Photo: Skylar

Wicked Evolution, Jr. is a 750-lb miniature van that can stand upright, partially transform into a vaguely beast-like creature, roar, and breathe fire. It was made by a fellow named Skylar, and is among his many custom-built vehicles:

The entire creation was scratch built in the basement of my house without any special fabrication tools. I just used a cutter, grinder, mig welder and a homemade metal bender. Some parts can be easily found like riding mover rims, garage door springs and big casters you can get in a hardware store. You may need to look harder to find the rest like like special order quad tires, heavy duty electric motors, radio control unit, stainless steel sheet metal, linear actuators and special solenoids (from ebay) and light duty hydraulics. Some steel came from a scrap pile in a junkyard to save money.[...]

It uses 3 sets of linear actuators and hydraulics to transform. First, extensions move from the bottom to push it up while an extension on the back with 2 heavy duty casters catch it as it comes backwards. It uses those back casters to steady it standing. When it first starts to stand, it breaks in half at the back of the doors and folds 90 degrees as the front of the van pulls backwards with hydraulics. The windshield lowers out of view and the front suspension bends in the center also with hydraulics. As it comes to a standing mechanical monster, the middle lifting mechanism tucks upwards, the doors open like wings. The convertible roof opens like a tail. Then the headlights come on and the front grill becomes a face that shoots sparks and flames (from a full size propane tank)

Link via Gizmodo (where there's a video)

Donald G. McNeil, Jr. writes in The New York Times that a new vaccine tested on 16,000 Thai volunteers demonstrated improved resistance to the virus that causes AIDS. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it's a significant discovery. McNeil writes:

Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the army’s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos. They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did.

Although the difference was small, Dr. Kim said it was statistically significant and meant the vaccine was 31.2 percent effective.

Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added, “If you have a product that’s even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there.”

Before you get your hopes up, keep in mind this warning from Zach Weiner about science journalism. We still have a long way to go.

Link via Popular Science

Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Priya Ganapati writes in Wired that researchers at MIT are developing an eye implant that can feed visual imput past damaged cells and directly into the brain. Patients will wear a camera that downloads images into the implant:

It won’t entirely restore normal vision, say the researchers, but it will offer just enough sight to help a blind person navigate a room.[...]

Here’s how the implant works. The glasses that patients wear contains a coil that can wirelessly transmit power to receiving coils surrounding the eyeball. The eyeball holds a microchip encased in a sealed titanium case to avoid damage from water seepage. The chip receives visual information and activates electrodes that in turn fire the nerve cells that carry visual input to the brain.

Link via DVICE

Image: flickr user Orange Acid, used under Creative Commons license.

(YouTube Link)

This video is in Japanese (?) so I can't offer any information about it. But it's clearly about a man who has cut and styled his hair to resemble a front-brimmed hat. Perhaps some Japanese-speaking Neatoramanaut could translate for us.

Via Boing Boing

Photo: Jon Sarriugarte

Jon Sarriugarte, a metal sculptor, and Kyrsten Mate Comoglio, an Oscar-nominated sound effects designer, have been previously featured on Neatorama for their fanciful snail car built out of an old Volkswagen Beetle. Their newest work is the Electrobite. It's a vehicle inspired by the trilobite -- a creature that went extinct 245 million years ago. It debuted at the most recent Burning Man festival:

The hand-tooled exoskeleton is mounted on the drive mechanism of an old electric wheelchair. At night, undermounted blue lights give it an otherworldly glow. Jon says, "People would walk up and ask if it was remote controlled. When I pointed out the leather seat and the joy stick they couldn’t believe you could drive it. Lots of smiling faces when we let them try it out."

Link via Boing Boing

(YouTube Link)

90-year old Lonnie Holloway, of Saluda, South Carolina chose to be buried inside his old Pontiac Catalina. He was entombed with his collection of guns in the passenger seat and next to his wife (who was not in the car). Jerry Garnett writes in The New York Times:

“He said, ‘They’re going to have me with my hat on, driving down the road,’ and I said I’m going to be there. That’s what he wanted. I know that sounds crazy,” Malcom Jones, a friend of Mr. Holloway, told WLTX.com.

Hundreds of onlookers turned out for the service this week at Rock Hill Baptist Church.

“This is what Mr. Holloway wanted,” said the pastor who conducted the graveside service. The attendees responded, “Amen.”

Link via Bits & Pieces

Dmitri Williams of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, et al., conducted a census of video game characters and concluded that non-Whites and women were vastly underrepresented:

Seasoned gamers were recruited to play each game for 30 minutes. The researchers analysed video of the sessions and recorded the demographics of each character that appeared on screen, no matter how briefly. They then weighted the results in proportion to each game's sales. For example, characters in a game selling 2 million copies counted for twice as many character stereotype impressions as those in a game selling 1 million.[...]

