Here are some great concept models and Mecha robots made from LEGOs. Complete with detailed descriptions too- Armament: Beam rifle x2 (~2 megawatt charge, stored in shoulder charging racks/weapons binders), clay bazooka (fed from 5-round clips, hand-carried). Even lighter armored than the L-Siren, V-Sirens are built for speed and agility above all else. Typically not armed with melee weapons, a V-Siren is most frequently seen slinging either its integral beam guns or a “clay bazooka”, a shotgun-like multi-payload launcher. [via] Link.

The TileToy is a modular electronic game prototype- their blog has lots of the iterations, ideas and updates their project has gone through. From what I can tell it can communicate with other blocks, and users can create patterns, possibly play games and some other neat things. They also have some interesting videos of the little guys in action. Link.

The project is aimed in part at demonstrating that NASA’s new balloon vehicle can carry sophisticated instruments in near-space fairly cheaply. Balloon-borne telescopes can be launched at roughly 1 per cent of the cost of deploying a satellite by conventional rocket launches. The balloon has a volume of about 1.2-million cubic metres and is as high as a 33-storey building. [via] Link.

The function of a brake booster is to prevent the brake bosses from moving apart under heavy braking. A good brake booster considerably improves the feel and the strength of the brakes – the force of your finger is converted to braking instead of flex of your fork or frame. It is especially important if you have flexible frame/fork/brake bosses. Therefore, the main characteristic of a booster is its stiffness. Not strength, but stiffness. Or actually stiffness-to-weight, because you wouldn’t like to carry half kilo of steel on your bike. Link.

It’s like robots, made out of clay. Tiny robots that can turn into any shape – from a replica human to a banana to a mobile phone – are being developed by scientists in the United States. The new science of claytronics, which will use nanotechnology to create tiny robots called catoms, should enable three-dimensional copies of people to be “faxed” around the world for virtual meetings. Link.

Earlier we posted up how to make a paper pinhole camera, the DIY Dirkon Paper Camera and here are some images of a ceramic pinhole camera along with some of the photos it took. Pottery + Photography = Phottery. There isn’t a how-to, but it wouldn’t be that difficult to adapt existing pinhole camera instructions to do something like this. [via] Link.

How many possible ways are there to lace an average shoe? This simple question, when answered with mathematics, results in some surprisingly big numbers – on an average shoe with six pairs of eyelets, there are 1,961,990,553,600 ways to feed a shoelace though those 12 eyelets. Here are 24 ways to tie your shoes. Link.