The Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah has created an interactive feature that allows you to see the relative size of small objects, starting with a coffee bean and magnifying down to a carbon atom. Click on the link and use the sliding bar at the bottom of the application to zoom in.
Lauren McCarthy created the Happiness Hat - a gadget that detects whether or not you're smiling. If you're not, it drives a small metal spike into the back of your head to encourage to you resolve that problem quickly:
An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.
A legal secretary at PepsiCo forgot to deal with a lawsuit notice that came across her desk. Consequently, PepsiCo's lawyers did not show up to court when expected. The presiding judge summarily handed down a $1.26 billion judgment against the corporation. Lynne Marek writes in The National Law Journal:
In court papers, PepsiCo claims it first received a legal document related to the case from the North Carolina agent on Sept. 15 when a copy of a co-defendant's letter was forwarded to Deputy General Counsel Tom Tamoney in PepsiCo's law department. Tamoney's secretary, Kathy Henry, put the letter aside and didn't tell anyone about it because she was "so busy preparing for a board meeting," PepsiCo said in its Oct. 13 motion to vacate.
Vadim Ryazanov built a robot that rolls away from you as you reach for it. He calls it "Mr. Wake." As soon as the alarm goes off, an IR sensor on the robot turns on. The robot is programmed to move in the opposite direction of any object moving toward it:
Now, to give you idea how Wake works: Alarm clock mechanism I used has 3 contacts, Plus, Ground, and Alarm, which goes high when alarm goes off. This was really fortune for me, as I had only to connect the grounds and use this Alarm pin as analog input (Could not use it as digital as clock runs on 1.5V) and it workes just fine. So, whenever Alarm pin goes high, my code picks this up and switches Mr. Wake from "standby" to "alarm" mode, which makes him switch on IR leds and red LED in Magic Button on, read ambient reading from IR transistors and wait till the reading inceased above ambiant one, which means something is aproaching from above (I have the detection only from above, where clock and Magic Button are.
The Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt isn't just a t-shirt. You can actually play music on it. Use a magnetic pick over the string markings and press down on the frets with your other hand. There's also a volume nob and an amplifier that fits on your belt.
Swiss artist Felice Varini is known for his massive art installations that show different images depending on the viewer's vantage point. Recently, he created an optical illusion that covered the entire Swiss town of Vercorin. In the picture above, it looks like rings have been drawn over an image, but what Varini has done is painted walls and roofs at particular angels to give this impression. Click on the link for pictures that show how Varini crated this illusion.
Horrace Burgess of Crossville, Tennessee built a treehouse 97 feet tall. Its 8,000 square feet of floor space is spread over 11 stories. The house is built around a tree 80 feet high and 12 feet wide at the base, so much of the structure extends well beyond the tree itself.
A building of over 11 floors would be expected to have some extra amenities – and the treehouse Horrace has established is no exception. This particular one comes complete with a mini basketball court – if you thought playing you would never live to see guys playing basketball on top of a tree!
The owner of the edifice is a 56 years old landscape architect by the way, and he say an upwards of $12,000 has gone into building thetreehouse . Asked about where he got the inspiration to build the edifice, he cites a prayer vision he got in the early 90s – going further to say that he built it ‘for God.’ Nobody is arguing with him – and nobody is contesting the assertion that it is the world’s greatesttreehouse either. Meanwhile, building work has not stopped at the 11th floor…the building is still a ‘work in progress!’
There are many pictures of the treehouse at the link.
Dutch designer Jelte van Abbema created a typeface out of e. coli bacteria. Cliff Kuang wrote in Fast Company about how he did it:
Van Abbema created the font by stamping bacteria into paper, and then placing the paper in a jury-rigged incubator, which provided the right humdity and warmth for the organisms. As they multiplied and died, the resulting fonts changed color and shape. As van Abbema says, bacteria "transforms the image to something new," creating something that is literally alive, changing every minute without ever being tended.
An artist from MAC Cosmetics painted a woman as a comic book character for Halloween -- right down to the dot printing style of old comics books. Or, alternatively, as a figure from a Roy Lichtenstein painting.
The pictures were taken by publicist and photographer Tasha Marie. You can view more at the link.
Tara Parker-Pope writes in The New York Times about the conclusions of some medical researchers that long-distance running is a major evolutionary advantage for humans. The ability to remain cool by sweating instead of panting and a foot structure ideal for running helped early humans hunt:
Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.
