It’s a bit stale to put an asterisk in a title, but just try and imagine one. For the most part, it’s true, this home-built rendition of the mighty Mjölnir cannot be picked up by anyone except those who are worthy. The key difference here is that in this case, worthiness roughly translates to ‘being the person whose thumbprint is scanned in’.
Underneath the shiny, Norse exterior beats a heart of wires, batteries, microchips and a whopping great microwave electromagnet. Accordingly, putting the hammer down on a metal surface renders it impossible to lift with human strength alone, but evidently a lot of people around the Venice Beach area couldn’t quite get their heads around that (except for that one guy).
None of them seem overly shocked when scientist, YouTuber and chief hammersmith Allen Pan saunters over and picks it up with no difficulty, but perhaps we’ve all just been conditions by the reams of videos featuring pedestrians shrieking like PCP fuelled colobus monkeys because somebody performed a mildly impressive magic trick.
In any case, it’s a neat little bit of science, just a shame it doesn’t come with any of the other apps that the real Mjölnir boasts, although I did hear that it developed a lot of issues after the software upgrade from Járngreipr to Þrymr. That’s funny, dammit.
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