Akhibara, Japan is the place to go to get just about anything you want in life…even if that anything includes wanting a creepy doll-like clone of yourself.

Recently a company called “Clone Factory” opened which now allows you to not only have a 3D-printed doll-head of your own mug but your pets as well.

Using several DSLR cameras, Clone Factory captures your face from different angles, puts it all together in the computer, prints it and hands you a bill for $1,300 US bucks.

Clone Factory uses one of the most advanced 3D printers (made by ZCorp) on the market to print out these plastic little mini-selfs of its customers. Disney recently used these same printers during their annual Star Wars Weekends at Walt Disney World where guests could either have their likeness frozen in a slab of carbonite or put onto the body of a Stormtrooper (complete with detachable helmet).

Most of Clone Factory’s customers are actually women. Not only do the women seek to preserve how they look on special days like their weddings, they also have the exact outfits they’re wearing at the time as well as their hair and make-up recreated as well.

Which doesn’t make any of this any less creepy.
[DesignTaxi]

In a case of ‘this is why we can’t take you seriously’, an amateur photographer snapped a couple photos of something that’s currently got the UFO and ‘rod community’ (leave jokes below…we know they’re coming) buzzing. And by buzzing we mean they’re all getting excited by a picture of what’s probably a photo-bombing bug moving across the frame of 43-year-old Corrine Federer’s camera while she was shooting photos of a castle in Amsterdam.

Federer stated that, “It was a tubular-shaped object that had an S-shaped fin on it. If it had been any type of missile, it would’ve had mulptiple fins, but facing the same direction. We heard nothing. It was completely quiet out. The more I flipped through the frames, it was kind of creepy.”

Many people are speculating that it’s a photo of a missile test, airplane or weather balloon.

Federer believes that it could be something more…

“I don’t find it unreasonable that there’s another habitable planet somewhere that has started exploring space. Maybe they’re more advanced than we are and they’ve come by to see what’s going on here.”

While some of us are pointing and giggling at the alleged UFO, many are pointing with serious there’s-all-the-proof-you-need-faces.

[FOX News]

Since Russia is like the overseas equivalent of Florida, news that typically comes out of there is usually skewed toward the weird.

After finding blood splattered near the wheel well of an Airbus passenger plane, authorities moved on to their second what-the-hell discovery…a frozen 22-year-old dead man stuck in said wheel well. This same 22-year-old was not only dead, frozen and stuck in the wheel well of an Airbus…he’d been there for four days and logged at least seven trips before he was discovered!

Giorgio Abduladze’s t-shirt and shorts-clad body underwent an autopsy showing that he froze to death in flight. Crews don’t regularly access the area where Abduladze’s body was found but now everyone’s wondering what he was doing in there in the first place.

[GeekoSystem]

3D printng is the ‘it’ thing right now. It seems like nothing can’t be printed. We can print plastic toys, metal parts and even cell tissues using additive manufacturing. So what’s next?

Food…3D-printed food.

A Texas company is partnering with NASA to explore the idea of printing food during long, deep space missions. Systems and Materials Research and
Consultancy, a company in Austin, was recently awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 contract concerning printing
food for astronauts. Currently astronauts eat foods that lose their micronutrients during the process they go through to become official space-food.

Eventually the prepackaged, off-the-shelf, single-servings the astronauts nom on now will make way for customizable recipes.

Anyone else excited to witness the first live-stream of a 3D-printed Thanksgiving dinner…in space? Us too.
[DesignBoom]

There’s really not much to talk about here with a bunch of words. They’ll just get in the way of you pressing play and smiling like a little kid as your brain sort of automatically speculates on the possibilities of this in peoples’ homes.

We’ve all dreamed of the Holodeck being a part of our secret lair at home. Microsoft’s new IllumiRoom is a lot like watching a baby take its first steps in the direction of Holodecks becoming a standard part of any man-cave.

Sure we’ve seen mapped projections before like at Walt Disney World’s Magic, Memories and You show at the Magic Kingdom…but nothing on a consumer level and nothing with this kind of customization. Using a Kinect, a couple of cameras and some software, this is something that, while in its newborn stage, could lead to some truly innovative projects and ideas…or just mean that we’re going to be leaving our mother’s basements way less than we already do.

[GizMag]

Someone at Budweiser had apparently just read about Virgin America’s in-cabin, passenger-to-passenger texting service, knocked back a couple bottles and decided that the giant beer-hive should also get in on the act of making social interaction among drunken stalkers and their prey even more uncomfortable.

Using a ‘Buddy Cup’, you scan the cup with your phone, link your Facebook profile to the chip embedded in the bottom of the cup and then, magically, every time you clink cups with someone else who’s gone through the process, you become ‘friends’ on everyone’s favorite social hive.

