CoolerBot uses a tail-dragger design with 14" wheels in front and a 10" castering wheel in the rear. The caster wheel is mounted using PVC pipe. The robot is capable of moving in either direction. CoolerBot uses two NPC-41250 motors powered by a 10 amp hour 12 volt SLA battery. The logic is powered by a separate 10 amp hour 12 volt SLA battery and both batteries are recharged by the two onboard solar panels. The motors are driven by two Parallax HB-25s are which are controlled by a Propeller. Currently the robot is remote controlled through a 912 MHz Transceiver.

As far as an "arsenal" is concerned, CoolerBot is equipped with an infrared video camera and a Nikon DSLR. Check out the terror in the eyes of the bunny in the shot above. It's just waiting for a missile launcher to pop out of the cooler and reduce him to a smoking crater. At any rate, it seems like overkill unless your objective is to capture lions with their cubs or dangerously unstable celebrities. Now that is a good use for this thing...a paparazzi-bot that goes in on the really dangerous missions. [Norris Labs via Make]

I've had Malcolm for a year now. He's a little dog. He's a good boy although kind of a moron, but Lisa and I love him. As a puppy, he chewed on a good variety of things, as puppies do. Pens probably reminded him of bones, and he'd sneak up onto Lisa's chair to her desk to grab a pen and prance away to a quiet corner with his prize to crunch away to get at the inky marrow. He'd attack shoelaces with the enough fervor you'd think they were spaghetti with meat sauce. Eyeglasses, too. He likes biting up the ear pieces so they are jagged and painful to wear, and putting cracks into the lenses. But now that he's a bit older, he's developed a primary affinity for eating gadgets.

TV remotes are fun for him, but only rectangular ones and mostly on the corners. The Toshiba remote has a little bit of chew on the corners, but the AppleTV remote, made of that soft plastic and chicklet looking, is his favorite. If I leave it on the coffee table, I will find it under a couch cushion 2 days later looking more worn. The black IR cap is broken off and the battery case is popped out. I'm lucky he didn't swallow the batteries. Or get shocked the one time he chewed through a 110v cable for a heating pad. I'd unplugged it that morning!

But Malcolm's favorite thing to chew on is an animatronic lion cub. Someone sent it to me last year, unsolicited, and it turned into a dog toy. It's basically a little robot cub that growls and moves its eyes and mouth. The size of a teddy bear. Malcolm used to be scared of it, but now he just unleashes all the hell a 9 pound dog can on it. I think he hates it. After all, he's flesh and blood dog, and the lion is a robotic cat. Not only is the conflict inter-species, but its a battle between a biological being and a robotic one.

At first, he'd drag it across the floor, by its limbs. After awhile, he learned to grab it by the nape of the neck and shake it. After 2 months, the neck opened up and the plastic spine, surrounded by various cables that powered the mouth and eye servos. He chewed through off of them, killing the robot, and gnawed on the neck bones. Sometimes he humps it, but it's pretty clearly dominance, not cross species homosexual technophilia. I think.

I don't have a point here. I just find it amusing and fun to watch nature's greatest machines destroy primitive man made replicants. Oh, how far we have to go.

*Yes, I spray things down with bitter apple now.

The result is a stunning composite of 83 different shots of this incredible tree. Look for a huge foldout of the image in the October issue of National Geographic, and here's a video of Nichols talking about the process of capturing the image.

[NPR via Hack-a-Day via Make]

This happened last week in Goshen co., Wyoming, the clip taken by the TornadoVideos.net SRV Dominator. The footage is impressive not because of what it does capture (the inside of a tornado) but also because of what it doesn't (girlish screaming and crying). [TornadoVideos.net via Neatorama]

As you can see in my highly detailed diagram, Obama wants to use a climate degenerating replic—I don't have any idea what im talking about. The truth, according to the AP, is that the smog shooter was called an "extreme last resort," but Obama is looking at radical measures to ensure we don't all broil at 500 degrees for 35-40 minutes. CO2-absorbing artificial trees were also listed as a possible way to fight The Warming.

While the above ideas may not be the most realistic, it is interesting that we're looking to climate engineering (or geoengineering) to directly control the larger climate trends. Maybe we'll someday control the weather...or just say screw it and move into domes. [AP via BreitBart]

Even though the rats being used are the Giant Gambian variety, they're still too light to set off most mines that they find. Trainers devised a harness that guides the rats systematically over a 100-meter square area, and a team of two can clear two such 100 square meter fields in a day. When they find the mines, they're rewarded with bananas.

The project has been going on for several years in multiple mine-strewn African zones, with some pretty significant success. You can donate by adopting a mini-sniffing rat online at, appropriately, HeroRat.org. [Hero Rats via Afrigadget]

Pachyderm rescue group Save the Elephants started the scheme up after five elephants who refused to stop raiding crops had to be shot by the Kenya Wildlife Service. The project, still in its infancy, is expensive to implement and not without its troubles. But it's already saved the life of one regular crop fiend, a bull named Kimari who's been intercepted 15 times since he was first connected. [Daily Mail via Switched]

26-year-old Kevin Kearney was strapped into his kite when a huge gust of wind came in and swept him away. A local TV crew was on the scene shooting weather footage and caught the entire disaster on tape. He's currently in the hospital in critical condition. Let this be a lesson to you all: don't be dumb. [CBS 4]

The vast majority of scientists will agree that the electromagnetic fields given off by small gadgets are far too weak to attract lightning strikes. Plus, there has been a marked increase amount of thunderstorms experienced across Russia this year—so there is definitely a reason to chalk this up to coincidence more than anything else. That is, until you see this. [CNN]

From what i understand, it went through my left hand holding the camera, crossed my back and exited out of my right hand holding onto the metal railing. No entry or exit wounds, just a really good zap!

And obviously the camera wasn't damaged so badly that the footage couldn't be extracted. Talk about some luck. Good lord, what an incredible video. [Flickr via Kottke]

Green Fortune Plantwall [via CNET Crave]