@hlooman's mindsnippets

propagandery: astronauts talk about the spiritual and emotional...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:23:01 -0700

astronauts talk about the spiritual and emotional impact of being an astronaut. absolutely incredible.

laboratoryequipment: Robot Runs Like a CatThanks to its legs,...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:14:54 -0700

Robot Runs Like a Cat

Thanks to its legs, whose design faithfully reproduces feline morphology, EPFL’s four-legged “cheetah-cub robot” has the same advantages as its model: it is small, light and fast. Still in its experimental stage, the robot will serve as a platform for research in locomotion and biomechanics.

Even though it doesn’t have a head, you can still tell what kind of animal it is: the robot is definitely modeled upon a cat. Developed by EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory (Biorob), the “cheetah-cub robot,” a small-size quadruped prototype robot, is described in an article appearing today in the International Journal of Robotics Research. The purpose of the platform is to encourage research in biomechanics; its particularity is the design of its legs, which make it very fast and stable. Robots developed from this concept could eventually be used in search and rescue missions or for exploration.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/06/robot-runs-cat

kenobi-wan-obi: Green and Blue Flashes The flashes result...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:10:46 -0700

kenobi-wan-obi:

Green and Blue Flashes

The flashes result from atmospheric refraction when the Sun is low in the sky.

Photography by Oliver Stiehler

Summary by Oliver Stiehler; Jim Foster

But the refraction must be sufficiently strong, through atmospheric temperature gradients, that a mirage occurs. When this happens there’s a marked vertical magnification of the images for parts of the mirage.

Then, and only then, will color separation produced by differential refraction be visible to the eye or camera. Of course, always use extreme caution when looking toward the Sun.

biocanvas: Small plant-parasitic nematodes (high magnification...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:07:29 -0700

biocanvas:

Small plant-parasitic nematodes (high magnification view seen here) can cause devastating crop damage, resulting in approximately 5% of global crop loss each year. Of particular note are the root-knot nematodes, so named because they transform root cells into giant galls that impair a plant’s ability to take up water and nutrients from the soil.

Image by Dr. Jonathan Eisenback.

explore-blog: Mental health break: To promote summer reading, a...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:44:40 -0700

explore-blog:

Mental health break: To promote summer reading, a group of students teamed up with the Seattle Public Library and built the world’s largest domino chain made of books. It took 2,131 books, 27 volunteers, and 112 slices of pizza.

The loveliest thing since this booktastic stop-motion rainbow.

(↬ io9)

wnycradiolab: heythereuniverse: How Animals See the World |...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:09:51 -0700

wnycradiolab:

heythereuniverse:

How Animals See the World | Mezzmer

This is pretty great.

Want to learn more about the experience of being a (non-human) animal? Check out our Animal Minds episode.

visualizingmath: Art Based on Numbers Dots are used to...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:09:01 -0700

visualizingmath:

Art Based on Numbers

Dots are used to represent the adjacency between digits. Each digit 0-9 is represented by a colored segment. Dots assigned to a segment represent digits that follow the digit represented by the segment. The position of the dot is roughly the position within the number that the digit appears.

Art by by Cristian Ilies Vasile.

joshbyard: Cold Fusion Device May Have Been Created Against...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:07:34 -0700

joshbyard:

Cold Fusion Device May Have Been Created

Against all probability, a device that purports to use cold fusion to generate vast amounts of power has been verified by a panel of independent scientists. The research paper, which hasn’t yet undergone peer review, seems to confirm both the existence of cold fusion, and its potency: The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline.

Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than gasoline — which is currently the best fuel readily available to mankind.

The device being tested, called by Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat for short), was created by Andrea Rossi. Rossi has been claiming for the past two years that he had finally cracked cold fusion, but much to the chagrin of the scientific community he hasn’t allowed anyone to independently analyze the device — until now.

While it sounds like the scientists had a fairly free rein while testing the E-Cat, we should stress that they still don’t know exactly what’s going on inside the sealed steel cylinder reactor. Still, the seven scientists, all from good European universities, obviously felt confident enough with their findings to publish the research paper.

