A large dairy in the Ukraine is powered by the energy generated by the cows' own manure. In fact, the cows generate a surplus of electricity that the dairy sells back to the electrical company:
The combined heat and power (CHP) plant--the first biogas cogeneration plant in the Ukraine--has successfully been powering the Ukraine Milk Company's factory for 9 months with 625 kW of electricity and 686 kW of thermal output. That's enough to fully power the factory and sell energy back to the grid. The advantages of using poop power are threefold: UMC improves its factory efficiency, cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions, and keeps excess manure out of the waste stream. After UMC's manure goes through its biogas plant, leftovers can be used as agricultural fertilizer.
Link | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user law kevin used under Creative Commons license
Well, that may be oversimplifying it a bit. But an Israeli company called Nanoflight claims to have developed a new type of paint that greatly enhances the radar-evading ability of aircraft and missiles that are covered with it:
For the test run, a thin layer of the material was painted on dummy missiles, and radar waves aimed at them had a difficult time registering them.
The paint particles don't make the missile's detection on the radar disappear completely, but make it exceedingly difficult to positively identify the object as a missile. In the future, this development will allow any missile or jet significantly decreased radar detection.
Even though they may not entirely disappear from radar screens, this technology is a considerably more cost-effective method to evade radar detection than purchasing an American stealth plane for $5 billion.
Link via Popular Science | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user eschipul used under Creative Commons license
Designer Fabian Brunsing created "Pay & Sit: The Private Bench". Normally, it's covered with spikes. But if you slip half a Euro in the coin slot, they retract for a fixed period of time. An alarm goes off a few seconds before the user's time is up and the spikes rise.
Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist, saved a patient by transplanting a piece of her husband's excrement into her colon:
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.
The microbes in the man's excrement replaced those absent in the patient:
Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”
Link via The Agitator | Photo (unrelated) from Flickr user pnoeric used under Creative Commons license
Australian inventors Brendan Corry and Peter Sargent designed the Wunda Weeder. This fanciful garden gadget is self-propelled, thanks to the solar cells on the roof. A gardener can lay on the cot and weed rows of plants in his/her garden while staying cool in the shade.
http://wundaproducts.com.au/home/products/wunda-weeder/ via OhGizmo! | Photo: Wunda Products
Flickr user StartTheDay, a photographer from Britain, spotted this Smart Car sporting a crocheted cozy. It was created by Magda Sayeg for the Il Lusso Essenziale art festival in Rome.
LiveJournal user squid314 has posted a great rant. He loves Babylon 5 because the story is pretty consistent, but hates Doctor Who because it isn't. He rips into Doctor Who good and hard, but reserves his harshest criticism for the writers of World War II:
So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.
I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".[...]
Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.
So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?
...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.
Industrial designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen made a clock that knits a 2-meter scarf over the course of one year. It's called "365", and its purpose is:
[...]to give a physical manifestation to the change of time. drawing from the change that is witnessed through the growth of human bodies and hair, the same concept is found in '365' which translates time through the growth of knitted material. the clock houses a circular knitting machine with 48 needles, a thread spool, a thread holder and roll of yarn. moving in clockwise direction, one day leads to a complete round, while a year gives users 2 meters of a complete scarf.
The clock was exhibited at the DMY International Design Festival in Berlin this year. You can view more pictures and a completed scarf at the link.
Boeing's new Phantom Eye UAV is powered by hydrogen, making it a very fuel efficient vehicle capable of flying at more than 12 miles of altitude for 4 days at a time. From the company's press release:
"The program is moving quickly, and it’s exciting to be part of such a unique aircraft," said Drew Mallow, Phantom Eye program manager for Boeing. "The hydrogen propulsion system will be the key to Phantom Eye's success. It is very efficient and offers great fuel economy, and its only byproduct is water, so it's also a 'green' aircraft."
Phantom Eye is powered by two 2.3-liter, four-cylinder engines that provide 150 horsepower each. It has a 150-foot wingspan, will cruise at approximately 150 knots and can carry up to a 450-pound payload.
