This is interesting its the world’s first glass bottomed hot air balloon. It recently took off on its first flight as part of the 2010 Bristol International Balloon Fiesta. Passengers are able to see the view right under their feet. I’m not sure I would fancy it.

This is interesting its a new solar cell technology which has recently been developed by a Norwegian company. The company EnSol AS have created a unique patented film which can be coated onto glass and walls to turn them into power generators. The film which they hope to release commercially by 2016 effectively means that you would be able to turn a window into a solar power generator. It is likely to be much cheaper than conventional devices and it is thought the coating could be built into windows and other building materials as part of the manufacturing process. It certainly sounds interesting but I wonder how much more expensive it would be to replace your windows with these. If the price were not a concern I would certainly consider it.

This is interesting its a drinks container that you can eat when you have finished your drink. Made of seaweed extract agar the Jelloware containers come in flavours like lemon basil, ginger mint and rosemary beet. When you have finished your drink you can either eat them or alternatively they can be thrown onto the garden as the sugar galactose they are made of can be used to nourish plants. It should save a lot of washing up after a party.

This is interesting is an add in for Outlook that can check the tone of your email before sending it. It works by analysing the phrases that you use to see what tone they create. Called ToneCheck it works in a similar way to a spell checker. Once you have written your email you simply click the Tonecheck button and it will tell you the dominant tone of the email. It’s an interesting idea and should prevent people misconstruing the tone of an email.

This is interesting its a new design of foldaway bike. It has been designed by Kevin Scott who cam up with the idea of a bendy bike. The bike includes a mechanism which allows the frame to bend meaning it can be bent around a lamppost and locked to itself. It is currently just a prototype but it certainly looks interesting.

This is cool, it’s a blow up pub which is available to purchase from Drinkstuff.com. It measures 26ft tall and 15ft wide and takes around ten minutes for four adults to set up. It holds around 50 people and costs £27,815. The inside features a tiled effect roof, a fireplace, brick stone wall and two chimney pots.

I came across this article which mentions an event I was unaware existed. The World Pea Shooting Championships is it seems held in Ely near Cambridgeshire. The competition which has been running since 1971 was created by a local teacher after he confiscated pea shooters from some pupils. This years winner was local man Ian Ashmeade who managed to improve on this previous attempt last year when he only managed the runner up position.

In a pioneering operation a cat called Oscar has been given some new paws. Oscar was involved in an accident which meant his back paws were amputated. In the first operation of its kind to be carried out on a cat he has been fitted with new prosthetic ones. They are attached to his ankle in both his back paws allowing him to walk naturally. However, the new limbs are not suitable for outdoor use so Oscar whilst still alive will now have to be a house cat.

This is an interesting idea its a vending machine which will offer prescriptions 24 hours a day. The machines which will initially be put into five hospitals will hold up to 330 different types of drugs. Each pack will include a microchip so that the machine will indentify it. The patient will then insert their prescription into the machine and speak to a pharmacists via a video link where they will check the medicine has been properly prescribed before authorising the transactions. The prescription can be paid for by inserting cash or a debit or credit card. The patient will then receive their prescription along with a leaflet on how the drugs should be taken.

If you have a spare £17 million burning a hole in your pocket then you might be interested in this yacht. The 122ft state of the art super yacht comes with a free super car. The yacht has a plush Art Deco interior with four large double rooms, a reception area and salon. It has 52 inch LED TVs and state of the art sounds systems in every room. The ship has a top speed of 43 knots and the supercar can reach speeds of 233mph. The yacht has its own garage located at the stern of the ship so you can park the car on board. If you want one you will have to be quick as only six models will be made.

This lovely looking creature is the caterpillar of a the Spicebush Swallowtail butterfly. The caterpillar is only a few inches long but uses it’s unusual markings to make itself look like a snake and thus deter predators. This picture was taken in the US by wildlife biologist Jonathan Mays.

This is interesting it’s a sign in North Carolina which not only has a picture of the beef it is advertising but also includes the smell. The large sign shows a black pepper and charcoal steak but also includes cartridges with fragranced oil. The aroma is spread with the help of a fan at the bottom of the billboard. The smell is pumped out six hours a day from from 7am to 10am and 4pm to 7pm. Interesting idea but I wouldn’t want to live next door to it.

According to this article this could be the oldest leather shoe. It was discovered by archaeologists in a cave in Armenia. It is 5,500 years old and made of a single piece of leather shaped to fit the wearers foot. The shoe would have been quite small about a UK women’s size 5 but it could have worn by either a man or woman. It would have been preserved due to the cool and dry conditions in the cave and the fact that it was covered by a thick layer of sheep dung which acted as a solid seal preserving it over the millennia.

