If I had $150 dollars (I don’t), I would probably buy a new hard drive. But I’m not MIT quaility. You see, two MIT students decided to spend $150 “to see what the world looked like from the sky.” And apparently they didn’t want to use this thing called the Internet. So they assembled a contraption made up of a weather balloon, helium, Styrofoam cooler, hand warmers, a cell phone, and a camera. Short story: it worked.

The balloon carried the cooler containing all the electronics to 18 miles where it captured some spectacular shots. Eventually though, what comes up must come down, but the Motorola phone used had a GPS locator built-in so retrieval was a tad easier than labeling the Styrofoam cooler with a return mailing address. The whole experient was cataloged on their blog. [via Mashable]