Archive Category: Science & Tech
Trivia: The 13th Month of the Year
Undecimber is the thirteenth month of the year, according to the computer language Java.
It’s not a joke: the logic is that lunar calendars sometime have 13th month (for example, in the Hebrew calendar, 7 years out of every 19 have 13 months.
Controlling Virtual Reality with the Eyes
(YouTube link)
People who have lost the ability to move have been using “gaze technology” to communicate by computer for years, but the technology has been too slow to operate in virtual worlds, until now. A team led by Stephen Vickers of De Montfort University, Leicester, UK has developed new software that allows the eyes to select functions and temporarily turn off tracking just by the movement of the gaze.
“Even though a user in, say, Second Life might look as if they are able-bodied, if they can’t operate and communicate as fast as everyone else, they could be perceived as having a disability,” he told New Scientist, adding that there is a privacy issue for players who may prefer not to reveal their disability in the virtual world.
The developments are “hugely important”, according to Mick Donegan, who works with severely disabled children and adults at Oxford-based charity and COGAIN partner, SpecialEffect.
“Enabling someone to express themselves and engage with people in ways that they can’t do in real life – because they are restricted to a wheelchair or a bed – can have a really positive effect on their self-esteem and motivation,” says Donegan.
Link -via Geek Like Me
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+SU500 Years Later, Parachutist Proved Leonardo da Vinci’s Parachute Works
Swedish parachutist Olivier Vietti-Teppa finally proved, after 500 years, that Leonardo da Vinci’s parachute design actually does work!
Link - via Scribal Terror
BBC News has the video clip: Link
The Beating Heart Fountain
Here’s something you don’t see everyday…a blood spewing fountain! Now I’m no artist (or should I be saying it like this: arteest?) but I would love to see this in real life on a gigantic scale.
Not entirely anatomically correct (nor real) this heart fountain spews, shoots, and jets “blood” all over the box it is contained in much to the amazement of the spectators. Created by artist Billy Chasen this fountain was displayed at the American Heart Association (AHA) 2008 “Heart of New York Gala”, which took place at Waldorf Astoria in NY City.
Click play or here [YouTube Link]
[Link] - Billy Chasen’s website.
[Link] - American Heart Association.
[Link] - Story via BoingBoing
How Its Users Help Nokia Innovate
Remember
the brouhaha when Apple
told a third-grader to get lost when she wrote a letter to Steve Jobs
about her ideas to improve the iPod?
Well, compare that to how Nokia treats its users' suggestions:
Nokia researchers didn't quite know what to expect when, in March, 2007, they posted a mobile phone application called Sports Tracker on a company Web site that is open to the public. The program, still a work in progress, was designed to let runners and cyclists take advantage of the global positioning capability included in some Nokia models. Users can record workout data such as speed and distance, and can plot routes.
The response to Sports Tracker was overwhelming. Eventually more than 1 million people downloaded the program and used it for sports the developers never dreamed of, such as paragliding, hot-air ballooning, and motorcycle riding. More importantly, the users avidly provided criticism that Nokia (NOK) then used to make improvements. Based on reader feedback, for example, developers added the capability to create online groups where users can share favorite routes and even photos they took along the way. "People were misusing the application in creative ways," says Jussi Kaasinen, a member of the team at Nokia Research Center in Helsinki that developed Sports Tracker.
You've heard of user-generated content? Sports Tracker is an example of how Nokia has begun experimenting with user-generated innovation. That's the premise behind Nokia Beta Labs, a Web site where the Finnish handset maker lets users test the latest smartphone software. Instead of people recording silly Web cam videos for YouTube or inventing frivolous advocacy groups on Facebook, they can help make the mobile Internet more useful.
The photo above is Sam from Accra, India Ghana, who sketched his dream phone
in open studios set up by Nokia's design team where users can submit their
best ideas.