According to this article this could be Britain’s biggest wasps nest. The size of a double mattress it was found in the attic of a pub in Southampton. It measured 6ft by 5ft and was around 15 times bigger than the UK average. Apparently it would house up to half a million wasps. The nest was removed by a pest controller who cracked open the top and squirted the colony with a powerful insecticide.

An England fan is trying to create the world’s largest football shirt. Justin Walley has been appealing to fans, players and clubs to donate football shirts which will all be stitched together to form one giant shirt. So far he has sewn together over 600 shirts but he is still appealing for more.

This is interesting its a new device which is expected to be popular this summer. Previously launched in the US is will soon be available in the UK. The device allows you to make home made ice lollies in just 7 minutes. Called the Zoku it costs £40 and allows you to pour fruit juice into moulds and produce lollies in 7 minutes.

A rare wild flower will be protected by police patrols and CCTV to prevent it being stolen. The flower is a Lady’s Slipper Orchid and is thought to be so rare that only one flowering plant example exists in the UK. Located at Sliverdale Golf Course in Carnforth, Lancashire the plant is due to flower later this month. Efforts to re-introduce the flower in other areas have so far failed and with cuttings from the plants selling to collectors for anything up to £5,000, this is one very special plant. The orchid is protected by the by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and is coded with a security mark so that anyone who tries to sell a cutting of it can be caught.

This is interesting it’s a beaver dam so big that it can be seen from space. The dam is 2,790ft, that’s more than twice the length of the Hoover dam.  The dam is located in Wood Buffalo National Park in Northern Alberta, Canada. It is thought that it has been created by several beaver families which have joined forces to create the huge dam. It contains thousands of tress and would have taken them months to create it.

This replica wine fountain has recently been unveiled at Hampton Court Palace. It is similar to those that would have been used by Henry V111 and has been created after the remains of a 16th century fountain were found at a archaeological dig at the palace in 2008. It stands 13ft high and is made of timber, lead, bronze and gold leaf. The best thing about it, however, is that it is a working replica. At weekends and bank holidays it will serve red and white wine priced at £3.50 a glass. I like the idea of a wine fountain I wonder if I can convince my husband to build one.

This plane is thought to be the world’s biggest model aircraft. Built by Tony Nijhuis in his garage the aircraft is a scale version of a Boeing B-50 Superfortress. It has a 20ft wingspan and weighs about seven stone. It took two years to make plane and cost around £8,000. The aircraft has 96 batteries that power four electric motors. It can manage around 8 minutes in the air before it needs to be recharged.

This interesting looking creature is a new species of giant monitor lizard that has recently been discovered. Despite measuring 2 metres long the lizard has escaped notice up to now. It lives in the forests which cover the Sierra Madre mountains in the north of the Philippines. Despite looking quite scary it survives on a diet of fruit. It is thought it has remained undiscovered for so long because it is a highly secretive animal that never leaves the forest or crosses open country. It is, however, known to the local people who regularly hunt it for food.

A chilli grown in Grantham in Lincolnshire has been named the hottest in the world. The Infinity chilli is hotter than the Bhut Jolokia chilli which previously held the record. Tests by Warwick University have found that the Infinity chilli has a rating of 1,067,286 on the Scoville Scale which is used to measure the heat of peppers. In comparison the Bhut Jolokia measures 1,041,427.

This is  Darius a Continental Giant rabbit that is thought to be the world’s largest. At 13 months old he weighs three and a half stone. He eats 12 carrots, two bowls of rabbit food, three apples and a cabbage every day. He may still grow bigger as he is not yet full grown.

A new butterfly exhibition has recently opened at the natural History Museum. Called the Butterfly Explorers’ exhibition it is designed to show school children the various stages in the life of a butterfly. Visitors will be able to experience various different environments where butterflies live such as the Amazon rainforest. They will be able to see two hatchery windows where they can watch butterflies emerging from the pupae as well as seeing the butterflies up close. The exhibition runs from the 8th of April to 26th of September. It looks like a great day out.

According to this article a dung beetle is the world’s strongest insect. It has been found that the male horned dung beetle is able to pull 1,141 times its own body weight. That’s the equivalent to a person dragging six fully loaded double decker buses. The strength of the insects was tested by sticking threads to their backs with superglue and placing them in artificial tunnels. The end of the thread was then attached to a pot, hung off a pulley and water was slowly dripped into the pot until the beetle could withstand the weight no longer.

