Two, actually. Watch them.

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Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility announced Tuesday a successful test of its ultrapowerful laser system, which melds 192 laser beams into a single incredible burst of energy. On Aug. 13, the facility was activated for 14 billionths of a second and aimed at a tiny capsule of fuel. The result: approximately 350 trillion watts of power — hundreds of times more than the entire United States consumes at any given instant.

We have the technology … or soon will.

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We have the technology … and the indolence.

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We have the technology.

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Swintec, a New Jersey typewriter company, is one of the last manufacturers standing in a dying industry. What has helped keep it alive? Funeral homes.

Funeral directors in a handful of states must tap out death certificates on a typewriter, relics of the days when the machines represented a modern improvement over an undertaker’s handwriting.

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Until they ban it — which they will.

I’m thinking that you’d want fin-stabilized ammunition in a ‘real’ version.

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Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division is building a drone that will be able to transport cars, storage containers, and eventually even pods full of soldiers for DARPA. The drone, which will be called the Transformer TX, is currently in a $20.3-million “Phase 3” process, which means Lockheed is finalizing its design before building a working prototype. If DARPA finds that the prototype meets its needs, it can then opt to pay the defense contractor to produce the drones for flight sometime in 2015.

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Card slots. A bottle opener. Pepper spray. Defense against a .50 caliber bullet. Whatever you might need on the go, people are thinking of ways for you to integrate it right into your iPhone case.

But Y Combinator startup Graft Concepts is trying to cover all your basic needs with one case, using a simple latched frame and interchangeable backplates. Named Leverage, the case’s frame alone is meant to be a bumper for the phone and comes with either a plain backplate for $40 or a card holder (which fits about five cards) for $50. Additional backplates range from $7 to $30 based on design and material.

We have the technology.

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One of the pivotal innovations in the way we prepare and package ready-to-eat foods came with the invention of the puffing cannon, a machine for heating up and pressurizing starchy foods to the point where they would explode into substantially larger, puffier shapes. It was, in effect, applying the familiar popcorn-making technique to the full range of other starches: rice, wheat, corn, lentils, and the like. The puffing gun was later superseded by more advanced machinery, but it’s now being brought back — on the basis of a Kellogg brothers patent filed near the turn of the century — by Dave Arnold, the founder of a new Museum of Food and Drink in New York City.

I blame Obama.

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I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE National Rifle Association, nor do I collect rare firearms, attend gun shows, or subscribe to gun magazines. I am not, in other words, a “gun nut” and, in fact, can sympathize to a degree with the views of those who detest all such weapons and want them regulated. You can’t have lived in a large American city for any length of time, as I have, without seeing that such people’s opinions may have a certain amount of validity.

But I grew up in a time and a region that almost automatically sparked interest in not only guns but also the hunting of birds and beasts, in which pursuits such weapons were and still are central components. Nor did a war experienced in the U.S. Marine Corps and a functional country life during most of the past forty-odd years do anything to hamper the affinity.

Texas would be perfect if it weren’t so beastly hot during the summer.

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According to CBS Denver, the institute will be a “100,000 square foot complex [with] a retail gun shop, five indoor shooting ranges, and a restaurant.”

In July, USA Liberty Firearms owner John Mason said, “This is going to be an upscale place to shoot your gun, to learn gun safety, and to be around people who know gun safety.” In a more recent statement, USA Liberty Firearms said it “will break ground in September and [hopes] to open doors next August.”

Don Boudreaux lays it out.

Competitive markets work so smoothly and silently that they fool us modern folk into thinking that the lives we lead are normal – fool us into thinking that poverty (rather than wealth) has causes; fool us into supposing that people my age (almost 55), because we still have all of our teeth and aren’t remotely yet decrepit, are “middle-aged” rather than old, ancient, nearly dead by historical standards; fool us into believing that possession by each person of several changes of clean, washable clothes is the norm; fool us into imagining that living under a solid roof atop solid walls joined to solid floors is natural; fool us into forgetting that starvation and malnutrition were in store for distressingly large numbers of our ancestors; fool us into worrying about the fact that someone has multiple more zeroes in his or her bank account than we have in ours rather than recognize that even the most ordinary of us today enjoy a material standard of living immeasurably higher than was dreamed of by any of our pre-industrial ancestors – and higher even, along many dimensions, than was enjoyed by the likes of Cleopatra, Louis XIV, and J.D. Rockefeller.

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Well, for one thing, it isn’t Michigan….

