Archive for January 11th, 2007
Aquadom.
Aquadom, the world’s largest cylindrical aquarium, is in the lobby of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Berlin. It’s 25 meters tall and holds about 900,000 gallons of water! There is an elevator at the center of the aquarium, leading to a restaurant on top. Link -via Dump Trumpet
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Close Call at the Scariest Car Accident Ever.
Follow the link to see why this accident is a very, very close call: Link - via Cellar IoTD
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Painted Rocks.
Here’s a gallery of cute animals painted on rocks at Fresh Pics: Link
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Scientists Work on a Device for Silent Speech.
Chuck Jorgensen, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and his team are developing a machine that can translate your body’s neuromuscular signals for speech, without the need to talk aloud:
We’re looking at the neuromuscular patterns being sent through the nervous system and inferring from those patterns what words would have been said out loud had a person actually permitted himself to produce the acoustics.
Link - via Gizmowatch
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Small Waterwheel Produces Cheap Electricity for Your Home.
If you’ve got a small stream (as little as 20cm wide) near your house and hate to pay the electric bill, just wait for this new invention:
The prototype has now been working successfully at St Catherine’s, a National Trust site near Windermere, opening up previously untapped energy. The waterwheel produces one to two kilowatts of power and generates at least 24 kilowatt hours of sustainable green energy in a day, just under the average household’s daily consumption of around 28 kilowatt hours. [...]
A ‘high head’ like a traditional water-wheel, is large, expensive and needs civil engineering. But with ‘low heads’ - under a 18 inches, no one had yet invented a method of successfully recovering the energy generated.
Link - via Gadget Reporter
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DIY MIDI Concertina.
Now, you can be a real tech-pirate with your own homemade Hayden Duet concertina to sing all those sailor songs.
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A Light Bulb in a Microwave
What happens if you microwave a light bulb? Check out the video:
Link to Youtube video - via TechEBlog
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Biggest Lava Plateaus Under Indian Ocean Discovered.
From the website:
The plateau is located in the so-called Mid Ridge in the Indian Ocean below a point 800 kilometers (500 miles) east of Mauritius, said Professor Tamaki Ura, director of the University of Tokyo’s Underwater Technology Research Center.
“This is presumed to be not only the biggest lava plateau in the Indian Ocean but also one of the biggest in the world,” Ura said.
“The vehicle [unmanned undersea probe r2D4] also spotted hydrothermal eruptions on the northern part.” The flat plateau measures about 14 kilometers (8.8 miles) in length and 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles) in width at a depth of about 2,700 meters (8,860 feet), according to the team from the university.
Ura said the plateau was covered with lava some 300 meters (980 feet) thick.
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Salvador Dali’s Student ID Card.
That’s Salvador Dali’s student ID card from when he was a student at the Special Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking School in Madrid from 1924 to 1925.
Found at VintagePhoto
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Hexafluorid.
The explanation that came with this on YouTube says:
Get enchanted by a aluminium foil ship floating above ground on hexafluorid (gas significantly denser than air) at the Physikshow of the University of Bonn!
I looked on the Really Weird Materials site Alex posted earlier, but found no explanation of “hexafluoridâ€. I Googled the word, and found plenty of documentation, none of it in English, at least what a non-scientist would understand. Can someone direct us to more on this? Push play or go to YouTube. -via Arbroath
UPDATE:
What they have is Sulfur hexafluoride. It’s 5.11 times as dense as air. It’s non toxic, although it’s byproducts can be extremely dangerous.
Another interesting point is that inhaling this gas will make your voice sound deeper. Sound does not travel as fast in this medium. Helium can transmit sound very rapidly, hence making your voice squeaky.
Thanks, Russell! I knew someone would know more about it!
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Patterns of Public Transport Vehicle Seats.
There is a Flickr pool dedicated to photos of patterns from the seats of public transport vehicles. Really.
This one to the left is from the District Line train in the London Underground.
Link - via Mira y Calla
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Robot Controlled by Thought.
The Neural Systems Group at the University of Washington has created a robot that they can contro by thoughts alone!
Link - via electroplankton
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Extreme 3D Chess.
If those three-dimensional chess [wiki] you see on Star Trek is too easy for you, try this one out: the 3D8 Chess!
Link - via Cliff Pickover’s RealityCarnival
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Caviar Vending Machine.
From English Russia.
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Man’s Head Pierced with 800 Needles
From Random Citations:
More than 800 acupuncture needles were pierced on the head of Wei Sheng, a Chinese medicine doctor from Guang Xi, Southwestern China. He once won a Guinness World Record for piercing 1790 needles on his body in 2004. He said that his main purpose of self-piercing is to promote China’s traditional acupuncture. He plans to pierce 2oo8 needles in his body as a special gift to Beijing Olympics in 2008, for which he has already reserved a hotel room in Beijing.
