Surrounded by crinolines and corset dresses sculpted out of wickerwork (think bread basket) and stuffed with round and shapely loaves, the French designer emphasized the finesse it had taken to create the show at the Cartier Foundation for contemporary art (until Oct. 10). The exhibition includes a sculpted dress with two brioches to create Gaultier's famous pointed-bosom gown for Madonna and a Kelly bag, lovingly shaped and baked, to celebrate his current role as designer for Hermès. Add umbrellas, hats and the signature matelot stripes re-created with inky dye.
The little two-wheeled robot can roam through the blaze spraying water from a fire hose and looking for trapped people. Its onboard light and camera helps firefighters pin-point people before they enter the building themselves. The robot also gives them enough information to decide on the safe routes, and quickly develop a rescue plan.
The Firefighters Assistance Robot is a small device resembling a miniature tank and measuring just 12.5 cm in diameter and weighing 2 kg. It can travel at 1 foot per second and withstand a fall of over six feet. It can also survive temperatures as high as 160 C (320 F). The operating time of the robot inside a burning structure is up to 30 minutes.
The horse isn’t pulling the four-and-a-half-ton, $427,000 vehicle. Rather, the vehicle keeps pace with the animal, and trainers fit the horse with equipment such as an electrocardiogram machine, oxygen masks and movement sensors to monitor its performance. They can then subtly regulate the horse’s speed for optimal training.
Granted to American inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver three years after it was filed, patent number 2,612,994 was for a pattern of concentric circles, rather than the set of straight lines used today.
Their research began in 1948 after Mr Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard a local food chain boss asking one of the institute's deans to design a system for reading product data automatically.
Mr Silver and Mr Woodland, a fellow graduate student and teacher at Drexel, first tried using patterns of ink that glowed under ultraviolet light, but it proved too expensive and unreliable.
Mr Woodland then came up with the linear bar code, and later replaced the lines with circles so that they could be scanned from any angle. The pair patented their “bull’s eye” design the next year.
The gun is based on a smaller device Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 metres long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometres per second.
Now Hunter and two other ex-LLNL scientists have set up a company called Quicklaunch, based in San Diego, California, to create a more powerful version of the gun.
At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described a design for a 1.1-kilometre-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometres per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit.
I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.
The vaccine itself does not destroy cocaine molecules, rather it induces antibodies that bind to it, making the opiate lose its ability to pass through the blood–brain barrier—and thus unable to trigger a high.
To test the vaccine's effectiveness in humans, researchers (with some help and financial backing from Celtic Pharma) enlisted 94 subjects who had enrolled in a methadone treatment program for opiate addiction—and who also regularly used cocaine—for a placebo-controlled, double-blind study. (They decided on this group because methadone programs historically have better retention rates than programs for cocaine abuse only.) One group received a placebo, another a low dosage of vaccine, whereas a third was administered a high dosage over a series of 12 weeks with five total injections.
More than half of the subjects in the high-dosage group (53 percent) appeared to have laid off the cocaine for more than half of the trial period, the researchers report after tracking traces of the drug in urine samples collected three times a week. Just less than a quarter of subjects with the low dosage had the same track record, according to the results published online yesterday in the Archives of General Psychiatry. A drop in cocaine usage across all groups may also be attributed to a curb in opiate drug consumption from the methadone treatment.
"This is the first time we have a model of an entire sunspot," says lead author Matthias Rempel, a scientist at NCAR's High Altitude Observatory. "If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth's atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve. Our simulations will advance research into the inner workings of the Sun as well as connections between solar output and Earth's atmosphere."[...]
The new computer models capture pairs of sunspots with opposite polarity. In striking detail, they reveal the dark central region, or umbra, with brighter umbral dots, as well as webs of elongated narrow filaments with flows of mass streaming away from the spots in the outer penumbral regions. They also capture the convective flow and movement of energy that underlie the sunspots, and that are not directly detectable by instruments.
The models suggest that the magnetic fields within sunspots need to be inclined in certain directions in order to create such complex structures. The authors conclude that there is a unified physical explanation for the structure of sunspots in umbra and penumbra that is the consequence of convection in a magnetic field with varying properties.
Four decades on, the image of John Cleese’s increasingly hysterical pet-shop customer — pacamac buttoned up, hair plastered down, vowels strangulated — remains one of the most memorable in television history. No other comedy series has seared itself into the national consciousness quite like Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
And, if the sketches were ever to be placed in order of popularity, Cleese’s confrontation with the chirpily evasive Michael Palin — the shopkeeper who simply will not admit that the inert “Norwegian blue” is dead — would undoubtedly come top. Indeed, when Channel 4 counted down the 50 greatest comedy moments, the “Dead Parrot” sketch perched at number two, just below the, frankly, far inferior “Lou and Andy at the swimming pool” sketch from Little Britain.
