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This music video for the song "Here Come the Guns" by Choo Choo La Rouge features a series of moving flipbooks. It was put together by animator Greg Condon. From an interview with the artist:

CF: Why did you choose flip bookery as your medium?

GC: I used to make flip books on post it notes all the time as a kid and have always wanted to do something where the action spills from one flip book to another. The rhythm of this song seemed to time out perfect with flipping through a post it note pad, so it felt like a good match!

Via Urlesque

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Kung Fu artist Zhang Tingting of Kaifeng, China, decided to become a Buddhist nun. This required shaving her head. To mark the end of her secular life, she decided to pull a car with her hair:

The 52-year-old artist has performed across China for decades, after taking up martial arts when she was 17. She began living the life of a nun two years ago.

Before bidding her meter-long braid farewell, she pulled six passenger cars some 50 meters (164 ft) through a Beijing suburb, then repeated the feat with ten cars, for about 30 meters, in her hometown of Kaifeng, Henan Province.

Although Zhang and her plait are now permanently separated, the hair has been preserved. Authorities are considering sending it on a pilgrimage to sacred Buddhist sites in Tibet, or displaying it in a local museum.

Link via The Corner

Image: Worth 1000 user Sylver

Charlie Jane Anders of the science fiction blog io9 has assembled a gallery of some of the best photoshop pieces that blend Star Wars and Western religious art. Among Anders' sources are the photoshop contests of Worth 1000 and Something Awful. The image above is derivative of Leonardo da Vinci's Litta Madonna.

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Gil Weinberg and Scott Driscoll of Georgia Tech developed a robot that can improvise rhythms as it hears music:

Haile is a robotic percussionist that can listen to live players, analyze their music in real-time, and use the product of this analysis to play back in an improvisational manner. It is designed to combine the benefits of computational power and algorithmic music with the richness, visual interactivity, and expression of acoustic playing. We believe that when collaborating with live players, Haile can facilitate a musical experience that is not possible by any other means, inspiring players to interact with it in novel expressive manners, which leads to novel musical outcome.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~gilwein/Haile.htm via The Presurfer

Psychological researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands conducted a study which supports the popular impression that men lose their minds in the presence of attractive women:

The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive...

Women, however, were not affected by chatting to a handsome man.

This may be simply because men are programmed by evolution to think more about mating opportunities.

Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never met before, that he could not remember his address when she asked him where he lived.

Researchers said it was as if he was so keen to make an impression he 'temporarily absorbed most of his cognitive resources.'

Link via The Presurfer (Photo: Getty)

That's the question that Jeremy Hsu asks, given innovations in genetic engineering:

In 2006, researchers found six Pakistani children who felt no pain due to an inactivated gene, and who constantly had bruises and cuts. One fell into the habit of putting knives through his hand and walking barefoot on coals, before his untimely death.

Still, scientists already know that humans can intellectually dissociate the sensation of pain from how much it bothers them. Lab experiments with mice have also suggested a way to disconnect that pain sensation without totally leaving animals vulnerable to a world of hurt.

Due the concern among some meat-eaters that the animals that provide their food suffer physical pain while being raised and slaughtered, Hsu wonders if geneticists may be able to create animals that cannot feel pain. Would it be ethical to do so? What do you think?

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/ethical-debate-pain-free-beef

Image: Mitch Romanowski Design

Image: Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph has an image gallery of twenty websites when they were first published. It includes Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Craiglist. The image above is of the White House's website when it was launched in 1994.

Link via Urlesque

Image: Physorg.com

How do you earthquake-proof a building? Apparently it involves allowing the building to shake in a controlled fashion. Clay Dillow explains one new use of this approach:

A research team led by Stanford and the University of Illinois successfully tested a structural system that holds a building together through a magnitude-seven earthquake, and even pulls it back upright on its foundation when the quaking stops. The key: embracing the shaking, by limiting the damage to a few flexible, replaceable areas within the building's frame.

When a quake strikes, the new system dissipates energy through steel frames in the building's core and exterior. These frames are free to rock up and down within fittings fixed at their bases. Steel tendons made from twisted steel cables run the length of each frame, keeping the frames from moving so much that the building could shear. When the quake stops, these tensile tendons pull the frames back down into the "shoes" at their bases, returning the building to its plumb, upright position.

