Paula Sunshine of Lawshall, Suffolk, UK, built an extension onto her 16th Century thatched house with hair. Cattle hair has been used as a traditional building material, but Sunshine is using primarily human and dog hair:

"Traditionally people would use cattle hair from long-haired cattle.

"But we don't get many long-haired cattle around here any more so I use human hair."

She added: "People say it is not thick enough but you just put more in.

"I don't human hair is a lot different.

"It is just the fibre that you need the hair for and human hair does the same thing as cattle hair for plaster.

"It is the fibres that holds the plaster together."

Link via The Corner

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

In a cave in the nation of Georgia, American, Israeli, and Georgian scientists discovered the oldest human-worked fibers ever known. The flax remnants date to about 30,000 years ago:

Flax was growing wild at the time. And it turns out not only to be a source of edible grain, but of fiber. These fibers were twisted — a sure sign that the flax had been spun.

Flax fibers woven together make linen, but in this case, linen doesn't mean crisply pressed summer suits. Bar-Yosef says the fibers they found in the cave were probably braided together, macrame style.

"You can make headgear, you can make baskets, you can make ropes and strings, and so on," he says.

Bar-Yosef didn't find any of those objects in the cave — that's too much to hope for 30,000 years later. But the researchers report in Science magazine that they did find evidence that the fibers were knotted and dyed — black, gray, turquoise and even pink. That's consistent with other artifacts that show an artistic flair among these early people.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112726804&ps=cprs via Scientific American

Photo: Eliso Kvavadze/NPR

In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment which suggested that an unobserved cat under perilious conditions was simultanteously dead and alive. Now scientists at the Max Plank Institute for Quantum Physics in Garching, Germany hope to place a virus into two quantum states as a test of that thought experiment:

The team hope to trap a virus in a vacuum using an electromagnetic field created by a laser. Then, with another laser, the team would slow down the virus's movement until it sits motionless in its lowest possible energy state.

Once the virus is fixed, the team will use a single photon to put the virus into a quantum superposition of two states, where it is either moving or not. Until it is measured, the virus should exist in a superposition of motion and stillness.

The team suggest that tobacco mosaic virus, a rod-shaped plant virus measuring about 50 nanometres wide and almost 1 micrometre long, would be an ideal candidate for the experiment. While there is still debate about whether such viruses can really be classed as alive, the experiment could even be extended to tiny organisms, the scientists say. Microscopic tardigrades, or water-bears, can survive in the vacuum of space for days, and may be suitable for the same sort of Schrödinger treatment.

Link

Image: U.S. Department of Energy

Biochemistry professor Judy Walls of the University of Missouri is working on ways to use sulfate-reducing bacteria to render radioactive metals harmless. This, she hopes, would provide a cheaper alternative to conventional cleanup:

The bacteria Wall is studying are bio-corrosives and can change the solubility of heavy metals. They can take uranium and convert it to uraninite, a nearly insoluble substance that will sink to the bottom of a lake or stream. Wall is looking into the bacteria's water cleansing ability and how long the changed material would remain inert.

Wall's research could also be beneficial to heavy metal pollution from storage tanks and industrial waste. The bacteria are already present in more than 7,000 heavy metal contaminated sites, but they live in a specific range of oxygen and temperature, making them difficult to control.

Link via Popular Science

(Image: Science Daily)

Photo: Resilient Technologies

Pneumatic tires take a lot of abuse in combat, which is why Resilient Technologies is trying to develop an airless tire. Because they can't be punctured, vehicles equipped with such tires can stay mobile after taking damage that would incapacitate others:

The Wisconsin design breakthrough, first developed by Resilient's in-house design and development team, takes a page from nature. "The goal was to reduce the variation in the stiffness of the tire, to make it transmit loads uniformly and become more homogenous," Osswald says. "And the best design, as nature gives it to us, is really the honeycomb."....

The patent-pending Resilient design relies on a precise pattern of six-sided cells that are arranged, like a honeycomb, in a way that best mimics the "ride feel" of pneumatic tires. The honeycomb geometry also does a great job of reducing noise levels and reducing heat generated during usage - two common problems with past applications.

Link via DVICE

Image:Kent Smith, Gizmodo

Gizmodo held a photoshop contest for video game peripherals that will probably never be developed. Above is the...uh, animal husbandry Nintendo Wii controller by Kent Smith, which took 3rd place. There are 42 reader-submitted images at the link.

Link via GearFuse

Or to be more precise, Dr. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling in Scotland says that in a study, Facebook users showed increased working memory, whereas Twitter users showed decreased working memory. She concluded that Facebook has more mentally intensive activities, but Twitter's communications are too brief to require substantial brain activity:

Dr. Alloway has developed a working memory training programme for slow-learning children aged 11 to 14 at a school in Durham, and she found out that Facebook did wonders for working memory, improving the kids’ IQ scores, while YouTube and Twitter’s steady stream of information was not healthy for working memory. Also, playing video games, especially those that involve planning and strategy, can also be beneficial.

