mike Nawrot and Romain Teil for a college rush, this wooden roller coaster, called The Reverse Cowgirl, features a terrifying design (heightened by the fact that it was made by college students instead of professional roller coaster engineers) in which the cart-looking thing at the top of the coaster in the picture above is where a lone rider is strapped in, then let loose across the track. Even scarier, the rider strapped into the cart is actually facing the ground, strapped into the side of the cart not seen in the above picture.

This movie has Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Sigourney Weaver, Seth Rogan, and Gilbert Gottfreid in it.

It looks more than solid, but we’re looking forward to the movie’s attempts to convince us that Jason Bateman is a man in black.

(via Blastr.)