Archive for February 9th, 2008
The Anti-Gambling Shoes
Lai Yingying of Xiamen City, China, used to gamble every night at his friend’s house. That is, until his wife who is tired of his gamblin’ ways, forced him to wear a pair of iron shoes to make it harder for him to walk there!
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Ferrari FXX Pedal Toy Car
Berg Toys, whose website is currently under construction, came up with the best toy car ever: the Ferrari FXX pedal car!
The Ferrari FXX Pedal Car (Exclusive model) comes with racing bucket seat and four-point harness, leather steering wheel and even an aero spoiler kit. But like the real thing, It doesn’t come cheap though, standard model begins at $730 while the Exclusive model will cost you about $2,200.
[Source: Autoblog via OhGizmo!]
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Murkami Loves His Tagged Billboard
To promote an exhibition by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, the Museum of Contemporary Art put up a billboard. Not long after it went up it was tagged by graffiti artists, and the billboard was quietly taken down.
According to LA Weekly, it turned out that Murakami himself saw the billboard on the Internet and found it "so wonderful, he had to have it for his collection."
Link – Photo via Wooster Collection
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The Ping Pong Printer
Vern Graner and Rick Abbott of The Robot Group built an inkjet printer for ping pong balls:
Why print on boring old paper, when you can get your message across on some nice bouncy ping pong balls? The appropriately named PingPongPrinter can print dot-matrix messages directly onto the spherical surface of ping pong balls.
Builders Vern Graner and Rick Abbott of The Robot Group used a Parallax inkjet print head kit and the EFX-TEK Prop-2 controller board to bring their wondrous creation to life. As each ball leaves the hopper, it’s loaded onto a rotating platform, and sprayed with tiny ink droplets.
The best part: the balls it prints are used as ammunition for the group’s other dastardly invention, the pneumatic, ping pong ball firing PONGINATOR!
Check out technabob blog for the video clip of the PingPongPrinter in action and the awesome giant PONGINATOR: Link
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Uncarriable Carrier Bag by Mother London
UK ad agency Mother London is full of creative people (just check out their website, where you can search for employees by ..um, their "distinguishing features"). So when they wanted to create a self-promotional item, printing bags with their logos like everyone else just won’t do.
Instead, Mother London created a series of Uncarriable Carrier Bags: bags that you don’t want to be seen carrying around. And proving that reverse psychology (or lack of common sense) works in mysterious ways, people love them!
Thanks Rocco!
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How a Hasidic Jew Principal with Military Intelligence Training Turned Around a Failing Public School
Junior High School 22 in South Bronx, New York, has overwhelmingly black and Hispanic students – and it was failing badly: student attendance was so atrocious that in one class of 30, only 5 students had bothered to show up, gangs roam the hallway, and students attacked each other on a regular basis.
That was before Shimon Waronker, a Hasidic Jew with a beard and a velvet yarmulke and training in military tactical intelligence, stepped up to be its principal:
He also asked a lot from his teachers, and often they delivered. One longtime teacher, Roy Naraine, said, “I like people who are visionaries.”
Sometimes teachers balked, as when Mr. Waronker asked them to take to rooftops with walkie-talkies before Halloween in 2006. He wanted to avoid a repetition of the previous year’s troubles, when students had been pelted with potatoes and frozen eggs.
“You control the heights, you control the terrain,” he explained.
“I said, if you go on a roof, you’re not covered,” said Jacqueline Williams, the leader of the teachers’ union chapter, referring to teachers’ insurance coverage.
Mr. Waronker has also courted his teachers; one of his first acts as principal was to meet with each individually, inviting them to discuss their perspective and goals. He says he was inspired by a story of how the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitch spiritual leader, met with an Army general, then inquired after his driver.
“That’s leadership,” he said, “when you’re sensitive about the driver.”
Lynne Bourke-Johnson, now an assistant principal, said: “His first question was, ‘Well, how can I help you, Lynne?’ I’m like, ‘Excuse me?’ No principal had ever asked me that.”
A fascinating report by Elissa Gootman of The New York Times about how one man could change a public school that was failing so badly it was put on a list of the 12 most dangerous schools in New York: Link – via growabrain
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Scientists Create Embryo with 3 Parents
Newcastle University scientists successfully created an embryo with 3 parents. They are hopeful that this method could one day help treat mitochondrial diseases:
The Newcastle team have effectively given the embryos a mitochondria transplant. They experimented on 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment.
Within hours of their creation, the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, was removed from the embryo, and implanted into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed.
The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria – around 16,000 of the 3billion component parts that make up the human genome.
The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed within six days.
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Apple Logo Birthmark
Photo: kmcculler [Flickr]
Pssst… Don’t tell Apple that Flickr user kmcculler’s son has a birthmark that looks like the Apple logo. They might sue the iBaby for trademark infringement! Link
//Yes, this made it round teh Interweb about two years ago, but I thought I’d post it here in honor of Neatorama’s recent article Evolution of Tech Companies’ Logos.
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Chameleons Evolved to Change Color to Stand Out, Not to Blend In
We’ve always been told that chameleons change color to camouflage themselves and blend in with their background. Well, according to scientists at the University of Melbourne, Australia, that was wrong: chameleons evolved the ability to change colors to make themselves more noticeable to other chameleons.
As chameleons have a different visual system to humans, they have a fourth type of cone which is ultra-violet (UV) sensitive, the researchers had to first measure what the chameleons were actually seeing.
The Melbourne-based researcher explained: "We measured colour with a spectrometer, which measures both the UV and visual colour range, and combined this with information on the chameleon visual system to model chameleon colour perception." [...]
Co-author Dr Devi Stuart-Fox, from The University of Melbourne, Australia, told BBC News: "[Our research] suggests that chameleons evolved colour change for signalling, to fend off rivals or attract a mate, and not so they could match a greater variety of backgrounds."
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Cormorant Swallowing a Pike Fish
Photo: Stewart Canham
Amateur photographer Stewart Canham snapped this amazing photo of a cormorant swallowing a foot-long pike:
With its rows of needle-sharp teeth, the pike is a feared predator in the water world. But this one hadn’t a hope when a hungry cormorant decided it was supper time. The bird pounced on the foot-long pike with its hooked bill and pulled it to the surface of a lake.
The two antagonists grappled for a few seconds before, in one swift movement, the magnificent bird extended and twisted its neck in preparation for supper. Its highly elastic throat allowed the cormorant to gobble the pike down whole within seconds.
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Quote: Engineer and the Glass Half Empty
"An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be"
– Anonymous
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DNA Vaccine Tattoo
Martin Müller of the German Cancer Research Center devised a new method of delivering DNA vaccines: by tattooing them!
"We get about 200-fold higher responses compared to conventional injection (of a DNA vaccine)," he said.
Using a modified tattoo gun, Müller tattooed mice with DNA programmed to create human papillomavirus proteins, which generated high levels of antibodies and white blood cells tuned to those antigens.
But the technique comes at a cost — pain — that could limit its application. And there’s no easy way around it because the injury associated with tattooing, Mülller said, is likely a key ingredient in generating an effective immune response.
Link (Photo: Martin Müller)
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