BRC Designs’s “Binary Low Table” is made out of computer junk; it’s a lovely piece of furniture, but it looks like it’d be prone to snagging and tearing clothes and exposed skin (and it’d be a major pain to dust!)…
Wow. If this app had been pitched to us on the 1st, I would have been sure it was an April Fool’s joke. Coming in a few days later, however, it seems almost genius…
We don’t have flying cars, but otherwise, it can be hard for science fiction to keep up with the pace of modern technology. Evan Hoovler of blastr has a list of eight technological wonders from science fiction now present in real life, such as the PADD from Star Trek, now available as the iPad…
This is not a special-effects still from an upcoming movie. Instead, it’s a photo taken at Nyiragongo Volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and National Geographic has the story of a team of Congolese seismologists who journeyed into Nyiragongo’s crater to study the volcano’s massive lava lake, and try to learn more about what’s going on inside a mountain that could potentially kill thousands…
Earth may be round, but not its gravitational field! After two years in orbit, the European Space Agency’s Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer satellite has revealed the clearest picture of earth’s gravity-field map…
A quadrocopter is an aircraft that is lifted and propelled by four rotors. Zurich’s Flying Machine Arena hosted a quadrocopter tennis match, involving a human-robot volley, a doubles match and an impressive robot-to-robot juggling act. The robots were outfitted with tennis rackets, allowing them to fly toward the ball and return a human’s serve.
A tiny array of microelectrodes, shown here, was implanted into the brains of epilepsy patients,
allowing scientists to gather data about seizures at the level of single cells.
For the first time, scientists have recorded activity from hundreds of single cells in the human brain during a seizure. The research, published this week in Nature Neuroscience, is part of a growing movement to employ new technologies to study brain processes at the single-cell level, which until recently has been impossible to do in living humans.
In an epileptic seizure, the normally orderly activity of neurons goes haywire. The abnormal amounts of electricity that get discharged can be temporarily disabling. Scientists typically monitor human seizures using electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures electrical activity across millions of neurons at a time, an approach that has revealed much about the overall patterns of activity in seizures. But researchers hope that by studying single cells, they’ll learn how seizures spread…
While Facebook marketing is on the rise among small businesses, many are still struggling to master the basics.
“Many people have difficulty with just the basic Page set up,” says social media marketing consultant Nicole Krug. “For example, I still see people setting up their business as a profile page instead of a business Page. I have other clients who jumped into Groups when they came out and have divided their fan base.”
Here are five more common Facebook marketing mistakes to avoid…
Somewhere between yesterday afternoon and last night, Instagram hit 3 million users after only six months of existence. To put that into perspective, that’s like 1% of the population of the US using a service that currently only fully exists on a iPhone…
What good is all those fancy chemistry lab equipments if you can’t benefit humanity, say by improving our cocktails? Analytic chemist Neil Da Costa decided to dissect the chemistry behind making the perfect Bloody Mary:
With gas and liquid chromatography, Da Costa isolated the wide variety of compounds that give the bloody mary its unique flavor. The drink covers much of the taste spectrum: sweet, salty, sour and umami — the savory taste of glutamic acid.
Many earlier cloaking systems turned objects invisible only under wavelengths of light that the human eye can’t see. Others could conceal only microscopic objects. But a new system, developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre, works in visible light and can hide objects big enough to see with the naked eye.
The cloak is made from two pieces of calcite crystal stuck together in a certain configuration.
Calcite is highly anisotropic, which means that light coming from one side will exit at a different angle than light entering from another side. By using two different pieces of calcite, the researchers were able to bend light around a solid object placed between the crystals. Whatever is put under this gap, it looks from the outside like it is not there.
Pop icon Lady Gaga will launch a line of meat-based clothing this Fall using food waste. The line will be a “contemporary interpretation of her stage outfits,” according to the Haus of Gaga.
Exactly what that means remains unclear but I suggest you don’t wear the clothing camping (or store them in a bear box if you do). Unlike her infamous meat dress, the line will actually be…clothing. And unlike her meat dress, it comes PeTA-approved. Yes, PeTA approved!