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Using a new, high-tech material, German scientists Klaus Sedlbauer and Herbert Sinnesbichler have developed a coffee cup that will keep your drink at the optimum temperature for drinking. Phase change material (PCM) was already in use as a building and clothing material because of its temperature-regulating capability. Now it will keep your coffee from going cold!
CM is able to absorb and maintain heat or cold for long periods of time. It melts when warmed and solidifies when cooled. Different PCMs have different melting points. If a hollow-framed mug were filled with PCM that becomes liquid at exactly 136.4 degrees Fahrenheit (the ideal drinking temperature for warm beverages) and the mug’s reservoir filled with a warm beverage, the PCM would absorb excess heat, bringing the liquid down to drinking temperature and keeping it there long enough for you to enjoy your coffee.
Sedlbauer and Sinnesbichler are looking for a manufacturer and distributor for their coffee cup. Link – via babycreativeblog
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I’m a big fan of Ashleigh Brilliant’s witty Pot-Shot series of epigrams, so I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that New Zealand artist Jane Seabrook of Furry Logic Books (published by Ten Speed Press) has created the perfect art for his words in book form.
The book Furry Logic: Don’t Worry is Jane’s sixth and Ashleigh’s first as a co-author in the series. Like all of the Furry Logic books, this one combines beautiful animal pictures with Ashleigh’s razor-sharp wit.
The colorful animal pictures aren’t just exquisitely drawn – they’re educational, too! Jane accurately depicted the red-eyed tree frog, the meerkat, the blue-footed booby and the flame angel (what’s that? You’ve got to read the book). There are 30 animals in all, each accompanied with Ashleigh’s epigrams. This book will make a perfect gift, inspirational book, or reading material to enjoy with your kids.
Links: Furry Logic: Don’t Worry at Amazon | Order from Ashleigh himself (you can even get it autographed)
Note: My review copy is graciously provided by Ashleigh Brilliant. I am not financially or otherwise compensated for this review.
Previously on Neatorama: Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot-Shots | I May Not Be Totally Perfect But Parts of Me Are Excellent | Ashleigh Brilliant-inspired T-Shirts at the Neatorama Shop
British medical researchers are working on growing human embryos that would have three parents: the father’s sperm, the mother’s egg nucleus, and another mother’s egg cytoplasm. In The Daily Telegraph, Richard Alleyne writes:
IVF often fails in older women because there are abnormalities in the outside of their eggs, known as cytoplasm, which surrounds the nucleus.
The team at St Mother Hospital in Kitakyushu, Japan, believe one way around the problem would be too implant the healthy nucleus – which contains most of the information to produce a baby – into the cytoplasm of a donor, usually a younger mother.
The team successfully did this in 31 eggs and of these seven formed “early stage embryos” when injected with sperm in a test tube.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NIH
The Galaxy Dress is composed of 24,000 LEDs, each measuring two by two millimeters, attached to four layers of chiffon and forty layers of crinoline. The whole thing can be powered by a few iPod batteries for up to an hour. It’s one of the recent creations of CuteCircuit, a design firm specializing in “wearable technology.” The dress is now on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. More pictures at the link.
Link via Fast Company | CuteCircuit
(L) Mr. Tap Water Bottle (R) Bacon Squeezins Water Bottle – $11.95
(L) Banana Juice Water Bottle (R) Pickle Brine Water Bottle – $11.95
Being environmentally friendly doesn’t mean that you have to lug around ugly water bottles. Here are 4 new stainless steel water bottles with funny designs that will make you instantly hip. From the Neatorama Shop: Link
Scientists at the Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery in Melbourne, Australia, are developing an implantable device that they hope will regenerate lost breast tissue. In The Daily Telegraph, Bonnie Malkin writes:
During the world-first trial surgeons will implant a chamber containing a sample of the woman’s fat tissue into the chest, which will act a “scaffolding” into which new breast tissue will grow.
“What we are hoping to do in the next two years is develop a biodegradable chamber so that the fat can grow inside the chamber and then the chamber will vanish naturally,” Dr Marzella said.
