balloon

Some eternal questions vex us through history. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? How do cats purr? How many balloons would it take to lift my house into the air like in the "Up" movie? That last question is no longer a mystery.

An online calculator from real estate blog Movoto will tell you how many helium balloons you'll have to order from Party City to get your house off the ground. You tell it how big your house is and it gives you the number. For the record, my 1,100-square-foot house will require a mere 28,470,200 balloons to battle gravity.… Read more

If you had to track down fugitives hidden in five cities around the world, would one day and a $5,000 reward be enough to succeed? And if so, how?

That's what the people behind the TAG Challenge want to know--and what the whole world will soon find out.

On March 31, mug shots of five "suspects" will be published, and it'll be game on in a global hunt for "jewel thieves" in Bratislava, Slovakia; Stockholm; London; Washington, D.C.; and New York City, each of whom will spend 12 hours that day in … Read more

Shark Week is over, but the Discovery Channel seems to have forgotten about a new species at the top of the underwater food chain: Air Swimmers. Unlike RC blimps and other flying mechanical toys, these Mylar balloons add realism and movement with moving fins that swish back and forth to propel the fish through the air.

How does it work? It's simple, kind-of: a 1.5-volt AAA-powered motor attaches to a small plastic pod on the bottom of the balloon, and the accompanying controller uses infrared reception to control the tail rudder's speed and navigation.

The set-up requires … Read more

Oh, wine, sweet nectar of the gods. I open my $2.99 bottle of Trader Joe's red, have a glass with dinner, and two days later discover that all the tasty goodness has disappeared, the victim of oxidation. Why must the world be so cruel?

The maker of the Wine Balloon says it can delay the inevitable with an invention that looks like a cross between a Whoopee cushion and a hand pump oxygen mask. I know that sounds suspect, but it's a much more elegant solution than that description might lead you to believe.

The Wine Balloon launched late last year, but its coming-out party happened at the International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago last month.

It joins a crowded field of devices designed to prolong the life of our beloved grape-based beverages. There are plenty of vacuum seals, pump stoppers, and argon cartridges already on the market. The Wine Balloon's appeal is in its simplicity.

For $22, you get a small hand pump in the shape of a bunch of grapes with a tube leading down to a rubber balloon. Drop the balloon into the partially imbibed bottle and pump it up to seal the precious liquid away from the meddlesome air. The company says the rubber will not affect the wine's taste.… Read more

Ever wished real life could be more like a Pixar movie? It was for a little while on Saturday, as a team of awesomizers managed to successfully lift a house into the air, "Up" style, using a cluster of brightly colored balloons.

The adorable 2,000-pound, 16x16-foot yellow house took to the skies with the aid of 300 weather balloons that grow to 8 feet tall when inflated. From top to bottom, the entire aircraft measured 10 stories high and reached an altitude of 10,000 feet. It flew for about an hour at dawn from a private airfield east of Los Angeles. Oh, and there were people (of the non-animated variety) aboard.

The floating feat sets a world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted, according to the National Geographic Channel. It filmed the flight as part of a new series called "How Hard Can It Be?" that's set to debut in the fall.

And if you're wondering how hard it can be to set a balloon-supported house aloft, well, "it was pretty hard," Paul Carson, the show's host, notes in the behind-the-scenes video below. "It was very difficult actually." … Read more

Flight Doodle is a simple, fun, and extremely polished casual flying game in which you pilot a hot-air balloon through endless hazards to ever-increasing heights.

The interface is simple: you use tilt controls (tilting your device left and right, with adjustable sensitivity) to steer a hot-air balloon up an infinitely scrolling vertical skyscape; you can use touch-screen buttons on the left to slow down, speed up, or get a temporary boost. You face an inexhaustible supply of enemies that threaten to pop your balloon and end your game--including rock-throwing cloud men and pointy thumbtacks that materialize at the edge of … Read more

It was 50 years ago today that Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger stepped off of a gondola that was suspended under a helium balloon 102,800 feet from the ground and fell back to Earth. It set a world record for a parachute jump that stands to this day and it cemented his place in the histories of both space exploration and badassery.

It's not something I'd want to try myself--indeed, Kittinger nearly reached the speed of sound and I get scared on a rollercoaster. But with today's digital technology, I don't have to put myself … Read more

Easy Screen Capture And Annotation takes shots of open windows on your computer. You can save the screen shots as virtually any type of image file, resize them, and add text, shapes, and other highlights.

Easy Screen has a clean, visually appealing interface. The program includes many useful features, such as the ability to e-mail screen shots directly from the interface. There's a highlight feature in which you can drag a box over parts of the capture for emphasis. You also can add text boxes and balloons to your captures. You can save your captures as JPEGs, PDFs, and … Read more

MIT's Riley Crane only found out about DARPA's red balloon challenge a few days before it started. Yet his team went on to win the contest through its savvy use of the Internet.

The challenge posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked people to find the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons floating above the U.S. in one day. Since no one individual could plot the location of all 10, participants had to figure out how to work with others to solve the puzzle.

Team MIT's strategy was to build a Web site designed … Read more