Photo: Popular Mechanics

The magazine Popular Mechanics has issued its Backyard Geniuses Award. It's like a Nobel Prize, but for people who complete amazing technical projects of questionable utility. Pictured above is a giant car-crushing mechanical hand by Christian Ristow, a former employee of Jim Henson's Creature Shop:

In 2007 Christian Ristow, an artist and former animatronics designer for the movie industry, demonstrated his first working incarnation of the Hand of Man at a robotics festival in Amsterdam. Much of his time since then has been spent re-engineering and refining the design of the 27-foot-long hydraulically actuated appendage, exhibiting more and more capable crushers at a series of public venues­. Ristow’s latest mechanical steel limb has 90-degree wrist rotation and improved mobility in the finger joints. It is powered by a 90-hp Perkins 1104C-44T four-cylinder diesel engine and is controlled through a glove worn by the operator. At demonstrations, that operator is usually a random member of the audience. “I’ve built other large-scale radio-control robots for shows over the years, but I always felt like I was the one having the most fun,” Ristow says. “This democratizes the crushing power.”

http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/workshop/4329771.html?nav=RSS20&src=syn&dom=yah_buzz&mag=pop

(Video Link)

Muzorama is a surrealist short film created by students at the animation studio Superinfocom and presented last month at the Siggraph 2009 computer animation festival. The six students involved, Laurent Monneron, Elsa Brehin, Raphaël Calamote, Mauro Carraro, Maxime Cazaux, Emilien Davaux and Axel Tillement were assigned to create an animated short based upon the universe of an artist within six weeks. They selected the French illustrator Muzo.

Via The Presurfer

Matthew Moore of The Daily Telegraph has a list of fifty technological or cultural features being eroded or eliminated by the Internet. Here are a few samples. What would you add to the list?

1) The art of polite disagreement
While the inane spats of YouTube commencers may not be representative, the internet has certainly sharpened the tone of debate. The most raucous sections of the blogworld seem incapable of accepting sincerely held differences of opinion; all opponents must have "agendas"....

3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There's no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will "album albums" like Radiohead's Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?...

22) Enforceable copyright
The record companies, film studios and news agencies are fighting back, but can the floodgates ever be closed?...

Link via Urlesque

Image via flickr user William Hook used under creative commons license.

The U.S. Department of Transportation granted $100,000 to the Idaho-based startup Solar Roadways to build a prototype roadway composed of solar cells and glass. The accumulated energy could, hypothetically, be used to light the roadway and provide electricity to consumers:

The 12- x 12-foot panels, which each cost $6,900, are designed to be embedded into roads. When shined upon, each panel generates an estimated 7.6 kilowatt hours of power each day. If this electricity could be pumped into the grid, the company predicts that a four-lane, one-mile stretch of road with panels could generate enough power for 500 homes. Although it would be expensive, covering the entire US interstate highway system with the panels could theoretically fulfill the country's total energy needs. The company estimates that this would take 5 billion panels, but could "produce three times more power than we've ever used as a nation - almost enough to power the entire world."

The Solar Road Panels also contain embedded LED lights that "paint" the road lines from beneath to provide safer nighttime driving. The LEDs could also be programmed to alert drivers of detours or road construction ahead, and can even sense wildlife on the road and warn drivers to slow down. The roads could also contain embedded heating elements in the surface to prevent snow and ice from building up on the road. Further, in the future, fully electric vehicles could recharge along the roadway and in parking lots, making electric cars practical for long trips.

Link via DVICE

Image: Solar Roadways

Photo: China Daily

Tao Xiangli, a Chinese inventor, is reported to have built a functional submarine:

Amateur inventor Tao, 34, made a fully functional submarine, which has a periscope, depth control tanks, electric motors, manometer, and two propellers, from old oil barrels and tools which he bought at a second-hand market. He took 2 years to invent and test the submarine which costs 30,000 yuan (US$4,385).

This comes a month after a Chinese farmer was reported to have built a helicopter from spare parts.

Link via Gizmodo

The world's largest bottle of whiskey was unveiled yesterday in Britain:

Dru McPherson and Mike Drury made the monster malt to put the village of Tomintoul, Banffshire, on the map.

The giant 1½metre bottle holds 105.3 litres of 14-year-old Tomintoul single malt.

A German glassmaker created the 7mm thick pyrex bottle, and a massive cork was specially made to fit.

Image via flickr user Kyle May used under creative commons license. Because of very strict copyright restrictions at The Sun, I can't show the picture of the bottle itself. But it's at the link, and it's huge.

Link via J-Walk Blog

Photo: TUM Institute of Metal Forming and Casting

Josef Mair and fellow engineers at the Technical University of Munich, Germany were inspired by the hook and loop concept of velcro to create a metal version:

Conventional hook-and-loop fasteners are used for everything from bandages to cable boots in aircraft and securing prosthetic limbs. Mair thinks his spring-steel fastener is tough enough to be used for building facades or car assembly. "A car parked in direct sunlight can reach temperatures of 80 °C, and temperatures of several hundred °C can arise around the exhaust manifold," he says, but Metaklett should be able to shrug off such extremes.