“Nature abhors a vacuum, so the chamber itself, because it is empty, it tends to be filled in by the body.”
Dr Marzella said the new breasts would feel normal to the patient.
The trial is believed to be just the second time in the world tissue engineering has been carried out in a human.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NASA
You’ve got to hand it to Wisconsin’s muggers. They may be criminals, but darn it, they’re patriotic criminals!
A Milwaukee Army reservist’s military identification earned him some street cred Tuesday, when he says four men who mugged him at gunpoint returned his belongings and thanked him for his service after finding the ID.
The 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student said he was walking home from work about 1:15 a.m. Tuesday when he was pulled into an alley and told to lay face down and with a gun to his neck. Four men took his wallet, $16, keys, his cell phone and even a PowerBar wrapper from his pants pockets, he said.
But the hostile tone quickly changed when one of the robbers, whom the reservist presumed was the leader, saw an Army ID in the wallet. The robber told the others to return the items and they put most of his belongings on the ground next to him, including the wrapper, the reservist said.
Are you fat? Be thankful that you’re in the United States. If you were in Japan, you’d be breaking the law:
In Japan, being thin isn’t just the price you pay for fashion or social acceptance. It’s the law. [...]
In Japan, already the slimmest industrialized nation, people are fighting fat to ward off dreaded metabolic syndrome and comply with a government-imposed waistline standard. Metabolic syndrome, known here simply as “metabo,” is a combination of health risks, including stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that can lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.
Someone tell Lin Ma that being hammered doesn’t mean that he should literally hammer his own skull:
Hard-headed husband Lin Ma hammered a nail into his own skull after a bust up with his wife over his boozing.
Lin, 66, of Yuyi, southern China, pounded the eight inch nail into his head when wife Su, 60, read him the riot act over a drinking session.
Amazingly, he survived which yet another confirmation that alcohol is good for people with head injury: Link (Photo: europics.at)
You can’t keep a good bomb-sniffing dog down. Sabi, a sniffer dog that got lost when an Australian unit was ambushed in Afghanistan 14 months ago, has been found:
The black labrador bitch was with a joint Australian-Afghan patrol that was ambushed in Uruzgan province in September 2008.
Nine Australian soldiers, including Sabi’s trainer, were wounded in the exchange.
After the battle there was no sign of the dog, and months of searching failed to find her. Sabi was officially declared Missing In Action.
An Australian military spokesman said it would probably never be known exactly what had happened to Sabi in the 14 months she was missing, but the fact that she was in good condition indicated she had been cared for by someone.
Previously on Neatorama: Welcome Home
A food fight is brewing in the school cafeteria, and this time, it’s promises to be much nastier than the one that got those kids jailed:
The milk industry clearly doesn’t want chocolate milk to go the way of the soda can in schools. Sure, a serving of chocolate milk has 60 more calories, but kids love it, so they’ll drink more milk if it’s an option instead of other sugary drinks, the campaign contends. The National Dairy Council and the Milk Processor Education Program are spending between $500,000 to $1 million to get the message across.
But no amount of money will convince people like Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, that chocolate milk needs to be in schools. She told the AP that kids get needed calcium elsewhere and do not need yet another source of sugar additives that contribute to obesity. Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services at the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, notes in the same story that kids "happily drink white milk" when it’s the only milk available at school. The "renegade lunch lady," as she calls herself, also said that the extra 40 to 60 calories on top of the 110 calories in a typical 8-ounce serving of white milk "could add up to 5 pounds of weight gain over the 180-day school year." Her district does not offer chocolate milk.
So, should schools ban chocolate milk? Will kids revolt if they did? Link
A new survey by the Centre for Retail Research revealed that shopping shoplifting has increased at an astonishing rate:
They found that shoplifting in Britain has increased in the past year by nearly 20 per cent to almost £5 billion, £750 million more than in 2008, keeping Britain at the top of Europe’s shoplifting table. Clothing and fashion accessory shops were hardest hit, with branded designer goods high on thieves’ shopping lists, closely followed by DIY stores.
