Watch How This 1000-Bloom Mega Flower Was Grown [Manvsnature]

This is a single Chrysanthemum with 991 blooms, measuring 11 feet in diamater. It's the largest plant of its type ever grown in North America. Here's how a master horticulturalist and a metal fabricator teamed up to make it happen.

Gigantic mutant flowers don't just grow themselves. This one was crafted by master grower Yoko Arakawa and metal worker Dave Beck using a challenging Japanese technique called Ozukuri:

The rigorous, 18-month growing technique involves meticulous watering, pinching and tying of the chrysanthemum to a customized wire frame to train the plant to grow into the desired form. The blooms are painstakingly arranged in a dome shape, with the goal of achieving as many uniform blooms as possible.

Only a few growers in the entire world today are skilled in the techniques of training a Thousand Bloom.

The horticultural feat is on display at this year's Longwood Gardens' Chrysanthemum Festival in Kennett Square, PA, running through November 21. After that it will become sentient, unroot itself from its correspondingly large stand, and viciously devour everything in its path. [Longwood Gardens via Core77

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Confirmed: China's Supercomputer Really Did Kick Our Asses [Supercomputers]

The super-duper list of the world's 500 supercomputers has been published, and as the Chinese boasted last month, their Tianhe-1A supercomputer is the most powerful. Those 7,168 Nvidia GPUs and 14,336 Intel CPUs must be working hard. [BBC]

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Panasonic's 103-Inch Plasma TV Goes 3D [3dTv]

After falling in price to "just" $50,000 last year, Panasonic's five-year-old plasma has been updated with 3D technology. The TH-P103MT2 will sell for the equivalent of $101,900 in Japan—not including installation, naturally. [AkihabaraNews]

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How To Hack Kinect [XBox360]

You've seen the kind of cool stuff people can get up to when they hack their Kinect. Now you can too, with this simple rather complex guide.

Adafruit, the team behind the recent "bounty" on hacking Microsoft's new motion-sensing peripheral, have posted an in-depth and incredibly technical guide on how to get the camera doing your bidding rather than Microsoft's.

Be warned when we say it's technical: this is not the kind of thing your average person, comfortable with a console dashboard and Firefox, could pull off. But if you fancy yourself as a bit of a whizz with computer code, have at it! And if you get some cool stuff working, be sure to let us know.

DIY Kinect Hacking [adafruit]

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Google's Boutiques.com Website and iPad App Launches [Google]

As we told you two days ago, Google's launched Boutiques.com—a fashion site (and app!) based on Like.com's image-recognition technology following their acquisition. It's very much For Women Only (unless you're buying!), but great for Google. [Boutiques via GoogleBlog]

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