Sandeep Ravindran writes in Popular Science that a Swiss violin maker treated a new violin with a unique fungus. The result was that the new violin beat a Stradivarius in a listening test:

A jury of experts, as well as the conference attendees, judged the tone quality of the violins, and the ultimate winner was "Opus 58" -- one of the fungus-infected violins. 90 of the 180 attendees voted for it, with the Stradivarius coming in second with 39 votes. 113 members guessed that "Opus 58" was actually the Strad.

The wood in "Opus 58" was treated with a fungus for the longest time: 9 months. Fungal infections are generally thought to damage wood, but results published by Francis Schwarze last year suggested that some types of soft rot fungi reduced the density of the wood, making it lighter and improving its tonal quality, without impairing its firmness. Fungi may thus help artificially replicate the unusually low density of wood that is thought to have occurred in Stradivarius' time. The "Little Ice Age" that occurred at this time brought about long winters and cool summers in Central Europe, causing trees to grow slowly and uniformly and creating wood with great tonal qualities.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/fungus-infected-violin-beats-stradivarius-listening-test

Image: U.S. Department of the Interior

Michael Tennesen writes in Scientific American that biologists suspect that robins, baby chicks, rhesus monkeys, and parrots may have the ability to count. Although they may not have fixed numerals, they have have concepts of relative quantities:

Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University has conducted similar experiments with rhesus monkeys, getting them to match the number of sounds they hear to the number of shapes they see, proving they can do math across different senses. She also tested the monkeys’ ability to do subtraction by covering a number of objects and then removing some of them. In all cases, the monkeys picked the correct remainder at a rate greater than chance. And although they might not grasp the deeper concept of zero as a number, the monkeys knew it was less than two or one, conclude Brannon and her colleagues in the May Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Although Brannon feels that animals do not have a linguistic sense of numbers—they aren’t counting “one, two, three” in their heads—they can do a rough sort of math by summing sets of objects without actually using numbers, and she believes that ability is innate. Brannon thinks that it might have evolved from the need for territorial animals “to access the different sizes of competing groups and for foraging animals to determine whether it is good to stay in one area given the amount of food retrieved versus the amount of time invested.”

Link

Image: U.S. Department of the Interior

The Bloodbot is a robot that drains you of your blood, thus replacing nursing assistants who previously did that task. It's a project by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, UK. It's been around for years now, but as people are waking up the a potential Robopocalypse, the Bloodbot only recently been getting attention in the blogosphere:

The Bloodbot has three powered (linear motion) axes and one unpowered (rotational) axis. All the motors are inexpensive stepper types.

The first axis moves a carriage up and down, so that it goes towards and away from the arm that is strapped in under it. This carriage is used to hold either a blunt probe (for finding a vein) or a syringe and needle. A piezo-resistive force sensor is mounted on the carriage to measure the force on the probe or needle.

The second axis moves the carriage across the width of the arm. This enables the probe to press in a series of places along the width of the arm.

The third axis, which is unpowered, enables a human operator to tilt the robot. This is so that, once a vein has been found, the needle can be inserted into the arm at the correct angle.

The fourth axis moves the whole robot along the length of the arm. This was designed to compensate for the slight difference between where the probe has identified a vein, and where the needle enters the skin, once the robot has been tilted.

Don't worry about safety -- it's accurate 78% of the time.

Link via DVICE

Image: Imperial College

Image: Artist's conception of LRLL 31 system, courtesty of NASA/JPL-CatlTech

NASA's Spitzer Telescope spent five months observing LRLL 31, a young star with a ring of materials orbiting it. Astronomers believe that it is in an early stage of planetary formation and that a sizeable lump in the ring system may be a protoplanet:

One theory of planet formation suggests that planets start out as dusty grains swirling around a star in a disk. They slowly bulk up in size, collecting more and more mass like sticky snow. As the planets get bigger and bigger, they carve out gaps in the dust, until a so-called transitional disk takes shape with a large doughnut-like hole at its center. Over time, this disk fades and a new type of disk emerges, made up of debris from collisions between planets, asteroids and comets. Ultimately, a more settled, mature solar system like our own forms.[...]