Neil Matthews, vice-president of Checkpoint Systems, said that he was astonished at the rise of middle-class shoplifters. “We are not simply looking at your traditional shoplifters here. We are seeing more instances of amateur thieves stealing goods for their own personal use rather than to sell on than before,” he said.
Photographer Richard Calmes takes glorious pictures of professional dancers in flight. This photograph (which took many attempts to achieve the result) is from the gallery entitled Beautiful Dancers on the Town. Link to gallery. Link to artist’s site. -via Everlasting Blort
Over a few years and several blogs I have posted quite a few imaginative marriage proposals, but this is by far the most elaborate proposal I have ever encountered. Steve posted the story at the YouTube page.
I have know my fiance Tracey Wade for over 14 years and wanted to propose to her in a very unique way. Tracey thought we were just going to the movies on a Sunday afternoon. Little did she know, I had rented the entire theater and filled it with 160 of our friends and family. I made it seem as though we were showing up a little late to the movie and went in to the theater after the lights had gone down and the movie trailers were already playing. This was done to keep her from recognizing anyone in the theater. What I had done was make an entire movie trailer that had actors portraying both Tracey and I at different times in our lives, both present day and in the future. After a few trailers played including one for Lord of the Rings the one I had made started. Tracey thought it was just another trailer for a movie soon to be released. Tracey was just perplexed as to how many different things had similarities to our relationship, she kept nudging me throughout the trailer. Tracey had no idea this was a marriage proposal until the last three seconds of the trailer.
Nine months earlier in September of 2006 I started by hiring a professional production team, securing two and a half million dollars (FOR FREE) worth of film equipment (THANK YOU PANAVISION, THEY DONATED THE EQUIPMENT FOR THE SHOOT), and writing a script that would show what would go through someone’s mind (Tracey’s) if they were about to die. It is said “moments before you die your life flashes right before your eyes”. JUST A NOTE: Ever since Tracey was a young girl, she has had a reoccurring dream that she was going to die in a plane crash. Actors were cast to portray both Tracey and I at different times in our lives (twenty years in the future as well as present day)
Oh yeah, she said yes! This is one of The Top 14 Geekiest Wedding Proposals at LaptopLogic. Link -via Unique Daily
Kyle Evans created a electric didgeridoo that can be performed wirelessly through a bluetooth transmission to his computer:
I created this instrument to experiment in the combination of the organic sound qualities of a didgeridoo with the advanced signal processing capabilities of modern computer programming and sound synthesis. This custom built didgeridoo features externally mounted modules that allow the performer to process and manipulate the sound of the instrument in real time. All control data is transmitted wirelessly via blue tooth and is controlling several audio processes created in a custom-built software environment.
You can view complete schematics for the instrument and videos of live performances at Evans’ blog.
via Make | Evans’ blog about the project
Remember Shrinky Dinks? Michelle Khine sure does, and has implemented the decorative toys into her research project at UC Irvine.
She was experimenting with tiny liquid-filled channels in hopes of devising chip-based diagnostic tests, a discipline called microfluidics. The trouble was, the specialized equipment that she previously used to make microfluidic chips cost more than $100,000–money that wasn’t immediately available.
Racking her brain for a quick-and-dirty way to make microfluidic devices, Khine remembered her favorite childhood toy: Shrinky Dinks, large sheets of thin plastic that can be colored with paint or ink and then shrunk in a hot oven. “I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for micro fluidics,” she says.
Technology Review has the story: Link. | Photo by Dave Lauridsen
Link via Make |Monkey wrench that looks like a human hand
Former British soldier Shaun Clark spent over four hours in a tattoo parlor yesterday, celebrating Remembrance Day by having the names of all 223 British soldiers who died in Afghanistan tattooed on his body.
He said: ‘I don’t mind suffering for a few days if I can let the lads know that people really care about what they’re doing out there, and raise some money for the guys coming home wounded as well.
‘The family thought I was mad to begin with, but they’ve come round to the idea now, and my wife is backing me all the way.’
The married father-of-two from Doncaster hopes his challenge will raise £500 for the charity Help for Heroes.
