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Well, real in the sense that opposing magnets suspend this Back to the Future model in the air without any structural support. French artist Nils Guadagnin made it for an art installation:

Integrated into the board and the plinth is an electromagnetic system which levitates the board. A laser system stabilises the object in the air. In the making of this work, this artist was thinking about different ways of presenting sculpture. In fact it's a reflexion on the multiple possibilities of how to give a sculpture full spatial autonomy.

via Geekosystem | Artist's Blog | Previously on Neatorama: Back to the Future Hoverboard Auction

It's a problem that we've all faced from time to time: you and your horse have been invited to a costume party, but your horse has nothing to wear. Thankfully, a Costa Rican company called The Horse Tailor offers custom-made outfits for horses. Among other options, your ride could go as a bumblebee, Batman, a leprechaun, or the Pink Panther (pictured above).

http://www.thehorsetailor.com/beta/catalog.html via The Presurfer Photo: Horse Tailor

Japanese researchers built a functional life-sized model of a butterfly. They did so in order to test their hypothesis on the flight mechanics of a particular species:

To prove that the swallowtail achieves forward flight with simple flapping motions, the researchers built a lifelike ornithopter in the same dimensions as the butterfly, copying the swallowtail's distinct wing shape and the thin membranes and veins that cover its wings.

Using motion analysis software, the researchers were able to monitor the ornithopter's aerodynamic performance, showing that flight can be realised with simple flapping motions without feedback control, a model which can be applied to future aerodynamic systems.

At the link, you can view a video of this machine in flight.

Link via DudeCraft | Photo: H. Tanaka and I. Shimoyama/Bioinspiration & Biomimetics

German police have trained "Sherlock", a vulture, to hunt for dead bodies in remote locations:

Birds generally rely mostly on sight to locate their supper. But vultures like Sherlock have a keen sense of smell and are able to detect the scent of rotting flesh from 1,000 metres (3,000 feet) up in the air.

He can even find remains in woodland or in thick undergrowth. And unlike sniffer dogs, who need regular breaks, Sherlock is indefatigable and can cover vast tracts of land.[...]

The bird, whose is more at home soaring over South America's Andes or the Atacama Desert than northern Germany's Lueneburg Heath, is being taught by trainer German Alonso to love the putrid smell of dead human flesh.

Every day Alonso puts pieces of meat in small cups, on top of a strip of cloth -- provided by the police -- that has been used to cover a corpse. Sherlock's mission is to locate these tasty morsels.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gafXAlAFn5jEEc8F6_e7a5fSOqBg via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: AFP

Matt Stopera at BuzzFeed has a list of -- with pictures -- sixteen items that he says are sold only at Chinese Wal-Marts. #11, pictured above, is frogs. Some, he can't identify. Can any figure out what #6 is?

Link via Marginal Revolution

Chinese scientists claim that they have teleported material over a distance of ten miles with 89% fidelity:

Teleportation over distances of a few hundred meters has previously only been accomplished with the photons traveling in fiber channels to help preserve their state. In this particular experiment, researchers maximally entangled two photons using both spatial and polarization modes and sent the one with higher energy through a ten-mile-long free space channel. They found that the distant photon was still able to respond to changes in state of the photon they held onto even at this unprecedented distance.

However, the long-distance teleportation of a photon is only a small step towards developing applications for the procedure. While photons are good at transmitting information, they are not as good as ions at allowing manipulation, an advancement we'd need for encryption. Researchers were also able to maintain the fidelity of the long-distance teleportation at 89 percent— decent enough for information, but still dangerous for the whole-body human teleportation that we're all looking forward to.

Link via DVICE | Journal Article | Image: Paramount

For seven years, The Smithsonian magazine has held an annual photography contest. The five categories are Altered Images, the Natural World, Americana, Travel, and People. Pictured above is Laurie McAndish King's winning submission in the Natural World category. It's a photograph of a tiny frog hiding in the leaves of a plant.

King was experimenting with a new camera in a local Mendocino County garden when a frog paused for a moment on the leaves of a nearby plant. She snapped; it hopped. “I’ve gone halfway around the world looking for new experiences,” she says. “This photo will always remind me of the beauty in my own backyard.”

You can view the other winners at the link.

Link | Previously: The Smithsonian By the Numbers

Remember how Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report was able to interact with a computer using gloves? MIT student Robert Wang has developed something similar.

