Need a good excuse for why you're late to/absent from work? The Office Kid kit lets you pretend to have a child, which you can then use as an excuse for your questionable work ethic. Each kit comes with a framed picture of a child (ethnicity of your choice), a work of children's art, and a list of suggested excuses. For additional fees, you can have the child photoshopped into a sports team picture or a doctor's note on official-looking stationery.
The New York Times has a slideshow of famous faked photographs, including Abraham Lincoln's head on John Calhoun's body and Stalin's erasure of his enemies. Shown above is the before and after photo manipulation where Nikolai Yezhov, a one-time head of Soviet's secret police NKVD and a central player in Stalin's Great Purge was himself purged - from life and this photograph.
Architect Sou Fujimoto created a house inspired by the table game Jenga. It consists of cedar blocks 35 cm wide and was completed in Kumamoto, Japan in 2008.
Inventor James Dyson's fountain, inspired by the work of MC Escher, gives the illusion that its water flows uphill:
Covering the ramp is a glass surface. Water is pumped in at the bottom, and comes out of the opening at the top. At the opening, some of the water is diverted back down the ramp, covering the glass in a thin layer of water.
Compressed air is also pumped in where the water enters - bubbles then travel up the ramp to the opening. These bubbles, combined with the thin layer of water going downhill, are what create the illusion that the surface of the ramp is not just a glass lid.
Frank Levine began running competitively at the age of 65 -- nothing big, just a marathon. He's run seventeen marathons since that time. Levine just broke a world record for the 5000-meter in the 95-99 category with a finishing time of 50 minutes and 10 seconds.
The EniCycle, invented by Aleksander Polutnik, has a three-hour battery charge and keeps upright through the use of gyroscopes (like the Segway). It's not yet in production, but there are currently two working models. Video of them in action at the link.
The QLOCKTWO, created by the German design firm Biegert & Funk, spells out time in five minute increments. Four dots in the corners let you know precisely which minute it is. The clock retails in Europe for about $1,600.
It's cool enough to have a realistic Bumblebee costume, but what makes this one Neato is that it actually transforms from robot to car mode. I don't have any more information about this clip. CrunchGear thinks that it's being used as a promotional gimmick in a car dealership, which seems like a reasonable guess.
Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne programmed robots to move around an area, looking for particular rings designated as food, and avoid others designated as poison. Whenever they found food, they were programmed to flash a light. This light attracted the other robots, leading them toward the food source. When the program was altered to give the robots a measure of autonomy, they gradually ceased to flash their lights and alert their competitors that they had found food. Here's the abstract of the journal article:
Reliable information is a crucial factor influencing decision-making, and thus fitness in all animals. A common source of information comes from inadvertent cues produced by the behavior of conspecifics. Here we use a system of experimental evolution with robots foraging in an arena containing a food source to study how communication strategies can evolve to regulate information provided by such cues. Robots could produce information by emitting blue light, which other robots could perceive with their cameras. Over the first few generations, robots quickly evolved to successfully locate the food, while emitting light randomly. This resulted in a high intensity of light near food, which provided social information allowing other robots to more rapidly find the food. Because robots were competing for food, they were quickly selected to conceal this information. However, they never completely ceased to produce information. Detailed analyses revealed that this somewhat surprising result was due to the strength of selection in suppressing information declining concomitantly with the reduction in information content. Accordingly, a stable equilibrium with low information and considerable variation in communicative behaviors was attained by mutation-selection. Because a similar co-evolutionary process should be common in natural systems, this may explain why communicative strategies are so variable in many animal species.
Although not directly related to the flesh-eating robot program, I'm sure that robots able to use humans for fuel would prefer to lie about their intentions.
This microwave safe and dishwasher safe stoneware pizza plate is divided into the first eighty-eight digits of the constant pi, should you ever desire to calculate its circumference.
This design, patented in 1945 by Henry Wallace, never made it into mass production (or, I suspect, even a prototype). Odd, that. From the text of the patent:
One of the objects of this invention is to provide a tank having an extensible leg capable of imparting a series of vertical oscillations to the tank, and having means to vary the angle of inclination of the leg to obtain directional movement of the tank.
Another of the objects of the invention is to provide a tank which is adapted to traverse difficult terrain.
Yet another object of the invention is to provide a tank which is propelled in such a manner that its progress is intermittent, thereby rendering it a difficult target. Still another object is to provide a tank provided with means whereby the direction of its course may be rapidly changed, thereby rendering it a difficult target.
Navy chemists claim to have refined short chain hydrocarbons from seawater and hope to develop kerosene-based jet fuel from the process:
The process involves extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and combining it with hydrogen – obtained by splitting water molecules using electricity – to make a hydrocarbon fuel...
Dorner and colleagues found that using the usual cobalt-based catalyst on seawater-derived CO2 produced almost entirely methane gas. Switching to an iron catalyst resulted in only 30 per cent methane being produced, with the remainder short-chain hydrocarbons that could be refined into jet fuel.
The Good Afternoon Clock uses beams of light, alternating along the interior of the ring, to indicate hours, minutes, and seconds. It's a product of the Mile Project and was exhibited at the Salone Satellite international design fair in Milan in 2008. This appears to be a one-of-a-kind item, so it's not yet available for retail sales.