Muzerolle and his team say that a companion to the star, circling in a gap in the system's disk, could explain the data. "A companion in the gap of an almost edge-on disk would periodically change the height of the inner disk rim as it circles around the star: a higher rim would emit more light at shorter wavelengths because it is larger and hot, but at the same time, the high rim would shadow the cool material of the outer disk, causing a decrease in the longer-wavelength light. A low rim would do the opposite. This is exactly what we observe in our data," said Elise Furlan, a co-author from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Link via io9

(YouTube Link)

Tina Law writes in New Zealand's Stuff magazine about one man who wanted to own a den that looked the interior of a submarine. Wayne Eyre of Spencerville, NZ hired special effects artist Dean Johnstone to design it. These were the results:

Customwood has been sprayed with concrete and painted to resemble rusting steel beams, while plastic sheets have been melted to give the impression of bent steel ripped apart when the submarine hit an island. Speakers emit sonar and ocean sounds throughout the 12-metre by 5.5m room.

At one end of the room, a bar has been created from materials likely to be found on a deserted island. Shelves have been made out of halved tree trunks, while there is a washed-up surfboard.

The bar top is engraved with the random writings of a shipwrecked soul, while vines work their way through the submarine and smoke seeps out of interior walls.

Link via Gizmodo

(YouTube Link)

Dan Ros rigged his Big Mouth Billy Bass so that it quotes Homer Simpson, Bill Clinton, and characters from Monty Python's The Holy Grail:

The star of the show is the mbed chipset, and in fact that’s Dan Ros’ real motivation. Priced at $60 (for a limited, introductory period; normal price $100), the mbed has an ARM Cortex M3 core, ethernet, USB, serial and other connections, and drag-and-drop loading of binary instruction files. It’s intended for rapid prototyping, as you can see in the second video below, and has just gone on sale today.

He also arranged for the fish to speak whatever is tweeted to him:

The Twittering Billy hack replaces his existing brain with an mbed Microcontroller, wiring it up to his motors so we have control of his movements, an SD card so he can store lots of audio files, and the mbed's Ethernet interface to the internet. What might be surprising is that Billy is not connected to a PC; everything is being done by the mbed Microcontroller and a connection to the internet!

Link via Gizmodo

Image: Dan Ros

An Indonesia woman named Ani gave birth to 19.2-lb baby yesterday in Medan, North Sumatra. The boy, Muhammad Akbar Risuddin, is among the heaviest babies ever delivered who survived:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was delivered by Caesarean section.

Britain's heaviest newborn was delivered in Cumbria in 1992 weighing 15lb 8oz.

The heaviest baby ever born was produced by Anna Bates of Canada in 1879, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It weighed 23.12lb and died 11 hours after birth.

The record for a baby which survived, according to the Guinness record keepers, is held by a boy born weighing 22lb 8oz at Aversa, Italy in 1955.

More recently Francisca do Santos gave birth to a son weighing 16lb 11oz by Caesarean section in Brazil.

Link via Yahoo! Buzz

Image: AFP/Getty Images

(YouTube Link)

The Colombian Pop artist Bon Yurt created an enormous portrait of Marilyn Monroe using paintball equipment. It's modeled after Andy Warhol's depiction of the actress. The final seconds of the above video show a time elapsed version of its creation.

Artist's Website via Geekologie

UPDATE: Apparently 'Bon Yurt' is actually a yogurt brand marketed in Colombia. So I'm not really sure who is responsible for this thing. Maybe it's an attempt at viral marketing. Thanks, Spanish-speaking commentors.

Photo: Skylar

Wicked Evolution, Jr. is a 750-lb miniature van that can stand upright, partially transform into a vaguely beast-like creature, roar, and breathe fire. It was made by a fellow named Skylar, and is among his many custom-built vehicles:

The entire creation was scratch built in the basement of my house without any special fabrication tools. I just used a cutter, grinder, mig welder and a homemade metal bender. Some parts can be easily found like riding mover rims, garage door springs and big casters you can get in a hardware store. You may need to look harder to find the rest like like special order quad tires, heavy duty electric motors, radio control unit, stainless steel sheet metal, linear actuators and special solenoids (from ebay) and light duty hydraulics. Some steel came from a scrap pile in a junkyard to save money.[...]

