Photo: Motoblog.it

An anonymous reader of the Italian-language site Motoblog.it made a Vespa-shaped rocking horse for his nephew Diego. Who wants to take it out for a spin?

Link (Google Translator version) via CrunchGear

(Video Link)

Artist Karolina Sobecka and software designer Jim George created Sniff -- a computer generated projection of a dog that responds to the actions of people passing by a storefront. Here's how it works:

People on the sidewalk are monitored by an IR camera in openFrameworks. In oF each individual person is isolated and assigned a unique id for the duration of their interaction. Each persons’ position and gesture information is continually sent to Unity3d via OSC networking protocol. In Unity, an artificial intelligence system representing the dog forms relationships with the individuals. He chooses which person to pay attention to, is able to move towards them or back away, responds to their gestures and initiates gestures of his own. Based on the interaction he gets excited or bored, friendly or aggressive, which is reflected in his behavior.

Link via Urlesque | Artist's Website

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Do you remember the the head-crushing sketch from The Kids in the Hall? Artist Chris O'Shea created something like it, but on a grand scale, in this augmented reality demonstration. As the people of Liverpool walk along the city streets, they are projected onto a huge LED screen. A giant hand appears on the screen and torments or picks up their images.

Link via Make

(YouTube Link)

iRobot, the company that invented the Roomba household vacuuming robot, is developing a robot that locomotes by inflating and deflating sections of its outer skin, moving contents inside toward its destination. Kristina Grifantini writes at MIT's Technology Review:

This week at IROS 09 (Intelligent Robots and Systems), iRobot and the University of Chicago unveiled a soft, blobby robot that looks something like an inflating marshmallow.

The new robot, called chembot, changes the shape of its stretchy polymer skin using a technique called "jamming skin enabled locomotion". This means that different sections of the robot inflate or deflate separately; controlling this inflation and deflation enables the robot to move. DARPA, which is funding the project, hopes to use the robot to squeeze into small holes or under doors, which I'm guessing would be used for sophisticated surveillance.

Link via Geekologie | Company Website

Image: Nicholas Lampert

Collage artist Nicolas Lampert combines the joys of lovely landscapes and mountains of meat. In an interview with ArtSlant, he wrote about the juxtapositions that he creates in his meatscapes:

AR: A lot of artists are interested in using spectacle as a prime component of their work. Whether it’s hanging a working locomotive from a crane, suspending cars in the Guggenheim rotunda, or diamonds on a skull, spectacle plays a key role. How does the idea of spectacle play into your work, and how is it different from the way other artists are using it?

NL: Spectacle is a great term because spectacles are a subversive form of entertainment. They are often unusual, humorous and disturbing and they force people to pay attention and to come to terms with the content. One piece in particular that I created “Attention Chicken” – a nine-foot tall realistic sculpture of a rotisserie chicken (uncooked of course) operates in the realm of spectacle when it is placed unannounced in the city. It doesn’t work in a galley context, but outside in the public, it plays the part of being subversive, humorous and is most certainly an unusual site for people to see. As far as how my art differs from others, it is difficult to say, because every artist has their own unique intentions.

Link via Urlesque | Interview with the Artist

Image: KiteGen Research

The Italian firm KiteGen Research is developing a generator that harnesses the wind through kites. As a kite flies into the air, it unspools a cord that cranks the turbine. Carina Storrs writes in Popular Science:

The company developed a prototype that flies 200-square-foot kites to altitudes of 2,600 feet, where wind streams are four times as strong as they are near ground-based wind turbines.

As the kite’s tether unspools, it spins an alternator that generates up to 40 kilowatts. Once the kite reaches its peak altitude, it collapses, and motors quickly reel it back in to restart the cycle. This spring, KiteGen started building a machine to fly a 1,500-square-foot kite, which it plans to finish by 2011, that could generate up to three megawatts—enough to power 9,000 homes.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/planet-fixers-clever-innovations-greener-future | Company Website

Photo: Inscentinel

For a few years, a British company called Inscentinel has been developing chemical-detecting honeybees for security and sanitation purposes. Bees are trained to respond to certain smells and then are loaded into cartridges that suck in air from an object. When they alert, the user knows that the chemical is present in the sample. From the company website:

Our "sniffer bees" are honeybees trained to recognise a specific odour. They are trained using a well known Classical Pavlovian conditioning protocol - a simple association of a smell with a food reward. The insect is exposed to the odour in controlled pulses and simultaneously rewarded with sugar syrup. After three to five presentations and rewards the bee is trained. When the bee detects the odour it expects a food reward and extends its tongue (proboscis). This response is a reflex action (Proboscis extension Reflex, PER) and is not consciously controlled by the bee. A "panel" of bees can be trained in as little as a few hours to remember a particular odour for several days.