Williams and his team found that male characters are "vastly more likely to appear" in games than females. They made up 85 per cent of characters, compared to 51 per cent of the real population.

Compared to the real population, African Americans were under-represented by 13 per cent and Hispanic/Latino people by 78 per cent. Asians were over-represented by 25 per cent and white people by 7 per cent.

The researchers also noted that video games originating in Asia demonstrated a similar disparity.

Link via Popular Science

Image: flickr user Gamer Score Blog used under Creative Commons License.

British jeweler Donald Edge was asked to create a gold, pearl, and diamond-encrustled bottle of Chambord raspberry liqueur. His work is estimated to be worth $2 million and contains 1,100 individual diamonds. It will be entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the "Most Expensive Bottle of Spirits." The bottle was created for promotional purposes at London Fashion Week, a design exhibition that ended today. It now moves to a display at a stage production of Breakfast at Tiffany's in London.

Link via Geekologie

Image: Vogue (UK)

Natalie Avon writes in Popular Science that between 1995 and 2008, 82% of people in the US killed by lightning were male. The experts that she consulted agreed that this was due to behavioral, rather than biological factors:

Peter Todd, a behavioral psychologist at Indiana University, suspects the difference between the sexes boils down to the basic risk-versus-reward systems that have been part of our biological wiring for thousands of years. For women, Todd explains, the priorities are to protect one’s reproductive role and to care for offspring, which outweighs any inclination to attract potential mates by exhibiting bold behavior.

But for men, Todd says, the risk of getting struck by lightning could be outweighed by the reward of proving to other men—and potential female mates—that they’re not afraid of getting struck by lightning. This is particularly true for young men, who have the most to gain by impressing others, thereby raising their status as attractive, daring, healthy mates in the dating pool. And then, zap!

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/are-men-or-women-more-likely-be-hit-lightning

Image: flickr user Kevin Miller, used under Creative Commons license.

A metaphor for life, I guess. Jeremy Hsu writes in Popular Science that Hiroo Iwata of the University of Tsukuba in Japan has developed robotic tiles that sense what direction a user is going in and move ahead to provide a place to step. With further development, it could be used in virtual reality simulators in order to imitate movement over distance:

The robot tiles emerged as the brainchild of Hiroo Iwata, a virtual reality researcher at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. A touch-sensitive conductive fabric covers each robot and gauges the pressure applied by a walking person's foot, which goes toward predicting the next step.

Ultrasonic sensors also help relay position and orientation of each tile back to a central computer that acts as the conductor. It's an oddly serene robotic ballet, even when two tiles have queued up to move down the line.

Video at the link.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/video-japans-robot-tiles-create-infinite-walkway

Image: DigInfo Video News

Image: Job Voyager

Job Voyager is a set of interactive charts showing changing occupations reported to the US Census Bureau from 1850-2000. It was made by Jeffrey Heer of the University of California at Berkeley from data collected by the University of Minnesota's Population Center using the visualization software Flare. You can use the feature to examine the rise and fall of different occupations and gender roles in American history.

Link via Fast Company

Photo: Nathan Sawaya

Here at Neatorama, we're big fans of LEGO artist Nathan Sawaya. His latest project is a functional cello made out of LEGO bricks. At the link, there are more pictures and a time-elapsed video of the construction process.

http://www.brickartist.com/large-sculptures/cello-1.html via Geekologie

Image: Fred Beneson

Emoji are pictographs and emoticons common to text messaging in Japan. The scale of this language has grown so much that Fred Beneson of Creative Commmons wants to translate Herman Melville's Moby Dick into emoji. The novel has 6,438 sentences, and he hopes to crowdsource the translation project out to people interested in completing at least one sentence of the novel.

Link via BoingBoing

Photo: Kenny Irwin

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) has designed an inexpensive laptop computer that it hopes to distribute to children in developing nations. To promote the project, artist Kenny Irwin took one OLPC computer, microwaved it, and sculpted it into the OLPCSlug. It's currently on sale at eBay. Video of the microwaving process at the link.

Link

The blog Instant Shift has compiled pictures of 84 bizarre and unique buildings scattered across the world. A few have already been featured on Neatorama, but most have not yet been posted here. Pictured above is the Crooked House of Sopot, Poland. It was designed by architect Szotynscy Zaleski and built in 2004. Zaleski was inspired by the fanciful work of Polish artist Jan Marcin Szancer, a fantasy and children's literature illustrator.

Link via The Presurfer

Image by flickr user lostajy used under creative commons license.