Link: Article at Business Week by Kerry Capell | Nokia Beta Labs website - via Core77
Impossible smells exhibition opens
As reported by Telegraph.co.uk, scent professionals of many stripes were tapped for the “extinct and impossible” smells exhibition at the Reg Vardy Gallery, University of Sunderland in the northeast of England. They’ve created a series of unique historical odors that would likely not exist naturally today. Scents include odors found a medieval plague doctor’s first aid kit, the smell of the fallout from an atomic bomb, the sweaty stink of a space station, the bouquet of extinct flowers and more. I wish the exhibition was showing here in the northeast of the US as well. Update: Here’s more from 24 Hour Museum.
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this +digg +del.icio.us +reddit +SUTrivia: Philematology
Philematology is the art or science of kissing.
The origin of the word kiss comes from Old English cyssan ("to kiss"), which transformed into the Middle English kissen before becoming the word as we know it today.
Anthropologists think that kissing evolved from grooming behavior or as a result of mothers premasticating (chewing) food for their children. Others think that kissing allowed prospective mates to sniff and taste each other’s pheromones for biological compatibility.
To avoid clashing their noses, couples turn their faces slightly to one side when kissing. In 2003, Onur Güntürkün observed that most couples turn their head to the right - by a ratio of 2:1 - when kissing in public (like while bidding goodbyes at airports). He noted that it’s similar to a baby’s preference for turning the head to the right during the final weeks of gestation and for the first few months after birth.
The human mouth is full of bacteria. When you kiss someone, you exchange anywhere between 10 million and 1 billion bacteria.
Spam Turns 30
On May 3, 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketer with the Digital Equipment Corporation, sent the very first spam e-mail to 393 Arpanet users. You can read the actual e-mail and its consequences at the link.
Image via Flickr user eurleif (R)
Crust, Mantle, Peanut Butter?
We all learned it growing up - The Earth’s crust is made up of three distinct layers: Core, mantle, and crust. Unfortunately, as with other simplistic theories like the tongue map, scientists have recently discovered that the real world is a bit more complicated:
One clue to the new thinking is that seismic waves traveling through the planet have long been measured to travel at inexplicably different speeds. Sharp speed changes suggest differing materials. On each side of the planet there are two big, chemically distinct, dense piles or blobs of material that are hundreds of kilometers thick – one beneath the Pacific and the other below the Atlantic and Africa, the researchers say.
“You can picture these piles like peanut butter,” McNamara said. “It is solid rock, but rock under very high pressures and temperatures becomes soft like peanut butter, so any stresses will cause it to flow.”
Hit the Link at LiveScience to find out more, or check out the full article at Science (subscription required)
That’s not Michigan
Fantastic "frozen wave" photos like this one have circulated on the internet to illustrate the 2008 Michigan cold snap. The accompanying text says they were taken in Macinaw City on Lake Huron. The photos are real, says Snopes, but the text is a hoax. The photos are from Antarctica, Dumont d’Urville Station, not Michigan, and the wavelike effect is caused when ice is lifted up and exposed by glaciation, then sculpted by extreme winds. Photo credit: Tony Travouillon (2002).
Synchronization
(YouTube link)
Synchronization of 5 coupled metronomes in Lancaster University.
Pretty neat. -via Cynical-C
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this +digg +del.icio.us +reddit +SUSkin Cells Made into Heart Cells
Scientists at UCLA have succeeded in reprogramming stem cells from mouse skin to become functioning cardiac cells. This is the first trial to find that partially differentiated, or iPS cells that don’t involve embyos or eggs can be made into the three types of cardiac cells needed for heart repair. Senior author of the study Dr. Robb MacLellan says the results are encouraging.
“I believe iPS cells address many of the shortcomings of human embryonic stem cells and are the future of regenerative medicine,” said MacLellan, an associate professor of cardiology and physiology. “I’m hoping that these scientific findings are the first step towards one day developing new therapies that I can offer my patients. There are still many limitations with using iPS cells in clinical studies that we must overcome, but there are scientists in labs across the country working to address these issues right now.”
Further studies at UCLA will try to determine whether human cells can be reprogrammed as well as the mouse cells. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Dake)
Quote: Paul Ehrlich on Computer
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
- Paul Ehrlich, scientist
and Nobel laureate- Thanks Fred!