In 2008, Terry Kniess became the only person to ever give the exact price of the final showcase on the game show The Price is Right. He wasn't lucky -- he was prepared. Kneiss has a natural talent for spotting patterns that other people don't notice. He spent years as a stunningly accurate meteorologist, and then worked in Las Vegas, catching card counters. Then for four months, he and his wife watched The Price Is Right:
For four months during the summer of 2008, they recorded The Price Is Right every morning and watched it together in bed every night, Terry hunting for patterns and Linda doing the math. It didn't take long for them to find their edge. In The Price Is Right's greatest strength, he and Linda also found its greatest weakness: It had survived all those years because it seemed never to change. Even when Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker — the show's own version of Vatican II — he rocked a similar skinny microphone. Behind all the screaming and seeming chaos, there was a precise and nostalgic order. Terry says he first sat upright in bed when a distinctive grill called the Big Green Egg came up for bid again and again. It was always $1,175.
When Kneiss was ready, he got a ticket the show and became a contestant. And with his knowledge of how the games worked, he kept on winning until the end:
Then came Terry. "You bid $23,743," Carey said through his teeth.
Today, at his kitchen table, Terry says he'd seen all three prizes before. The karaoke machine was $1,000. The pool table, depending on the model, he says, went for between $2,800 and $3,200. Terry went with $3,000. The rule of thumb for campers, he knew, was about $1,000 a foot, plus a little more; he says today he'd actually misheard the length of the trailer, thought Rich Fields had said it was nineteen feet long — so, $19,000. That gave him $23,000. And then, he says, he got lucky. He picked 743 because that was the number he and Linda had used for their PINs, their securitycodes, their bets: their wedding date, the seventh of April, and her birth month, March. Here's their wedding certificate, he says, and here's her passport: $23,743.
"Actual retail price, $23,743," Carey said. "You got it right on the nose. You win both Showcases."
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/price-is-right-perfect-bid-0810 via Geekosystem | Photo: Esquire
Research by psychologists at the University of Utah has led to the development of a new lie detection system that tracks the activities of a subject's eyes:
Using eye movement to detect lies contrasts with polygraph testing. Instead of measuring a person's emotional reaction to lying, eye-tracking technology measures the person's cognitive reaction. To do so, the researchers record a number of measurements while a subject is answering a series of true-and-false questions on a computer. The measurements include pupil dilation, response time, reading and rereading time, and errors.
The researchers determined that lying requires more work than telling the truth, so they look for indications that the subject is working hard. For example, a person who is being dishonest may have dilated pupils and take longer to read and answer the questions. These reactions are often minute and require sophisticated measurement and statistical modeling to determine their significance.[...]
Besides measuring a different type of response, eye-tracking methods for detecting lies has several other benefits over the polygraph. Eye tracking promises to cost substantially less, require one-fifth of the time currently needed for examinations, require no attachment to the subject being tested, be available in any language and be administered by technicians rather than qualified polygraph examiners.
Link via DVICE | Photo by Flickr user orangeacid used under Creative Commons license
Cartoonist Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal is back with six good arguments on why you should ride a polar bear to work. The Encyclopedia of Adaptations in the Natural World, which confirms Inman's claim that a polar bear's hair is transparent and hollow.
Sometimes one might encounter a simulation of jousting at a Renaissance fair, but this medieval sport is now returning as a full-contact martial art. There are about 200 jousters around the world and 30 in North America, and as Dashka Slater writes in The New York Times, the sport is becoming increasingly authentic and dangerous:
Over time, modern jousters have learned the lessons of their medieval predecessors — plate armor protects better than chain mail, and more armor protects better than less. Even so, there are still plenty of injuries: concussions and dislocated shoulders, broken hands, assorted fractures and gashes. In one much-talked-about incident a few years ago, the Australian jouster Rod Walker suffered a partly severed penis when a lance veered south during a match at a Renaissance fair in Michigan — a targeting failure that might not have happened if both he and his opponent hadn’t been competing with broken hands.
Who will win in this grand battle between the toughest, most savage men ever?
Judging from the visual style and sound effects, I'd guess that this video was created by the same Russian ad agency responsible for the Mario vs. Pac-Man video.
We've previously featured the neat videos of astronaut Don Pettit showing how a CD player becomes a gyroscope in space, adding Alka-Seltzer to a spherical drop of water, showing the Aurora Borealis from space, and drinking drops of tea with a pair of chopsticks. In this video, Pettit shows how it's possible to sip a coffee in zero gravity from a specially-designed lidless cup.
