Image: Physorg.com

How do you earthquake-proof a building? Apparently it involves allowing the building to shake in a controlled fashion. Clay Dillow explains one new use of this approach:

A research team led by Stanford and the University of Illinois successfully tested a structural system that holds a building together through a magnitude-seven earthquake, and even pulls it back upright on its foundation when the quaking stops. The key: embracing the shaking, by limiting the damage to a few flexible, replaceable areas within the building's frame.

When a quake strikes, the new system dissipates energy through steel frames in the building's core and exterior. These frames are free to rock up and down within fittings fixed at their bases. Steel tendons made from twisted steel cables run the length of each frame, keeping the frames from moving so much that the building could shear. When the quake stops, these tensile tendons pull the frames back down into the "shoes" at their bases, returning the building to its plumb, upright position.

So where does all that energy go? At the base of each frame is a flexible steel "fuse" that takes the brunt of the force, keeping the frame and constituent tendons from shouldering the entire load. The fuses are easily replaceable when they blow -- just like an electrical fuse -- so after a quake, the building can be refitted with fresh fuses for its next bout with Earth's occasional tectonic fits.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/new-earthquake-resistant-design-keeps-buildings-standing-during-violent-quakes

Photo: Snakeliner

Andrew Liszewski of OhGizmo! suspects that the Snakeliner Presidential Suite may be the most extravagant travel trailer on the market. When fully expanded, its 969 square feet of space include a waterbed, central heating, and a whirlpool. That's the base model, priced at $930,000. If you're able and willing to spend more, you can get options like a helicopter landing site and a motorboat in the cellar. Note that it probably can't be hauled by a bicycle.

Link via OhGizmo!

Image: Raygun Studio

Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnologist at the University of Washington, writes that in the future, biotech innovations could lead to display screens inside contact lenses:

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.

Link via CrunchGear

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This video by YouTube user Elman511 shows a chicken egg that contains another chicken egg -- shell and all -- inside. I suspected this was a hoax until I read about the phenomenon of ovum in ovo:

Douglas Russell, speaking about the phenomenon in the New Scientist, said: "As the curator of the British Natural History Museum egg collection, I've come across quite a few examples of egg oddities.

"Double eggs (as opposed to multiple-yolked eggs) are less common than some other zoological anomalies and consequently the ovum in ovo has attracted specific scholarly attention for hundreds of years.

"Several theories have been proposed for the origin of double eggs.

"The most likely suggests that the normal rhythmic muscular action, or peristalsis, that moves a developing egg down the oviduct malfunctions in some way."

Link via Bits & Pieces

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The pop culture blog Urlesque has called for next Wednesday, September 9th, to be a day in which cats are absent from the Internet. Ostensibly, Urlesque seeks to end the meme-driven exploitation of cats, but I suspect that it may find broad support for the movement among those who weary of lolcats, piano-playing cats, and other examples of feline ubiquity on the Internet.

What do you think? Should September 9th be a day without cats on the Internet?

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This CBC news story describes a brain surgery simulator that doctors in Halifax, Canada use for practice before cutting open real patients. It simulates not a generic human brain, but the brain of the specific patient:

First, patient data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is rendered into a 3-D, high-resolution model of an individual's brain. After the model is loaded into the system, doctors can touch and manipulate tumors and other virtual objects on screens in real time using a physical instrument resembling a scalpel. The instrument has six degrees of freedom and re-creates the force-feedback of the real tool and the varying resistance of tissue in brain regions with differing toughness. Meanwhile, photo-realistic on-screen imagery shows the simulated surgery, including bleeding and pulsing gray matter.

Link via Popular Science

Photo: Kenneth Suslick

Chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a testing implement that mimics the way human taste buds detect sweetness:

A computer compares scans of the array of dots before and after the paper is wetted with an eyedropper full of liquid.

After running dozens of samples of mystery artificial sweeteners dissolved in water or tea, the research team reported that their tongue could pick out the sweetener used with with 100 percent accuracy.

Potential applications include detecting noxious gases, harmful bacteria, and providing early warnings for lung cancer (which Miss C mentioned yesterday).

Link via Boing Boing

Behold the blessings of technology:

After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical. The hotter a fart, the faster it spreads. “It beeps faster if it’s a high ranker, and a voice rates it on a scale of zero to nine,” he says. “If it ranks a nine, a fan comes on to blow it away. It even records the noise so you can play it back later.” After a few months of construction, they began field tests. “Well, the sample data wasn’t the entire school, but we definitely tested it,” Salas says.

The developers suggest that their invention could be used to evaluate the health of livestock, detect hydrogen-sulfide-producing bacteria in hospitals, or test for bad breath.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/there-scientific-way-measure-fart-smell via GearFuse

Photo credit: Robert Clain and Miguel Salas

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British nuclear engineer Allen Millyard is known for building huge motorcycles, often using car engines to replace the factory engines. His latest creation is this motorcycle, which uses a 500-hp, 8,400cc engine from the Dodge Viper sports car. That's as impressive as his prior feat of mounting two 6-cylinder engines on one bike.

http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/News/newsresults/videos/2009/August/aug2509-video-500bhp-v10-viper/?R=EPI-117907 via OhGizmo!

