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Web tool that lets you chop YouTube videos

TubeChop allows you to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video and share it.

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'Perpetual motion' machine

The Finsrud Wheel is a moving sculpture built by Norwegian artist Reidar Finsrud. It appears to use a combination of gravity, magnets, and pendulum effects, which modern physics would say is impossible, to generate nearly continuous motion since 1996* when it was assembled. It is presently housed in a vault in a Norwegian gallery featuring Finsrud's works.

* 14-days in a row is the longest it has run without stopping. -- Rita Børtveit, on behalf of Reidar Finsrud (April 2, 2008)

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Gym ball back flip

Firefox Could Be a Facebook Challenger

Firefox doesn't keep track of the number of users it has but Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, said today that the company estimates that there are 270 million people using the browser. That's 35% more users than Facebook has signed up for accounts (200 million), and almost triple the number of people Facebook says log in to the social network every day (100 million).

Why compare user numbers between a browser and a social network? Because there's every reason to believe that the two technologies are converging in the near term future. Here's why we believe that Firefox should be Facebook's biggest competition.

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Stop Trying to Save the Planet

Nature is gone. It was gone before you were born, before your parents were born, before the pilgrims arrived, before the pyramids were built. You are living on a used planet.

If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene ― a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces.

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Cockney William Tell by BBC Concert Orchestra & Bill Bailey

Property prices trapping people into living with the ex

Couples who have split up and want to go their separate ways are increasingly being forced to live apart under the same roof by a lack of movement in the housing market. Robert Sinclair, director of the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries, says there is a "worrying rise" in couples like Gemma and Ben who have split up and are forced to stay together.

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Model Train Set In A Briefcase

Priced at $1500, the Blumenau comes with a key locking briefcase, two carriages, throttle controller and a 9 volt battery holder.

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New world's smallest car

What is claimed to be the world's smallest car, roughly the size of a domestic washing machine, is being unveiled this weekend. The vehicle - a hybrid of a quad bike and a model of Postman Pat's van - is half the size of the current holder of the title

Click through for a video.

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New website 'Kachingle' could help fund newspapers & bloggers

Here's the basic idea of Kachingle: Users contribute a small amount, currently $5.00 per month, voluntarily. While surfing they select content sites they like and want to support. At the end of the month, their monthly fee is distributed to their sites, based on how much time they spent on each site.

"We're going to have at least three, probably five or six major newspapers signed up by the time we launch," said Fred Dewey, CEO of Kachingle. 

Kachingle will take 20 percent of the revenue collected and distribute the rest to its publishers.

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Skydiving Without A Parachute

US national debt - another government Ponzi scheme

As you may well be aware of, the US government has run a budget deficit for the majority of the last twenty years. This means that the government spends far more each year than they collect in taxes and transfer payments. The budget gap is bridged through borrowing money from investors by selling government debt. Through decades of economic supremacy, the average investor (institutional or otherwise) has come to view the chances of our government defaulting on these debts as trivial. This can be seen in the simple fact that the yield of the shortest term government debt is known as "the risk free rate of interest." This is very good for our government as investors around the world line up to pour their money in the governments cup, even at today's low rates of interest. As a result the government has issued a very large amount of debt: $9,682,116,996,293.84 (as of 9/11/08 from www.treasurydirect.gov). Stripping out debt held by other US governing entities the number drops to $5,526,828,606,295.84, still a ridiculously large figure. Assuming a average rate of interest of 3% (its definitely more), that means the government must pay a net $165,804,858,188 per year to service its debt. This figure is approximately equal to our government's entire budget deficit for 2007.

THIS MEANS THAT THE GOVERNMENT MUST BORROW MONEY TO PAY ITS CURRENT INTEREST LIABILITIES.

This meets the criteria of a Ponzi Scheme, paying early investors with the capital of later investors.

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BBC Panorama investigation into dangers of Wi-Fi

Beef jerky business cards

Two weeks ago a number of blogs caught wind of this bizarre and potentially amazing creation, bringing meat and lasers together to create the most protein-rich business cards ever. Some thought it was a hoax. But it’s very real.

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African tribe populated rest of the world

The entire human race outside Africa owes its existence to the survival of a single tribe of around 200 people who crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago, scientists have discovered.

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Pirates try to capture anti-pirate navy ship

Hapless Somali pirates got more than they bargained for when the ship they were trying to hijack turned out to be an anti-pirate navy ship.

It is thought the bungling gang had mistaken the French navy ship - filled with weapons and angry commandos - for a cargo ship, and tried to attack it.

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Comedian sneaks into US State department

Comedian Armando Iannucci got past security guards at the US State department in Washington with a pass which "could have been produced by a child", in what he described as "probably international espionage". The identification he had with him was an amateurish BBC pass with his face show by a print out of a picture of him from the internet

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First face transplant surgery in the US

This is a photo of Connie Culp, after an injury to her face, left, and then as she appears today. Culp underwent the first face transplant surgery in the United States at the Cleveland Clinic last December.

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'Hoax' Wikipedia quote used worldwide in newspaper obituaries

A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.

Mr Fitzgerald said he placed the quote on the website as an experiment when doing research on globalisation.

Fitzgerald posted the quote on Wikipedia late at night after news of Jarre’s death broke.

The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours.

Fitzgerald was shocked by the result of his experiment. “I didn’t expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised about,” he said.

However, the hoax remained undiscovered for weeks until Fitzgerald e-mailed offending newspapers to tell them that they had published an inaccurate quote.

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