New Legless Lizard Species Found in the Brazilian Cerrado
Photo: Cristiano Nogueira / Conservation International
Scientists from the Conservation International and Brazilian universities found 14 new species in the protected wooded grassland of Brazil’s Cerrado. Amongst the new species is this legless lizard of the genus Bachia:
This species of lizard of the genus Bachia is one of the new species discovered during the expedition. Although there are other species of the genus in the Cerrado (almost all discovered and described only recently), this new species has only been recorded in the Ecological Station. The absence of legs and the sharply pointed snout help in locomotion over the surface layer of sandy soil, predominating in all the Jalapao, formed by the natural erosion of the escarpments of the Serra Geral plateaus.
Link | View the new species at CI’s gallery - Thanks Lindsay Walter-Cox!
Student Twitters Himself Out of Jail
UC Berkeley graduate student James Karl Buck, who was in Egypt covering an anti-government protest when he was arrested, helped free himself with … twitter!
On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.
The message only had one word. "Arrested."
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.
Naturally, when he was released, James sent another one-word twitter: "Free"
CNN Article by Mallory Simon: Link (Photo: James Karl Buck)
The Annual Stupid Robot Contest in (Where Else?) Japan
Gotta love Japan! Every year, Maiwa Electronics hosts The Stupid Robot Contest to determine whose robot is the silliest.
The contest rules are simple (and brilliant!):
1. It must be mechanical
2. It must be completely useless from a societal point of view
3. It must make people laugh
From Tokyomango:
Pictured above is Papa Robopucho, a disfigured little box bot that plays the red-flag-white-flag game by himself, and then occasionally topples over and cries for help.
Some of the other contestants last year were a chorus of pregnant wife robots, a child robot that did push-ups, and and a "moe" robot dressed like a maid from a maid cafe.
Link | Bacarobo (official website, in Japanese)
The Amen Break and the Golden Ratio
Mathematician Michael S. Schneider saw a wave form of the well-known drum sequence known as the Amen Break. It’s a drum 5.2 second sequence performed by Gregory Cylvester Coleman of The Winstons and has been sampled and used by countless artists since it was recorded in the 60s. Schneider, seeing the waveform through the eyes of a math professor, recognized a pattern, a relationship called the Golden Ratio. So he began to analyze the drum sequence and its deeper meaning.
For more exact visual analysis I examined the wave image in my computer, in which I have a palatte of geometric forms and proportions for quickly identifying an object’s ratios. Sure enough, Golden Ratio relationships were indicated among the different peaks. Am I seeing things? You decide. But the appearance of the Golden Ratio may help explain its popularity.
To appreciate this relationship between the Golden Ratio and sound, it’s worthwhile to consider some of the ideal, eternal, unchanging principles of Golden relationships which can only be approximated in nature, and byartists, architects and musicians.
Link -via the Presurfer
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this +digg +del.icio.us +reddit +SUThe Museum of Unworkable Devices
The Museum of Unworkable Devices is one of those sites everyone on the internet should visit at least once.
This museum is a celebration of fascinating devices that don’t work. It houses diverse examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures. Watch and be amazed as we bring to life eccentric and even intricate perpetual motion machines that have remained steadfastly unmoving since their inception. Marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind, as it reinvents the square wheel in all of its possible variations. Exercise your mind to puzzle out exactly why they don’t work as the inventors intended.
There’s a special emphasis on the Holy Grail of engineering, the perpetual motion machine. Alex has posted about the museum before, but that was in 2005 when Neatorama was very young. Link -via the Presurfer
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this +digg +del.icio.us +reddit +SUScientists Are “Barcoding” Fish
Tired of having to identify new species of fish the old fashioned way - by looking at it - scientists are trying a new method of taxonomy: barcoding them!
