Not only is the placebo effect becoming stronger, but it's now been imaged for the first time by researchers with fMRI machines. Falk Eippert at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany led the study:

Later, with an fMRI scanner on, the researchers rubbed "control" and "painkiller" creams onto two different spots on each volunteer's left forearm and applied the same level of heat to each spot, 15 times.

The fake "painkiller" cream worked: volunteers said they experienced 26 per cent less pain on the "painkiller"-treated patch of their arm, compared with the "control"-treated area.

Meanwhile, the fMRI scanner witnessed the placebo effect. When skin treated with the "control" cream was heated, an area of the dorsal horn located on the left side of volunteers' lower necks lit up, suggesting increased neural activity there in response to pain. However, this signal disappeared in the "painkiller" trials.

Link via Popular Science | Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

1962, a NASA administrator named James Webb decided to give artists broad access to the agency's facilities and programs. In the ensuing five decades, a vast body of work was created by those artists. Many of their compositions have been compiled into a new book called NASA/Art: 50 Years of Exploration by James Dean and Bertram Ulrich. Discover magazine has provided ten visually stunning examples from this book. Copyright restrictions prevent me from placing any here, but you can few them all at the link.

Link | Amazon Link

Image: Anne Cavanagh and Dave McCarthy

The Wellcome Image Awards are given annually for achievement in scientific imagery. The 2009 winners were announced yesterday in London. Among those winners was the above image showing:

...the synthetic polymers used to coat a drug, either to target the release of the drug in a specific part of the digestive tract or to allow the drug to be released slowly. Polymers play an important role in reducing side-effects of drugs, as well as the number of times a patient needs to take a medication.

Scanning electron micrograph images are taken in black and white and are coloured later. The orange spheres contain the drug and the encapsulating co-polymers are coloured blue.

You can view more amazing works by prize winners at the link.

http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/gallery.aspx# via io9 | Information About the Competition

(YouTube Link)

Klenginem is a German rapper who performs in the Klingon language, mostly modified Eminem songs. Here is his performance of "SuvwI'pu' qan tu'lu'be", which is known in English as "Without Me."

Official Website via Popped Culture

Researchers Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China created a device that partially simulates the effects (to a limited scale) of a black hole. It bends light differently from a the way that a black hole does, but it will readily absorb it:

The hole is the latest clever device to use 'metamaterials', specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build 'invisibility carpets' and super-clear lenses.[...]

The new meta-black hole also bends light, but in a very different way. Rather than relying on gravity, the black hole uses a series of metallic 'resonators' arranged in 60 concentric circles. The resonators affect the electric and magnetic fields of a passing light wave, causing it to bend towards the centre of the hole. It spirals closer and closer to the black hole's 'core' until it reaches the 20 innermost layers. Those layers are made of another set of resonators that convert light into heat. The result: what goes in cannot come out. "The light into the core is totally absorbed," Cui says.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091015/full/news.2009.1007.html?s=news_rss via Popular Science | Image: NASA

Photo: megpi

This cake inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night was created by flickr user megpi of Silver Lake, California.

Link via Make | Starry Night at the MoMA

UPDATE 10/14/09: In the comments, basketcasey points out that the bottom two layers are inspired by works of Monet.

(YouTube Link)

Princeton neuroscientist David Tank wanted to study individual neurons in a mouse's hippocamus as it moves. But the movement of the mouse's body prevented accurate readings. So he placed the mouse on a giant trackball and let it run through a virtual maze from the video game Quake 2 displayed on screens. Brandon Keim writes in Wired:

Studying individual neurons has been possible in cell cultures, but brains in a dish behave different than real, living brains. Tracking individual neurons in moving animals has been impossible.

“The neurons move back and forth while you’re trying to measure things,” said Tank. “So we developed a way to keep the head fixed in space, but still have mice perform behaviors that are usually studied in mice running through a maze.”

Tank’s team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball’s movement as the mouse runs.

Those readings were the input for the researchers’ virtual reality software — a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it “a mini-IMAX theater.”

Link via Popular Science

Photo: Motoblog.it

An anonymous reader of the Italian-language site Motoblog.it made a Vespa-shaped rocking horse for his nephew Diego. Who wants to take it out for a spin?

Link (Google Translator version) via CrunchGear

(Video Link)

Artist Karolina Sobecka and software designer Jim George created Sniff -- a computer generated projection of a dog that responds to the actions of people passing by a storefront. Here's how it works:

People on the sidewalk are monitored by an IR camera in openFrameworks. In oF each individual person is isolated and assigned a unique id for the duration of their interaction. Each persons’ position and gesture information is continually sent to Unity3d via OSC networking protocol. In Unity, an artificial intelligence system representing the dog forms relationships with the individuals. He chooses which person to pay attention to, is able to move towards them or back away, responds to their gestures and initiates gestures of his own. Based on the interaction he gets excited or bored, friendly or aggressive, which is reflected in his behavior.