Photo: Jesse van Kuijk

Dutch teenager Jesse van Kuijk designed and built a crude but functional human-powered aircraft:

Dates pour out of him as he relates the history of human-powered flight. The year 1979 was another landmark: Another craft, dubbed the Gossamer Albatross, made a successful flight over the English Channel, flying over 35 kilometers in less than three hours. The Gossamer Albatross was flown by American Bryan Allen, who now works in California as a software engineer for the Mars exploration project. Van Kuijk contacted Allen and the two exchanged emails about van Kuijk's dream of self-powered flight.

In 2006, with his calculations complete, van Kuijk began to collect building materials. For over three years he gathered extremely light balsa wood, polyurethane and the light, rip-resistant foil that would eventually line the craft's 26-meter-wide (85 feet) wings. And then he built what he had designed....

And then suddenly, unbelievably, "the earth under my feet slipped away," van Kuijk exclaimed afterwards. He was flying! Alone, under his own power and in the aircraft he had designed and built. His aircraft flew, he had always known it would. But he could barely believe he had actually managed to defeat gravity's pull.

Link via Gizmodo

In contrast to horses, which can walk within an hour of being born, or newborn baboons, which can cling to their mothers as they swing through the trees, human babies are unusually helpless and vulnerable. Anthropologist John Bock explains why:

One of the first traits that differentiated humans from our ancestors was upright gait. There are several hypotheses about the emergence of this trait, but it seems to have offered a way to move more efficiently in open environments such as the savanna. Although our earliest human ancestors were very apelike in terms of their brains, their upright gait had changed their pelvis to look much like our modern one. This reshaped pelvis came with a narrower birth canal, making childbirth more difficult.

Meanwhile the new roaming grounds afforded advantages in acquiring resources and negotiating social relationships to those with flexible, problem-solving behavior. Over time, natural selection increased brain size in these early humans. But at some point, the selection for bigger and bigger brains collided head-on, so to speak, with the narrow pelvis. If babies’ heads got any bigger, they would get stuck in the birth canal and kill both mother and child. Although natural selection worked to maximize what could be done—for instance, babies’ heads compress as they twist their way around the bones in the pelvis—there simply is not enough room for a big, mature brain to pass through.

Therefore, Bock explains, human baby brains continue to develop substantially after birth and it takes longer for them to learn how to walk.

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Image by flickr user BadrNaseem used under creative commons license

Blogger Kevin J. Guhl has a list of twelve Smurf figurines that probably shouldn't have been marketed to children, including scenes of intoxication, gambling, murderous rage, and wardobe malfunctions. Pictured above is a Smurf soon be drunk off his Smurf, if not Smurfed from alcohol poisoning. All images are courtesy of Smurfs über-site Blue Buddies.

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This dentist no doubt inspires confidence in his patients with his tower made from 28,000 teeth from previous patients:

This 8ft tower of teeth is foul, and the summit of 15 years work by Yu Qian, a Chinese dentist who is trying to raise awareness about dental hygiene by word of mouth. Or, as it turns out, an awesome viral film gone global.

His piece of art is made from 28,000 human teeth (URGH). So far he has treated 100,000 patients, and ‘harvested’ 28,000 diseased teeth from his patients.

Link via The Presurfer

With sound sources bouncing off walls and other surfaces, how is the brain able to sort out from what direction and distance sound is traveling? Robert Goodier explains:

In an April study, neuroscientists led by Sasha Devore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested the widely held hypothesis that specialized cells in the brain actively suppress neuronal response to echoes. Using electrodes in a cat’s midbrain, researchers measured cells’ responses to a sound and its reverberations. They found that the cells that sense a sound’s direction of origin responded more strongly to the first 50 milliseconds of sound waves than they did to the later waves—their activity simply tapered off after the onset of the sound. The tapering response, a much simpler mechanism than the earlier theory of suppression, allows the brain to easily tune in to original sounds and pinpoint who or what is making noise.

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Image by flickr user mystical child used under creative commons license

Image: Robert Thom, University of Michigan Health System

One hundred years ago to this day, German doctor Paul Ehrlich developed the first effective chemotherapy drug. Specifically, he was trying to find a cure for syphilis:

Ehrlich and Japanese student Sahachiro Hata produced their 606th preparation of an arsenobenzene compound in 1907. Ehrlich watched on Aug. 31 two years later, as Hata injected chemical No. 606 into a rabbit with syphilitic ulcers. The next day, no live spirochetes could be found on the animal’s ulcers, and within three weeks, the ulcers were completely gone.

After testing the drug on mice, guinea pigs and many more rabbits, Ehrlich and Hata sent their miracle cure to the chemical firm Hoechst, which marketed it under the name Salvarsan. The drug became an almost instant success around the world, although many criticized Ehrlich for creating a chemical that might encourage promiscuity.

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