Knex sculptures

K’Nex (trademarked as K’NEX) is a brand name of a construction toy system invented by Joel Glickman, designed and produced by K’Nex Industries of Hatfield, Pennsylvania, USA. Currently Michael Araten is the president of the organization. The name is, presumably, a phonetic variation of connects, and is pronounced the same way. The toy’s building system consists of interconnecting plastic rods and connectors, which can connect together to form all kinds of contraptions. K’Nex is a construction toy, and therefore in the same genre as Lego, Fischertechnik and Meccano. Whit K’Nex  you can make really impresiv sculptures.

kNex sculpture

kNex sculpture

kNex sculpture

The concept behind K’Nex was originally conceived by Joel Glickman. While he was at a party, he started thinking of what he could do with his straw if he could connect it with other straws. He and his brother Bob Glickman discussed the idea and started the K’Nex company. The original building system kept very closely to the idea that Joel Glickman had: The K’Nex building system was simply Rods and Connectors which could be easily attached together to make different things. Other parts such as wheels and pulleys were also included to allow more flexibility in construction. The first K’Nex Box was launched in the U.S. market in 1993. Original models with moving parts would have a handcrank to make things move. But soon gears and motors allowed models to move on their own.

kNex sculpture

kNex sculpture

kNex sculpture

kNex sculpture

kNex sculpture

When K’Nex went to the big toy companies, such as Hasbro, and others, their idea was turned down, but they were referred to giant construction toy producer Lego. However Lego refused to even see their new toy. K’Nex is now distributed in Europe by TOMY.

kNex sculpture

kNex sculpture

kNex sculpture

Deadly jellyfish

In a case of extraordinary bad luck, a man sailing off the coast of north-eastern Australia dived into the ocean and face first into a tiny, but deadly, Irukandji jellyfish with a sting said to be as painful as childbirth.

The 29-year-old, who has not been named, was wearing a full-length protective stinger suit (a lightweight version of the wetsuit), which covers everything but the face, feet and hands. But the peanut-sized jellyfish still managed to find his exposed face when he dived off a yacht while sailing near South Molle Island in Queensland’s popular group of Whitsunday Islands on Thursday.

He was immediately stung on the face by the venomous jellyfish, which is almost impossible to see in the ocean but which is common throughout the tropical waters in north-eastern Australia from October to May each year. Tourists are advised to wear stinger suits or simply not to swim in the water, or risk being stung by the marine creatures.

The man was pulled back on to the tour boat suffering excruciating pain and taken to the island where, shivering and in shock, he was given first aid. He then had to wait 40 minutes until a rescue helicopter was able to transfer him to a hospital at Mackay on the mainland, where he remained in intensive care earlier today.

Phillip Dowler, general manager of the CQ rescue squad in Queensland, said the man would have welts across his face for weeks, but was likely to eventually recover from the painful sting. “It was very unfortunate that it (the jellyfish) managed to get him on the only part of his body that was exposed,” Mr Dowler said.

“A sting from an Irukandji jellyfish has been described as being as painful as childbirth, people who are stung usually screaming in pain. And his would have been exacerbated by the fact that it got him on his face, close to his brain and his nervous system. It would have been extraordinarily painful.”

Goat’s milk ice cream ‘almost killed woman’

A County Tyrone woman who almost died after having an allergic reaction to an ice cream she ate on holiday is having to learn how to walk and talk again. Rachel Devine, 24, went into anaphylactic shock and suffered heart failure minutes after eating the ice cream, which contained goat’s milk. She was in Turkey with her boyfriend when the incident happened in August.

Her father, Stephen Devine, said her life had been saved by the quick actions of her boyfriend and locals. Mr Devine said his daughter first realised she was allergic to goat’s milk about two years ago and had taken an EpiPen with her on holiday. But he said she did not know it was an ingredient in the ice cream.

“With an allergic reaction to anything, the first thing to happen is the airways closing,” he said. “But with the help of her boyfriend Chris and some local people they got her to the local hospital in the resort where she was staying.”

Ms Devine was then transferred to a specialist unit in Izmir, 40 miles away. She was flown back to Northern Ireland 10 days later and was treated at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, before being moved to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She is currently being treated at Musgrave Park Hospital.

“She is receiving intense speech and language therapy, also with physiotherapy she is learning to regain her mobility,” Mr Devine said. “Rachel has asked for all the details of what happened, but her memory and her personality, everything remains intact, thank goodness.

“She is an extremely determined girl and wants to return to her job – she works for a law firm in Manchester where she studied. She had just been given a training contract to train as a solicitor the week before she left on holiday.”

Giant Galaxy Found at Very Edge of Universe

Scientists have located a giant 13-billion year old galaxy at the edge of the observable universe. Detecting this huge galaxy was a challenge because of the massive quantities of light coming from the black hole, and if you think you spotted two problems in that sentence, read on.

The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun.

“It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the sun. The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe,” said University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. Tomotsugu Goto who discovered the object.

“How can a galaxy be giant when it’s the same size as our own?” is because of lightspeed – the galaxy is almost thirteen billion light-years away, which means it’s almost thirteen billion years ago, which is almost as much “ago” as there is. When the universe was only about a billion years old even a Milky Way sized galaxy was pretty big, and the supermassive black hole in the center was impressively huge.
Which brings us to the second issue: light coming from a black hole. Everyone knows that nothing can escape from a black hole, not even light, but that’s only after matter passes the “event horizon” – the ultimate one-way sign in spacetime. But as matter falls in towards this cut-off point it’s heated up by friction, radiating energy away as light, and this emission from infalling matter makes up over half of all the light detected from the distant galaxy. This is why we didn’t see it before – a little thing like a few hundred billion stars was outshone by the superheated material around the black hole.

Detection was made possible by newly upgraded CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) Cameras fitted to the Suprime-Cam in the Hawaiian Mauna Kea observatory. The improvement was engineered by Professor Satoshi Miyazaki and colleagues of the National Observatory of Japan.

The new early-stage black hole-galaxy system will be an important clue in the evolution of such supermassive black holes. While asking how they get so big might sound simple (they just keep eating stuff, including each other), their ability such spectacular size in so short a time isn’t explained by any current creation theories. And by “spectacular size” me mean about a giga-Sun of mass.

Yet another reminder of the amazing: our amazing ability to detect such incredibility, and the amazing universe where such awe-inspiring objects can be lost down the back of the cosmological sofa until we look really hard.

Luke McKinney

Image: is a false-color image of the QSO, the most distant black hole currently known. In addition to the bright central black hole (white), the image shows the surrounding host galaxy (red).

Tomotsugu Goto, University of Hawaii at Manoa

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