Link [in Chinese] via Random Citations
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Literary Eccentricities.
James Joyce [wiki] was nearly always seen wearing an eye patch, which was not mere accessorizing: He suffered from glaucoma throughout adulthood and eventually went completely blind. In fact, he dictated much of his latest book, Finnegans Wake, to his research assistant, Samuel Waiting for Godot Beckett.
But Joyce sometimes wore five wristwatches on one arm, which was mere eccentric accessorizing. He also asked his wife, Nora Barnacle, to sleep with another man so he could understand the feeling of being cuckolded, which seems a bit odd. (Nora declined.)
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Nineteenth-century French poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire [wiki], who besides being quirky was addicted to opium, once famously wrote, "If you would not be the martyred slave of time, / Get drunk! …" He wasn’t kidding about making the most of his time: In his house he kept a clock with no hands that bore the inscription "It’s later than you think." Incidentally, the positively batty Baudelaire also happened to own a pet bat, which he’d captured at (where else?) a graveyard.
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Charles Dickens [wiki] could not sleep unless his bed was aligned in a north-south position. Also, he habitually touched certain objects three times "for luck."
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When he was 29, George Bernard Shaw [wiki] lost his virginity to a widow 15 years his senior. Apparently it wasn’t all that good, because thereafter Shaw rarely, if ever, had intimate physical relationships - not even with his wife, to whom he was married for 45 years.
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Although Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie [wiki] did not like the taste of brussels sprouts (as would befit a boy who never grew up), he often ordered them at restaurants. Why? "I cannot resist ordering them. The words are so lovely to say."
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"Little Mermaids" and "Thumbelina" author Hans Christian Andersen [wiki] was so intensely afraid of being buried alive that he left a note by his bed each night that read, "I only appear to be dead." Andersen was right to feel anxiety around sleeping, incidentally: In 1875, he died as a result of injuries sustained falling out of bed.
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Although Emily Dickinson [wiki] was not quite the utter recluse that she is often made out to be, she was unquestionably eccentric: She wore white from head to toe, exclusively, for the last several years of her life.
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From mental_floss’ book Scatterbrained, published in Neatorama with permission.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!
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What is It? Game 7.
Our weekly What is It? game, in collaboration of the What is It? blog is this strange tool: guess what it is and win a free Neatorama T-Shirt (I think I’ll one t-shirt contest a month from now on, till my supplies run out).
Game rules: place your guess on the comment section below but post no URL links (let others play, please!). Past winners can play, but won’t win anymore T-shirts, ok?
While you’re at it, definitely check out the What is It? blog for more fun stuff!
Update 1/12/07: It’s a corn sheller (patent 99106). Congrats to withvous for the correct answer!
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Amazing Sand Sculptures
Here’s some photos of the sand sculpture competition they hold every year in Lommel Belgium. Kinda puts my sand castles to shame.
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Brain Scanning Machine.
Photo: CTF Systems Inc.
This weird contraption is a Magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanner. It scans … your brain!
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanners work by measuring the magnetic field produced by the brain. While MEG scans don’t do a good job of deciphering the geography of the brain, they can easily detect instantaneous changes in brain activity, allowing scientists to track changes that happen in milliseconds.
Found at Wired
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"subway" map of the Blogosphere.
Information Architects has developed a "subway" map showing the trend of the Blogosphere and the Internet. Neatorama, sadly, is not listed. Link - via Micro Persuasion (who is listed).
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Doorganizer.
Constantly forgetting your keys when you go out the door? You need this hanging reminder and organizer for the doorknob: Link - via Lifehacker
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Half of US Teen Use Social Networking Websites.
A study by the Pew Internet Research revealed that more than half of teens use social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook!
And I have never been on either one! Link
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Really Weird Materials.
From New Scientist Tech Blog: a list of very, very weird materials. For example:
2. Auxetic materials - materials that get thicker when stretched. Pull them in one direction and they expand in another. See the video (.mov format)
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Drawing a Perfect Circle
Alexander Overwijk, a teacher from Ottawa (Canada), is one of the fastest Circle Drawers in the world. In this video, he draws a close-to-perfect 3 foot wide circle in one second. Even if he did not win the seemingly non-existent World Freehand Circle Drawing Competition, his talent is still impressive.
Hit play or go to this link [YouTube]. Found via digg.
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Photograph of the Second Before Doomsday
The picture above is from an actual test of a single U.S. nuclear missile holding at least 8 dummy warheads. Each line shows the deployed warhead striking the ocean at well over 4,000 miles per hour.
The stunning full-size photograph can be seen in Wikipedia’s gallery of the Peacekeeper missile.
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