Okay, okay - I was being cheeky. But this is actually quite cool: FISH-BOL, the global Fish Barcode of Life Initiative is an on-going effort to compile a database of DNA barcodes of all marine species in the world:
"Even though several million species of plants, animals and microbes have been identified over the past 300 years or so, we still find new species,” Collette says. “And despite advances in technology, we still have to sort organisms into piles and research every known bit of information before we can say we found a new species. Sometimes we have to go back to the basics and look at an organism in a jar for reference to make a determination.”
Scientists like Collette often go to sea and collect dozens of samples of an organism they think might be a new species. They return to the lab to sort out what they have collected before focusing in on the details to determine exactly what the organism is, sharing samples with colleagues to reach a consensus. The process takes time, and they are excited about the contributions FISH-BOL and other similar efforts around the world will make to documenting and understanding life forms on earth.
After decades of following similar taxonomic procedures often done by visual identification, DNA bar-coding offers a new and much faster, more accurate way to identify species and share information. Since nearly all biological species have distinct gene sequences, they can be identified using a short gene sequence collected from a standardized position in the genome – a DNA barcode. Bar-coding of animals relies on differences between species in a relatively short segment of mitochondrial DNA.
Link | FISH-BOL Website - via Underwater Times
World’s Oldest Tree: 10,000-Year-Old Spruce in Sweden
Professor Leif Kullmann of Umeaa University, Sweden, and colleagues have discovered the world’s oldest living tree: a 10,000 year-old spruce in central Sweden:
Researchers had discovered a spruce with genetic material dating back 9,550 years in the Fulu mountain in Dalarna, according to Leif Kullmann, a professor of Physical Geography at the university in northwestern Sweden.
That would mean it had taken root in roughly the year 7,542 BC.
"It was a big surprise because we thought until (now) that this kind of spruce grew much later in those regions," he said.
Scientists had previously believed the world’s oldest trees were 4,000 to 5,000 year-old pine trees found in North America.
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World
Fish Are a Noisy Bunch
Most people aren’t aware of this, but the ocean is actually a noisy place, because its inhabitants are a noisy bunch:
For most fish, the sonic mechanism is a muscle that vibrates a swim bladder not unlike our vocal cord. The bladder is a gas-filled sac used for buoyancy, but it can also be used as a sort of drum. The Gulf toadfish contracts its sonic muscle against its swim bladder thousands of times a minute to generate a loud drone. At nearly three times the average wingbeat of a hummingbird, toadfish have the fastest known muscle of any vertebrate. Cusk eel rattle bones against their bladder, but clownfish have a sonic ligament they use to “chirp.”
Link | Listen to the fishies (don’t miss the wonderful humming of the toad fish!)
Neanderthal Talk
Scientists have recreated what they believe to be the voice of Neanderthals.
Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human’s speech lacked the “quantal vowel” sounds that underlie modern speech.
Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.
“They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn’t have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language,” he says.
New Scientist has very short audio clips contrasting the Neanderthal and modern human speech. Link -via Yahoo News
(image credit: Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich)
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this +digg +del.icio.us +reddit +SUHouston, We No Longer Have a Problem
38 years ago today, April 17th, 1970 the capsule from the Apollo 13 mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, and the whole world breathed a sigh of relief.
Apollo 13 launched from Cape Canaveral on April 11, intended to be the third manned lunar landing. The crew — James A. Lovell Jr., John L. Swigert Jr. and Fred W. Haise Jr. — experienced a slight vibration shortly after launch, but things were going normally until 55 hours, 55 minutes into the flight.
Oxygen tank No. 2 exploded, causing No. 1 to fail and start leaking rapidly. Warning lights started blinking. The astronaut’s supplies of air, water, light and electricity were imperiled … 200,000 miles from Earth.
They didn’t land on the moon as planned, but just making it home alive was an amazing accomplishment. The film Apollo 13 (based on astronaut James Lovell’s book Lost Moon) recounted the story of their close call and McGyver-like operations. Wired has more details. Link
Baby Fire Ants Play Dead When Attacked
Opossums aren’t the only animals that play dead - turns out that fire ants do it too:
When threatened by danger, the young insects will play dead to fake out an attacker.