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“Call your representative!” We’ve all heard it before, but actually picking up the phone (or shooting over an email) is always harder than it looks. Infrastructure advocacy group Building America’s Future wants to make that process a bit easier so citizens can let their representatives know that the country’s transportation system isn’t as good as it should be. With a free new iOS and Android app called “I’m Stuck,” users can quickly send an email when the subway is letting them down or when traffic on the highway is a mess.

The app takes in a bit of info — like your address — when you use it the first time so it knows which representative or senator to send your complaint to. Then, when you get stuck in a transportation mess, you can choose the type of problem you’re having and then send a pre-generated or custom email to Washington. You can also send a photo of your problem. Smartly, the app uses your location so it’ll send your email to the right place if you have a problem while you’re away from home.

Now that has texture, and scope.

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Should that be what you want to do, of course.

The mercury-in-glass thermometer has served us well for the past 270 years, but sometimes you need something smaller — say to find the temperature inside a single living cell. Researchers at Harvard have discovered a new technique using lasers and diamond nanocrystals to measure temperatures of microscopic structures, recording temperature fluctuations as small as 0.05 Kelvin (0.09ºF) in size.

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What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.

Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Presenting one of the unsung wonders of modern life, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger.

The argument above was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Levitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.

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Like blood circulating through the human body, a new system out of Harvard harnesses channels of running water to cool windows that receive a lot of sun. The water carries away heat, leading to less work for air conditioners and a lower electricity bill.

The channels are ultra-thin and encased in a sheet of clear silicone rubber that is stretched over a window. They crisscross to create a mesh-like pattern. While the channels are visible when empty, they become transparent when they contain water.

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If you were to nuke San Francisco, how much better off would the country be?

Note that the pre-sets are all in Blue states….

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In back-woods America the government isn’t too popular, but the tiny town of Deer Trail, Colorado (population 546 – deer not included) may be taking this sentiment to extremes with a proposal to open an official hunting season on government drones.

“We do not want drones in town,” said the proposed ordinance’s author David Steel told ABC7. “They fly in town, they get shot down.”

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The “wood” is actually microscopic wood fibers that are fashioned into thin sheets. The sheets are then coated with carbon nanotubes and packed into small metal discs.

The wood batteries use sodium ions, rather than the lithium ions that are found in the batteries of cellphones and laptops. In this case, the charged particles move around in the wood fibers, creating an electric current. It turns out wood is a good medium for sodium ions to move around in.

We have the technology.

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How to survive the coming apocalypse.

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Airman 1st Class Mary Howe is one of the few women qualified as an aerial gunner aboard Air Force special operations AC-130 gunships — the warplanes with accurate cannons unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan to support troops on the ground.

Airman Howe is the daughter of retired ArmyMaster Sgt. Paul Howe — featured prominently in the best-selling book “Black Hawk Down” about a Delta Force operation in Somalia — and Connie Beckwith Howe, a former Army Reserve major and one of the colonel’s three daughters.

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… the US Navy’s next-generation autonomous drone, the X-47B, successfully landed on the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush today during a milestone test run off the coast of Virginia. Following another historic test which took place in May, the feat makes the drone the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to both take off and land on an aircraft carrier, opening up frightening new horizons for the world’s most powerful military.

Read it. And watch the video.

An Oklahoma City surgery center is offering a new kind of price transparency, posting guaranteed all-inclusive surgery prices online. The move is revolutionizing medical billing in Oklahoma and around the world.

Dr. Keith Smith and Dr. Steven Lantier launched Surgery Center of Oklahoma 15 years ago, founded on the simple principle of price honesty.

“What we’ve discovered is health care really doesn’t cost that much,” Dr. Smith said. “What people are being charged for is another matter altogether.”

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Jason Everman has the unique distinction of being the guy who was kicked out of Nirvana and Soundgarden, two rock bands that would sell roughly 100 million records combined. At 26, he wasn’t just Pete Best, the guy the Beatles left behind. He was Pete Best twice.

Then again, he wasn’t remotely. What Everman did afterward put him far outside the category of rock’n’roll footnote. He became an elite member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, one of those bearded guys riding around on horseback in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

…

In Everman’s cabin, I saw medal after medal, including the coveted Combat Infantryman Badge. “Sounds kind of Boy Scouty,” he said. “But it’s actually something cool.” I saw photos of Everman in fatigues on a warship (“an antipiracy operation in Asia”). A shot of Everman with Donald Rumsfeld. Another with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. And that’s when it hit me. Jason Everman had finally become a rock star.

Surest thing you know.