He plans on updating the sombre list every year on Remembrance Day if required.
Tattoo artist Kevin Kent donated his services free of charge. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Ross Parry Agency)
A hungry dog in Llanfairfechan, Wales set fire to a home and caused £6,000 in damage. Paul Gregson, his wife, and two sons escaped the burning house just after midnight Tuesday.
John Morgan, of North Wales Fire and Rescue Service, said: “The family’s pet dog appears to have started the fire by turning on the griddle in the middle of the night. This is why all electrical items not designed to be left on should be switched off at the mains when not in use or overnight.
“The smoke alarm activated and gave this family the opportunity to escape safely. It demonstrates once again that smoke alarms really do save lives.”
The kitchen was badly damaged and there was heat and smoke damage to the rest of the house.
Three-year-old Alfie is a flat-coated retriever, a breed Gregson says is “slow to mature”. Link -via Arbroath
This week’s collaboration with the What is it? Blog brings us this unusual scale. It has a very specific function – can you guess what it is used to weigh?
Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please. You can enter as many guesses as you’d like. Please post no URL or web links – doing so will forfeit your winnings.
Two prizes this week: the first correct guess and the funniest but ultimately incorrect guess will win a cool ice tray from the Neatorama Shop.
For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog. Good luck!
Update 11/13/09 – the answer is: A Reliable Automatic Dial Egg Scale and Candler, there is a light bulb in the cylinder at the right, the egg was placed on the hole and was illuminated to monitor the development of the embryo and to identify infertile eggs. The numbers represent ounces per dozen.
Congratulations to Edward who got it correct and to John the Third who made me chuckle with the “methane measurement device.”
Why are men so cheap? Blame testosterone:
"Our broad conclusion is that testosterone causes men essentially to be stingy," says Karen Redwine, a neuro-economist at Whittier College in California [...] To make this case, Redwine and her colleague Paul Zak, at the Claremont Graduate University in California, gave a testosterone-containing gel to 25 male university students, and then tested their generosity.
The students then played a simple economic game with another participant via a computer. One volunteer is tasked with splitting $10 with another volunteer in any way he likes. The other volunteer either accepts the offer or rejects it as unfair, in which case no one gets any money. Each volunteer played this game in both roles, on and off the testosterone gel.
Overall, the testosterone cream caused a 27 per cent reduction in the generosity of the offers, from averages of $2.15 to $1.57, Redwine and Zak found.
The article also described how oxytocin, the so-called cuddle chemical, can actually boost generosity: Link
Think that the ending of Humpty Dumpty is too harsh for little children? Change it! That’s what the BBC’s CBeebies programme Something Special did:
Instead of being unable to ‘put Humpty together again’, the new version claimed all the King’s horses and all the King’s men ‘made Humpty happy again’. [...]
The Something Special show, presented by Justin Fletcher, is aimed at children with learning difficulties but is popular with all children under the age of five.
The BBC insisted the nursery rhyme was not modified due to its target audience and said it had only been changed for ‘creative’ purposes.
Was it political correctness or a sensible attempt to make the nursery rhyme more cheerful for kids? Link
Probably the nicest one you will see all day. This one, from Multan, Pakistan, was crafted in the mid-19th century and currently resides in the collections of the Museum of Leathercraft in Northampton, U.K.
Of note, the “camel bladder” term refers not to the shape, but to the material from which it was made. Animal bladders have traditionally been used for fashioning drinking flasks, enema bags, and other liquid-containing vessels. A dried, tanned, but unmoulded and unpainted one is depicted here.
Link, via Scribal Terror
Earlier this year the Vatican issued a statement acknowledging that Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with Christian theology. Now the Vatican’s chief astronomer has postulated that extraterrestrial life is possible.
Writing in the Vatican newspaper, the astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space. Father Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome, is a respected scientist who collaborates with universities around the world. The search for forms of extraterrestrial life, he says, does not contradict belief in God.
Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God. And some aliens could even be free from original sin, he speculates.
Link. The photo does not depict an alien free from original sin – just a random chestbusting alien.
