Yesterday, the American Chemical Society's database of identified, unique chemical substances hit the 50 million mark. Most of these discoveries were made quite recently:

“A novel substance is either isolated or synthesized every 2.6 seconds on the average during the past 12 months, day and night, seven days a week in the world,” said Dr. Hideaki Chihara, Ph.D. chemist and former president of Japan Association for International Chemical Information.

The rate new chemicals are being produced and isolated is astounding. It took 33 years to get the first 10 million chemicals registered and a mere nine months to get the last 10 million chemicals into the database. In part, the acceleration is due to better tracking by the American Chemical Society, but laboratories around the world are also just producing (and patenting) a tremendous amount of molecules.

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Image by flickr user delta avi delta used under creative commons license.

Eighteen-year-old Milan Karki of Nepal has invented a new type of solar panel that uses human hair as a conductor:

The hair replaces silicon, a pricey component typically used in solar panels, and means the panels can be produced at a low cost for those with no access to power, he explained....

The solar panel, which produces 9 V (18 W) of energy, costs around £23 to make from raw materials.

But if they were mass-produced, Milan says they could be sold for less than half that price, which could make them a quarter of the price of those already on the market.

Melanin, a pigment that gives hair its colour, is light sensitive and also acts as a type of conductor. Because hair is far cheaper than silicon the appliance is less costly.

Link (Photo: Tom Van Cakenberghe/Barcroft Media) - via Gizmodo

(YouTube Link)

Google's Japan division released this stop motion film explaining (in a rather fanciful way) how Street View works. It features a cute little robot puttering around town, taking film photographs and painting over license plate numbers with a marker. The video is part of an effort to make the practice less appear less invasive of individuals' privacy.

Via Boing Boing

The first Nerf product debuted forty years ago today. It began as a humble orange ball created by toy developer Reyn Guyer. His team designed several games that could be played with it and marketed it to Milton Bradley. That company turned him down. So Guyer took his product to Parker Brothers, who bought his idea, threw out the game rules, and began selling the ball as a single product. The company named the product "Nerf" after the packing material that off-roaders used to wrap around their roll-bars.

http://www.reynguyer.com/nerf.htm via GeekDad

Image via flickr user Jake Sutton used under creative commons license.

Yesterday, the residents of Samoa began driving on the left side of the road instead of the right. This is the first major switch since the 1970s, when Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone made the change. Randy James of Time magazine has an article exploring how different nations came to use different sides of the road:

Theories differ, but there's no doubt Napoleon was a major influence. The French have used the right since at least the late 18th century (there's evidence of a Parisian "keep-right" law dating to 1794). Some say that before the French Revolution, aristocrats drove their carriages on the left, forcing the peasantry to the right. Amid the upheaval, fearful aristocrats sought to blend in with the proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations he conquered, including Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Hitler, in turn, ordered right-hand traffic in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s. Nations that escaped right-handed conquest, like Great Britain, preserved their left-handed tradition.

Link via Outside the Beltway

Image by flickr user multitrack used under creative commons license.

(YouTube Link)

The Lucky Dragon is a work by Japanese artist Yanobe Kenji. It is a water and fire-shooting articulated steel dragon head with glowing eyes mounted on a 15-meter long cruise boat. The video above is of the boat in action at Aqua Metropolis festival in Osaka. It's scheduled to make similar demonstrations in Osaka's waterways until October 12.

Artist's Website

Link via DVICE

Image: DNA Art Forms

Lauren Davis of io9 describes four companies that make a portrait of you, right down to the profile of your DNA. Above is a portrait of a woman named Catherine from DNA Art Forms. It all started with a cheek swab:

After identifying 15 unique regions of your genetic code, clients consult with an artist as to how they want their DNA represented, be it as an abstract form, a landscape, or as an actual portrait including your image. Portraits start at $1500, and clients are consulted each step of the way, approving concept sketches before paint ever touches canvas.

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Photo: Popular Mechanics

The magazine Popular Mechanics has issued its Backyard Geniuses Award. It's like a Nobel Prize, but for people who complete amazing technical projects of questionable utility. Pictured above is a giant car-crushing mechanical hand by Christian Ristow, a former employee of Jim Henson's Creature Shop:

In 2007 Christian Ristow, an artist and former animatronics designer for the movie industry, demonstrated his first working incarnation of the Hand of Man at a robotics festival in Amsterdam. Much of his time since then has been spent re-engineering and refining the design of the 27-foot-long hydraulically actuated appendage, exhibiting more and more capable crushers at a series of public venues­. Ristow’s latest mechanical steel limb has 90-degree wrist rotation and improved mobility in the finger joints. It is powered by a 90-hp Perkins 1104C-44T four-cylinder diesel engine and is controlled through a glove worn by the operator. At demonstrations, that operator is usually a random member of the audience. “I’ve built other large-scale radio-control robots for shows over the years, but I always felt like I was the one having the most fun,” Ristow says. “This democratizes the crushing power.”

http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/workshop/4329771.html?nav=RSS20&src=syn&dom=yah_buzz&mag=pop

(Video Link)

Muzorama is a surrealist short film created by students at the animation studio Superinfocom and presented last month at the Siggraph 2009 computer animation festival. The six students involved, Laurent Monneron, Elsa Brehin, Raphaël Calamote, Mauro Carraro, Maxime Cazaux, Emilien Davaux and Axel Tillement were assigned to create an animated short based upon the universe of an artist within six weeks. They selected the French illustrator Muzo.

