The work involves a black Hummer H2 (which the artist says gets about 9 miles to the gallon and came tricked out with DVD players in the headsets) partly dismantled and refashioned in the style of a horse-drawn carriage. Dean says the project is inspired by the “Hoover Carts” that cropped up in some rural parts of the U.S. during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, some owners who couldn’t afford to gas up their vehicles, cut them in half and hitched them to horses or mules and used them as carriages to save on fuel.[...]
The Hummer represents all that is wrong with consumer culture, says Dean. He says he sees parallels between the Hummer and the GM vehicles that came out during the 1920s, which were widely bought using some of the earliest versions of consumer credit, then became unaffordable when the Depression hit.
Human raiment is not typically preserved in the fossil record, so researchers have turned to lice genetics for hints. Body lice diverged genetically from other louse species about 100,000 years ago. Because body lice live primarily in our clothing, scientists use that moment of differentiation as the likely era when humans started dressing themselves.
It's possible, however, that humans started wearing clothes even earlier. We know that pubic lice jumped over to humans from gorillas—our genetically distinct head lice migrated from chimpanzees—about 2 million years ago. And since pubic and head lice probably couldn't have coexisted on the same body if there was a hairy highway connecting their favorite anatomical spaces (one would have beaten out the other for all the available resources), it's likely that we had lost our body hair by then. Some claim that humans donned clothing shortly after that, but others argue that there's no reason our ancestors would have needed clothing in steamy Africa.
By using a computer-controlled magnetic field, the researchers turned the bacteria into fully-compliant biological nanorobots.
The trick was using a type of microbe known as magnetotactic bacteria. These critters have little internal compasses, and will follow the pull of a magnetic field. By manipulating a magnetic field, the researchers tricked the bacteria into forming a giant, computer-controlled swarm. In one experiment, the researchers had the bacterial swarm assemble a small pyramid.
Police arrested 27-year-old Albert Bailey and an unidentified 16-year-old boy on robbery charges on Tuesday afternoon.
Sgt James Perez said the two Bridgeport residents turned up at the bank about 10 minutes after making the call and were met by police in the bank's car park.
Sgt Perez told the Connecticut Post that, in his opinion, the suspects were "not too bright".
Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem.[...]
Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.
The virus has increased fourfold in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside, the areas of Britain where Facebook is most popular, because it has given people a new way to meet multiple partners for casual sexual encounters.
Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside, said staff had found a link between social networking sites and the rise in cases, especially among young women.
The robot detects changes in its surroundings, decides if they are relevant, and then takes pictures with its on board camera. It can query nearby people for information, and it uses internet searches to further round out its understanding. If something appears newsworthy, the robot will even write a short article and publish it to the web.
'The flames are pretty big and up to 15ft long so you could definitely set fire to someone's car if you wanted to.'
'The only problem is it can get rather hot if you are riding the moped and blast the flames when the wind is in the wrong direction.'[...]
'It was quite tricky to make and the first version wouldn't fire the flames when the moped was moving,' he said.
'My second attempt kept setting fire to itself, but my third version works really well and I'm very pleased with it.'
But sadly Colin, who built the moped in his spare time in his back garden, will not legally be allowed to use it on the road.
It has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili's spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000.
"The chili grenade has been found fit for use after trials in Indian defense laboratories, a fact confirmed by scientists at the Defense Research and Development Organization," Col. R. Kalia, a defense spokesman in the northeastern state of Assam, told The Associated Press.
"This is definitely going to be an effective nontoxic weapon because its pungent smell can choke terrorists and force them out of their hide-outs," R. B. Srivastava, the director of the Life Sciences Department at the New Delhi headquarters of the DRDO said.
