A New York family who set a Guinness World Record with 601,736 Christmas lights on their property in 2014 said this year’s display tops their own record with a total 687,000 lights.
Timothy Gay of Lagrangeville, whose family first set the record for most lights on a residential property with 346,283 Christmas lights in 2012 before topping it with their 2014 display, said the latest version of the ERDAJT Holiday Lights Display – named for his children’s initials – features 687,000 lights, UPI reported.
Gay said going all-out for Christmas is a tradition he inherited from his mother.
“I grew up in a family of eight children and she made the holidays magical for the whole family,” he told the Albany Times-Union. “From Thanksgiving to New Years, it was like Grand Central Station in our house. It was very special to us.”
The family’s annual light display serves as a fundraiser for local charities, including the Union Vale Fire Department’s community fund.
Gay said he is hoping to collect $500,000 with this year’s show.
 

Scientists in the United States have developed a tiny camera that they say is “the size of a coarse grain of salt”.
This new camera can produce clear, full-colour images that are as good as ones taken with camera lenses that are 500,000 times bigger in size, bbc.co.uk wrote.
While scientists have developed tiny cameras before, the pictures they have taken have been blurry and the quality of the images hasn’t been very good.
Traditionally, cameras rely on a number of curved pieces of glass or plastic known as ‘lenses’ to keep images clear which limits how small cameras can be, however this one uses different technology to get around this – meaning the camera is tiny and takes clear pictures!
The secret to this new camera is that the surface contains 1.6 million cylinder shaped ‘posts’ which each use artificial intelligence and light to turn what they detect into an image.
The team at Princeton University and the University of Washington in America which developed the device, are now working to add more features to the camera itself – such as giving it the ability to detect objects.
Scientists are really excited by this new camera and think it could make a big difference to future technology.
The camera could be used to help doctors take better images of the human body to help diagnose and treat diseases.
It could also be used to make better quality camera phones.
Felix Heide, who helped develop the camera said, “You wouldn’t need three cameras on the back of your phone anymore, but the whole back of your phone would become one giant camera.
“We can think of completely different ways to build devices in the future,” he added.

 

That’s what an anti-vaxxer in Italy hoped would happen when he used a silicone arm to avoid getting jabbed.
Spoiler alert – his attempt failed.
The 50-year-old man was armed with the fake arm at a clinic in Biella in the northern part of the country, torontosun.com wrote.
However, since medical staff at the clinic know what an actual arm feels and looks like, they caught on quickly when they saw the texture did not match a normal arm. The skin colour was realistic, though, so he gets an A for effort on that front.
Local media reported the man tried to convince the medic to jab his fake arm, even after they realized it was fake.
“A stage costume,” was how he defined it, according to nurse Filippa Bua, who first noticed the man.
“He arrived late in the morning,” Bua told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera “I reported to the doctor, and then we made a report to communicate it to the superiors.”
It is believed the man was trying to fool medical staff into giving him a Green Pass, which proves the holder has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested negative or recently recovered from the coronavirus.
 

If five cats can catch five mice in five minutes, how long will it take one cat to catch one mouse?