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Full video from the Stanford Racing Team (with science-y explanation) below. [via IEEE Spectrum and Metafilter]
Honestly, it would hardly ever refer to anything except on the most astronomical of scales. One hellameter would be something like a billion light-years, and the limit of the universe as we know it seems to be, well, a fraction of that. A hellasecond would be about a two and a half million times the age of our galaxy. So really, there’s no danger of people who don’t like hella having to say it all the time. Come on people, let’s do this. [via Reddit]
At $469 each, you can be pretty sure that you’ll be the only one sporting a wetsuit like this.
Hurry up, sports fans, for today’s the last day you can submit a message to the KEO space capsule. The idea is to have a bunch of people write an epic message, then in 50,000 years it’ll return and give future people the messages. I have no idea how any of this works, so please direct your WTFs somewhere else. What does fascinate me is the idea that the countries, languages, cultures, etc. that are around today will be around in 50,000 years to read the capsule when it returns. (All messages will also be made available over the Internet, anonymously, so it’s not like you’ll have to wait 50,000 years to read what people wrote. It’s just that the spirit of the project is a hard copy time capsule of sorts.) How long did Rome last? Isn’t China one of the oldest continuous civilizations on Earth, and it only clocks in at a few thousand years, nowhere near 50,000. Will people be able to read English and Spanish and Arabic (and so on) in 50,000 years? Will anyone care that Dream just beat Sengoku at the Dynamite!! show in Tokyo on New Year’s Eve? I don’t know, it’s just that 50,000 years is a pretty long time on the timeline of human history. One thing’s for sure: if people are still around in 50,000 years even they won’t have flying cars. See, a joke!
The family of the fake flying balloon boy, the Heenes, whose strange, sad story so captivated us for about an hour two months ago has been hit with a $42,000 fine for the cost associated with tracking the balloon through the skies of Colorado.
There’s only one internationally recognized organization that can name stars. It’s called the International Astronomical Union. These are the guys who name all the celestial bodies, including stars. Normally the names aren’t anything flashy like “Dorothy” or “Rose” or “Blanche” or “Sophia” but rather are a combination of numbers and letters that describe their location. The International Star Registry clears up any star-ownership misconceptions you may have with this:
So paying to name a star is tantamount to pointing to a mountain or a pretty flower and telling your gal, “Let’s name this mountain Gigantor.” You literally could buy a cheap telescope, point out a random star, and say, “Hey, from now on we call that star Stephanie.” It holds just as much weight in the scientific community as an International Star Registry-named star. Fun? Sure. Actual science? Nope.
We reported about a motorized knee being developed at Tsukuba University in Japan just yesterday. That and HAL-5, the famous robot suit that lets paralyzed people walk through brain signal control and which was developed at the same university, seem to be just the beginning of the way to merge man and machine. The Kobayashi Lab [JP] at the Tokyo University of Science has now come up with the Muscle Suit, a wearable robot whose basic concept is quite similar to HAL-5. There are two versions available: One is geared towards workers who have to lift up stuff from the ground regularly. While that Muscle Suit supports the lower back, the version that supports your arms can make you lift objects weighing 50kg without any effort from your own muscles. The key idea is to use “muscular augmenters”, which are made of rubber and nylon and compressed by air pressure. So the Muscle Suit isn’t as fancy technically as HAL-5 but appears to get the job done, too (it can’t make paralyzed people walk but it primarily supposed to support workers). The Muscle Suit weighs 8kg (HAL-5: between 15 and 23kg). A practical version is planned to be ready sometime next year. This video explains how the Muscle Suit works (courtesy of Diginfonews in Tokyo):
Normal X-rays penetrate too effectively for them to be used on individual cells; the amount of interference provided by the cell is simply not enough to detect and create an image from. So they use soft X-rays, which have a slightly longer wavelength than the kind used on a broken arm. A new technique developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has enabled soft X-ray images to be taken quickly and sequentially, and then assembled into a 3D model of the subject. It’s not “live” like an fMRI, and it doesn’t provide the detail one finds in electron microscopy, but obviously it’s very useful. I doubt any of us will ever run into one of these machines in real life, but it’s cool to know they exist. [via Reddit]
NASA has developed a shock absorber system that mounts from the bottom of the helicopter to take up the force of the impact. Recent tests have involved a small helicopter being dropped from a height of 35 feet. This caused the chopper to hit the ground at 54 miles per hour, which normally would be a severe if not necessarily fatal crash. Instead of smashing into many small pieces, the helicopter landed on NASA’s “deployable energy absorber,” a honeycomb airbag system. This took the majority of the force of the impact, and the four crash test dummies managed to escape more or less unscathed. Of course, all of this is experimental, so don’t expect to see it in public any time soon.
