They look more like the brightly lit shelves of a chemists shop than the rows of a vegetable garden. But according to their creators, these perfect looking vegetables could be the future of food.
Satellite images have picked up giant red-brown stains on the pristine white sea ice, indicating the presence of thousands of penguins.
It meant that researchers for the British Antarctic Survey were able to locate every colony on the continent for the first time ever.
Squidolin Inventor and Visionary Carlos Mendez
“I love the sound of the violin,” explains Carlos Mendez. “Since I was a kid, I wanted to learn how to play it. But born in a poor country such as Nicaragua, my parents couldn’t afford lessons.”
It was this childhood affection for the stringed instrument that encouraged the young industrial designer to use part of his final project at the Art Center College of Design in Pasedena, California, where he graduated with honors in product design, to come up with an affordable way of learning the violin. So was born the concept of the “squidolin”.
The squidolin – named on account of its squid-like appearance – is designed to hook up to a TV to instruct students on how to play, although it will play like a regular violin too…
Who needs a body these days anyway?
Researchers at the North Carolina State University has developed a machine that can keep a heart beating outside the body. The potential medical benefit is huge, though for whatever reason I kept on thinking about Dr. Frankenstein:
“Researchers can obtain pig hearts from a pork processing facility and use the system to test their prototypes or practice new surgical procedures,” says Andrew Richards, a Ph. D. student in mechanical engineering at NC State who designed the heart machine.
The computer-controlled machine, which operates using pressurized saline solution, also allows researchers to film the interior workings of the pumping heart – enabling them to ascertain exactly which surgical technologies and techniques perform best for repairing heart valves.
(video after jump…)
Notice how amazingly similar the product looks to the photo on the can…
The folks over at Now That’s Nifty Blogspot have assembled a colorful and quite disquieting array of canned meat (and meat-like) products from around the world. All cultures around the world eat canned meat because it is an easy and safe way to preserve it. However, most of these meats are WAY off the scale of a typical American’s diet.
Take for instance the ”Pork Brains
Sharks can be trained like dolphins to feed from keepers, roll over and enjoy cuddles, according to new research. Continue Reading »
Motor madman Bob Maddox is back with a twin-engine jet bike that makes the raucous rocket he rode last year look tame.
He recently bolted a dual-exhaust pulse jet engine to the side of an ordinary bicycle, donned a leather jacket and helmet and then held on tight as he peeled off a 73-mph run down a deserted back road. And we thought he was crazy when he hit 50 mph on one of his single-engine contraptions last year. Continue Reading »
The Earth could be habitable for another 2.3 billion years, extending previous estimates of life’s horizon by more than 1 billion years.
King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.
The Other Way Around Would be More Impressive…
We’re not too sure what to think about this 1,300 lbs piece of machinery by Tokyo-based Nakabayashi. It takes paper waste from an office and turns it into toilet paper: “The toilet paper machine is able to produce two rolls per hour from around 1,800 sheets (or 7.2kg) of used A4-sized paper”. Seems like a whole lot of machine overkill. What’s the footprint of that machine and how much toilet paper should it produce before it compensate for that? More details after the jump…
Just a squiggle of BBQ sauce around the edges and VIOLA!
McDonald’s food is often the butt of jokes, but those days are gone if foodie Georgia Hardstark of The State That I Am In blog and her friend Alie Ward of Curiology have their way.
You see, they’ve concocted that could surely be called as the perfect alcoholic beverage/dinner/dessert, the McNuggitini. Here’s the McRecipe…
Rare baby birds.
Red kite chicks have hatched in the wild in Aberdeenshire for the first time in almost 150 years.
The chicks are being raised by birds released two years ago as part of a project to reintroduce the birds to the skies over the county. At least three have hatched.
Red kites were once common all over the British Isles, but were persecuted almost to the point of extinction in the 19th century.
In the UK, the population had almost died out until birds began being reintroduced from overseas via breeding programmes in the 1990s.
A planned camera controller for Xbox 360 promises 3-D motion recognition that will turn your entire body into a game controller. (Videos)
Parents who home-school children increasingly are white, wealthy and well-educated – and their numbers have nearly doubled in a decade, a new federal government report says. Continue Reading »
Parents talk less to their children if the TV is on and youngsters also speak less, American researchers have found.
A study of children and babies from two-months-old to four-years-old found that for every hour the television was on, parents said between 500 and 1,000 fewer words to their children.
Changing someone’s gender or race on screen traditionally requires lengthy hours in front of a make-up mirror. But new software that can take a live video feed of a person talking and make them look and sound like somebody else could change that. Continue Reading »
Scientists have developed purple tomatoes which they hope may be able to keep cancer at bay.
The fruit are rich in an antioxidant pigment called anthocyanin which is thought to have anti-cancer properties. Continue Reading »
Lots of sculptors these days use blowtorches and create their works in hard steel. Jerry Ross Barrish uses a glue gun and makes his art from discarded plastic. And the art is something to behold. Continue Reading »
Brando’s new Zippo lighter has more to it than meets the eye. Specifically, it’s got a videocamera and microphone built in (well, a “mircophone” according to their press images, but let’s go ahead and assume they mean microphone). Continue Reading »
Why does a bus stop need to be solar powered, you ask? To power its LED lighting, intercom system and even a wireless router – at least, that’s how it is with these swanky new bus stops being installed in San Fransisco. The stop you see up above is the first of the 1,100 wavy-topped, solar-powered bus stops the city wants to roll out by 2013. Continue Reading »
Mice carrying a “humanized version” of a gene believed to influence speech and language may not actually talk, but they nonetheless do have a lot to say about our evolutionary past, according to a report in the May 29th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have recently demonstrated a breakthrough in the quantum control of photons, the energy quanta of light. This is a significant result in quantum computation, and could eventually have implications in banking, drug design, and other applications.
MIT and Boston University engineers have designed cells that can count and “remember” cellular events, using simple circuits in which a series of genes are activated in a specific order.
A previously unknown giant volcanic eruption that led to global mass extinction 260 million years ago has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Leeds.
From plows to seed drills to tractors, evolving technology has brought about radical changes to agriculture over the years. Now the sector is poised for another shift as robotic farmhands gear up to make agriculture greener and more efficient.
One of the world’s rarest deer has been found in a tiny patch of Philippines forest that is being cut down by farmers and loggers, according to a British-Filipino scientific expedition.