The fastening is made from perforated steel strips 0.2 millimetres thick, one kind bristling with springy steel brushes and the other sporting jagged spikes.

Link via Gizmodo

Scientists have long speculated about the existence of magnetic materials that have only one pole, instead of both negative and postive poles. Even our resident mad scientist has written about the subject. But now, Claudio Castelnovo of the University of Oxford thinks that his team has found evidence of the existence of these monopoles in certain rare-materials known as "spin ices":

At low temperatures, there is still some magnetic wiggle room in the spin ice's lattice structure, but not a lot—the magnetic freedom of the system is frustrated, so to speak. "As a result, this is a substance that has degrees of freedom that look the same, microscopically, as you would see in a fridge magnet," Castelnovo says. "But a fridge magnet is able to order so as to act as a fridge magnet and stick to metals, while this one is not able to achieve this level of ordering in spite of having this magnetic structure inside, because of this frustration."

Internally, the tiny magnetic components arrange themselves head to tail in strings, like chains of bar magnets stretching across a table in different directions. In a very cold, clean sample, those strings form closed loops. But excitation induced by a rise in temperature can introduce tiny defects in these chains, Castelnovo says—in the bar-magnet analogue, one of the magnets is flipped, breaking the head-to-tail continuity. "You have your path that is north–south–north–south, and at a certain point one of the needles actually twists 180 degrees and points the wrong way," he explains.

On either side of that defect, all of a sudden, is a concentration of magnetic charge—two norths at one end, two souths at the other. Those concentrations can float free along the string, acting as—voilà—magnetic monopoles.

Link

Image by flickr user Stinging Eyes used under creative commons license

(YouTube Link)

This music video for the song "Here Come the Guns" by Choo Choo La Rouge features a series of moving flipbooks. It was put together by animator Greg Condon. From an interview with the artist:

CF: Why did you choose flip bookery as your medium?

GC: I used to make flip books on post it notes all the time as a kid and have always wanted to do something where the action spills from one flip book to another. The rhythm of this song seemed to time out perfect with flipping through a post it note pad, so it felt like a good match!

Via Urlesque

(YouTube Link)

Kung Fu artist Zhang Tingting of Kaifeng, China, decided to become a Buddhist nun. This required shaving her head. To mark the end of her secular life, she decided to pull a car with her hair:

The 52-year-old artist has performed across China for decades, after taking up martial arts when she was 17. She began living the life of a nun two years ago.

Before bidding her meter-long braid farewell, she pulled six passenger cars some 50 meters (164 ft) through a Beijing suburb, then repeated the feat with ten cars, for about 30 meters, in her hometown of Kaifeng, Henan Province.

Although Zhang and her plait are now permanently separated, the hair has been preserved. Authorities are considering sending it on a pilgrimage to sacred Buddhist sites in Tibet, or displaying it in a local museum.

Link via The Corner

Image: Worth 1000 user Sylver

Charlie Jane Anders of the science fiction blog io9 has assembled a gallery of some of the best photoshop pieces that blend Star Wars and Western religious art. Among Anders' sources are the photoshop contests of Worth 1000 and Something Awful. The image above is derivative of Leonardo da Vinci's Litta Madonna.

Link

(YouTube Link)

Gil Weinberg and Scott Driscoll of Georgia Tech developed a robot that can improvise rhythms as it hears music:

Haile is a robotic percussionist that can listen to live players, analyze their music in real-time, and use the product of this analysis to play back in an improvisational manner. It is designed to combine the benefits of computational power and algorithmic music with the richness, visual interactivity, and expression of acoustic playing. We believe that when collaborating with live players, Haile can facilitate a musical experience that is not possible by any other means, inspiring players to interact with it in novel expressive manners, which leads to novel musical outcome.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~gilwein/Haile.htm via The Presurfer

Psychological researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands conducted a study which supports the popular impression that men lose their minds in the presence of attractive women:

The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive...

Women, however, were not affected by chatting to a handsome man.

This may be simply because men are programmed by evolution to think more about mating opportunities.

Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never met before, that he could not remember his address when she asked him where he lived.

Researchers said it was as if he was so keen to make an impression he 'temporarily absorbed most of his cognitive resources.'

Link via The Presurfer (Photo: Getty)

That's the question that Jeremy Hsu asks, given innovations in genetic engineering:

In 2006, researchers found six Pakistani children who felt no pain due to an inactivated gene, and who constantly had bruises and cuts. One fell into the habit of putting knives through his hand and walking barefoot on coals, before his untimely death.

Still, scientists already know that humans can intellectually dissociate the sensation of pain from how much it bothers them. Lab experiments with mice have also suggested a way to disconnect that pain sensation without totally leaving animals vulnerable to a world of hurt.

Due the concern among some meat-eaters that the animals that provide their food suffer physical pain while being raised and slaughtered, Hsu wonders if geneticists may be able to create animals that cannot feel pain. Would it be ethical to do so? What do you think?

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/ethical-debate-pain-free-beef

Image: Mitch Romanowski Design

Image: Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph has an image gallery of twenty websites when they were first published. It includes Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Craiglist. The image above is of the White House's website when it was launched in 1994.

Link via Urlesque