Photo: Erin Papacki

Creating a robot capable of grasping a variety of door nobs but is light enough to fit onto a wheelchair is quite an engineering challenge. But Erin Rapacki of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell was up to the task, and built one from only $2,000:

A door-opening robot must be able to grasp a variety of designs of door knobs and handles. It also needs to calculate "how much force is needed to open the door, the twisting angles to unlatch the door, and how much force is needed to unlatch it", says Erin Rapacki, now at Anybots in Mountain View, California [...]

To keep her device simple, Rapacki used a single motor and avoided the expense of cameras and elaborate sensors. Instead, a motor-driven set of gears extends the gripper towards the handle with its three fingers spread apart (see diagram).

Rapacki first tried flexible neoprene fingers, thinking that they could bend to grasp the knob, but these proved too thick and soft. Stiff plastic fingers with plates to constrain their sideways motion proved much more effective.

She also added a slip clutch to the drive system, to allow the device to hold and turn the knob at the same time as pushing or pulling.

Link via Popular Science

Image:Alexandre Suannes

From the cartography blog Strange Maps comes this Portuguese-language chart of per capita wine consumption around the world, shaped like a bundle of grapes. It was created by Brazilian graphic designer Alexandre Suannes. Luxembourg appears to be the largest consumer, with 5.91 liters per person. You can view a larger image at the link.

Link

Image: willito, screenshot by SciFiWire

YouTube user willito has a video of Battlestar Galactica cake that has a shifting, glowing red eye.

YouTube Link via DVICE

Photo: Andrew Byrom

Designer Andrew Byrom has developed a font derived from Venetian blinds opened and closed at various angles and lengths. Byrom, a native of Liverpool, UK, studied design at the Cumbria Institute of Art and Design and now teaches at California State University in Los Angeles. He has won numerous awards for his typographical work in the past few years.

http://www.ignant.de/2009/11/24/venetian-von-andrew-byrom/ via DudeCraft | Artist's Website

Image: Olly Moss

Artist Olly Moss, previously featured on Neatorama for his parody of Shepard Fairey, has created a poster summarizing the weaknesses of foes that you regularly encounter. Whether you're fighting Pokémon, vampires, AT-ATs, or Achilles, this poster will keep you focused on a quick victory.

Link via Geekologie | Artist's Website

Photo: Prudence Staite

Food artist Prudence Staite, previously featured on Neatorama, recently recreated scenes from the movie Snow White using fourteen different types of apples to express different colors, shapes, and textures. The works were commissioned by Disney to promote the film. You can view three more at the link.

Link via Urlesque | Artist's Website

(Video Link)

It's probably not strong enough to support a human user, but Liddy Scheffknecht and Armin B. Wagner's pop-up cardboard office sure is nifty-looking. The entire structure folds into a portable flat panel.

Via Gizmodo | Armin B. Wagner | Liddy Scheffknecht | Previously on Neatorama: Cardboard Office

Image: Kalimedia

Cartography blog Strange Maps has a map of the British Isles showing current place names translated into modern English. It's one from a collection known as The Atlas of True Names. You can view a larger image at the link.

Link | Other Maps of Translated Place Names | News Story

(YouTube Link)

Goodnight Keith Moon is a parody of the classic children's picture book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. This version by Bruce Worden and Clare Cross features Keith Moon (1946-1978), drummer for The Who.

The humor is pretty dark, so readers who don't wish to have haunting memories Goodnight Moon should probably skip this one.

Link via Popped Culture

Photo: Stoneridge Engineering

Lichtenberg figures are the branching patterns formed by electrical discharges, discovered by 18th Century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. He captured the images in dust on charged plates, but in the 20th Century, laboratories used solid blocks of acrylic, such as the one pictured above. "Captured Lightning" was created by shooting five million volts into the acrylic by the art/engineering firm Stoneridge Engineering. More pictures and an exhaustively detailed scientific explanation at the link.

http://205.243.100.155/frames/lichtenbergs.html via The Presurfer

John Madden of GeekDad relates the story of how the 'smoot' became a measurement of distance:

Way back in 1958, the MIT chapter of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity used pledge Oliver R. Smoot to measure the Harvard Bridge in Massachusetts, coining the smoot as a unit of measurement in the process – one smoot equaling five feet, seven inches. Smoot (the man) lay down on the bridge, his position was marked, and he moved on (or was moved on – eventually he so tired from the movement that his frat brothers carried him), until the bridge was established as being 364.4 smoots, plus or minus an ear, in length. Appropriately, Smoot would later become chairman of the American National Standards Institute.

Madden then passes on ten more recent forms of measurement, including some of his own devising. These include the milliwheaton (number of Twitter followers), the Warhol (fame duration), and the Emmet (power). The latter comes from the movie Back to the Future:

1 Emmet = 1.21 Gigawatts, or the amount of power required to operated the flux capacitor in a modified DeLorean DMC-12. GeekDad note – when describing the Emmet, it’s pronounced ‘Jigga’ watt. There was briefly some debate as to whether this should be called a ‘lloyd’ or a docbrown’, But for simplicity (and to honour the character rather than the actor - though don’t get me wrong, Christopher Lloyd rocks) I’ve gone for ‘Emmet’.

In the comments, propose Neatorama-themed measurements.

Link | Images: MIT and Universal Studios, respectively

John F. Talarico of the podcast show Bloodthirsty Vegetarians created two 20-sided dice out of stained glass and black and copper patina. The orange one is called "Fire." There are more detailed images in the flickr photostream.

Image via d20 Blog | Flickr Stream | Official Website

(Video Link)

Pedro M. Cruz, a graduate student in information visualization and interaction design, created this time-elapsed representation of the rise and decline of the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish overseas empires from 1800 to 2000. He writes:

The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. I chose the maritime empires because of their more abrupt and obtuse evolution as the visual emphasis is on their decline. The first idea to represent a territory independence was a mitosis like split — it’s harder to implement than it looks. Each shape tends to retain an area that’s directly proportional to the extent of the occupied territory on a specific year. The datasource is mostly our beloved wikipedia. The split of a territory is often the result of an extent process and it had to be visualized on a specific year. So I chose to pick the dates where it was perceived a de facto independence (e.g. the most of independence declarations prior to the new state’s recognition). Dominions of an empire, were considered part of that empire and thus not independent.

Link via Hit & Run

Charlie Sorrel has an article at Wired exploring the potential development of LED-lit tattoos. New chips are small enough to be placed under the skin, mounted on a sheet of silk that dissolves into the body:

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.

These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chips to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example.

Chips are already used inside bodies, most notably the tiny RFID tags injected into pets. But the flexible nature of these “tattooed” circuits means they can move elastically with the body, sitting in places that a rigid circuit board couldn’t.

The electronics company Philips is developing the idea, and you can see a concept video of their work at the link.

Link | Image: flickr user spacemanbobby

This is a functional mug made out of woven strips of bacon, filled with melted cheese.

I have not yet been able to find the name of the genius responsible for this holy creation. Will s/he step forward and claim the appropriate adulation?

http://www.thisisfreakingridiculous.com/tifr/2009/11/19/bacon-beer-mug.html via Geekologie