San Francisco is a city that has hosted and inspired many great writers. So artist Ian Huebert created an enormous map of that city filled with the words of novelists and poets who either wrote their works in those locations, or located their stories there. In the links, you'll find a larger image. And at Strange Maps, you'll find a list of every author and work mentioned.

Larger Image | News Story via Strange Maps | Artist's Website | Image: San Francisco Gate

The fastest human alive, Usain Bolt, can run 28 MPH. But a new study proposes a theoretical maximum of 40 MPH for the human body under ideal conditions:

This provides a new twist on the old school of thought that speed limits depended on how much force a runner could exert against the ground. Past studies showed that sprinters can apply up to 1,000 pounds of force with a single limb during each sprinting step, and so researchers thought that humans simply could not push beyond that point.[...]

One-legged hopping produced ground forces greater than those applied during normal running by 30 percent or more, and active leg muscles also generated about 1.5 to 2 times greater force during one-legged hopping. That shows how humans don't exert the maximum possible force during the act of forward sprinting, the researchers say.

Going one step farther, the researchers also found that the "critical biological limit" depends upon how quickly runners can exert ground force while sprinting. Elite runners have foot-ground contact times of less than one-tenth of a second, and max out ground forces within one-twentieth of one second when their foot first hits the ground.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/scientists-investigate-how-break-biological-speed-limits-humans | Photo: US Department of State

Lockheed Martin's Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) is an actuated exoskeleton that helps a soldier carry up to 200 pounds of weight on its frame. It senses the direction that the user wants to move, and then moves in it. In the links, you find a video from the company showing the HULC in action.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/robotic-super-soldier-suit-gets-more-juice |YouTube Video | Image: Lockheed Martin

Elephants at the Island Safari Centre on Koh Samui, Thailand have been trained to play basketball:

“It takes two or three months of intensive training to teach them basics, but fortunately their standards are improving with each passing day”, said organiser Ning.

The keepers begin by teaching the elephants basic ball control skills, and how to hold the ball in their trunk. The animals are then taught to stand on their hind legs, walk with the ball and finally shoot it through the hoop.

Link | Photo: Barcroft Media

Stonehenge and other historic monuments in the UK are now available on Google Street View as a result of a joint venture between Google and the National Trust:

The pictures were taken late last summer using the 'Google trike' – a three wheeled bike with a Street View camera mounted on it, suited to collecting images in places not easily accessible by car.

Other locations include Stonehenge in Wiltshire, Lindisfarne Castle in Northumberland, Lyme Park in Cheshire and Ham House just outside Richmond-upon-Thames near London.

Link via J-Walk Blog

Eyam is a small village in Derbyshire, UK. In 1665, the bubonic plague hit its population. Rather than flee, the villagers were persuaded that they had a moral obligation to isolate themselves from the outside world in order to prevent the spread of that disease:

They lined up stones to mark the village boundaries, and no one was allowed beyond them. Supplies of food and clothing brought to the village from the outside were left at the boundary stones and were paid for with coins placed in a disinfectant of vinegar and water.

The horror increased as the months passed. By the end of August 1666, two-thirds of the original population had perished. Format burial services were no longer held. When the cemetery became full, the dead were buried in gardens and fields.

Only a fourth of the population had survived when outsiders made contact a year later. Today, although the village was subsequently resettled, much of it is a museum and a memorial to its inhabitants.

http://healthmad.com/health/the-plague-of-eyam-the-village-that-died-to-save-its-neighbors/ via The Presurfer | Official Website | Photo: Cressbrook Multimedia

(Video Link)

This video shows a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) chasing a staphylococcus aureus bacterium. The video was recorded by biochemistry professor David Rogers of Vanderbilt University in the 1950s. Notes on the movement by med school professor Thomas P. Stossel:

Contraction waves are visible along the surface of the moving cell as it moves forward in a gliding fashion. As the neutrophil relentlessly pursues the microbe it ignores the red cells and platelets. However, its leading edge is sufficiently stiff (elastic) to deform and displace the red cells it bumps into. The internal contents of the neutrophil also move, and granule motion is particularly dynamic near the leading edge. These granules only approach the cell surface membrane when the cell changes direction and redistributes its peripheral "gel." After the neutrophil has engulfed the bacterium, note that the cell's movements become somewhat more jerky, and that it begins to extend more spherical surface projections.