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It generally takes a decent-sized particle accelerator to produce antimatter, but a team of physicists working at the University of Michigan says they’ve developed a table-top system that can create short bursts of positrons – anti-electrons.

We have the the technology, heh heh heh….

Never fear, however: as the image below shows, a mere lump of Teflon is sufficient to absorb the positrons, so the setup doesn’t actually risk the earth-shattering kaboom of a matter-antimatter annihilation.

Well, shucks.

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Dr. Rafael Grossmann, of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, recently performed his first Google surgery with Google Glass in tow. As far as we can tell, it’s also the first such Google Glass-equipped surgery in the device’s history – complete with a corresponding Google Glass Hangout (which wasn’t open to the public, for those looking to tune in to a live surgery when the thrill of a YouTube video just isn’t enough anymore).

“By performing and documenting this event, I wanted to show that this device and its platform, are certainly intuitive tools that have a great potential in Healthcare, and specifically for surgery, could allow better intra-operative consultations, surgical mentoring and potentiate remote medical education, in a very simple way,” Grossmann writes.

No surprises.

Wonder whether it will lower his malpractice insurance rates?

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ReasonGovernment officials like to use eminent domain for the convenience of their preferred policies and/or the enrichment of themselves and their buddies. Usually, they get away with it, because the folks on the receiving end are too few and powerless to hold their tormentors to account. In Hackensack, New Jersey, however, the officials who targeted Michael Monaghan’s property for seizure as part of an “area in need of redevelopment,”  even while denying him the right to develop it himself, pushed too many people around, too often. Last month, voters booted out the entire city council.

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A new blog analyzing the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV) minute by agonizing minute.

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The engineered vein was created with donated human blood vessel cells, which are implanted onto a tubular, biodegradable scaffold. The scaffold supports those cells as they grow into a fully-formed vessel. Once the process is complete, the new vein is “scrubbed” of cellular properties that might trigger an immune response — and subsequent rejection — in a patient. Where kidney disease is concerned, the vessels could replace synthetic grafts used to link an artery to a vein for the process of hemodialysis. Such synthetics are accompanied by serious risks, including clotting and infection.

Gavin MacInnes lightens the mood.

I can’t tell you what Hasidic Jews are like or even if I like them, but I can tell you what it’s like to be around them. Here are 10 things I’ve noticed over the past quarter-century.

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A sandwich shop owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, has posted signs in the front windows of his two shops announcing guns are welcome, although he asks that they remain holstered unless a need for self-defense arises.

A perfectly reasonable expectation.

Whether you like it or not.

But for some, the abbreviated original mission was a tribble in the quadrotriticale, nibbling away at them. So some fans got together and created a new web series, “Star Trek Continues”. This is no fly-by-night operation; my friend Steve Dengler is putting his weight behind it, and he’s funded such web-series efforts as Geek & Sundry, “My Gimpy Life”, and many more. He told me he and the others are doing this for no other reason than love of the show. They don’t make any money from it; they simply want to do it.

“Star Trek Continues” takes up where the original series left off, even creating a vignette that takes place moments after the final scene of “Turnabout Intruder”—the final episode of the original series, a clever way of tying it all together. Two other shorts are available as well.

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To the handful of petrochemical scientists, engineers and industry executives who have spent a lifetime trying to unlock America’s domestic energy potential, the country’s current shale-oil and -gas boom is the result of a half-century of technological trial and error. But to the rest of the world, it has seemed like an overnight miracle. In less than a decade, the United States has gone from importing $30 billion worth of natural gas to the cusp of becoming an energy exporter.

Thanks to improvements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, wells can be dug into rock formations that are nearly 100 m thick and tap reserves that are nearly two kilometres wide. That has the potential to unleash enough oil and gas to power America for nearly a century—a feat unthinkable just a few years ago.

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The Nautilus took high school inventor Justin Beckerman just six months and $2,000 to put together — all while keeping on top of his homework.

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Not in Texas, he doesn’t. He’s like George W Bush, without the nice.

Gov. Rick Perry’s high-profile efforts to lure jobs to Texas from other states may be good business and smart politics back home, but they’re infuriating to prominent Democrats around the country.

Hey, prominent Democrats! Suck on it! If you weren’t so busy destroying your own states’ economies, you wouldn’t have to worry about it.

And now at least one Republican business leader says Perry’s taking the Lone Star swagger a little too far.

Wonder how long they had to look in order to find him? And that fact that he claims to be a Republican is just hot air; Nanny Bloomberg claims to be a Republican, and he’s about as Republican as Lincoln Chafee.