(via Cold fusion reactor independently verified, has 10,000 times the energy density of gas | ExtremeTech)

1ucasvb: Franz Liszt - “Hungarian Rhapsody nº 2” Our perception...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:04:16 -0700

1ucasvb:

Franz Liszt - “Hungarian Rhapsody nº 2”

Our perception of pitch is circular: if you double the frequency of a note, you perceive the sound as being somewhat the same. It feels like the same note, it has the same “flavor” to it, except higher. The same happens if you halve the frequency, only that the sound now feels deeper and lower.

We call this family of pitches a “pitch class”. The note names (A to G, with flats and sharps for the intermediate notes) are just names for these pitch classes.

So a while back I thought: what shape best describes this relation of something cyclical that grows and shrinks as you move around? The answer is obvious: a spiral!

I wanted to see how piano music would look like in this shape. I searched the web to see if anyone had mapped piano music into a spiral before, and nobody had. So I wrote a script to do it!

This was the first video of a series of 7 videos I’ve created using this method.

The script used note information from a MIDI file, and the audio was rendered later using a wavefront I had at the time (Wingroove). So the audio quality isn’t the best, but the point being made here was visual anyway.

You can see several interesting patterns, and chord progressions and structures are much more evident in this format.

Check the rest of the videos too!

fuckyeahfluiddynamics: The immiscibility of oil and water...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 09:21:33 -0700

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

The immiscibility of oil and water creates a multitude of bubbles of all sizes. A lack of miscibility occurs when the forces between like molecules are very strong for two liquids—essentially the oil molecules and the water molecules are so much more strongly attracted to themselves than they are to one another that they cannot mix. Surface tension—another expression of molecular forces—pulls the oil into droplets that float in the water and refract the light in such lovely ways. (Photo credit: Vendula Adriana Kaprálová Hauznerová; via thinxblog)

futurescope: Opal-inspired material changes colour when...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 09:16:40 -0700

futurescope:

Opal-inspired material changes colour when stretched

A synthetic material which mimics the brightest and most vivid colours in nature, and changes colour when twisted or stretched, has been developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, and could have important applications in the security, textile and sensing industries. The Polymer Opal films change to green and blue when stretched, and to red when compressed.

[read more @wired-uk] [Cambridge University] [via @envisioningtech]

futurescope: Three Czech companies have teamed up to make a...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:59:25 -0700

futurescope:

Three Czech companies have teamed up to make a prototype of an electric bicycle that can fly

From Physorg:

Three Czech companies have teamed up to make a prototype of an electric bicycle that successfully took off Wednesday inside an exhibition hall in Prague and landed safely after a remote-controlled, five-minute flight. Looking like a heavy mountain bike, it weighs 95 kilograms (209 pounds). It has two battery-power propellers in the front, two in the back and one each on the sides.

[read more] [photos by AP Photo/CTK, Stanislav Zbynek]

futurescope: Self-Charging Cell Phone Screens Coming Soon From...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:57:28 -0700

futurescope:

Self-Charging Cell Phone Screens Coming Soon

From Tekla Perry at IEEE:

Today’s mobile devices are constantly in use—so constantly that battery life is a huge problem. I recently hosted an afternoon barbecue at a community pool; over in one corner, folks jockeyed for a turn to charge their mobile devices at the one available outlet. Meanwhile, the sun shown down brightly on mobile phones scattered across the picnic tables, as the batteries on those idle devices quietly drained.

The SunPartner Group, a 30-employee startup in Aix-en-Provence, France, thinks that’s a real waste. Folks sitting in restaurants, in outdoor cafes, or at their desks typically pull out their phones and put them face up in front of them; put solar cells on the phones and there’d be a lot less scrambling to find a wall outlet. And they’ve built a low-cost transparent panel that does just that. They’re now testing it with a number of manufacturers and expect to see it built into mobile devices early next year. […]

[read more] [The SunPartner Group] [Photo by Tekla Perry, Illustration by SunPartner Group]

we-are-star-stuff: This is an example of supercooling – the...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:46:35 -0700

we-are-star-stuff:

This is an example of supercooling – the process by which a very pure liquid is chilled to a temperature just below its usual freezing point without actually making the jump to its solid state. Bottled water is perfect for this, especially the kind that’s been purified via reverse osmosis, a process that strips water of all its particulates. This particulates can act as “seed crystals,” or “nuclei,” to which a liquid phase on the cusp of becoming solid can attach, and crystalize around. In this video, a seed crystal is introduced in the form of a cube of already-frozen water. As soon as it’s introduced, the liquid phase rapidly crystallizes and attaches to the solid one, kicking off a chain reaction of ice-formation.