Link via Urlesque | Artist's Website

(Video Link)

Do you remember the the head-crushing sketch from The Kids in the Hall? Artist Chris O'Shea created something like it, but on a grand scale, in this augmented reality demonstration. As the people of Liverpool walk along the city streets, they are projected onto a huge LED screen. A giant hand appears on the screen and torments or picks up their images.

Link via Make

(YouTube Link)

iRobot, the company that invented the Roomba household vacuuming robot, is developing a robot that locomotes by inflating and deflating sections of its outer skin, moving contents inside toward its destination. Kristina Grifantini writes at MIT's Technology Review:

This week at IROS 09 (Intelligent Robots and Systems), iRobot and the University of Chicago unveiled a soft, blobby robot that looks something like an inflating marshmallow.

The new robot, called chembot, changes the shape of its stretchy polymer skin using a technique called "jamming skin enabled locomotion". This means that different sections of the robot inflate or deflate separately; controlling this inflation and deflation enables the robot to move. DARPA, which is funding the project, hopes to use the robot to squeeze into small holes or under doors, which I'm guessing would be used for sophisticated surveillance.

Link via Geekologie | Company Website

Image: Nicholas Lampert

Collage artist Nicolas Lampert combines the joys of lovely landscapes and mountains of meat. In an interview with ArtSlant, he wrote about the juxtapositions that he creates in his meatscapes:

AR: A lot of artists are interested in using spectacle as a prime component of their work. Whether it’s hanging a working locomotive from a crane, suspending cars in the Guggenheim rotunda, or diamonds on a skull, spectacle plays a key role. How does the idea of spectacle play into your work, and how is it different from the way other artists are using it?

NL: Spectacle is a great term because spectacles are a subversive form of entertainment. They are often unusual, humorous and disturbing and they force people to pay attention and to come to terms with the content. One piece in particular that I created “Attention Chicken” – a nine-foot tall realistic sculpture of a rotisserie chicken (uncooked of course) operates in the realm of spectacle when it is placed unannounced in the city. It doesn’t work in a galley context, but outside in the public, it plays the part of being subversive, humorous and is most certainly an unusual site for people to see. As far as how my art differs from others, it is difficult to say, because every artist has their own unique intentions.

Link via Urlesque | Interview with the Artist

Image: KiteGen Research

The Italian firm KiteGen Research is developing a generator that harnesses the wind through kites. As a kite flies into the air, it unspools a cord that cranks the turbine. Carina Storrs writes in Popular Science:

The company developed a prototype that flies 200-square-foot kites to altitudes of 2,600 feet, where wind streams are four times as strong as they are near ground-based wind turbines.

As the kite’s tether unspools, it spins an alternator that generates up to 40 kilowatts. Once the kite reaches its peak altitude, it collapses, and motors quickly reel it back in to restart the cycle. This spring, KiteGen started building a machine to fly a 1,500-square-foot kite, which it plans to finish by 2011, that could generate up to three megawatts—enough to power 9,000 homes.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/planet-fixers-clever-innovations-greener-future | Company Website

Photo: Inscentinel

For a few years, a British company called Inscentinel has been developing chemical-detecting honeybees for security and sanitation purposes. Bees are trained to respond to certain smells and then are loaded into cartridges that suck in air from an object. When they alert, the user knows that the chemical is present in the sample. From the company website:

Our "sniffer bees" are honeybees trained to recognise a specific odour. They are trained using a well known Classical Pavlovian conditioning protocol - a simple association of a smell with a food reward. The insect is exposed to the odour in controlled pulses and simultaneously rewarded with sugar syrup. After three to five presentations and rewards the bee is trained. When the bee detects the odour it expects a food reward and extends its tongue (proboscis). This response is a reflex action (Proboscis extension Reflex, PER) and is not consciously controlled by the bee. A "panel" of bees can be trained in as little as a few hours to remember a particular odour for several days.

Although there are a variety of newspaper articles about this invention, I haven't found the company's claims supported by respected scientific periodicals.

Link via CrunchGear

(Video Link)

Newsweek interviewed five actors who played munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. They reminisce about the production of the movie and how it impacted their lives. Did you know that Toto got paid more than they did? You can read about the movie in Stacy's trivia post.

via io9 | Run time: 5 minutes, 38 seconds.