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

You might or might not consider this to be good news. Enrico Grasso of the University Hospital Tor Vergata in Rome, Italy, has developed a pill-sized robot that can crawl around inside a patient, searching for signs of cancer. Alastair Jamieson writes in The Daily Telegraph:

Pills containing cameras already exist, but this is believed to be the first that can be controlled after it has been swallowed.

Once the examination has finished, the spider pill exits the body naturally.

It has been successfully tested on pigs but further trials will be needed before it can be cleared for use by doctors.

Elisa Buselli, one of the scientists working on the project that created the spider pill, said: “This should improve the situation not just for the patient but also the doctor.”

Link via Popular Science | Image: BBC News

Although the story was first composed as a radio script, the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published 30 years ago today. Fans in Britain are marking the occasion by wearing dressing gowns and carrying towels. Chris Irvine writes in The Daily Telegraph:

Hitchcon’09, the fans' convention at the Royal Festival Hall contained a spacesuit worn by a Vogon, the galactic galaxy's bureaucrats notorious for their aggressive manner and terrible poetry, as well as Adams' bath, where the author, who died in 2001, claimed to have some of his best ideas.[...]

The Hitchhiker books began as a Radio 4 comedy show in 1978. Adams then adapted the radio series to create the initial book, completing four more instalments over the next 20 years. He died of a heart attack in 2001, which writing The Salmon of Doubt, published post humously.

Link via GeekDad | Image: Random House

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Sean Michael Ragan of Make magazine declares that with this video by inventor Patrick Brawley, steampunk has 'jumped the shark':

Introducing the Electro-Flush! Technically, TeslaPunk Urinal. Hand-made solid oak tank with battery powered flush pump, laser aiming assist (aim at the laser dot in the bowl at night), lights, antique gauges, flush capacitor, and cup holder. Bowl is a round 1949 Standard.

via Make

Image: Marc Quinn

Artist Marc Quinn created a self portrait sculpted out of 4.5 liters of his own frozen blood. He plans to repeat the process every five years to show the aging process.

Quinn has achieved fame (or infamy, depending your perspective) for other provocative works of art, such as a golden statue of Kate Moss in a yoga pose. He's been previously featured on Neatorama for more mundane work: a botanical garden.

Link via Make

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This video describes a banner consisting of LED tubes and sophisticated sensors that graces the atrium at one of the buildings on Microsoft's campus. It was designed by Mode Studios in order to encourage creativity and envision dynamic systems. What's on the screen changes with the weather and traffic patterns inside the atrium. There's also a "hot spot" where a person can control what's on the screen through body movements and temperature.

Via Gizmodo | Mode Studios Website

Image: Facebook

Jason Kinkaid writes at Tech Crunch that Facebook has developed a new application that aggregates the published emotional states of users over time. The relative contentment that users express constitutes "Gross National Happiness":

Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook, which is all anonymized before its analyzed. To determine if a particular status message is happy or sad (or neither), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.

You can adjust the graph by sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can also adjust the zoom by dragging the handlebars on the slider, and can actually watch happiness jump hour-to-hour, though it’s a bit difficult to navigate when you’re zoomed in that far. It’s fun to play around with, but you aren’t going to find many surprises: happiness generally hits a low on Mondays, then gradually grows up through the weekend when it drops again as the work-week begins. Peaks are all found around holidays, with Thanksgiving drawing the most happiness. Also worth nothing: this year there was an abrupt drop in happiness in late June, which is likely associated with the tragic death of Michael Jackson.

Link via Fast Company

Photo: Modding user Newsmaker

The above picture is one of several found at a Russian-language case mod website. Most case mods alter the outside of a CPU case, but this hobbyist changed the interior of his/her case into a cozy living room.

Link (Google Translator version) via DVICE

Image: Mohd Abubakr

The modern periodic table of elements has been attributed to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, which he published in 1869. Pictured above is a proposed alternative that is shaped like a circle in order to arrange atoms by relative size:

According to Mohd Abubakr from Microsoft Research in Hyderabad, the table can be improved by arranging it in circular form. He says this gives a sense of the relative size of atoms--the closer to the centre, the smaller they are--something that is missing from the current form of the table. It preserves the periods and groups that make Mendeleev's table so useful. And by placing hydrogen and helium near the centre, Abubakr says this solves the problem of whether to put hydrogen with the halogens or alkali metals and of whether to put helium in the 2nd group or with the inert gases.

That's worthy but flawed. Unfortunately, Abubakr's arrangement means that the table can only be read by rotating it. That's tricky with a textbook and impossible with most computer screens.

The great utility of Mendeleev's arrangements was its predictive power: the gaps in his table allowed him to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. It's worth preserving in its current form for that reason alone.

Link via Gizmodo | Article by Abubakr | History of the Periodic Table of Elements

(YouTube Link)

This 10-minute video shows the impact of bullets on various targets at 1 million frames per second. It was made by Werner Mehl, an engineer noted for his development of high-speed photography:

Germany’s Werner Mehl is the talented engineer who created the PVM-21 infrared chronograph, in many respects the most sophisticated ballistic speed-measuring system currently available to the general public. Werner runs a company, Kurzzeitmesstechnik, which specializes in high-tech ballistic measuring systems and ultra-high-speed photography. Werner has engineered camera and lighting systems that can literally track a bullet in flight, millimeter by millimeter, with eye-popping resolution. Werner employs digital cameras that record up to 1 million frames per second, with effective shutter speeds as fast as 1.5 nano-seconds. The videos produced by Werner’s systems are amazing. Below are two short samples. The first shows a 7mm bullet penetrating cardboard. Note you can clearly see the engraving of the rifling on the bullet.

Link via Hell in a Handbasket | Werner Mehl's Website

Photo: Tomas Valenzuela

Artist and environmental activist Oliver Bishop-Young's project "Skip Conversions" tried to find creative and often amusing ways of recycling unwanted products. One example was a dumpster, which he turned into a swimming pool, a skateboard ramp, a living room, a garden, and a campsite. More pictures at the link.

Link via Urlesque | Artist's Website

At the blog Food & Think, Amanda Bensen asks "Have you ever stopped to think about how strange it is that we drink the breast milk of another species?" She did some research on the history of milk drinking and found that it can be traced back to 7,500 years ago in Central Europe and the Balkans. From a press release by researchers at University College, London:

The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology. The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe. Previously, it was thought that natural selection favoured milk drinkers only in more northern regions because of their greater need for vitamin D in their diet. People living in most parts of the world make vitamin D when sunlight hits the skin, but in northern latitudes there isn't enough sunlight to do this for most of the year.

In the collaborative study, the team used a computer simulation model to explore the spread of lactase persistence, dairy farming, other food gathering practices and genes in Europe. The model integrated genetic and archaeological data using newly developed statistical approaches.

Link via Food & Think | Image: U.S. Department of Agriculture