As part of the promotion, transit passengers from 20 specified neighborhoods will get the chance to compete against each other in different video games — and the community that wins the two-month contest will host a block party featuring the rock band OK Go.
To compete, passengers need only to tap the screen and choose one of four games, which range from visual puzzles to sports trivia competitions. Once a rider has selected which neighborhood they want to represent, they can challenge any other waiting passenger to a live competition. Also, for anyone curious about duping the system, Yahoo has set up barriers to prevent any sort of automated competition.
At the end of the 15 months, Le swabbed the jeans for bacteria. He then put the garb through a washing machine, after which he wore the jeans another two weeks before re-testing.
And the results surprised Le and his professor, Rachel McQueen.
"They were similar," McQueen said of the bacteria count of the freshly washed pair, compared to the prewashing levels. "I expected they would still be much lower than after 15 months."
In all, there were five kinds of skin bacteria in the jeans, and mostly in the crotch area, where between 8,500 and 10,000 bacterial units per square centimetre were found. However, McQueen said because Le was healthy, with no skin problems or cuts, there was no health concern.
Controlling odour was a different concern, Le said, admitting the jeans began to smell after a few months.
He solved that problem, however.
"I triple-bagged them and put them in the freezer," he said.
It’s called “Turnstyle” and it’s made up of the motor, the needle, the speakers, and the controls. What more do you need? It’s a skeleton of its former self, and not former as in it was stripped, former as in there’s no reason to ever go back to more!
This project is designed by RD Silver, a designer who has the guts to take away everything but the guts. The requirements for function set upon this project were the following: spin record, on/off, volume, speaker, and needle. As far as design requirements: no corners, no hard edges, no 90 degree angles.
The oblique wing was the brainchild of NASA aeronautical engineer Robert T. Jones, whose analytical and wind tunnel studies at the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, California, indicated that an oblique wing, supersonic transport might achieve twice the fuel economy of an aircraft sporting more conventional wings.[...]
The oblique wing on the AD-1 pivoted about the fuselage, remaining perpendicular to it during slow flight and swinging to angles of up to 60 degrees as aircraft speed increased.
The swing wing concept was first evaluated by a small, propeller-driven, remotely-piloted research vehicle (RPRV) flown at Dryden in 1976. These early techniques for gathering data about the oblique wing aircraft were applied to the twin turbojet, piloted AD-1, which was flown from 1979 to 1982.
Planning for the robot -- called GhostBot -- began when graduate student Oscar Curet, a co-author of the paper, observed a knifefish suddenly moving vertically in a tank in MacIver's lab.
"We had only tracked it horizontally before," said MacIver, a recent recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. "We thought, 'How could it be doing this?'"
Further observations revealed that while the fish only uses one traveling wave along the fin during horizontal motion (forward or backward depending on the direction on the wave), while moving vertically it uses two waves. One of these moves from head to tail, and the other moves tail to head. The two waves collide and stop at the center of the fin.
The group took the robot to Harvard University to test it in a flow tunnel in the lab of George V. Lauder, professor of ichthyology and co-author of the paper. The team measured the flow around the robotic fish by placing reflective particles in the water, then shining a laser sheet into the water. That allowed them to track the flow of the water by watching the particles, and the test showed the water flowing around the biomimetic robot just as computer simulations predicted it would.
"It worked perfectly the first time," MacIver said. "We high-fived. We had the robot in the real world being pushed by real forces."
A site called Ratio Finder uses GPS data from Foursquare check-ins to generate a map showing which restaurants have more men in them and which have more women in them. Combine this with the information on Facebook, Grindr, and Google, and soon you'll be able to pick your restaurant by flipping through naked pictures of everyone eating there. Or that's the direction we seem to be headed.