"No one has ever reported this before, and it was a big shock to me," said Deby Cassill, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. "Ants from an attacking colony will come up to inspect them, and they’ll be curled up just like a dead ant. Then moments later they uncurl and walk away."
Cassill and her students also noticed that as the ants age — some live six months to a year — they grow out of the curious behavior. Middle-aged ants tend to flee, while the eldest are aggressive and attack furiously.
"All worker ants are sterile females, so it’s the cranky old ladies who are the ones fighting to the death," Cassill said.
We all should know better than messing with cranky old ladies: Link (photo: Scott Bauer)
Oldest Living Tree
A Norway spruce growing in Sweden has a root system that has been growing for 9,550 years! The tree is only about 13 feet tall, but the trunk is not the first first one grown from the roots. Leif Kullman, professor at Umeå University led the team that discovered the tree’s age.
The spruce’s stems or trunks have a lifespan of around 600 years, “but as soon as a stem dies, a new one emerges from the same root stock,” Kullman explained. “So the tree has a very long life expectancy.”
The age of the root system was determined by radiocarbon dating.
Trees much older than 9,550 years would be impossible in Sweden, because ice sheets covered the country until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 years ago, Kullman noted.
Quote: Evan Esar on Statistics
"Definition of statistics: the science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures."
- Evan Esar, American humorist
Hackers Protest Biometric Data Use by Publishing German Government Official’s Fingerprint!
To protest the use of biometric data, a hacker club in Germany called the Chaos Computer Club has published the fingerprint of German Home Secretary Wolfgang Schäuble.
There’s more:
The hackers go even further than reproducing Schäuble’s fingerprint; the magazine also includes a thin film that can be taped over your finger to deceive fingerprint readers with Schäuble’s fingerprint. "We recommend that you use the film whenever you’re fingerprint is taken, such as when you enter the US, stop over at Heathrow , or even when you touch bottles at your local super market — just to be on the safe side," Engling says.
The CCC says that the fingerprint it published is genuine. It says it got the fingerprint from a sympathizer who took it from a glass the Home Secretary had been drinking from during a podium discussion. The hackers then saved the fingerprint and created the dummy fingerprints from it in a meticulous process that took all night. A total of 4000 copies of the magazine were printed, more than 2000 of which are currently being sent to members of the CCC.
Link - Thanks tim!
Russians to Send Monkeys to Mars
Remember Laika the dogmonaut .. er, Russian space dog? Well, if the Russians have their way, more animals are on their way to outer space. Here’s their plan of sending monkeys to Mars:
They won’t utter Yuri Gagarin’s famous phrase "Let’s go!" But the monkeys of Sochi have already proven their worth as trailblazers in space - and now they are being groomed for a trip to Mars.
The macaques will be the first to experience the radiation that poses a big risk to astronauts - or Russian cosmonauts - on any flight to the Red Planet.
Dudes Sue the Large Hadron Collider to Stop Total World Annihilation
We posted about the dangers of the Large Hadron Collider before (how dangerous? Like opening a tiny blackhole on Earth).
Now, some guys are suing CERN to stop the project:
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.
Link - Thanks Xander!
Scientists Took CT Scans of a Baby Mammoth
Russian scientists have taken a CT Scan of Lyuba, a 4-month-old baby mammoth found frozen in a Siberian riverbank:
The mammoth is named after the wife of the hunter who found her last year. The body was shipped back to Russia in February from Japan, where it was studied using computer tomography in a process similar to one doctors use to scan patients.
"We could see for the first time how internal organs are located inside a mammoth. It is pretty important from a scientific point of view," said Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute, who has been leading the project.
"Her internal organs were well preserved — the heart was seen distinctly with all its ventricles and atria, as well as the liver and its veins," Tikhonov told Reuters.
"This is the best preserved specimen not only of the mammoth but of any prehistoric animal."
Link - via Scribal Terror. Photo (Daniel Fisher / University of Michigan)
Previously on Neatorama: Frozen Baby Mammoth