Via The Presurfer

Matthew Moore of The Daily Telegraph has a list of fifty technological or cultural features being eroded or eliminated by the Internet. Here are a few samples. What would you add to the list?

1) The art of polite disagreement
While the inane spats of YouTube commencers may not be representative, the internet has certainly sharpened the tone of debate. The most raucous sections of the blogworld seem incapable of accepting sincerely held differences of opinion; all opponents must have "agendas"....

3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There's no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will "album albums" like Radiohead's Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?...

22) Enforceable copyright
The record companies, film studios and news agencies are fighting back, but can the floodgates ever be closed?...

Link via Urlesque

Image via flickr user William Hook used under creative commons license.

The U.S. Department of Transportation granted $100,000 to the Idaho-based startup Solar Roadways to build a prototype roadway composed of solar cells and glass. The accumulated energy could, hypothetically, be used to light the roadway and provide electricity to consumers:

The 12- x 12-foot panels, which each cost $6,900, are designed to be embedded into roads. When shined upon, each panel generates an estimated 7.6 kilowatt hours of power each day. If this electricity could be pumped into the grid, the company predicts that a four-lane, one-mile stretch of road with panels could generate enough power for 500 homes. Although it would be expensive, covering the entire US interstate highway system with the panels could theoretically fulfill the country's total energy needs. The company estimates that this would take 5 billion panels, but could "produce three times more power than we've ever used as a nation - almost enough to power the entire world."

The Solar Road Panels also contain embedded LED lights that "paint" the road lines from beneath to provide safer nighttime driving. The LEDs could also be programmed to alert drivers of detours or road construction ahead, and can even sense wildlife on the road and warn drivers to slow down. The roads could also contain embedded heating elements in the surface to prevent snow and ice from building up on the road. Further, in the future, fully electric vehicles could recharge along the roadway and in parking lots, making electric cars practical for long trips.

Link via DVICE

Image: Solar Roadways

Photo: China Daily

Tao Xiangli, a Chinese inventor, is reported to have built a functional submarine:

Amateur inventor Tao, 34, made a fully functional submarine, which has a periscope, depth control tanks, electric motors, manometer, and two propellers, from old oil barrels and tools which he bought at a second-hand market. He took 2 years to invent and test the submarine which costs 30,000 yuan (US$4,385).

This comes a month after a Chinese farmer was reported to have built a helicopter from spare parts.

Link via Gizmodo

The world's largest bottle of whiskey was unveiled yesterday in Britain:

Dru McPherson and Mike Drury made the monster malt to put the village of Tomintoul, Banffshire, on the map.

The giant 1½metre bottle holds 105.3 litres of 14-year-old Tomintoul single malt.

A German glassmaker created the 7mm thick pyrex bottle, and a massive cork was specially made to fit.

Image via flickr user Kyle May used under creative commons license. Because of very strict copyright restrictions at The Sun, I can't show the picture of the bottle itself. But it's at the link, and it's huge.

Link via J-Walk Blog

Photo: TUM Institute of Metal Forming and Casting

Josef Mair and fellow engineers at the Technical University of Munich, Germany were inspired by the hook and loop concept of velcro to create a metal version:

Conventional hook-and-loop fasteners are used for everything from bandages to cable boots in aircraft and securing prosthetic limbs. Mair thinks his spring-steel fastener is tough enough to be used for building facades or car assembly. "A car parked in direct sunlight can reach temperatures of 80 °C, and temperatures of several hundred °C can arise around the exhaust manifold," he says, but Metaklett should be able to shrug off such extremes.

The fastening is made from perforated steel strips 0.2 millimetres thick, one kind bristling with springy steel brushes and the other sporting jagged spikes.

Link via Gizmodo

Scientists have long speculated about the existence of magnetic materials that have only one pole, instead of both negative and postive poles. Even our resident mad scientist has written about the subject. But now, Claudio Castelnovo of the University of Oxford thinks that his team has found evidence of the existence of these monopoles in certain rare-materials known as "spin ices":

At low temperatures, there is still some magnetic wiggle room in the spin ice's lattice structure, but not a lot—the magnetic freedom of the system is frustrated, so to speak. "As a result, this is a substance that has degrees of freedom that look the same, microscopically, as you would see in a fridge magnet," Castelnovo says. "But a fridge magnet is able to order so as to act as a fridge magnet and stick to metals, while this one is not able to achieve this level of ordering in spite of having this magnetic structure inside, because of this frustration."

Internally, the tiny magnetic components arrange themselves head to tail in strings, like chains of bar magnets stretching across a table in different directions. In a very cold, clean sample, those strings form closed loops. But excitation induced by a rise in temperature can introduce tiny defects in these chains, Castelnovo says—in the bar-magnet analogue, one of the magnets is flipped, breaking the head-to-tail continuity. "You have your path that is north–south–north–south, and at a certain point one of the needles actually twists 180 degrees and points the wrong way," he explains.

On either side of that defect, all of a sudden, is a concentration of magnetic charge—two norths at one end, two souths at the other. Those concentrations can float free along the string, acting as—voilà—magnetic monopoles.

Link

Image by flickr user Stinging Eyes used under creative commons license