Water that freezes as it’s being poured out of the bottle also solidifies upon exposure to a seed crystal, which, in this case, is an already-frozen surface. This is similar to the effect observed when freezing rain, supercooled by its flightpath through sub-freezing layers of atmosphere, comes into contact with an object cooled to a temperature below freezing. The result is a phenomenon known as glaze-ice, which – if you live somewhere cold – you may have seen before, coating the spindly extremities of tree branches.

See here for more on supercooling and glassy water.

via

8bitfuture: Video: Helper robot anticipates your every...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:32:03 -0700

8bitfuture:

Video: Helper robot anticipates your every move.

Cornell’s Personal Robotics Lab have been working on a helper robot which predicts a persons future actions to help them achieve tasks around the home.

Gazing intently with a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera and using a database of 3D videos, the Cornell robot identifies the activities it sees, considers what uses are possible with the objects in the scene and determines how those uses fit with the activities. It then generates a set of possible continuations into the future – such as eating, drinking, cleaning, putting away – and finally chooses the most probable. As the action continues, the robot constantly updates and refines its predictions.

matthen: When rays of light bunch together, the image they form...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:39:39 -0700

matthen:

When rays of light bunch together, the image they form is called a caustic. This animation shows the caustics created by the surface of wavey water due to the refraction of light as it enters the water. The appearance of rainbows can be derived by considering the bunching up of light rays entering into a droplet of water and reflecting back out [i.e. rainbows are caustics]. [code] [more]

staceythinx: These were part of a series of Klein...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:38:23 -0700

staceythinx:

These were part of a series of Klein bottles created for the Science Museum in London by Alan Bennett.

About the Klein bottles:

A Klein bottle is a surface which has no edges, no outside or inside and cannot properly be constructed in three dimensions. In the series Alan Bennett made Klein bottles analogous to Mobius strips with odd numbers of twists greater than one.

scienceisbeauty: Internal structure of a carbon-nanotube...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 09:45:50 -0700

scienceisbeauty:

Internal structure of a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbs about 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that strikes it. A section of the coating, which was grown on smooth silicon, was purposely removed to show the tubes’ vertical alignment.

Source: NASA Develops Super-Black Material That Absorbs Light Across Multiple Wavelength Bands (NASA)

High-res

Credit: Stephanie Getty, NASA Goddard)

futurescope: Points: Smart Robotic Street Sign Rotates towards...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 18:15:41 -0700

futurescope:

Points: Smart Robotic Street Sign Rotates towards Direction of Content

via informations aesthetics:

Points by futuristic product development studio Breakfast is a new kind of street sign that dynamically rotates towards the direction of the real-time content it is showing.

The directional street sign consists of 3 separate arms pointing in different directions, each containing a LED display that shows specific text or graphics about a nearby destination. Depending on the actual location of the content it displays, each arm is able to rotate endlessly around 360° degrees. The content varies depending on what passers-by select via a list of buttons, ranging from public transport arrival times nearby to the content and actual location of Twitter messages.

[more] [Points] [Breakfast]

moshita: IBB Blood Transfusion Packs is a 2012 red dot award:...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 18:13:44 -0700

moshita:

IBB Blood Transfusion Packs is a 2012 red dot award: design concept winner.

With the IBB Blood Transfusion Packs there will be no room for error while administering blood to those who need it. The packaging makes it almost impossible for you to make a mistake, because the letters A, B, or O appear prominently when the bag is filled with blood. Every part of the bags except the letters is translucent and this is what makes it distinctive.