Scientists have discovered that common toads are able to predict earthquakes. Researchers at the Open University made the discovery when studying a population of common toads in L’Aquila in central Italy just before it was hit by an earthquake. Although it was the toads breeding season 96% of the male toads abandoned the area five days before the earthquake struck. In addition to this the number of paired toads at the breeding site dropped to zero three days before the earthquake and no fresh spawn was found at the site from that date to the date of the last aftershock. Toads would usually stay at the breeding from the moment the breeding activity begins until the end of spawning so it seems the behaviour is unusual and is directly related to the earthquake. It is thought that just before an earthquake hits radon gas and gravity waves are released from the earth and that these are reflected back by the atmosphere and picked up by the toads.

This article is interesting, it suggests that in bee colonies there are certain bees that use their bodies to provide heat for the colony. The bees have been dubbed “heater bees” due to the function they perform. Thermal imaging research for a TV series found that heater bees maintain the temperature in the hive where the young bees grow. The young bees called pupae are sealed inside wax cells whilst they grow into adults. Heater bees keep the temperature at 35C for those pupae which will become forager bees and 34C for bees that will be house keepers. The heater bees creep into empty wax cells and transmit heat to around 70 pupae at any time. In this way they can ensure that there are always enough of each type of bee to maintain the hive.

This new design for the British plug has recently won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award for 2010. It was designed by British student Min-Kyu Choi. It measures just 1cm thick compared with the standard size of 4.5cm and has a fold away design. The two bottom pins of the plug can rotate 90 degrees whilst the top pin remains static meaning it can be easily collapsed to fit inside a laptop case.

If you have ever been in a dark bathroom at night struggling to find the toilet roll then this glow in the dark toilet roll might be just what you need. It looks like regular toilet roll but gives off a florescent glow when the lights are turned off. It costs £4.99 for a roll so is not cheap but could be useful if you are planning a camping trip or simply going somewhere really dark.

A 90 year old man is waiting for confirmation from Guinness Wolrd Records to see whether he is the world’s oldest paperboy. Ted Ingram has been a paperboy for 68 years and claims he has delivered more than 500,000 papers on his round in Winterborne Monkton near Dorchester. Ted has only ever missed his round twice due to snow, despite the fact that he now has a hip replacement. He continues to do the round despite the fact that he no longer makes any money from it because he now has to take the car.

A dermatologist has developed a application for the iPhone which he claims can get rid of wrinkles and acne whilst you talk on the phone. Called AcneApp The application costs $1.99 and uses blue and red light to help kill bacteria and promote collagen growth. There is some scepticism over whether the product actually works as it is yet to undergo clinical study but its an interesting idea.

This is interesting, its a machine that supposedly turns waste paper from the office into toilet roll. Called the “White Goat” the machine could not be described as portable, it is 6ft tall and weighs in at 94st. It can create a new toilet roll from 40 sheets of A4 paper in around 30 minutes. Waste paper is fed into a shredder, untangled and then dissolved in a pulper. The wet paper is then thinned out and dried before being wound into toilet paper.

This coin which was found in the village of Hallaton in Leicestershire is thought to be the oldest piece of Roman money found in Britain. The coin was found in 2000 with around 5,000 other coins, a helmet and a decorated bowl. It has since been dated to 221BC and has been put on display at the Harbrough Museum. The other coins excavated at the Iron Age shrine of the Corieltavi tribe have been dated to the first century AD. It is not known how a Roman coin might have come into the possession of the local tribe but it is thought that they might have been traded before the Roman conquest in 43AD.

This is Missy the world’s first cat to receive a knee replacement. She was close to death after being run over by a car but after receiving pioneering surgery to rebuild her limbs and being fitted with a metal joint she is now recovering nicely. To repair her leg a collagen mesh made from a pigs bladder was used to re-grow tissue and cover the bone. The bones were then placed in a device called a spider which held them in place until the bone and tissue had healed. The implant itself was custom made to fit Missy’s measurements. It was made out of stainless steel and bonded to the thigh bone and shin bone using cement. The new implant should allow Missy to walk, run and jump around as normal.

According to this article this is the world’s largest TV. Recently unveiled by Panasonic it measures 152 inches. If you want one it is likely to have a fairly hefty price tag and you will need a large living room as you need to be seated between 25ft and 38ft away from it to enjoy optimum viewing.

Weighing in at 3,682lbs this is The Field Marshall a bull who has recently been named Britain’s biggest bullock. The bull eats more than 17lbs of feed every day and at the age of  8 is only a teenager so is likely to grow bigger yet.