Those attacks hit where it hurts and have touched off an angry political backlash against Perry outside the Texas borders, with Democrats mocking his attempts to steal jobs as clownish — and warning the Republican governor to keep his hands off. In a memorable put-down, Gov. Jerry Brown said Perry’s incursions into California were about as effective as breaking wind.

And even that is more effective than any policy Jerry Brown has ever pushed. Talk’s cheap, which is why that’s all that Democrats can afford.

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After more than 25 years of studying the calls of prairie dog in the field, one researcher managed to decode just what these animals are saying. And the results show that praire dogs aren’t only extremely effective communicators, they also pay close attention to detail.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

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The bottom 10% in the U.S. are better off than the top 10% in Italy, Israel, Russia, Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, and Mexico.

Think about that next time some Crustian hand-wringer starts to vent about ‘the poor’.

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Sipping a soda before one of their Thursday-night “meet-ups” at the Rosewood bar, Andersen’s business partner, Nina Ericson, describes the origins of Cougar Night. Ericson—a 50-year-old lawyer turned life coach—goes by the Twitter handle @DrDate2soulmate and often meets Andersen’s clients at the Rosewood spa café. She tells me it all started when the local venture capitalists wanted to find somewhere to go for drinks after work. Men make up 89 percent of venture-capital-firm partners, according to a 2011 survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones Venture Source, and a demographic of mostly male, wealthy, well-known businessmen began reliably showing up for happy hour. Thursdays were the most consistent night and colleagues from up and down the road congregated in the comfortable bar overlooking the Santa Cruz Mountains. “Soon, women interested in the V.C.’s started coming,” says Ericson, “and it just turned into a crazy night.”

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“It was our friend Chelsea’s birthday, and we didn’t have an oven to bake her a cake, so we decided to try to 3D print a cake for her, instead. It took some trial and error, but eventually (and unfortunately months past her actual birthday) we managed to print a simple cupcake topper that spelled out ‘Chelsea’ in cursive sugar,” said Liz von Hasseln. “Chelsea loved it so much that we started seriously considering how interested other people might be in 3D printed sugar. When we graduated, we decided to start a mini design firm for 3D printing custom sugar.”

You, too, can be fattening.

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Welcome to the future of 3D-printed body hacks. Dr. Susmita Bose and Dr. Amit Bandyopadhyay have been waiting for you.

In the same way that commercial 3D printing has changed product design and prototyping, these researchers are creating a way to build body parts. Their cheap, iterative designs take the best of the 3D-printing industry and add novel materials like resorbable ceramic powders and titanium. The resulting artificial body parts can then be placed on humans, creating some of the most complex chimeras in existence.

“Using 3D-printing technology, and optimum material chemistry, one can control the geometry and shape of the scaffold and bone-like material chemistry at the same time. We can control the resorption and dissolution kinetics in a controlled manner that can be used based on application need. If you can resorp the scaffold, then the ultimate result would be for the natural healing to replace the scaffold and need for a second surgery, as is needed with current technologies,” explains Dr. Bose on a recent visit to her office.

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If you write code, you need these.

Not only can you leave expressive remarks in your code, you can use these annotations to draw attention to your poetic endeavors. How many times have you written a palindromic or synecdochal line of code and wished you could annotate it for future readers to admire? Look no further than @Palindrome and @Synecdoche.

But wait, there’s more. The Google Annotations Gallery comes complete with dynamic bytecode instrumentation. By using the gag-agent.jar Java agent, you can have your annotations behavior-enforced at runtime. For example, if you want to ensure that a method parameter is non-zero, try @ThisHadBetterNotBe(Property.ZERO). Want to completely inhibit a method’s implementation? Try @Noop.

We have the technology.

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For the first time, scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new type of lens that bends and focuses ultraviolet (UV) light in such an unusual way that it can create ghostly, 3D images of objects that float in free space. The easy-to-build lens could lead to improved photolithography, nanoscale manipulation and manufacturing, and even high-resolution three-dimensional imaging, as well as a number of as-yet-unimagined applications in a diverse range of fields.

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After the unprecedented damage to New York City’s transit system brought on by Hurricane Sandy, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has been looking into near-term solutions that could shield subway tunnels from flood waters come next storm season. It tested one of those safeguards yesterday for the first time by inflating a 30-foot plug (designed by the US Department of Homeland Security) that could effectively seal off New York’s subways in the event of a natural disaster. The test run took place at the South Ferry station in Manhattan — one of eight stations consumed by flooding in Sandy’s aftermath.

Soon to be a major motion picture.

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And the Terms of Service are a bitch.