So where does all that energy go? At the base of each frame is a flexible steel "fuse" that takes the brunt of the force, keeping the frame and constituent tendons from shouldering the entire load. The fuses are easily replaceable when they blow -- just like an electrical fuse -- so after a quake, the building can be refitted with fresh fuses for its next bout with Earth's occasional tectonic fits.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/new-earthquake-resistant-design-keeps-buildings-standing-during-violent-quakes

Photo: Snakeliner

Andrew Liszewski of OhGizmo! suspects that the Snakeliner Presidential Suite may be the most extravagant travel trailer on the market. When fully expanded, its 969 square feet of space include a waterbed, central heating, and a whirlpool. That's the base model, priced at $930,000. If you're able and willing to spend more, you can get options like a helicopter landing site and a motorboat in the cellar. Note that it probably can't be hauled by a bicycle.

Link via OhGizmo!

Image: Raygun Studio

Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnologist at the University of Washington, writes that in the future, biotech innovations could lead to display screens inside contact lenses:

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.

Link via CrunchGear

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This video by YouTube user Elman511 shows a chicken egg that contains another chicken egg -- shell and all -- inside. I suspected this was a hoax until I read about the phenomenon of ovum in ovo:

Douglas Russell, speaking about the phenomenon in the New Scientist, said: "As the curator of the British Natural History Museum egg collection, I've come across quite a few examples of egg oddities.

"Double eggs (as opposed to multiple-yolked eggs) are less common than some other zoological anomalies and consequently the ovum in ovo has attracted specific scholarly attention for hundreds of years.

"Several theories have been proposed for the origin of double eggs.

"The most likely suggests that the normal rhythmic muscular action, or peristalsis, that moves a developing egg down the oviduct malfunctions in some way."

Link via Bits & Pieces

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The pop culture blog Urlesque has called for next Wednesday, September 9th, to be a day in which cats are absent from the Internet. Ostensibly, Urlesque seeks to end the meme-driven exploitation of cats, but I suspect that it may find broad support for the movement among those who weary of lolcats, piano-playing cats, and other examples of feline ubiquity on the Internet.

What do you think? Should September 9th be a day without cats on the Internet?

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This CBC news story describes a brain surgery simulator that doctors in Halifax, Canada use for practice before cutting open real patients. It simulates not a generic human brain, but the brain of the specific patient:

First, patient data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is rendered into a 3-D, high-resolution model of an individual's brain. After the model is loaded into the system, doctors can touch and manipulate tumors and other virtual objects on screens in real time using a physical instrument resembling a scalpel. The instrument has six degrees of freedom and re-creates the force-feedback of the real tool and the varying resistance of tissue in brain regions with differing toughness. Meanwhile, photo-realistic on-screen imagery shows the simulated surgery, including bleeding and pulsing gray matter.

Link via Popular Science

Photo: Kenneth Suslick

Chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a testing implement that mimics the way human taste buds detect sweetness:

A computer compares scans of the array of dots before and after the paper is wetted with an eyedropper full of liquid.

After running dozens of samples of mystery artificial sweeteners dissolved in water or tea, the research team reported that their tongue could pick out the sweetener used with with 100 percent accuracy.

Potential applications include detecting noxious gases, harmful bacteria, and providing early warnings for lung cancer (which Miss C mentioned yesterday).

Link via Boing Boing

Behold the blessings of technology:

After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical. The hotter a fart, the faster it spreads. “It beeps faster if it’s a high ranker, and a voice rates it on a scale of zero to nine,” he says. “If it ranks a nine, a fan comes on to blow it away. It even records the noise so you can play it back later.” After a few months of construction, they began field tests. “Well, the sample data wasn’t the entire school, but we definitely tested it,” Salas says.

The developers suggest that their invention could be used to evaluate the health of livestock, detect hydrogen-sulfide-producing bacteria in hospitals, or test for bad breath.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/there-scientific-way-measure-fart-smell via GearFuse

Photo credit: Robert Clain and Miguel Salas