Ornithopter

Slow motion (high speed) video is just so doggone amazing - revealing life's hidden mysteries.

Take for example the lowly ladybug. For all of recorded history we simply marveled at the lovely black spots on her red shell, and watched her fly away (because her house was on fire). Little did we realize that behind the beauty there were complex mechanisms at work - allowing the wings to be hidden but elegantly released when required. Wohba! Link.

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Santa's Helper

Top Men and Top Women hate shopping, but it would certainly liven things up to shop with this flaming, torso-less, robot shopping cart.

Who thinks this stuff up?

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Road Kill

And now for something completely different! From the rings of Saturn, to terra firma, or shall we say, terra parta!

Watch and be patient - wait for the pave-off at the end. (Sorry for the bad puns, it's not my asphalt, Top Men made me do it!)

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Ring Wraith

Now that your Top Team has reengaged, we realize that our space coverage has been... well... vacuous. We'll save Mars for a later date, but today, let's talk rings - Saturn's specifically. Seems that Saturn's rings, that look so homogeneously milky from here, have some dynamic forces shaping them.

So we have this rather striking image of a "streamer" created when Saturn's moon Prometheus moved through the F ring - and since it's hard to picture how it happened - here's a movie.

Will everyone who thinks it's amazing that the Cassini spacecraft is still sending back such treasures from Saturn after over four years in orbit please shout out a raucous "Wohba!"

Update: Top Women would like to call your attention to even more rings of Saturn (via Astronomy Picture of the Day) - rings of aurora over Saturn's north pole. Wohba!

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Fourth Annual Tribute To Corn

Top Men and Top Women have been lazy, busy, on strike, seriously ill, kidnapped, consumed by intrigue in the political ongoings of the United States presidential race, vacationing on Mars... Whatever. No excuse is good enough - please accept our sincerest apologies. We are alive and... well... you be the judge.

It's been a very, very, long hiatus, but we couldn't think of a more fitting event to plunge back into all things "Wohba" then the Fourth Annual Tribute To Corn No matter what the reason for our long withdrawal - there is no way we would miss this worldwide annual celebration.

And this year we feature the amazing ability of corn to pliably puff. First oozed in the 1930s by Ed Wilson as an accidental byproduct of overheated feed producing equipment, the stuff became Korn Kurls - the forerunner of modern day Cheetos (Top Momma likey).

We have for your enjoyment two very diverse corn puffing links...

Here is a link to a miraculous, miniature, personal corn puffer on the streets of Shanghai. Talk about fresh!

Here is a link to the Wenger Manufacturing corn puffing process equipment diagram - in all its gargantuan, automated glory!

Corn to be wild!


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The Ants Go Marching...

Time-lapse is fun. Top Men like how it educates and entertains all at once. This time-lapse demonstrates how those pesky ants can be so darn handy to have around for cleaning up stuff.

(Thanks Kara!)

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M. Nightmare

We interupt this blog for the following entertainment review...

As Top Fans of M. Night Shyamalan, Top Men went to see The Happening this weekend. We have extensively exercised the scientific method (gratuitously recited in the film) and reached a conclusion...

It was not written and directed by Mr. Shyamalan, but by his twelve year old daughter Saleka Shyamalan.

What a twist!

(We hope we're right for his sake.)

We now return to our irregularly scheduled blog...

Nothing To Sphere

Ever hear of Contact Juggling? Neither had Top Men until we watched this video.

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Beautiful Machinery

Top Men have a very strange mix of right and left brain. Arthur Ganson tickles both sides so he gets our second honorary Wohba Top Mention Award.

Arthur gave a presentation at TED in 2004 and the video has just been made available. Top Men were entertained, mesmerized, and amazed.

(Thanks Top Women)

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Mars Landing

Top Men like space. And Top Men like Mars. And Top Men think it's good for the Teeming Masses to like space and Mars, too. So we're giving you plenty of time to mark your calendars for the landing of the Mars Phoenix Lander on the evening of May 25th (only 10 days from now.) Mars landings are not simple - Mars is littered with slight miscalculations.

In honor of this rather amazing achievement we've provided two videos for your enjoyment.

The first is a NASA production demonstrating how the landing will take place. No airbags on this landing - it's a good old-fashioned, rocket-blasting, nail-biting, potential-crater-making touch-down. Fun!

The second is a foward looking video - anticipating Mars in the spring of 2020. Very fun!

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Momentary Lapse

Time-lapse photography is always amazing. But Ross Ching has produced this standout, high-definition time-lapse video that Top Men feel is worth bringing to your attention.

The video has some striking pans. And amazingly he used a digital SLR - not a video camera - to capture the footage. He also provides a full (and we mean full) making-of video to show you how he did it.

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Art-ificial Intelligence

Top Men have never seen any species besides ours paint anything recognizable - let alone a self portrait. Sure it's probably just a trained and repeated behavior, but we buy paintings this-weekend-only from starving artists who do the same thing.

Besides, let's face it, for some reason we secretly want animals to be smarter than us.

Watch and wonder.

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Flying Penguins

This amazing breed of antarctic penguin has adapted an astounding way to battle the cold. It truly is an amazing sight to behold.

But Top Women have discovered that after a winter gorging themselves on jungle berries, they're too heavy to take flight back home again. Their berry-fattened bodies are easy targets for jaguars. This unfortunate scenario has begun a dire trend as other species of penguins are beginning to mimic the behavior and learning how to fly as well. The potential mass exodus has biologists from all over the world very concerned. The antarctic food chain will be so disrupted that many antarctic animals may soon follow by beginning northern migration patterns.

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Musical Magic

Top Men are simply amazed at this video. Granted it's not a finished product yet, and there are bound to be some limitations, but this is one of those tools that Top Men would not have believed possible.

It just further reinforces the strange fact that the most important musical instrument any band needs is a computer.

Web site is here.

(Via Tinselman!)

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I'll Tak' The Low Road

Oh, ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland (or Spain) afore ye;

'Cause ye'll be dead!

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