legos

I've tried what I thought were some ambitious Lego builds in my childhood, but I never got close to making anything that could be considered life-size. That's why I'm tipping my hat to the insane quest of the Lego builders who made a life-size Bag End in honor of "The Hobbit" movie.

The Bag End creation is impressively detailed. There's a big round door and life-size characters running around, including Bilbo and Gandalf. If you look closely in one of the photos, you can even see smoke coming out of the chimney. I don't think that part is made out of little plastic bricks. … Read more

Tired of the city and need some more greenery in your life? Real estate blog Movoto calculated the cost of buying a home similar to Bag End featured in "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" movie sagas.

Movoto considered Worcestershire County, England, as a reasonable locale for estimating the value of a Hobbiton home since "Hobbit" author J.R.R. Tolkien supposedly favored the lush countryside area.… Read more

Earlier in the year, a "Firefly" Serenity spaceship Lego playset gathered 10,000 supporters on Lego's Cuusoo site. Cuusoo is a little bit like Kickstarter for Lego geeks. Fans put kits together, gather votes, and have a shot at Lego putting their projects into production.

Lego Serenity, however, failed to pass Lego's review process to become reality. One reason Lego gave is that "Firefly" contains content that's inappropriate for its core target audience of children ages 6-11. I wonder what did it. Was it all the cursing in Chinese?

Fortunately, Lego and "Firefly" fans are much more resilient than that. The kit's designer is now offering eager builders an opportunity to buy the kit and make their own 2,186-piece Serenity ships.… Read more

We're going to need a cleanup on aisle 3. There's been a geek collision between the cast of the "The Hobbit" and their Lego mini-fig counterparts. Fans are losing it all over the place.

The cast of "The Hobbit" got their hands on their Lego versions. Even better, the cast members were all in costume when they opened up the little boxes and met themselves. You can swoon over the whole gallery over at the Facebook page for the "The Hobbit."… Read more

These days, Lego sets seem bigger and more expensive than ever, but the most expensive Lego of them all never actually hit store shelves.

From around 1979 to 1981, select business partners and Lego employees (supposedly two per year) who worked 25 years at the brick-building factory in Hohenwestedt, Germany, received one heck of an anniversary gift: a 14-carat gold Lego brick that weighs 0.8246 troy ounces. … Read more

NASA and the European Space Agency say they have successfully tested an interplanetary communications protocol, with astronauts on the International Space Station using it to control a Lego robot in Germany.

The protocol is called Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), and one of its creators is Vint Cerf, who helped come up with the original Internet Protocol suite. NASA and the ESA said on Thursday that DTN may one day allow "internet-like communications" with spaceships and help support infrastructure on other planets.

"The demonstration showed the feasibility of using a new communications infrastructure to send commands to a … Read more

I huddled around my iPad connected to the City of Albuquerque's public Wi-Fi, waiting as Felix Baumgartner started his pre-jump checklist from 24 miles above the earth. The video stuttered, then stopped.

I missed most of the record-setting jump, but I don't feel so bad about it since I found the Lego reenactment. All of the excitement is pretty accurately captured in little plastic detail.… Read more

Goodyear decided to kick off this year's IAA Commercial Vehicle show in a gigantic way with the reveal of a life-size Lego big rig. While you cannot drive this mock truck, at least we can marvel at the fact that it weighs 1,631 pounds and contains a quarter of a million Lego bricks. … Read more

Few of our past Lego stories compare to this elaborate device, which sends hundreds of small toy balls through a series of 17 challenging Lego Mindstorm contraptions including zigzag stairs, spiral lifts, and even a basket shooter.

The mesmerizing machine took a 21-year-old Japanese brick artist nicknamed "akiyuky" more than 600 hours to build and stretches beyond imagination at 4.9 feet by 21.3 feet. While we could spend several paragraphs describing the many intricacies of this doodad, the embedded seven-minute video below shows in better detail than we could tell the full 101.7-foot path each ball travels through. … Read more