Putting film together isn’t as simple as brushing a photosensitive layer onto some plastic. There’s a whole science to doing it right, to say nothing of the chemical recipes necessary. The layers are micrometers thin and… well, there’s no use getting into the nitty gritty. If you wanted to build your own film-making machine, you’d have your nose in this kind of stuff all day long anyway. More details at the Flickr page.
It is a sweet-looking rig though, isn’t it? I’d like to have one even if it didn’t make workable film.
There’s been a few stories over the years about people being overly sensitive to Wi-Fi. It makes them sick and whatnot. There’s usually one reaction to such stories: bologna. (That’s not my reaction, mind you. If you’re sick, you’re sick. Who am I to call you a liar?) Well now! A series of studies, carried out by the UK Department of Health, say “there is no consistent evidence to date that exposure to radio waves from wireless networks adversely affects the health of the general population and that there is no reason why schools and others should not use Wi-Fi equipment.” The Health Protection Agency over there found that Wi-Fi doesn’t emit any more radio waves than your average cellphone. The radio waves emitted by Wi-Fi are well within international guidelines. In other words, Wi-Fi, at least from a controlled lab point of view, is totally safe. Now, this doesn’t mean that the people complaining of Wi-Fi sensitivity are lying through their teeth, but that science seems to disagree with the premise. Keep the blue flag flying high.
Students at Tokyo's University of Science have developed a new muscle suit, a wearable robotic suit that assists the muscles when carrying out strenuous tasks.
Did you hear the news? An asteroid passed within 8,700 miles of the planet on Friday. The craziest thing is that scientists only knew about it 15 hours before it flew by. So if you have any confidence that this planet is safe from giant space objects smashing into the surface, possibly destroying all life in the process, well, think again. This particular asteroid wasn’t so big, measuring at around 23 feet across, that it would have caused mass destruction, but it just goes to show you: maybe one day, when the big one arrives, we’ll have a hot 20 hours to figure out what to do. Can you even imagine what would happen? Scientists spot a gigantic asteroid that would surely cause planet-wide destruction, but they only discover it a few hours before it hits the planet. How would people react? How would society function when faced with mass carnage, if not certain doom? Now you can see why asteroids represent my favorite sci-fi scenario: how does humanity react when it faces such a cataclysm? Do we band together in the interest of survival? Do we take the opportunity to invade Country A in order to secure resources that we could use? Oh my God, how would Twitter react? It should be noted that objects enter the Earth’s atmosphere all the time, and that relatively big ones pass by the planet about two times per year. Done right, a doomsday scenario movie, unlike that hunk of junk 2012, could be really interesting. None of this, “pull the plane into the air even though we haven’t reached the speed necessary to generate enough lift to pull us upward to begin with,” but a serious look at how people would react. Which is to say the movie could never be made by Hollywood, lest some American Joe Blow somehow save the day.
In lieu of an actually interesting collection of words and punctuation marks, I present this debate that has nothing to do with us: the weather in China. It seems that they’ve figured out how to control the weather over there using super-duper technology called cloud seeding. You may have heard of it. The problem is that officials there are blaming scientists for causing a major snowstorm; more snow is expected in the coming days. Basically, it’s snowing too much, too early, and the powers that be aren’t happy. Like I said, I sincerely doubt the good people of Columbus, Ohio care about the weather in China, but it helps introduce a topic that I can run with for a minute: should man control the weather? I’ve come up with two points of view based on zero research to help get the conversation started. Yes we should! We’re mankind, the top of the food chain and arbiters of all that happens on the planet. If we can move earth, drain lakes, divert rivers, drop nuclear bombs (throwing untold garbage into the atmosphere), then why shouldn’t we be allowed to control when it rains? I can see it being genuinely helpful, too, bringing rain to an area that’s going through a drought. You know what I mean. It wouldn’t merely be controlling the weather for the sake of it. No we shouldn’t! If man were meant to fly he’d have wings, and if man were meant to control the weather he’d have the equivalent of wings for the purposes of this sentence. Who’s to say what would happen if we mess up while seeding the clouds? Or, to get theological, what right do we have to dictate the weather patterns He has chosen for us?
Well, send ‘em on in. If they can take Pharyngula’s traffic, they can take ours too. Follow the guidelines, please. You do have to fill out forms and stuff.
That’s what this particular ATI Radeon 5870 is doing. Can you say six (mini) DisplayPorts?
Apart from the extra ports, this model doesn’t differ too much from the reference 5870, though it does sport a slightly different PCI interface and, of course, it has 2GB of GDDR5. It’s got HDMI and two DVIs, plus… I don’t recognize that one on the left, am I losing it? (yes, I am, it’s a standard DisplayPort) No pricing or availability information at the moment, but it’s good to know it’s out there if I ever happen to buy five more monitors and need to rock that Eyefinity. [via Tom's Hardware]
Not impossible. I used to bulls-eye whomp rats in my T-16 back home.
