The basic skin production system, which Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft hopes to start selling next year, can produce 5,000 little swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around $49 to produce, far less than the current cost.
The system, which should be available in 2010, is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product. So far, this project has generated 19 patents for Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
The small town of Vulcan in Alberta, Canada, has exploited its Star Trek name since the 60s. It's a pilgrimage site for nerds where the local menus offer foods from Star Trek without explaining what they are for you unenlightened souls who don't watch the shows. Via Topless Robot
On Feb 2nd, 1970, a Convair F-106 Delta Dagger was found in a snow-covered Montana field, pilot-less, landing gear up, and with the engine still running - the melting snow causing the aircraft to slowly move forward…
The pilot - Captain Gary Faust - had earlier ejected from the aircraft at 15,000 feet when it entered a flat spin. Amazingly, the un-piloted aircraft then recovered, to make a gentle “belly-up” landing…
“We’re taking it to an earthquake level that’s associated with being on the verge of collapse,” said civil engineer Michael Symans of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who helped design the test building. “We don’t expect it to collapse, but we expect it to be very vulnerable to a strong aftershock that could cause it to collapse.”
The 23-unit condo building currently sits on the world’s largest shake table, a 50-by-60-foot structure in Miki, Japan. The table will simulate the motions of the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, California, amplified about 1.5 times. Sensors on each floor of the building will record motion and detect internal damage, generating valuable data about how wooden structures perform in a quake.
A biomedical engineering professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham envisioned a program for home computers that could sync via wireless with the Wii remote, and train users on proper resuscitation of people who have suffered cardiac arrest. The students hope to make the program available for download this fall, free of charge, on the American Heart Association's website.
6. The "one small step for man" wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface.
7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.
8. The toughest moonwalk task? Planting the flag. NASA’s studies suggested that the lunar soil was soft, but Armstrong and Aldrin found the surface to be a thin wisp of dust over hard rock. They managed to drive the flagpole a few inches into the ground and film it for broadcast, and then took care not to accidentally knock it over.
One early British recipe for “Bride’s Pye” mixed cockscombs, lamb testicles, sweetbreads, oysters and (mercifully) plenty of spices. Another version called for boiled calf’s feet.
By the mid sixteenth century, though, sugar was becoming plentiful in England. The more refined the sugar, the whiter it was. Pure white icing soon became a wedding cake staple. Not only did the color allude to the bride’s virginity, as Carol Wilson points out in her Gastronomica article “Wedding Cake: A Slice of History,” but the whiteness was “a status symbol, a display of the family’s wealth.” Later, tiered cakes, with their cement-like supports of decorative dried icing, also advertised affluence. Formal wedding cakes became bigger and more elaborate through the Victorian age. In 1947, when Queen Elizabeth II (then Princess Elizabeth) wed Prince Philip, the cake weighed 500 pounds.