Buddy Cup! Because there’s nothing like becoming friends with all the people involved in a lot of bad decision-making from the night before.

[BudBrasilOficial YouTube]

It wasn’t too long ago that North America’s Hellmouth of a state was calling for people to go out into the wild and bag/kill as many giant pythons as they possibly could.
Now that that’s yesterday’s Nature versus Humankind battle is over, everyone’s favorite birthing place of weird EVERYTHING is taking us back to the good old days of that era of 1970s horror films when piranha, worms, snakes, rats, bears and even tadpoles decided they were tired of sharing the planet with us.

Just what the hell is this new scourge that’s coming to wreak havoc upon us now?

Brace yourselves, people…

Snails.

SNAILS!

And they’re exactly the kind of snails some of you are imagining right now…
Giant African Snails that can grow to 8 inches long, devour 500 different species of plants and (you’re going to slap your face like Maculay Culkin in Home Alone right about now) they are tearing through stucco and peoples’ homes! Not only that but the snails’ shells are big enough to puncture car tires because they’re Frogger-like skills are nonexistent!

Good luck, Florida.

[Huffington Post]

Recently a group of Japanese scientists at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in Orlando, Florida have unveiled
the latest incarnation of…
(sad, loungy drumroll please)
Smell-O-Vision!

That’s right. Scientists have been working hard at making your television smell.

Do we really need to smell the elephants of Africa while watching a beautiful documentary about the animals?

No. Not really.

But advertisers sure would like us to get a whiff of things like the latest addition to the IHOP menu, the latest
colognes and Pilsbury would take the obesity problems in America to a whole new level when that little chubby, animated
chef shows up shoving a tray full of warm, delicious chocolate chip cookies in our faces.

Using gel pellets placed at the four corners of the monitor and small air-streams, scientists are able to get fairly
specific across the face of the monitor where the smell will seem to emanate from. Think of it like 5.1 surround sound but
your nose is the one in the recliner experiencing it.

Modern day theme parks like Universal and Disney often use gel packs or cartridges to send the smell of candy, food or, in the case of Universal’s
Halloween Horror Nights, the smell of rotting meat to add a subtle something to guests’ in-park experience.

What was unveiled at the conference is still fairly primitive but technological developments will continue to improve and
pretty soon you could be smelling the oil and smoking metal of Call of Duty…

Or the sweet, acrid smell of a Well Zombie from the Walking Dead.

[DAILY MAIL UK]

Quadcopters are the new must-have toys of the tech-headed kids. They’re showing up everywhere and there are thousands of them out ‘in the wild’.

For those frightened that these things will eventually be controlled by SkyNet, this latest advancement in their abilities is only going to reinforce that paranoia.

For the rest of us who believe our robot friends would never hurt us based on a set of laws thrust into existence by an author of science fiction novels? This is pretty awesome to watch.

For a more detailed description of how exactly this whole process works, you can check out RoboHub for a more educational explanation than anything you’re ever going to find here.

Those that just want to be amazed at a serious demonstration of how organized, responsive, agile….

Know what? Forget we ever called those people paranoid.

[RoboHub.Org]

Fans of The Walking Dead know that if you cover yourself in the leftovers of friends, neighbors and family, zombies will just stroll right on by you…until it begins to rain and things go to hell real fast.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone would just come up with a scented…oh wait…it’s happened..

Demeter Fragrances has added two new perfumes to their line-up:

‘Zombie for Him’ and ‘Zombie for Her’.

Now there’s no need to don protective wear and hack away for hours when only a butter knife is available in order to smother yourself with the innards of a hapless stranger…or a not quite zombie-apocalypse-prepped friend.

‘Zombie for Him’ is described thusly:

Think forest floor. Zombie for Him is a combination of dried leaves, mushrooms, mildew, moss and earth. A definite must-have for any Man’s scent collection.

‘Zombie for Her’ is:

A slightly lighter version of the Men’s fragrance with a touch of Dregs from the bottom of the wine barrel for that feminine touch.

Now you can protect anyone in an instant by just spritzing them and blending in socially amongst the walking dead…

Until it suddenly rains again.

[DesignTaxi]

For a LOT of the more nerdy kids out there, we’re placing bets that many of you pretended you had the ability to throw fireballs, move objects by waving your hands and occasionally even tried in vain to channel the Force.

That was all fun, lots of pretending and wishful thinking…wasn’t it?

Not any more.

Thalmic Labs, the creators of Myo is a company that, with the help of a special armband, could make a lot of those things a reality.

‘As a company, we’re interested in how we can use technology to enhance our abilities as humans – in short, giving us superpowers,’ Stephen Lake, co-founder and CEO of Thalmic Labs said.