Why would evolution favor the distance runner? The prevailing theory is that endurance running allowed primitive humans to incorporate meat into their diet. They may have watched the sky for scavenging birds and then run long distances to reach a fresh kill and steal the meat from whatever animal was there first.
Other research suggests that before the development of slingshots or bows, early hunters engaged in persistence hunting, chasing an animal for hours until it overheated, making it easy to kill at close range. A 2006 report in the journal Current Anthropology documents persistence hunting among modern hunter-gatherers, including the Bushmen in Africa.[...]
There is other evidence that evolution favored endurance running. A study in The Journal of Experimental Biology last February showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running.
This past January, Timothy Ryback wrote in The Times about the books that Adolf Hitler kept in his private library. 1,200 books that he retained at his residences in southern Germany are now warehoused by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Ryback suggests that one might gain insights into the mind of a man by the books that he collects. Among Hitler's favorites:
He ranked Don Quixote, along with Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gulliver’s Travels, among the great works of world literature. “Each of them is a grandiose idea unto itself,” he said. In Robinson Crusoe he perceived “the development of the entire history of mankind”. Don Quixote captured “ingeniously” the end of an era. He was especially impressed by Gustave Doré’s depictions of Cervantes’s delusion-plagued hero.
He also owned the collected works of William Shakespeare, published in German translation in 1925 by Georg Müller as part of a series intended to make great literature available to the general public. Volume six includes As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. The entire set is bound in hand-tooled Moroccan leather, with a gold-embossed eagle, flanked by his initials, on the spine.
Hitler considered Shakespeare superior to Goethe and Schiller. While Shakespeare had fuelled his imagination on the protean forces of the emerging British empire, these two Teutonic playwright-poets squandered their talent on stories of midlife crises and sibling rivalries. Why was it, he wondered, the German Enlightenment produced Nathan the Wise, the story of the rabbi who reconciles Christians, Muslims and Jews, while it had been left to Shakespeare to give the world The Merchant of Venice and Shylock?
Stanford University's robotics lab has built autonomous cars for several years. Recently, it established a land speed record for a robot car -- 140 mph in an Audi TT-S nicknamed "Shelly". But their next goal is even more ambitious: to have Shelly race the twisted dirt road that leads up to Pike's Peak. Chris Dannen writes in Fast Company about the changes that allow the car to safely navigate sharper turns at higher speeds:
The new autonomous TT-S is markedly different from Junior, however. Junior was environmentally-aware; it had cameras that could see objects and road features, and it paired that data with GPS data. All that processing required two on-board Linux computers running quad-core Pentium chips and programmed in C and C++.
The new TT-S, unofficially dubbed "Shelly," uses a different system. It has no cameras, only GPS, and a smaller, less powerful computing box running Sun's Java Real Time System running on Solaris. Why? Despite Junior's speedy processors, it still takes the car between 20-50 milliseconds to react to inputs from its sensory equipment. Because the TT-S "Shelly" is traveling at much higher speeds--the team has pushed it over 140 mph--even 20 milliseconds is too much of a delay.
You can view more videos of the project at the link.
Since he was a young boy, Anthony Toth has seen the first class cabin of an old Pan Am 747 as the very quintessence of luxury. So he has spent the past twenty years building a simulation of that environment in his garage. In addition to spending $50,000 on the project, he's traveled widely just to find vintage equipment. Candace Jackson writes in The Wall Street Journal:
To find artifacts from the airline, which ceased operation in 1991, Mr. Toth spends his vacations trekking out to an area in the Mojave Desert known as the airplane boneyard, where retired aircraft are stripped for parts. When he can't buy an original Pan Am item in good condition, like seat covers, he recruits professionals to create suitable stand-ins.
Julie Fisher, a friend of Mr. Toth's, says one time she got a call from Mr. Toth saying he'd heard about a source for headsets in Bangkok. A few days later, the two of them hopped a plane to Thailand for the weekend to track them down. (As an airline employee, Mr. Toth can usually fly himself and a friend for free if space is available.)
There's a slideshow of Toth's work at the link.
Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Brian L. Frank for the WSJ
Katie Liljenquist of Brigham Young University led a study that suggests that clean-smelling environments subtly encourage people to avoid abberant behavior. From Science Daily:
The study titled "The Smell of Virtue" was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.
The first experiment evaluated fairness.
As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic "trust game." Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.
Erin McKean is a Chicago-based lexicographer who writes at the blog A Dress A Day. There she opines on various dresses that she sees and makes. Her most recent creation is a dress inspired by the classic video game Tetris. You can view more pictures at the link.