It uses 3 sets of linear actuators and hydraulics to transform. First, extensions move from the bottom to push it up while an extension on the back with 2 heavy duty casters catch it as it comes backwards. It uses those back casters to steady it standing. When it first starts to stand, it breaks in half at the back of the doors and folds 90 degrees as the front of the van pulls backwards with hydraulics. The windshield lowers out of view and the front suspension bends in the center also with hydraulics. As it comes to a standing mechanical monster, the middle lifting mechanism tucks upwards, the doors open like wings. The convertible roof opens like a tail. Then the headlights come on and the front grill becomes a face that shoots sparks and flames (from a full size propane tank)

Link via Gizmodo (where there's a video)

Donald G. McNeil, Jr. writes in The New York Times that a new vaccine tested on 16,000 Thai volunteers demonstrated improved resistance to the virus that causes AIDS. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it's a significant discovery. McNeil writes:

Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the army’s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos. They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did.

Although the difference was small, Dr. Kim said it was statistically significant and meant the vaccine was 31.2 percent effective.

Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added, “If you have a product that’s even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there.”

Before you get your hopes up, keep in mind this warning from Zach Weiner about science journalism. We still have a long way to go.

Link via Popular Science

Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Priya Ganapati writes in Wired that researchers at MIT are developing an eye implant that can feed visual imput past damaged cells and directly into the brain. Patients will wear a camera that downloads images into the implant:

It won’t entirely restore normal vision, say the researchers, but it will offer just enough sight to help a blind person navigate a room.[...]

Here’s how the implant works. The glasses that patients wear contains a coil that can wirelessly transmit power to receiving coils surrounding the eyeball. The eyeball holds a microchip encased in a sealed titanium case to avoid damage from water seepage. The chip receives visual information and activates electrodes that in turn fire the nerve cells that carry visual input to the brain.

Link via DVICE

Image: flickr user Orange Acid, used under Creative Commons license.

(YouTube Link)

This video is in Japanese (?) so I can't offer any information about it. But it's clearly about a man who has cut and styled his hair to resemble a front-brimmed hat. Perhaps some Japanese-speaking Neatoramanaut could translate for us.

Via Boing Boing

Photo: Jon Sarriugarte

Jon Sarriugarte, a metal sculptor, and Kyrsten Mate Comoglio, an Oscar-nominated sound effects designer, have been previously featured on Neatorama for their fanciful snail car built out of an old Volkswagen Beetle. Their newest work is the Electrobite. It's a vehicle inspired by the trilobite -- a creature that went extinct 245 million years ago. It debuted at the most recent Burning Man festival:

The hand-tooled exoskeleton is mounted on the drive mechanism of an old electric wheelchair. At night, undermounted blue lights give it an otherworldly glow. Jon says, "People would walk up and ask if it was remote controlled. When I pointed out the leather seat and the joy stick they couldn’t believe you could drive it. Lots of smiling faces when we let them try it out."

Link via Boing Boing

(YouTube Link)

90-year old Lonnie Holloway, of Saluda, South Carolina chose to be buried inside his old Pontiac Catalina. He was entombed with his collection of guns in the passenger seat and next to his wife (who was not in the car). Jerry Garnett writes in The New York Times:

“He said, ‘They’re going to have me with my hat on, driving down the road,’ and I said I’m going to be there. That’s what he wanted. I know that sounds crazy,” Malcom Jones, a friend of Mr. Holloway, told WLTX.com.

Hundreds of onlookers turned out for the service this week at Rock Hill Baptist Church.

“This is what Mr. Holloway wanted,” said the pastor who conducted the graveside service. The attendees responded, “Amen.”

Link via Bits & Pieces

Dmitri Williams of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, et al., conducted a census of video game characters and concluded that non-Whites and women were vastly underrepresented:

Seasoned gamers were recruited to play each game for 30 minutes. The researchers analysed video of the sessions and recorded the demographics of each character that appeared on screen, no matter how briefly. They then weighted the results in proportion to each game's sales. For example, characters in a game selling 2 million copies counted for twice as many character stereotype impressions as those in a game selling 1 million.[...]

Williams and his team found that male characters are "vastly more likely to appear" in games than females. They made up 85 per cent of characters, compared to 51 per cent of the real population.

Compared to the real population, African Americans were under-represented by 13 per cent and Hispanic/Latino people by 78 per cent. Asians were over-represented by 25 per cent and white people by 7 per cent.

The researchers also noted that video games originating in Asia demonstrated a similar disparity.

Link via Popular Science

Image: flickr user Gamer Score Blog used under Creative Commons License.