Using gesture control, Myo is an armband that registers the electrical activity in your muscle movements that will produce a signal that’s interpreted and sent wirelessly to your phone, television, kitchen or even your personal drone instantly.

But the best part about Myo?

You can actually pre-order one right now! Scheduled to come out later this year, the Myo armband will begin shipping near the end of the 2013.

The asking price? $149!

At that price why waste time running around in a swamp with an 800 year-old, green, raisin-skinned, wizard clinging to your back and nagging at you or visiting some weird old desert hermit when you can just drop a little cash and skip the middleman?

Let’s just hope people remember to remove it when they’re doing…uh…private stuff involving a lot of gesturing.

We’re pretty sure that this thing can’t help us ‘unsee’ things yet.

[Daily Mail UK]

Last time we checked Brazil seemed like a place where men really wouldn’t be hard up to find a female companion.

We were wrong. Very, very wrong.

How wrong? Just…just keep reading.

There’s a bidding war going on in Brazil right now over a woman. For some she’s the perfect woman. For most of us she’s just plain weird and the ridiculous bidding war over her is even weirder.

Her name is Valentina.

Valentina is, disturbingly enough, the most desirable woman in Brazil right now and the man with the most padded wallet will get the chance to deflower her.

The current going price for Valentina’s virginity right now? $105,000 and climbing.

Wondering what her parents and family might be thinking of all of this craziness? Doesn’t matter.

Valentina isn’t real. She’s a life-like sex doll created by the acme of all sex-doll companies, Real Doll. The company has recently opened a manufacturing plant in Brazil and Valentina is the first doll created there. Now her ‘virginity’ is on the auction block.

The winner of the auction will also receive all-expenses-paid travel to and from São Paulo, a free night’s stay in the Presidential Suite of a fancy hotel, and a complimentary candlelight dinner with French Champagne to share with Valentina.
They’ll even throw in some sexy lingerie as Valentina’s gift to you, and a digital camera “to shoot and then show your friends.”

Not only is this a bidding war for an inanimate woman’s viginity…it also seems like an opportunity to see who the richest, most desperate Brazillian man is who’s got such bad game that he’s willing to shell out a small fortune for a woman who won’t say no to even his worst pitch.

[Gawker]

Anyone who’s been following the evolution of Boston Dynamics has been creeped out at one point by their BigDog robot. BigDog is a quadraped robot that has learned a lot of tricks since it was a terrifying little puppy of a machine. It balances itself even when an engineer makes an attempt at cow-tipping it, it ambles over the most diverse terrain ever laid out in front of a robot, follows humans like an obedient pack-mule and even understands what humans are saying to it.

Each stage in BigDog’s learning process has brought with it a level of creepiness.

But BigDog’s newest trick just put the nail in the coffin of humankind’s demise.

BigDog now throws things.

And what it’s throwing isn’t a spitball. It’s not a paper airplane. It’s not throwing Mardi Gras beads. It’s not a fun frisbee.

Nope. Not anything even remotely associated with enjoyable OR fun…

It’s throwing cinder blocks.

30 pound, concrete cinder blocks…

And it’s throwing them easier and more accurately than you could ever hope to throw one.

Which once again goes to prove that we shouldn’t be worried about the robots taking over in the future…

We should be worried about our own fellow humans helping them.

[Boston Dynamics YouTube Channel]

What’s up with UFOs, volcanoes and Mexico?

Just now hitting the internet are videos of a ‘cigar ufo’ doing a drive-by of a volcano in Mexico. In October of 2012 a more daring group of what’s probably the alien equivalent of a tour bus decided to just fly into a volcano so its occupants could probably Instagram much cooler pics than the other tour groups who were just safely cruising by.

Are we saying it’s a UFO? Nope. Probably just another drunk alien.

[UFOvni2012 YouTube Channel]

In another step toward getting our food like the Jetsons, Fanta has created a print ad to describe, in a lot of adjectives, what their orange-flavored soda tastes like…

Then they offer you a chance to taste it.

And not by giving you a redeemable coupon for a cold, delicious orange-flavored drink from the store…

Nope…we’re in the ‘future’ now, kids.

Fanta is asking people to actually eat the print ad which has been created solely for that purpose.

[Ads of the World]

Ever wonder what it’s like to be homeless?

If you live in Sweden, you can quit wondering and put your money where your wondering is.

In order to raise awareness for the plight of the homeless population in the city of Gothenburg, an interactive agency has set up 10 locations that you can actually book for a stay. These 10 locations are the real deal and by booking one you’ll be giving the money to a charity to help the people actually living in those conditions.

You can even gift a night stay to a friend…or potential ex-friend.

[DesignTAXI]