The absurdity of this failure (though it apparently won’t affect the re-activation) makes me think that maybe the LHC really is so abhorrent to nature that the universe is contriving to snuff it out. [via PopSci]
A group from University of California, San Diego use a pair of antennae aligned with the laser to automatically detect the traffic control transponder on every airplane. “One antenna has a broad beam, the other a narrow beam.” In this way, airplanes can be detected as they approach the laser. Using the ratio of the signal from both antennae, the distance of the aircaft from the laser can be measured. If its “too close” then the laser is automatically shuttered, preventing any catastrophes at 35,000 feet. Initial test are positive, though there are of course still a few kinks to work out. Chalk another one up for science! Via Technology Review.
It’s almost like someone got their Top Gear in my Mythbusters lately. First the duct tape holding up a car, and now the ‘golf ball’ effect on mileage. So what exactly does happen when you cover a car with clay, and then dimple it like a golf ball? You can watch the video and find out, or just scroll past the picture of the lovely Kari Byron. The car part is about 40 minutes in.
Yes. Apparently, covering your car in clay and dimpling it like a golf ball will result in a significant increase in gas mileage. Who would of thunk it? The real trick it to make sure the dimples are scaled up to the proper size. I could get into the science, but it’s easier to let Jamie and Adam tell you all about it.
The idea is that by taking out as many layers of the display as possible, you reduce light interference (increasing brightness), power draw (better battery life) and component number (allowing for more pixels per square unit). But what to strip out? Uni-Pixel, the people behind TMOS note that instead of having three dots per pixel (red, green, blue in varying intensity), you could just have one, but with the dot changing color so rapidly that your eye only perceives the aggregate color. I’m not going to get all neuroscience on you here, but allow me to just say that there are biological reasons both for and against this technology, which I’m sure Uni-Pixel is aware of. Micro-mirrors would direct light from side-mounted LEDs, which sounds clumsy to me, but they say it’ll result in refresh rates far above current displays’. They would also be simpler to manufacture, more durable, and more flexible. Anyhow, the engineering challenges are serious, but they say they should be able to put one in a product in 2010. Guess we’ll just have to wait!
120 Kelvin is -243 F, so it’s not likely that this material is going to find its way into the next generation of handheld electronics. But the research does open new avenues of exploration and innovation for “memory, sensors, actuators and other multifunctional devices by acting as magnetic switches when their electric fields are reversed.” FeTiO3 is normally called ilmenite, but there’s no common name for the high pressure phase created by the scientists in this effort. If you want to geek out even more, enjoy reading the Wikipedia entries for ferromagnetic and ferroelectric, both of which describe the term in great detail, and both of which fail, completely, to provide a friendly way to describe the terms!
We’re stretching for stories today, believe me. Hence: it’s about time we update the way we conduct the U.S. census. Someone else said that, not me. Like, don’t you think it’s a little quaint to go from door to door, with a pen and paper in hand, and ask, “Hey, um… how many people are you? Did you go to college? Do you have a job? Cool, thanks.” Why not, you know, make use of electronic records, recognize that some people don’t have landline telephones and plan accordingly, etc. Why do we need to update the way we take the census? Well, for one, there’s the pragmatic reason that, in its current form, the census just costs too much money. It cost $14 billion to conduct the 2010 census. $14 billion! To pay a man in a hat to knock on your door! Two, the methods we use are patently outdated; we need to leverage the available technology we have access to a little bit better. “Such as?” Such as using the electronic records we already have on record rather than starting from scratch every 10 years; such as using fancy statistical computations to ensure that populations are accurately counted. I don’t know, I thought it was interesting. We might as well be using the same methods that William I did 1,000 years ago in England.
![[Image credit: Louise Murray, Rex Features]](http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/bee-ready_1491380i1.jpg "bee-ready_1491380i") (Image credit: Louise Murray, Rex Features) Next time you head through security, you may be getting more than pat-down. If you’re lucky, you might just have your bags and person exposed to bee arrays. These specially-trained (and just plain special) insects will stick their tongues out if they smell whatever the nice TSA person is looking for. TNT, crack, pirated music, it’s all the same to bees, who know they get a treat whenever they smell their special smell. They’re trained by Inscentinel, a company which has one too many portmanteaus in its name. I’ve heard of this kind of thing for years, but this is definitely the first bee-in-a-box I’ve seen.The story and more images can be found at the Daily Telegraph.