Other prototypes of low-cost gestural interfaces have used reflective or colored tape attached to the fingertips, but “that’s 2-D information,” says Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who developed the new system together with Jovan Popovi?, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “You’re only getting the fingertips; you don’t even know which fingertip [the tape] is corresponding to.” Wang and Popovi?’s system, by contrast, can translate gestures made with a gloved hand into the corresponding gestures of a 3-D model of the hand on screen, with almost no lag time. “This actually gets the 3-D configuration of your hand and your fingers,” Wang says. “We get how your fingers are flexing.”

The most obvious application of the technology, Wang says, would be in video games: Gamers navigating a virtual world could pick up and wield objects simply by using hand gestures. But Wang also imagines that engineers and designers could use the system to more easily and intuitively manipulate 3-D models of commercial products or large civic structures.

Wang's team also made a pretty funny promotional video.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: Jason Dorfman/CSAIL

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Skål is a rather playful remote control designed by Jørn Knutsen, Einar Sneve Martinussen and Timo Arnall. It looks like a block of wood, but it has a RFID reader inside. When an equipped object is placed inside, such as a wooden block or a toy, it plays a video related to that object. For example, when a child places a Sleeping Beauty toy inside, it plays the Sleeping Beauty movie.

Link via DVICE

(YouTube Link)

At the Rosenthaler Platz, an intersection in Berlin, artists poured paint on to the street to see what images cars, buses, and bicycles would make with it:

The various colours of paint were dumped onto the road in large puddles at different locations throughout the intersection. As traffic drove through, the paint was spread around creating lots of colourful lines. The whole action took only a few seconds: bikers had poured paint from big boxes in front of cars that waited for green lights. So the cars and their wheels, if the driver wanted it or not, became the brush tool for this guerilla public art piece.The creators of the project posted signs on post nearby explaining that the paint wasn’t harmful and would simply wash off with water

Link via Urlesque

The Dancing Forest is an unusual natural wonder in the Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. Its trees have grown into twisted shapes, as though they were dancing. More images at English Russia.

Link | Photo: Vaplakal.com

Nike78 is an project by designer Paul Jenkins and the Nike apparel company which invited artists to modify shoes in creative ways. The Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency in Tokyo turned one of their shoes into an aquarium.

Link via Super Punch | Project Page | Photo: W+K Tokyo Lab

Police in Hampshire, UK, have a new patrol vehicle in their fleet -- a five-speed, pedal-powered car:

Officers believe building their new five-gear vehicle, which has a top speed of 20 miles per hour, will help combat anti-social behaviour.[...]

PC Keith Waller, who will pilot the vehicle, spent 40 hours painstakingly building the replica car with children aged 13 to 16 at Ringwood Comprehensive School.

He insisted that getting involved with the project allowed police to show their "fun side" and made them look "cooler" and "more approachable".

But he also admitted it had made him a laughing stock as people drew comparisons with him and Mr Plod from cartoon series Noddy from Toytown.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Metro

A team led by geneticist J. Craig Venter claims to have created a synthetic life form. This process involved building a genome from pre-existing fragments and then placing the resulting product inside a single-celled organism. The cell then accepted the genome and began replicating:

A few years ago, the researchers transplanted an entire natural genome — the genetic code — of one bacterium into another and watched it take over, turning a goat germ into a cattle germ.

Next, the researchers built from scratch another, smaller bacterium's genome, using off-the-shelf laboratory-made DNA fragments.

Friday's report combines those two achievements to test a big question: Could synthetic DNA really take over and drive a living cell? Somehow, it did.

"This is transforming life totally from one species into another by changing the software," said Venter, using a computer analogy to explain the DNA's role.[...]

That fixed, the transplant worked. The recipient cell started out with synthetic DNA and its original cytoplasm, but the new genome "booted up" that cell to start producing only proteins that normally would be found in the copied goat germ. The researchers had tagged the synthetic DNA to be able to tell it apart, and checked as the modified cell reproduced to confirm that new cells really looked and behaved like M. mycoides.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jUy0CkhjIEOS2ZY_SP3gWg8ELgewD9FQPB980 via DVICE | Photo: University of Florida

A German exchange student in Sydney, Australia was getting beaten and mugged by thugs. That's when the ninjas showed up:

They grabbed his phone and iPod and kicked him while he lay on the ground.

However, the men were spotted by a member of a nearby dojo.

Nathan Smith told his sensei and the rest of the students at Ninja Senshi Ryu and they rushed out to confront the thugs - all dressed in traditional black ninja garb.

On seeing the ninjas, the men fled, only to be later arrested by police.

"You should have seen their faces when they saw us in ninja gear coming towards them," the school's sensei, Kaylan Soto, told the Herald.

Link via Say Uncle | Photo via flickr user R'eyes, used under Creative Commons license