Well maybe that is a bit of a stretch, but I found this Engadget post mildly entertaining to say the least. Or maybe it was the tremendous wave of nostalgia to roll over me as soon as I saw *my* Super Soaker in the blog post, sitting there in all its hypercolor glory. What mid 20-something to mid 30-something doesn’t remember the joys of summer days spent shooting Super Soakers at older siblings and horror stories of people filling them with bleach (I never did figure out if that really happened or if it was an urban legend)? Ahh, those were the days.

So yeah, the guy who invented the Super Soaker, Lonnie Johnson, is apparently quite the nuclear engineer. He has managed to harness the energy of the sun to rule the world…or, at least turbines. His invention, the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System (JTEC) is supposed to be somewhat like a fuel cell and can apparently covert more than 60 percent of solar energy into electricity, which is twice the current rate. And that’s about the totality of nuclear engineering I can understand.

On the other hand, imagine if Mr. Johnson applied that level of technology to his Super Soakers. People would be able to save the world with them!