Link via The Presurfer

Image: U.S. Department of Energy

Charles Q. Choi of Live Science writes that scientists working for NASA used a superconducting magnet that simulates some of the effects of gravity to lift a mouse into the air. The agency has been working on such technology in the hope of alleviating the bone decay that would affect astronauts in zero-gravity environments for prolonged periods of time:

Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments....

Repeated levitation tests showed the mice, even when not sedated, could quickly acclimate to levitation inside the cage. After three or four hours, the mice acted normally, including eating and drinking. The strong magnetic fields did not seem to have any negative impacts on the mice in the short term, and past studies have shown that rats did not suffer from adverse effects after 10 weeks of strong, non-levitating magnetic fields.

"We're trying to see what kind of physiological impact is due to prolonged microgravity, and also what kind of countermeasures might work against it for astronauts," Liu said. "If we can contribute to the future human exploration of space, that would be very exciting." They are now applying for funding for such research with their levitator.

Link via Popular Science

Image: U.S. Department of Energy

Yesterday, the American Chemical Society's database of identified, unique chemical substances hit the 50 million mark. Most of these discoveries were made quite recently:

“A novel substance is either isolated or synthesized every 2.6 seconds on the average during the past 12 months, day and night, seven days a week in the world,” said Dr. Hideaki Chihara, Ph.D. chemist and former president of Japan Association for International Chemical Information.

The rate new chemicals are being produced and isolated is astounding. It took 33 years to get the first 10 million chemicals registered and a mere nine months to get the last 10 million chemicals into the database. In part, the acceleration is due to better tracking by the American Chemical Society, but laboratories around the world are also just producing (and patenting) a tremendous amount of molecules.

Link

Image by flickr user delta avi delta used under creative commons license.

Eighteen-year-old Milan Karki of Nepal has invented a new type of solar panel that uses human hair as a conductor:

The hair replaces silicon, a pricey component typically used in solar panels, and means the panels can be produced at a low cost for those with no access to power, he explained....

The solar panel, which produces 9 V (18 W) of energy, costs around £23 to make from raw materials.

But if they were mass-produced, Milan says they could be sold for less than half that price, which could make them a quarter of the price of those already on the market.

Melanin, a pigment that gives hair its colour, is light sensitive and also acts as a type of conductor. Because hair is far cheaper than silicon the appliance is less costly.

Link (Photo: Tom Van Cakenberghe/Barcroft Media) - via Gizmodo

(YouTube Link)

Google's Japan division released this stop motion film explaining (in a rather fanciful way) how Street View works. It features a cute little robot puttering around town, taking film photographs and painting over license plate numbers with a marker. The video is part of an effort to make the practice less appear less invasive of individuals' privacy.

Via Boing Boing

The first Nerf product debuted forty years ago today. It began as a humble orange ball created by toy developer Reyn Guyer. His team designed several games that could be played with it and marketed it to Milton Bradley. That company turned him down. So Guyer took his product to Parker Brothers, who bought his idea, threw out the game rules, and began selling the ball as a single product. The company named the product "Nerf" after the packing material that off-roaders used to wrap around their roll-bars.

http://www.reynguyer.com/nerf.htm via GeekDad

Image via flickr user Jake Sutton used under creative commons license.

Yesterday, the residents of Samoa began driving on the left side of the road instead of the right. This is the first major switch since the 1970s, when Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone made the change. Randy James of Time magazine has an article exploring how different nations came to use different sides of the road:

Theories differ, but there's no doubt Napoleon was a major influence. The French have used the right since at least the late 18th century (there's evidence of a Parisian "keep-right" law dating to 1794). Some say that before the French Revolution, aristocrats drove their carriages on the left, forcing the peasantry to the right. Amid the upheaval, fearful aristocrats sought to blend in with the proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations he conquered, including Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Hitler, in turn, ordered right-hand traffic in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s. Nations that escaped right-handed conquest, like Great Britain, preserved their left-handed tradition.

Link via Outside the Beltway

Image by flickr user multitrack used under creative commons license.

(YouTube Link)

The Lucky Dragon is a work by Japanese artist Yanobe Kenji. It is a water and fire-shooting articulated steel dragon head with glowing eyes mounted on a 15-meter long cruise boat. The video above is of the boat in action at Aqua Metropolis festival in Osaka. It's scheduled to make similar demonstrations in Osaka's waterways until October 12.

Artist's Website

Link via DVICE

Image: DNA Art Forms

Lauren Davis of io9 describes four companies that make a portrait of you, right down to the profile of your DNA. Above is a portrait of a woman named Catherine from DNA Art Forms. It all started with a cheek swab:

After identifying 15 unique regions of your genetic code, clients consult with an artist as to how they want their DNA represented, be it as an abstract form, a landscape, or as an actual portrait including your image. Portraits start at $1500, and clients are consulted each step of the way, approving concept sketches before paint ever touches canvas.

Link