Slot Car Speed Insanity! 21

We all remember slot cars. We have fond memories of sitting on the carpet, holding the steering wheel/gas trigger, and watching them fly around the track. None of us had slot cars like this!
These are the European Slot Car Racing Championships held in Helsinki, Sweden. You’d need a high speed camera to get a decent picture of this insanity!

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The World's First 3D-Printed Titanium Rib Cage Is a Medical Marvel

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We can rebuild him, better, stronger, faster

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Okay I’m sure the surgeon and designers thought of this but ..... aren’t these a bit narrow?

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It sounds like something straight out of a comic book, but after losing his sternum and part of his rib cage to cancer, a 54-year-old Spanish man received the world’s first 3D-printed chest prosthetic made from lightweight, but incredibly strong, titanium.

Titanium implants aren’t new, but replacing large sections of the rib cage is tricky. Titanium prosthetics are usually built from various plate components, and over time they can come loose creating future complications.

Surgeons at the Salamanca University Hospital in Spain decided that a custom-designed titanium prosthetic would better replicate the portions of the patient’s chest that had been removed, and in the long term would be a safer option.

Using high-resolution 3D CT scans of the patient’s chest, the surgeons determined what areas needed to be replaced, and then turned to a Melbourne, Australia-based company called Anatomics to design and build the replacement sternum and rib cage.

As impressive as home 3D printers like the MakerBot are, printing with titanium requires a higher level of expertise and equipment. Anatomics actually used a $1.3 million electron beam Arcam 3D printer to produce the prosthetic, the first of its kind in the world, which was then flown to Spain and surgically implanted in the patient.

Just 12 days after their final surgery, the patient, who is now probably the closest thing the world has to Marvel’s Wolverine, was discharged and is recovering well. And 3D printing takes another important step forward to becoming one of the most important technologies of the 21st century.Source===G

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Metal Gear Solid 5's best secret: You can play the campaign as a woman

Much has been written about the juvenile design of Quiet, the improbably naked sidekick in the Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. But, for all the justifiable anger about her character, almost nothing has been written about the secret new female protagonist in Metal Gear.

I’m calling her FemSnake.
FemSnake is awesome. She’s on the title screen. Soldiers stop dead in their tracks and sharply salute her. "Thanks for saving those kids, Boss," they say.
Revolver Ocelot speaks to her in reverent tones, reporting on mission outcomes. When she interrogates a prisoner, she demands "Out with it!" and my heart skips a beat.

FemSnake stands in ironic contrast to Quiet. FemSnake wears full military armor, form-fitting, but tough and realistic. Everything about her demands to be treated like a professional and not a sex object. Accompanying her is a sexist train wreck of a design, a woman designed to be ogled while never speaking a word. Quiet is a capable soldier who looks like anything but.
Some people will tell me FemSnake is not really Snake, and it’s true. She’s a prisoner you rescue on a mission, but you do get to play almost every mission as her. She can be your protagonist, and is included in many of the cutscenes. She runs Mother Base. She commands the game’s soldiers. She is fully voiced, and her acting is even more menacing than Kiefer Sutherland’s. This is my title screen, featuring my game's hero:

I’ll tell you how to unlock her. But first, let’s back up. Let’s look at some of the design decisions in Metal Gear Solid V that are meant to make most gamers feel like they’re Snake — including gamers that are not white.

A silent protagonist

I was confused when David Hayter tweeted that he wouldn’t be returning as Snake. As a hardcore fan of the series, I couldn’t imagine long codec monologues with anyone but Hayter. Now that I’m 30 hours in, this design decision makes total sense.
Wanting to capture a wider audience, Metal Gear has gone the Portal route with Snake — our now near-silent protagonist. The story happens around him, with imaginative characters like Ocelot, Master Miller and Skull Face providing much of the personality and voice acting. Snake watches everything unfold around him.

Goodbye, long discussions about nuclear disarmament. Hello, adrenaline-filled setpieces and systems that hint towards for-pay DLC. Just like the Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Call of Duty franchises, Metal Gear is going for a more mainstream appeal. For that to happen, the angst-ridden, talkative version of Snake had to go.
In fact, Snake himself barely even matters in this version of Metal Gear. That’s why the game teases you with changing Snake’s character’s race and face in the opening, a feature that delighted my Asian husband. As the online component comes next month, players will represent themselves as their custom avatar. The technical term for this in gamedev parlance is "player agency," giving you control over your game world.
FemSnake is a design compromise to allow female players to play as a woman. And make no mistake, including her was a feature that took quite a bit of development resources from the Metal Gear team. They had to alter the game’s armor implementation to work with her different body proportions. They had to bring in a voice actress. They had to code scenes so Sutherland’s line reads would appear as captions and not voiceover in many scenes. What they did to make this happen across so much content was neither quick nor easy. Someone cared about this feature.

