HOME |
RSS | 
Metin Sitti and colleagues at the Carnegie Mellon University have developed a tiny swallowable robot that can anchor itself to the walls of your gut in order to snap images, deliver drug, perform biopsy, and so on.
Turns out, finding an adhesive that would stick to tissues without damaging them was very tricky, and the researchers found the solution … in beetles and geckos!
Sitti and his lab group looked to beetles, which secrete oil-like liquids along their foot hairs in order to stick securely to surfaces. They coated their robot’s feet with a similarly viscous liquid to "help get more adhesion by giving them a surface-tension component," says Sitti. Aside from increasing capillary and intermolecular forces, secretions help feet adhere to rough surfaces by filling in the gaps, he adds. [...]
Sitti’s group is also mimicking gecko feet. Geckos have angled hairs on their feet that allow them to pull in one direction to adhere more securely, and in another direction to detach. "We made some angled fibers [where] in one direction friction is very high, and the other direction it’s low," says Sitti. The group plans to put the angled fibers on the capsule robot in the future.
Link – via ElectricPig
In a burst of geeky nostalgia, I was overjoyed to find this online emulator of Hewlett-Packard’s HP-12C reverse polish calculator (yes, this is the “financial” version).
Check it out here: Link – via Asttro!
Previously on Neatorama: Take a Stroll Down Computing Memory Lane
Photos: Sichuan Online
Who needs dynamite to demolish an earthquake-damaged building when you have this: monster hydraulic scissors that cut buildings to shred!
This giant 59-ton cutter has a 28-m (92 feet) long arm that turns a damaged 8-story building into a pile of rubble in just days. The clamp can exert a 300-ton pressure to cut a 85-cm (33 in) thick beam in just 10 seconds.
Link [in Chinese] – via YeinJee’s Asian Journal
Discover Magazine has a pretty neat run down of zombie animals and the parasites that control them. Did you know that parasitic protozoa Toxoplasma gondii, which normally lives in cat, can also infect humans?
The rate of infection can vary wildly from country to country – only three percent of South Koreans are infected by toxoplasma, while as many as 80 percent of French people are carriers …
Toxoplasmosis, researchers have found, might make people more likely to be schizophrenic, and can change personality in subtle ways. One researcher found that infected men were more aggressive and jealous, women were more outgoing, and perhaps more seriously, both had slower reaction times and were in more traffic accidents.
Link [Flash gallery] – Thanks Andrew Moseman!
(Photo: Blue Diego)
Alex Rushmer of Just Cook It! Blog wrote an eye-popping account on eating the Asian delicacy (read: gross!) thousand year egg or century egg for breakfast:
What we know as the white is not white at all. It is a translucent brown colour reminiscent of recycled glass. The yolk, far from being an appetising yellow, is grey. And hard. Depending on how old the egg in question is, the smell can be no more than a tickle of ammonia to an eye-wateringly sulphurous tang. Century eggs tend to be milder whereas the millennial counterparts really are a force to be reckoned with. Governments in need of an alternative fuel source need look no further than these potent little ova.
They are made by wrapping regular eggs (that taste so very good fried or poached or boiled or scrambled) in a mixture of salt, lime, mud, clay and straw and then leaving them. For ages. Occasionally they are even buried in the ground for several months before they are deemed edible. And here they were staring me plainly in the face, at breakfast.
Now, even though I’m Chinese and have eaten my share of weird food, I have to say that I’ve never had century egg and after reading Alex’s account, probably never will: Link
Neatorama reader Miguel Artime sent in this one: a special coin found in the cash register of a Spanish candy shop. It seems that someone decided
to, um, modify the 1 Euro coin featuring the face of King Juan Carlos I de Borbon y Borbon, King of Spain, into the less regal mug of Homer Simpson! The owner does not want to sell it because "it brings good luck."
Link [in Spanish] - Thanks Miguel!
Gotta love the hair!
Click Play or go to Link.
A sportswriter lists the most memorable Olympic performances of the modern Games. Sure, you’ve heard of Nadia Comaneci, Mark Spitz, and Jesse Owens, but are you familiar with Abebe Bikila, Emil Zatopek, and the other past Olympic stars? What other Olympic performances would you add to the list? Link -via Digg
I bought half a kilo of bacon, half a kilo of cheese, six eggs, lettuce, 3 tomatoes, an onion, beetroot, sesame seeds, mustard and ketchup, from Coles, the 4kg of mince from Fine Freddys’ Meats again, and flavourings from my own kitchen. Total cost of the items bought was about $58.
It’s the second project of the Giant Burger Project. Link -via Unique Daily
With over 20 million people in its extended metropolitan area, Shanghai is China’s most populated city. With an area of nearly 5,300 km² (2,046 sq mi), it is also one of the world’s largest urban areas – and it’s growing fast.
On the third floor of the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, there is what probably is the world’s largest scale model of a city. The room-sized model of central Shanghai in 2020, as envisioned by the urban planners, fills an area larger than 100 square meters (1,000 square feet) – via media pigs, Thanks Mark Dearman!
Photo: brandon [Flickr]
Photo: +tajc [Flickr]
Photo: pete&brook [Flickr]
Photo: pete&brook [Flickr]
Photo: larryncelia [Flickr]
During Victorian era, leaving your calling card when visiting a friend or attending a party is the proper etiquette.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years, this quaint practice is coming back into fashion, but instead of "calling" cards, people are handing out their "calling-and-emailing-and-AIMing-andTwittering cards."
For a flagging stationery industry, calling cards–essentially nonbusiness business cards–have brought a welcome dose of energy. Some are teenier than standard business cards, others much bigger, and many come in bright colors that seem anything but stodgy. Among the buyers: playdate-seeking parents eager for a sane way to exchange contact info, retirees who miss having business cards to hand out (Memphis stationer Baylor Stovall calls them "cruise-ship customers") and itinerant young professionals whose cell phones and e-mail addresses are their most reliable locators.
Link – Thanks Michelle Shildkret!