http://www.biochemweb.org/neutrophil.shtml via Geekologie

Danish artist Kristine Suhr creates images that move when tabs -- like those on children's pop-up books -- are pulled. Since they're brief Flash videos, there's no way to demonstrate them in motion here at Neatorama, but at the link, you can view a whole gallery of them moving. Warning: sound effects.

http://www.pop-up.dk/VideoPlayer2008/index.htm?p=1&v=11 via DudeCraft

Olivia Putnal of Woman's Day has pictures and descriptions of eight unusual chocolate-covered foods, including crickets, Fritos, beef jerky, and squid. Pictured above is a chocolate-covered onion, which photographer Jean-Paul de Guzman described as eating a raw onion "followed by a bite off of a Hershey's chocolate bar."

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Food/8-Curious-Chocolate-Covered-Creations.html via The Presurfer

Charting The Beatles is a project by graphic designer Michael Deal to express the history of that band through quantitative infographics. Pictured above is one describing their working activities, divided into touring, filming, and recording. Deal invites anyone to participate by contributing their own infographics to a flickr set.

Link via J-Walk Blog | flickr set

Los Angeles-based artist Ramon Coronado made furniture from shopping carts. He calls the project "Mercado Negro" and his ambition lies in "reclaiming an ordinary, everyday object and transforming it into a whole new object." At the link, you can see many more pictures, as well as photographs from his workshop as Coronado constructed these pieces.

http://www.ramoncoronado.info/_archive/2009/mercado_negro/2009_mercado_negro.html via Fast Company | Photo: Ramon Coronado

Why are humans mostly free of body hair, in comparison to other primates? Losing body hair was an evolutionary advantage in that it allowed early hominids to forage over a greater distance in harsher climates. In Scientific American, Mariette DiChristina writes:

Our forebears abandoned their easier foraging habits, traveling longer distances through a tropical landscape to acquire sufficient food to survive. Adding meat to their diets meant more calories, but finding prey also took more work. Their activity level increased and with it their need to dissipate body heat to avoid tissue damage. By 1.6 mya, protohumans had long legs for sustained walking and running. Along with that trait came naked skin and a large number of eccrine sweat glands, which produce moisture that removes body heat through evaporative cooling. The hairs on our head also help to combat overheating, by shielding our big brain from direct sun.

Link | Photo: US Department of Energy

The Lady and the Unicorn is a 15th Century Flemish tapestry, often said to be one of the greatest works of medieval European art. Artist Joey Syta copied the work in Lite Brite -- an illuminated toy popular in the United States since its introduction in the 1960s. It's called My Only Desire and is composed of 55,000 pegs.

Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Joey Syta

Crysomallon squamiferum, also known as the scaly-foot gastropod, was discovered at the bottom of the Indian Ocean in 1999 at a depth of 2420 metres. Its shell is remarkably strong because it is flexible, allowing it to absorb blows from predators and dissipate their energy, rather than shatter:

For example, the shell's outermost layer consists of strong particles of iron sulphide created in the hydrothermal vents, each around 20 nanometres across, embedded in a soft organic matrix secreted by the snail. This structure is designed to crack when hit, but in a way that absorbs energy.

Cracks spread only by fanning out around the iron sulphide particles. This "microcracking" not only absorbs energy, it also ensures that larger cracks do not form. What's more, the particles of iron sulphide may blunt and deform intruding claws, the study suggests.

Scientists who have studied the creature suggest that it might be possible to duplicate the structure synthetically for armor or pipelines.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: JAMSTEC

(YouTube Link)

We've previously posted about a ceiling-walking robot developed by the robotics lab at Ben Gurion University. Here are four more ingenious robot designs developed at that same laboratory, each of which scales walls using different mobility techniques:

First, a magnetic climber that has compliant magnetic wheels and is capable to climb on ferromagnetic surfaces. This robot can be used for inspection of ship hull or bridges. Second, is a Snail inspired wall climbing robot capable of climbing on non metallic surfaces using hot melt glue. The robot secretes the adhesive at the front and peels off the track from the wall at the bottom leaving a trail behind just like the snail does. Third, is a robot that uses sticky wheels in order to attach itself to the wall. It simply has 3Ms sticky tape on the wheels. It can climb on smooth surfaces like glass. Fourth, is a four legged wall climbing robot for climbing on rough surfaces. It has 12 claws made of fishing hooks mounted on each footpad, and it climbs like cat or other rodents.

via Gizmodo