How to make this happen

How do you unlock FemSnake? Go to Prisoner Extraction 02 in Side Ops, which seems to always spawn the otherwise extremely rare woman prisoners. This unlocked my FemSnake, who was assigned the random codename "Obsidian Mole."
Then, when choosing a mission, go to Character and you’ll be able to play the rest of the game as her. Her combat stats rise as you play, primarily affecting your health pool — but any other differences between Snake and FemSnake were not perceptible to me.
After you’ve selected your new character, you’ll see them in everything but fully-voiced cutscenes for the remainder of the game, including the title screen. This trick can also be used with any rescued prisoner you’d like to represent you instead of Snake, including those of different races.

This is a nice step forward

Metal Gear fans are used to duality in how the series treats women. I was astonished by the excellent portayal of Meryl Silverburgh when Metal Gear Solid came out in 1998. You felt her emotions, you understood her as a person and cared about her. And then, you burst in on her in the bathroom, creepily staring at her butt and watching her change from her uniform.
That’s how I feel playing this latest Metal Gear. I’m both elated and troubled. In researching this piece, I saw hundreds of articles critiquing Quiet’s design. But I didn’t see a single article praising Konami for including an inclusive design compromise that boosts my own enjoyment of the game. You can play through almost the entirety of the game as a woman hero! Or a person of color! This is great news, and needs to be celebrated.
So, to all the team and Kojima Productions, I want to say thank you for this inclusive game design. FemSnake is a huge step forward for the series. None of the core Metal Gear console games have had a female protagonist, and even Metal Gear Online omitted women.
We can’t just critique the steps backwards, we need to notice the steps forward. FemSnake Source==polygon

salutes you.

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See Reaction After Man Adds Butane Gas to Coke Bottle, Then Flips It Over

You probably should avoid trying this experiment at home.
A Russian YouTuber published a video late-last that shows him pump a Coca-Cola bottle with butane gas and then flip it over.
The result?
It turns into what he called a “mega rocket,” shooting straight up into the air and leaving a gas stream behind.
“Liquid gas mixed with cola instantly turns into a gaseous state, while increasing in volume more than 500 times!” the YouTuber wrote in the description of the video, according to an online translation.
Since it was uploaded, the footage has gone mega-viral, amassing more than 4 million views on YouTube.
Correction: This story has been amended to reflect that the man added butane gas to the bottle of Coke, not propane gas.Source===BLAZE=====

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Yahoo Weather warns you about rain in time to find an umbrella

Weather apps are quite handy, and now Yahoo's mobile software is even more helpful. The app will send you an alert 15 minutes before rain or snow is expected to start so you have enough time to prepare. The new feature offers warnings similar to Dark Sky's weather info. That app takes readings from the barometric sensors in users' iPhones, though. What's more, Yahoo says its Weather software is more accurate too, with the ability to zoom in on small areas should the need arise. Of course, you want to take a slightly different approach to getting your forecast, you could always go the route of an aspiring meteorologist..Source==engadget===

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Watch Boston Dynamics' Robot Run Outside Oh God They're Coming For Us

“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK I need to poop badly where’s there a big enough tree to squat behind?”

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Thank you for my next halloween costume idea!

Possible cause of the singularity Boston Dynamics is secretive about upcoming projects, but new footage shows their robots in action—and the results are highly unsettling.

First you can see Spot, an agile autonomous quadruped ripped directly from Isaac Asimov’s nightmares, opening a door with the arm it sports instead of a face. Spot would almost be adorable the way it trots around on four legs except for the protruding face-arm that will turn the handle on your front door with its superstrength. Sleep well tonight.

Next, humanoid robot Atlas, an early prototype for the Terminator that will one day destroy us, is seen striding across uneven rocky surfaces and stalking through the woods. Atlas in action outside the lab is new—no doubt Boston Dynamics’ way of telling a cowed planet, “Be afraid. They know no environmental boundaries.” Atlas is also shown being hit by heavy weights and maintaining his balance, so good luck, future freedom fighters of the underground human resistance.

“We’re interested in getting this robot out into this world,” says Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert in the video, as part of MIT’s FAB 11 conference. He seems calm and blithely unafraid, ignoring the fact that his creation is moving through the trees with an ease of motion that would make Gort weep. “We’re working on a version that doesn’t have that [power tether],” Raibert says of Atlas, which is code for “run, you helpless fleshbag fools. RUN!”souceG=======

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