Gearfuse

Don’t ask me why they did it, but they did it. Design group “I Never Kissed A Dog” spent hours, meticulously covering a room in white Post-It notes, as to recreate the wintery whiteness of the coldest season of the year. The project, called “Winter 1972,” does a bang up job of recreating the sharpness of winter’s chill, and it just looks awesome no matter how you spin it.

I don’t image it would be too comfortable sitting on a couch covered in Post-It notes, but it’s certainly more comfortable than sleeping in a real winter landscape? Having snow down your pants is not an experience I recommend to anyone. Can you say shrinkage? I’m a Jew. I can’t afford shrinkage. (more…)

If you’ve ever seen Fifth Gear, which is essentially a direct copy of Top Gear on the BBC, then you know it’s all about two things: raw power and fast cars. This video is a direct example of that. It features host Tiff Needell taking a bright green Lamborghini Gallardo on to an ice-covered track and lets her rip with traction control both on and off. The results are, understandably, awesome. Whoever gave Tiff carte blanche to fuck with their Lamborghini on a mountain is pretty impressive.

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No, but you’re close. This fucking bulldozer-like Hellchild of a machine is the work of Kai Grundt, a Canadian Metalworker who threw a V8 engine in a snow-blowing machine. Why the excess power? Well it snows quite a bit in Canada and like any sane person, Kai didn’t feel like throwing his back out and shoveling for hours.

So what you really want to know is how many horses this thing has: Four hundred twelve at 6,200 RPM. No word on the amount of torque. To keep his neighbors happy, Kai used a special routing technique to dampen the sound before it exits the machine. Be sure to check out Popular Science’s full write-up on Kai’s machine.

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Kevin Kelly has a great find over on his site Cool Tools. It’s an $11 book from author Norbert E. Yankielun that teaches the art of the igloo and other snow shelters. After reading the 208 page novel, all you’ll need to do is wait for the next Nor’Easter and you’re ready to build a house that isn’t affected by sub-prime mortgages. Suh-weet!

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Take the fun of a snowmobile and put it on a snowboard. That’s the idea here. If you love going up to the mountains in the winter and carving up the trails, you’ll fall in love with this $2000 toy from Hammacher Schlemmer. It features a 6.5 horsepower engine that can carry riders up to 250 pounds at up to 18 MPH. That’s pretty damn fast for a snowboard. There’s spiked footplates that allow you to keep your grip and a steering mechanism as well. All in all, it looks like the most fun you’ve had all winter, essentially. Just be sure you stay warm.

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The Phoenix Mars Lander has given NASA and scientists an unimaginable amount of information. It discovered both water and snow on Mars and has helped paved the way for exploring for life in outer space. But all good things must come to an end and after a Martian dust storm, combined with the harsh winter conditions on the surface of the planet, the time has come for the Phoenix to shut down and die. NASA has declared the mission officially over and the lander is now shut off and dead.

If you’ll recall, the mission cost about $475 million. I think you’ll have to agree that it was money well spent considering what we discovered. I call dibs on the lander wheels when we all move to Mars in 2056.

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Live in Arizona? How about Texas? Florida?

If you live somewhere where it doesn’t snow, consider iSnow. For $4 and a feeling of embarrassment, you can open the package, mix in a little water and have some snow to play with. It’s made in China though, so make sure your kids aren’t playing with this shit. It’s probably packed to the jam with GHB, like many of the other unsafe toys to come out of China.

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As a kid, I never had any cool contraptions that shot snow at my friends. It was simply a matter of building a fort and throwing some snowballs around. Now that it’s almost 2009, it’s time to get real about shit. Get your kids this $30 Snowball Blaster. It can instantly form three round snowballs which you can then launch via a slingshot mechanism. Bag ‘em and tag ‘em, chief.

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The Phoenix Lander is still hard at work discovering various hints of life on Mars. NASA had originally believed there was ice on Mars, but weren’t able to prove it at the time. Then, NASA found water.  Now, Philip Christensen, the principal investigator for the Mars Odyssey THEMIS camera system and a professor from Arizona State University says melting snow in Martian craters may have created a system of gullies that have potentially formed life.

“I think we have discovered remnants of snow packs on Mars that in the recent past have melted,” says Christensen. “I think if you were to land on one of those and stick a shovel in the ground, you’d be shoveling snow. And if life ever existed on Mars, I can’t think of a more exciting place to possibly go and look.”

Mars is a cold place, but just because it’s as cold as a witches tit doesn’t mean it can’t sustain lifeforms. After all, there are organisms on Earth that can withstand the temperature of Mars. Is mankind ready to take that giant leap into the final frontier and colonize a planet? Probably not. Regardless, Mars is proving itself to be the perfect candidate and has been proving it for quite some time.

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When we were kids we used to love when it snowed. We’d get a day off of school and get a full day of building forts and throwing ice balls at unsuspecting victims. But then we grew up, and realized we were not only expected to go to work on snowy days, but to also shovel the snow instead of playing in it.

The Pedal-Powered Snowplow is pretty much a shovel added on to a pedal-powered vehicle. Not only does it look a hell of a lot more fun and easy than shoveling, but saves the plow trucks from wasting more exhaust on your driveway.  — Andrew Dobrow

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