For over a century, space exploration enthusiasts have proposed building an elevator into low earth orbit using a very long cable stretching from the surface of the earth into space. Huge technical (particularly material) obstacles have prevented this dream from becoming a reality. But technology marches on, and some researchers have made progress:

Funded by NASA and the Spaceward Foundation, the yearly contest offers a $2 million first prize to any group whose machine can quickly climb a kilometer-long ribbon tethered to a helicopter, while receiving power remotely from the ground. On Tuesday, LaserMotive became the first team in competition history to qualify for the $900,000 second prize.

The LaserMotive machine consists of a motor that pulls the device up the 2,953-foot-long ribbon, photovoltaic cells that power the motor, and a ground-based laser that provides the light for the cells. LaserMotive set a new record for the competition, and became the first team to ever reach the top of the ribbon. However, they had to settle for the $900,000 second prize, as securing the $2 million first prize requires not only reaching the top of the ribbon, but doing so at an average speed of 11 miles per hour. Sadly, the LaserMotive machine ran slightly slower than that mark.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/space-elevator-competition-pays-out-900000 | Image: NASA

Photo: Jason Taylor

A few years ago, British designer Jason Taylor created a furniture set made to look like bristle brushes. So far, he's made two tables and a trio of stools using this theme.

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/6160/jason-taylor-scrubber-seats.html via Make | Official Website

The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, an example of the spontaneous crowdsourced humor in the Amazon.com comments, has spawned many parodies, including Virginia Woolf, Worf, and Rowlf. Josh Rachford of Urlesque has compiled nine such parodies for your viewing pleasure.

Link | Image: Amazon.com

(YouTube Link)

Walter Beckett, a junior CIA agent, receives a briefcase that controls a nuclear missile. The hand-off goes smoothly, until a pigeon gets trapped inside. Pigeon: Impossible is a six-minute short film by Lucas Martell. It is his first animated film, and it took him almost five years to complete it.

Official Website via The Presurfer

His friends call him "the man with the bionic bottom." Ged Galvin permanently lost control of his colon after a motorcycle accident. But surgeons moved one of his knee muscles to his colon and attached electrodes to it. He can clench or unclench it with a remote control that he carries in his pocket:

“They call me the man with the bionic bottom, but that doesn’t bother me. My gratitude to the surgeons is endless because what they have done is a miracle.”

Mr Galvin, who had previously endured the indignity of carrying a colostomy bag, added: “I thought that in these days of modern medicine surely there was something they could do. They'd mended everything else - why not this? Anything was better than a colostomy bag.

“The operation changed my life and gave me back my pride and confidence. Because of the remote control I can lead a normal life again.”

Link via Geekologie | Image: SWNS

At The Business Insider, Alyson Shontell wrote about her unsuccessful job interview with Google, which has gained a reputation for asking hard and bizarre questions that test a candidate's creativity, priorities, and critical thinking skills. She provided 15 examples from other people who've interviewed with Google:

How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

Why are manhole covers round?

Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.

You have eight balls all of the same size 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

You can read more questions and the preferred answers at the link.

Link via Gizmodo | Image: US Department of State

Photo: Le Creative Sweatshop

Le Creative Sweatshop is a French art studio that produces (among other things) enormous papercraft art installations. The high-heeled shoes pictured above are a part of their effort to "make a paper world." You can view more pictures of the studio's work at the link.

Link via Gizmodo | Video about their work

Images: IMMD

It Made My Day (IMMD) is a blog of reader-submitted anecdotes about the funny experiences that made their day. On the right-side of the page, you can type in your own "moment of win" and vote on other submissions -- sort of like the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.

Link via Urlesque

Amanda Bensen of the Smithsonian blog Food & Think attended a program at that institution on the history of beer. Her post summarizes the long history of the beverage, from prehistoric soggy bread to modern microbrewing.

But while beer’s popularity waned in the Middle East, it was gaining ground in northern Europe. People there somehow figured out brewing (perhaps via another soggy-bread epiphany) by at least 800 B.C., based on beer residues in a Celtic amphora found in modern Bavaria. Dornbusch says the Romans were the first to invent the modern brewing process—involving malting and mashing—based on the ruins of a 179 A.D. brewery discovered in a Roman settlement near what is now Regensburg, Germany.

Link | Image: US National Archives

Why can humans talk and chimpanzees can't? Scientists at UCLA and Emory University suspect that it comes down to a single gene designated FOXP2. There is only a slight variation in this gene between humans and chimps, as Elaine Schmidt writes in UCLA Newsroom:

"Earlier research suggests that the amino-acid composition of human FOXP2 changed rapidly around the same time that language emerged in modern humans," said Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Ours is the first study to examine the effect of these amino-acid substitutions in FOXP2 in human cells[...]

"We found that a significant number of the newly identified targets are expressed differently in human and chimpanzee brains," Geschwind said. "This suggests that FOXP2 drives these genes to behave differently in the two species."

The research demonstrates that mutations believed to be important to FOXP2's evolution in humans change how the gene functions, resulting in different gene targets being switched on or off in human and chimp brains.

Link via io9 | Image: US Department of Energy

(Video Link)

Graffiti artist Tony Quan suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and is unable to move any part of his body other than his eyes. But thanks to an open source computer project called EyeWriter, he can still draw. The technology tracks the movements of his eyes, allows him to select different shapes and colors, and then projects his images onto the sides of buildings. The above video is a selection from a documentary about the project.

Link via Gizmodo

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

Photo: J.B. Spector/Museum of Science and Industry

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

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

(YouTube Link)

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