Although there are a variety of newspaper articles about this invention, I haven't found the company's claims supported by respected scientific periodicals.

Link via CrunchGear

(Video Link)

Newsweek interviewed five actors who played munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. They reminisce about the production of the movie and how it impacted their lives. Did you know that Toto got paid more than they did? You can read about the movie in Stacy's trivia post.

via io9 | Run time: 5 minutes, 38 seconds.

Photo: flickr user Ang & Nick

Botropolis (a robot-themed blog) has pictures of 10 Jack-O-Lanterns modeled to look like robots. Pictured above is Punk-O-Tron, a work by flickr user Ang & Nick. Others are inspired by Transformers, Star Wars, and Short Circuit.

http://botropolis.com/2009/10/10-awesome-robot-halloween-pumpkins/ via Gizmodo

Photo: ~toge-nyc

deviantArt user ~toge-nyc created this dragon out of plastic forks, spoons, and knives held together with glue. It took him about 80 hours complete the project. If you check out his page, you can also see some pretty cool pen-and-ink drawings.

Link via Geekologie

Image: Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Since 1967, scientific illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honegger has visited 25 nuclear sites, including that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, documenting the mutated insects resulting from radioactive contamination. In an interview about her work, Hesse-Honegger said:

I never thought really about myself as being an artist. I just made what I thought was necessary. I thought that these laboratory flies are the prototypes of our understanding of nature, in the sense that we can do anything to nature—we the humans dictate in the end how nature should look like. It was for me the prototype of a future nature, man-made.

The professor who first gave me the mutated flies was convinced, however, that the radiation from Chernobyl had no impact on nature. This is what brought up the question of “low-level radiation.” Nobody was interested in doing research; this is why I thought I had to make these paintings to show the scientists that it would be important to start research in fallout areas.

Link via Fast Company | Interview with the Artist

Matt Kaplan writes in National Geographic about a new study that suggests a link between a person's olfactory sensitivity and awareness of the emotions of other people. Denise Chen of Rice University in Texas led the research process:

Women have a more uniform sense of smell than men, and are also thought to be more sensitive to emotional cues.

So Chen and graduate student Wen Zhou presented 22 pairs of young women living in university dormitories with identical t-shirts to sleep in.

After being worn for one night, the t-shirts were later presented to the same women to smell.

Each woman was given three t-shirts and informed that one of the shirts had been worn by her roommate, and that the other two had been worn by other university students.

The subjects were asked to identify the shirt that had been worn by their roommate.

The women then took a series of recognized emotional-sensitivity tests.

Subjects who correctly selected the t-shirt worn by their roommates tended to score high on the emotional tests.

Link | Photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Image: National Geographic

The above image is a selection and compression of an enormous interactive map of the almost two hundred manned and unmanned exploratory missions in our solar system over the past fifty years. It was created by graphic designers Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic. Click on the link and use the box in the upper-right corner of the screen to choose what area you'd like to see, and zoom as needed.

Link via OhGimzo!

Photo: OLPC

The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) hopes to distribute a simple but useful laptop computer to impoverished children in developing nations at a very low cost per unit. One recurring problem in the project has been power supply. So the Afghan IT company Paiwastoon has developed this prototype pedalling machine that allows the user to crank electricity into the computer.

Link via CrunchGear | Paiwastoon

Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that a new published study reveals substantial differences between how dyslexia impacts English and Chinese-language readers:

English speakers who have developmental dyslexia usually don't have trouble recognizing letters visually, but rather just have a hard time connecting them to their sounds.

What about languages based on full-word characters rather than sound-carrying letters? Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception.

The pronunciation of detailed and complex Chinese characters must be memorized, rather than sounded out like words in alphabet-based languages. That requirement led researchers to suspect that disabilities in the visual realm might come into play in dyslexia in that language. "A fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be preformed by the visual system in order to activate the characters' phonological and semantic information," said lead author Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong, in a prepared statement.

Link | Image: NASA