This kind of imaging isn’t actually new, and research has been going on for a few years, but they’ve only relatively recently ended its research phase and is now in execution, if I read correctly. That means that there are labs around the world giving this sucker a spin. Seriously, this technology has the potential to really change the way molecular biology is done, among other things. If it’s interesting to you, visit the project’s page, or the ICT Results summary. [via Science Daily; image credit: H.R. Petty]
Graphene is substantially faster than current semiconductors, which are made of a substance called III-V, which is comprised of gallium, phosphorous and other stuff. Not only is it faster, but graphene detects a larger spectrum of light, from the visible and the infrared. According to Technology Review, “That means that graphene photodetectors could work at extremely high frequencies, making them highly efficient at detecting light and transporting the resulting electrons to an external circuit.” Think flexible flat panel displays, thin solar panels, and the like.
Thanks, Graphene-Info, your one-stop shop for all things Graphene! Bookmark it today!
Whether he’s got more packed into this book than you can extract from various photo sites and forums, I don’t know. But it might be nice to take with you if you’re going on a picturesque tour somewhere without internet. There are places like that, you know. [via Photography Bay]
Talk about a bird’s-eye-view. While these bird-mounted surveillance systems haven’t been deployed in cities yet, you can bet the Pentagon is taking notice. An interesting result of the study, which you can find in its entirety here, was that albatross, strong as they are, don’t simply fly around forever looking for random fish. They sometimes watch for whales and pick up the scraps left behind (an orca isn’t exactly a dainty eater). Smart birds, those albatrosses. You can see the whale in the bottom left, there, if you hadn’t spotted it already. Not that it’s inconspicuous. Plus there’s an arrow. Never mind. So how long before we get our own little life recorders? A tiny, wide-angle lens and sensor uploading a picture every five minutes via a 3G connection? Can’t be that hard. Get on it, Microsoft/Apple/Google/Everyone! [via Wired News]
The claim to fame is Ultrasone’s S-Logic technology. I’m sure there’s all sorts of fancy science behind it, but it basically means that the drivers are mounted off-center. This allows the sound to bounce around your head for a bit, instead of being pumped directly into your ears. Supposedly, it gives the effect of a much more three dimensional musical experience. Other high points include a reduced sound pressure level, meaning less strain on your ears. Also, the “MU metal shielding” reduces the amount of magnetic radiation “as much as 98%” So if the only thing holding you back from buying a pair of headphones was the lack of proper radioactive safety regulations, these might be the pair for you. They fold up into a convenient size, and have a detachable, straight cable. And the technical schematics all say the right things to make a audiophile-level pair of headphones. Frequency range 10 – 25000 Hz Headphones like this are an investment. Mostly because you can’t afford to eat for a week after you buy them. The HFI-2400s are available for pre-order at $295.00. Just remember, it could be worse.
Finnish company Patria Aviation Oy has developed a type of cloth that’s capable of working as an antenna for the Iridium network and GPS frequency bands, making it possible to actually create a communicator style system similar to the type used in ST:TNG. The company said the most difficult of the process was choosing the correct fabric with the proper characteristics. Many fabrics change their electrical properties when bent, which would render the them useless as a antenna materiel. The material also contains an insulating layer that protects you from excess radiation coming from wearing an antenna as a shirt. The first antenna will be made into a shirt, however there is no word on when this product will be made available (if ever) to the public. [via Networkworld]
The “WiFi Body Scale” from French company Withings records your weight and BMI and automatically uploads it to a secure website, which would be a lot easier to make fun of if it weren’t for Wii Fit, which does that stuff but doesn’t upload it anywhere. People made fun of Wii Fit at first and then it went on to become the most popular Wii game in the history of the universe, so it stands to reason that this scale may become the most popular scale in the history of scales. Or it may not. You never can tell. And it wouldn’t be a serious product if there wasn’t also an iPhone app for keeping track of your progress as well, right? Well, there is. And get this: up to eight different people can keep track of their weight on the same scale. The scale even knows who’s who right when they step on the scale. Maybe it knows each person by the amount of meat in their feet. Science! The scale costs $159 and is available at Withings.com (and apparently Amazon, although it’s not in stock there at the moment). Yes, that’s a lot for a scale but even at $159 it offers far more value than the $55 Yay! Scale from earlier this week. WiFi Body Scale [Withings.com]
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So, big problem with flying in a helicopter: if you crash, you’re screwed. It’s not like a jet, where you can eject (for obvious reasons), and it’s not like helicopters are designed with a crumple zone. For this reason, 
There’s more to a good panorama than switching your camera to autopano mode. Or at least, that’s what author Harald Woeste 
German headphone manufacturer 
Many gadgets we use today were inspired by the fictional gadgets in Star Trek. Communicators inspired cell phones, 