PowerLabs On the News!
PowerLabs On the News! |
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There is nothing better than seeing your hard work being recognized! Over the years PowerLabs and its creator, Sam Barros, have been linked from various sites, appeared on numerous science pages, magazines, newspapers and TV shows. Below is a listing of a few of the more recent / significant appearances that I have been made aware off: I wholeheartedly welcome any publicity and am always available for any kind of media work / interviews.
I
assisted in the design, construction and implementation of a 40 foot
electrified maze stunt for NBC's "Fear Factor" TV show. The
episode (#521) aired on January 31st.
You can see a short clip of it at the
Fear Factor
webpage.
This month's edition of Fortune magazine (out in Oct 14th) has a really interesting article on High Voltage enthusiasts that talks about me and my RailGun research. You can preview the article here.
More publicity this month:
Michigan Tech Lode:
Tech Student
Finds Stardom
Daily Mining Gazette:
Jet Set
I'm on the Michigan
Tech Mechanical Engineering Student Profile page.
A crew from
Discovery Canada came to my University in March to film my railgun research in
my laboratory. The 8 minute show was aired in Canada, USA, South America and
Europe, and it shows me performing a wide variety of magnetic and
electromagnetic experiments, culminating with several slow motion clips of the
coil gun and railgun firing. Well worth watching. BTW the "plasmaboy" nickname
was not my idea.
Click
here to watch video
Video in Windows Media (for
those who had problems watching it in streaming format, 25MB)
I also made a page about what it was like being on the show. The show originally aired on January 20th at 10PM. It aired multiple times after that.
Here is some of the media coverage I received for being on
JYW:
Daily Lode
Michigan Tech Media Relations
MTU
Mechanical Engineering news
Daily
Mining Gazette
TV 6
Sam Barros on the Mining Gazette (click picture)
I was the microwave expert on MTV's "Big Urban Myth Show", which aired
in February 2003. In the show my friend Slava and I talk about how microwave
ovens work, and what happens when you put metals inside them. We got paid to
blow an oven up and microwave things ordinary people wouldn't even dream of
taking near an oven. It was a great time and it turned out to be a great show,
even though at under 2 minutes it was quite cut down from the nearly 5 hours we
filmed in New York.
Click the picture or
this link to watch the 14.8MB movie.
MTV's
Big Urban Myth Show, Episode 102:
Bush busters, Superbowl flushers, microwave disasters, hooker
hysteria, ten year-old Twinkies, and Keith's bloody babble. The
tongue twisters come untied in this episode of MTV's Big Urban Myth
Show.
Air Times:
Tuesday, Feb 25 @ 10:30 PM
Wednesday, Feb 26 @ 2:30 PM
Sunday, Mar 02 @ 6:30 PM
Sunday, Mar 02 @ 12:00 AM
The following
newspaper article appeared in the March 2002 issue of "Electronics
Weekly", an English publication. I became aware of it after the number of
e-mails I received asking questions about projects on the page tripled.
Click on the thumbnail to see the full size scan and read the article.
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Sure, your skin crawls when you accidentally microwave a metal-edged plate. Fortunately, there are folks who have no problem recklessly experimenting with this and other high-voltage devices, and are only too happy to post their results online. Read up on creating your own ball lightning, nuking CDs, and making your very own Quake railgun. |
POWERLABS Sam Berros mag graag wat knutselen. Zijn laatste project is een
'railgun', een apparaat waarbij een projectiel door middel van
electromagnetische krachten wordt weggeschoten. De condensators die hij gebruikt
kunnen voorzichtige geschat een voorwerp van vijf gram wegschieten met een
snelheid van meer dan twee keer de snelheid van het geluid. Andere hobbies van
Sam zijn het zelf maken van TNT en het bouwen van Tesla-spoelen waarmee vonken
van anderhalve meter lang kunnen worden opgewekt. Probeer dit niet thuis.
(My attempt at translating this (sorry, my Dutch is a bit
rusty from not speaking it in 4 years. If someone could do a better job I'd
appreciate it):
"POWERLABS: Sam Barros is a do-it-yourselfer: His latest project is a "railgun";
a device that fires a projectile electromagnetically. The capacitors he is using
accelerate a 5 gram projectile to a speed of over two times that of sound. Other
hobbies Sam has are making TNT by himself and building Tesla Coils capable of
making sparks over half a meter long. Do not try this at home."
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Got your ZZZ’s??
Well then get some!! This week the fellas have the usual bizarre bazaar
of all that is odd in the industry. I personally like the quasi-spud gun
that uses 60% propane and 40% butane to get things going. Heh..whoa.
"..I chose to fire a tennis ball out of the barrel, as I didn't believe
a potato would sustain the forces I had in mind..."
Sam had seen those spud guns, and decided that he wanted to make one, but hair spray or compressed air just wouldn't cut it. So he decided to build a gun that would use a 60% propane 40% butane mixture, and pure oxygen... |
The article continues on for a few pages: it is a very good article, well worth reading! Check it out on the link above.
| More Ways to Blow Things Up |
In this country, we're less likely to hide weapons of mass destruction and more
inclined to build up a website touting the fabulous power we carelessly hold at
our fingertips. Visit Sam Barros' PowerLabs
and watch as he bends chemistry to his will and crushes full soda cans with
nothing but a semiconductor. Make fun of him at your peril . . . he's also
building a rail gun.
Posted by
michael
on Wednesday June 11, @03:38AM
from the young's-modulus dept.
mbreitba writes "Sam Barros is at it
again, Some may know him for his
Railgun
research, and some may know him for his
homemade
cannons. But now he's found a use for
all those
old CD's you don't need anymore. Personally, I couldn't think
of a better use for them."
Slashdot has its minuses though... This e-mail came in 2 days after PowerLabs was featured:
"
Dear Customer: Our records indicate that your account is projected to exceed the traffic allowance for your current Hostway plan. Please see below for information on this traffic overage. For more details, you can review and monitor your traffic usage on a daily basis in SiteControl at https://sitecontrol.hostway.com Customer ID.................: barros0383 Domain Name.................: power-labs.com Period Covering.............: 2003-6-1 to 2003-6-14 Plan Type...................: Platinum Plan Allowed Traffic.............: 15000 MB Projected Monthly Traffic...: 1069532 MB Projected Traffic Overage charges.....: $10545 *Current rate for traffic overage: $10/GB |
Praise (and constructive criticism) is of course always welcome. I am always very willing to answer questions and grant interviews, and nothing pleases me more than seeing my hard work gain publicity so that I can share my ideas and research with as many people as possible!
Would you like to feature PowerLabs in an article of
you own? Interview the creator? Mail
me!
People have come here to support my big ego :-)
Last update
03/04/05
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Copyright
© 1999 -2002 by Sam Barros. All rights reserved. Removing any material from this site for display without consent from its author consists in an infringement of international copyright laws and can result in fines up to $50000 per infringement, plus legal costs. So ASK ME before you remove anything from here. |
