Industrial designers Mike Simonian and Pieter Schouten made this skateboard in order to add the flexibility of snowboarding movements to skateboarding:
The Flowlab Skateboard allows you to surf without waves and ride without snow. Years of experimentation resulted in the geometry that allows a device with no moving parts to simulate the fluid motion of snowboarding or surfing on land. The arced axles let you carve to 45 degree angles with no resistance and fluid transitions edge-to-edge.
You can view a technical drawing of the design at the link.
In order to promote Black Flag anti-insect spray, the Cleveland-based ad agency Marcus Thomas projected ants crawling over a building. At the link, you can view a video of the ants in motion.
Scientists in East Timor have discovered the skeleton of a rat three times larger than any rat living today:
The new species was three times heavier -- about six kilograms (13 pounds) -- than the biggest rats known to exist today, which are found in the tropical forests of the Philippines and New Guinea.[...]
Researchers found 13 more rat specimens in caves on Timor and other islands, 11 of which are completely new to science.
Aplin said that some of those new species may still be alive today and have simply eluded detection by scientists.
Rodents of unusual size? I don't think they exist.
Tony Nijhuis built this functional model of the Boeing B-50 bomber, a postwar variant of the B-29:
The real bomber had four engines, so he hunted down four of the biggest electric motors he could find. He created 2-D sketches of the body, wings and tail using AutoCAD and commissioned a laser-cutting company to handle the more than 300 custom segments he needed.
To make the plastic nose and gun canopies, Nijhuis first had to hand-carve wooden molds of each one. For the retractable landing gear, he hooked an off-the-shelf pneumatic system up to pressurized air tanks made from plastic Coke bottles. He also skinned the balsa-wood-ribbed fuselage with laminate wood composite and fiberglass.
To make his model more realistic, Nijhuis added speakers that play the sound that the engines from the actual B-50 made. The entire project took two years and cost $9,000.
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-07/backyard-b-50-bomber | Photo: Jonathan Worth
Two years ago, we featured the creative furniture of Cuban art group Los Carpinteros. Here's one of their recent works called "La Montaña Rusa", which Google Translator says means "Roller Coaster".
http://www.loscarpinteros.net/index/photo-thumb/cama/ via Make | Photo: Los Carpinteros
The Plastiki is a ship made from plastic bottles. It was built from this frequently wasted product in order to promote recycling. Last March it left California, heading for Australia. Today, it docked in Sydney, completing a 8,000-mile voyage. The captain, David de Rothschild, described the journey:
De Rothschild, 31, said the idea for the journey came to him after he read a United Nations report in 2006 that said pollution — and particularly plastic waste — was seriously threatening the world's oceans.
He figured a good way to prove that trash can be effectively reused was to use some of it to build a boat. The Plastiki — named after the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl — is fully recyclable and gets its power from solar panels and windmills.
The boat is almost entirely made up of bottles, which are held together with an organic glue made of sugar cane and cashews, but includes other materials too. The mast, for instance, is recycled aluminum irrigation pipe.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128765142 via Gizmodo | Photo: Design Boom
Popular Mechanics has a slideshow of 18 oddities in bathroom design. Pictured above is a floating bathroom that the US National Park Service installed in Lake Powell (UT/AZ) to persuade people there not to simply relieve themselves in the water. The official website confirms that there are, in fact, six such floating facilities.
Link via Digg | Photo by Flickr user Niels van Eck used under Creative Commons license
This video presents Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club as a Regency romance written by Jane Austen.
Ladies, welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is one never mentions Fight Club. No corsets, no hat pins, and no crying. If this is your first invitation to Fight Club, you must fight.
O. Ray Courtney was a designer from the 1930s-1950s who applied Art Deco stylistic principles to motorcycles. Pictured above is a 1936 motorcycle that he built in that style from a 1930 Henderson, carefully restored by its owner, Frank Westfall. You can view more pictures of this beauty at the link.
If you were hoping that, after the Robopocalypse, you could earn your soylent green by flipping pancakes for our robot overlords, you're out of luck. Human researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology have taught a robot how to do it. No, they didn't refine it's programming; the robot learned how to complete the task:
The video shows a Barrett WAM 7 DOFs manipulator learning to flip pancakes by reinforcement learning. The motion is encoded in a mixture of basis force fields through an extension of Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) that represents the synergies across the different variables through stiffness matrices. An Inverse Dynamics controller with variable stiffness is used for reproduction.
The skill is first demonstrated via kinesthetic teaching, and then refined by Policy learning by Weighting Exploration with the Returns (PoWER) algorithm. Compared to policy-gradient approaches, the reward is treated as a pseudo-probability, which allows Reinforcement Learning to use probabilistic estimation methods such as Expectation-Maximization (EM).
After fifty attempts, the robot became a competent pancake-flipper.
via Popular Science | Previously: Rapid Pancake Sorting Robot
Canadian Air Force pilot Capt. Brian Bews experienced a breakdown while flying into Lethbridge County Airport in Lethbridge, Alberta. He safely ejected from his CF-18 Hornet immediately before it impacted on the ground. MSNBC has a set of amazing photos from the incident.
Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Ian Martens / Lethbridge Herald / CP via AP
Biologists have determined that this tiny cave salamander, nicknamed the "human fish" has a maximum lifespan of 100 years. For a creature of that size, that's quite unusual:
The salamander, also called olm and Proteus, has a maximum lifespan of over 100 years, concludes the new study, published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters. That's nearly double the age of other often-elderly amphibians: the Japanese giant salamander (55 years), the African bullfrog (45 years), the common European toad (40 years) and the mudpuppy (34 years).[...]
Voituron, a professor at Claude Bernard Lyon University, and his team calculated growth rates, generation times and the lifespan of olms living in a cave at Moulis, Saint-Girons, France. Since the 1950s, conservationists have established a breeding program there for the threatened salamanders.
In addition to determining the lifespan of the cave salamanders, the researchers found that this species becomes sexually mature at around age 16 and lays, on average, 35 eggs every 12.5 years.
"What promotes its longevity is probably very low activity, low reproduction, no environmental stress and its peculiar physiology," Voituron said.
This Academy Award-nominated short film is about an old woman who tells her little granddaughter the tale of Sleeping Beauty. But grandma has some anger issues with people in her past (and present) and weaves them into the story. The film is entitled "Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty"
Seoul-based designers Jeong-Min Lee and Hyoung-Min Park made packing tape that creates the impression of hinges wherever you lay it down. It's called "X-Tape".
