Battery made from 2,923 lemons

A team of chemists gathered 2,923 lemons in Britain to break the Guinness World Record for the highest voltage from a fruit battery. Members of the Royal Society of Chemistry cut the lemons in half in Manchester, and hooked strips of zinc and copper to each end to extract a total 2,307.8 volts from the fruit.

It broke the previous record by 1,521 volts, Guinness announced. Saiful Islam, a material science professor from the University of Bath, said the lemon juice acts as an electrolyte, with the zinc and copper acting as electrodes. The lemon battery was used to activate an LED attached to a light sensor that triggered a relay and activated a pyrotechnic system to kick off a go-kart race.

The lemons were processed by Refood, a company that uses food waste to generate renewable energy.

Giant snow bear sculpture

Travellers on an Ontario highway were treated to an unusual sight when a local resident built a 10-foot-tall polar bear sculpture out of snow.

Tina Lanteigne of Kingston said in a Facebook post that her husband, Rob, spent three days building a polar bear with a heart on its chest in the couple’s backyard. The sculpture faced Highway 38 so it could be enjoyed by the community. Rob installed lights so the bear could be seen at night. The bear is dressed in a scarf and holding a glass Coke bottle. Lanteigne said the bear’s nose and eyes were made using hockey pucks.

World’s first retractable lightsabre

Guinness World Records certified Russian YouTuber, Alex Burkan, as the inventor of the world’s first retractable lightsabre.

Burkan’ Star Wars-inspired invention produces a plasma blade measuring more than three feet in length and burns at a temperature of 5,072 degrees — hot enough to cut through steel. It took hundreds of experiments to get his apparatus to match the size and shape of a lightsabre hilt.

“The key component of my lightsabre is an electrolyser, that can generate a huge amount of hydrogen and oxygen, and compress the gas to any pressure without a mechanical compressor,” Burkan told Guinness World Records. “This is a first prototype so it has lots of limitations. It works for only 30 seconds on full power,” he said.

Wisconsin’s Ice Castles attraction

The US state, Wisconsin attraction featuring ice-sculpted tunnels, slides, fountains and other structures opened to the public.

The Ice Castles attraction, an annual tradition in Lake Geneva, features towering structures created from ice and is expected to remain open to the public through early March, if weather cooperates.

Wally Bullard, the Ice Castles event manager, said, “It’s about 4,000 man hours to get the castle up. Anywhere from two to four months of set up and getting it ready to go. And it’s about 25 million pounds, it’s about three million gallons of water.”

Published in Dawn, Young World, February 12th, 2022