Eideard

One of the world’s leading tea-producing nations, Sri Lanka, has just become the scene for a new world record – the largest cup of tea.

A giant red mug was filled with 1,000 gallons of water, 141lb of tea, 1,929lb of malted milk powder and 353lb of sugar.

It was almost three times the size of the previous record, set last year.

The tea was later driven around the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, and handed out to locals in small plastic cups.

The tea came from Sri Lanka’s famed estates, and was brewed for hours in 44-gallon (200l) urns in a way that is popular in South Asia – with sugar and malted milk power, says the BBC’s Charles Haviland in Colombo.

The mixture was then slowly pumped into the mug – which had a capacity of about 32,000 normal cups – until it was full, he adds.

A representative from Guinness World Records certified the feat.

Now, I have to fix myself a cuppa. A little smaller.

Too many people with too much time on their hands.

The captain of a huge “flying” boat that has smashed world records for speed on water now plans to sail round the world in under 40 days.

Frenchman Alain Thebault, skipper of “Hydroptere,” a revolutionary sailing boat that looks more like a plane, says his next project is to circumnavigate the globe in half the time of the Jules Verne novel “Around the World in 80 Days…”

“Hydroptere,” currently the world’s fastest sailing boat, gets its speed from foils, or underwater “wings” that lift the boat and enable it to “fly” several meters above the water. This innovation, which uses principles similar to those of airplanes, avoids drag and allows the 18- by 24-meter boat to achieve previously unimaginable speeds…

“When you sail at very high speeds, around 100 km/hour, the water becomes like a rock,” he said. “So yes, it is dangerous.Sailing at very high speeds is similar to high altitude for alpinists — up there, you have to spend the least time possible.”

Thebault and his team rebuilt “Hydroptere” [after a 2008 crash] and in late 2009 it became the fastest boat on the planet, traveling at over 50 knots over 500 meters and one nautical mile.

Thebault is currently building a larger version of the boat, “Hydroptere Maxi,” to make his attempt at crossing the world in under 40 days…

But before all that, the maverick sailor, who admits this project is both his profession and obsession, has another goal: He will attempt to cross the Pacific in three days in 2011.

Good luck, dude. I’ve had close friends with some experience at high speeds on water and the biggest risk is the one you never see. What may be floating in the water in your path.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

With a bend of the knees and an arch of the back, a Japanese engineer today set a world flight record for a paper plane, keeping his hand-folded construction in the air for 26.1 seconds.

Using a plane specially designed for “long haul” flights, Takuo Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima earlier, but achieved with a plane that was held together with cellophane tape.

Today’s flight, inside a Japan Airlines hangar near Haneda airport in Tokyo, was the longest by an unadulterated model. “I felt a lot of pressure,” Toda told the Associated Press after his feat. “Everything is a factor ‑ the moisture in the air, the temperature, the crowd.”

The record was all the more satisfying for having been achieved with a plane that stayed true to the traditions of origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. He folded his 10cm aircraft by hand from a single sheet of paper and did not use scissors or glue…

He will again try to achieve the origami plane equivalent of Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile: keeping his plane aloft for a full half a minute.

“I will get the 30-second record,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Bravo!

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An official tally of 4,026 pale and bloodied revellers congregated at the festival. Many more are believed to have been present but did not fill in a form to be counted in the record attempt.

They were also taking part in filming for the forthcoming Film4 and Warp Films’ production, I Spit On Your Rave.

The film, set nine years in the future with mankind extinct after a virus is released at the 2012 Olympics, stars comedian Noel Fielding as the zombie king.

The previous record for the largest zombie gathering was set last month when 3,894 participants congregated in Seattle.

My kind of music and film [and zombie] festival.

The University of Washington has surpassed its 2-year-old world record for operating a glider under the ice, this time by successfully operating one of its seagliders for six months as it made round trips hundreds of miles in length under the ice at Davis Strait.

The result contributes to the longest continuous measurement of fresh water exiting the Arctic through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Davis Strait and into the Labrador Sea.

Scientists worry that climate change may increase the amount of fresh water so much that it impacts the formation of very dense water in the Labrador Sea. That dense, cold water is a critical component driving the circulation of the world’s oceans, according to Craig Lee, a principal oceanographer with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory…

Seagliders developed by the UW School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory are small, reusable underwater vehicles meant to operate on their own, gliding without propellers from the surface to as deep as 1,000 meters, or 3,300 feet, while collecting such information as temperature, salinity and level of dissolved oxygen. When seagliders are at the ocean surface they can be commanded remotely from nearly anywhere in the world via the Internet and can transmit their data via satellite telephone. Unlike faster-moving propeller-driven autonomous underwater vehicles, which may need to be retrieved by ships only days after being deployed, UW seagliders can operate on their own for months at a time…

In the latest deployment, two Applied Physics Laboratory seagliders went into the water Sept. 5…One operated for 25 weeks, spending 51 days and traveling more than 450 miles under the ice, before being collected Feb. 26 by the Danish Navy. During under-ice operations, the glider periodically sought small openings in the ice cover and succeeded in surfacing 10 times to transmit data. It made two round trips under the ice of about 230 miles each…

RTFA. Lots of interesting news and design discussion. Fascinating stuff.

Usain Bolt winning the 100 meter event in record time

Usain Bolt of Jamaica smashed the world record in winning the 200 meters in 19.30 seconds to complete a stunning sprint double in Beijing.

On the eve of his 22nd birthday, Bolt became the first man since Carl Lewis in 1984 to sweep the 100 and 200 gold medals at an Olympics.

Bolt was an astonishing 0.52 seconds ahead of Churandy Martina of Netherlands Antilles, who was second across the finish line but later was disqualified after the U.S. team protest that he had run out of his lane.

The third man across the line, Wallace Spearmon of the U.S. also was disqualified for leaving his lane.

Those rulings meant American Shawn Crawford, the defending Olympic champion, wound up with the silver medal, and teammate Walter Dix was promoted to bronze despite being the fifth man across the finish line.

Bravo! The King of the Caribbean, Usain Bolt.