This is one of the country’s smallest libraries. The phone box was brought from BT for £1 under a National scheme that allows communities to adopt a phone box. Villages in the local area of Westbury-sub-Mendip can use the library, selecting books, DVDs and CDs. They simply have to leave a book they have read and take one that they would like to read. The idea was thought up by a resident when the village lost both its phone box and its mobile library in quick succession.

According to this article a whisky company is preparing an expedition to try and locate two crates of 100 years whisky. The whisky was shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton during his 1909 expedition. It is now thought to be frozen inside in the icecap. The company that now owns McKinlay and Co who made the whisky are hoping that they will be able to conduct tests on the bottles with a view to re-launching the Scotch. One thing is for sure it will certainly be nicely chilled.

According to this article thousands of microscopic worms have been sent into space. The worms which were collected from a rubbish tip in Bristol have boarded the Atlantis space shuttle for a mission to the international space station. It is hoped that studying the worms will help scientists explain how astronauts build and lose muscle as they circle the earth. The worms will be exposed to conditions in space for four days before being frozen and returned to the laboratory where they can be studied.

Our cat Oliver is notorious for being very timid, he usually hides when we get any visitors and get beaten up by our other cats. Bearing this in mind we were very surprised when a large fox wandered into the garden and approached him. Oliver and the fox regarded each other for a while before the fox rolled on the ground. It was obvious to us that the fox wanted to play but Oliver seemed to miss the point and chased him away. You can see pictures below of the encounter, click on the images for a bigger version.

These pumpkins were carved by a gardener is Essex. He has carved many different famous faces into pumpkins such as Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Wayne Rooney, Amy Winehouse and Cheryl Cole. The carvings take around three hours to complete but only last a few days as the pumpkins start to contort after that amount of time.

These realistic looking creatures are made by origami expert Sipho Mabona. Despite the intricate designs surprisingly they are each made from just a single sheet of paper. Each piece takes around 20 hours to fold and can take more than six months to design so it doesn’t come as a surprise to find that they sell for around £1,500 each. The preying mantis and stag beetle are just two of his many designs with others including grasshoppers, tigers and fish.

These gargoyles are made out of toilet roll tubes. French artist Junior Fritz Jacquet makes the faces by moulding the toilet roll tube to create the sculpture. He starts off by constructing the eyes and then creates the nose, mouth and the rest of the face. When finished the face is coated in different coloured pigments and fitted to a metal stalk so it can be displayed.

I have come across many cool hedge shapes in the past such as the hedge whale, the hedge sea monster and the hedge elephants but this is the first time I have seen a hedge car. The 11ft car is made up of six plants and there are also some 6ft high mechanics which are made from two plants each. The plants have been carefully trained over a wire frame to create the shape and are then trimmed.

This is interesting its a watch that contains a satellite positioning system which can locate the wearer to within ten feet. Aimed at parents who want to keep an eye on their children, the brightly coloured watch costs £149.99. Parents will be able to see their child’s location on Google maps by texting a special number. They will also be able to set up safe zones in which the children can play and receive an alert when the children go outside the area. The device is made by a company called Lok8u. I’m not sure how practical it is for children as they would soon learn to take it off but I would be interested in getting one of these for cats. Having emailed the company that makes these I have found out that a cat version is due to be released in the new year.

This is interesting its a man who makes famous landmarks from toothpicks. He has spent six years building the structures and in that time has used over six million toothpicks and more than 170 million litres of glue. The picture to the left shows him working on a structure of the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat  and the second picture shows his version of the Taj Mahal.

This is interesting its some pictures taken by a man in Surrey of bats flying over his garden pond. To get the pictures he rigged up this rather elaborate set up using a digital camera that listens for ultrasonic squeaks and an infrared beam to trigger flash  lamps when a bat flew near the water. The first picture shows how he set up his equipment and the second is one of the pictures that he took.

I have read a few articles about silent disco in the past but was surprised to learn that it appears to be becoming very popular. According to this article it is becoming popular at weddings and private parties. Silent discos work much the same as regular discos except people dance to music played through personal headphones rather than through speakers. There are several different channels to choose from so people at the same party can choose their own type of music. The article highlights one example where a couple had a silent disco at their wedding reception and chose to have Motown on one channel for older guests and current hits on another for the younger ones. It’s an interesting idea and has the advantage that you can party all night without upsetting the neighbours.

These interesting looking sandwiches were created by Mark Northeast in an attempt to get his son Oscar to eat his vegetables. Fed up of his son not eating his meals Mark started to make them a little more interesting. His creation include a caterpillar and a crocodile (pictured) as well as Spongebob Squarepants and a piano. They are certainly more exciting than most sandwiches I have seen.