Artist Calvin Seibert (previously) recently completed a new series of his geometrically precise sand castles on the beaches of Hawaii. A professional sculptor, Seibert seems to borrow angular ideas from Bauhaus architecture or the flair of Frank Gehry. How he’s able to control the sand so perfectly is anyone’s guess, it certainly puts my traditional upside down bucket method to shame. You can see more of his work over the last few years here.
If you or someone you know has celiac disease, then you'll know how much
it can limit one's diet. Because people with the autoimmune condition
have a negative reaction to the gluten in grains such as wheat, rye or
barley, that means they can't consume many baked goods, pastas, liquors,
or any number of processed foods that use wheat as a binding agent.
Soon, however, they may be able to eat whatever they want – if they take
a new egg-based supplement first.
The handlebars of this Honda CL175 ended up being perfect for holding two Nixie tubes which serve as the speedometer. There are two circular cavities on the front fork tree which are the same size as the Nixies. Wrapping the tubes in a bit of rubber before the installation has them looking like they are factory installed!
This isn’t a retrofit, he’s added the entire system himself. It starts with a hall effect sensor and magnets on the rear wheel and swing arm. Right now the result is 4 MPH resolution but he plans to add more magnets to improve upon that. For now, the driver and speedometer circuitry are hosted on protoboard but we found a reddit thread where [Johnathan] talks about creating a more compact PCB. If your own bike lacks the fork tree openings for this (or you need help with the drivers) check out this other Nixie build for a slick-looking enclosure idea.
The link at the top is a garage demo, but last night he also uploaded a rolling test to show the speedometer in action. Check out both videos after the break.
Pluto’s Norgay Montes, 3500-meter-high ice mountains south of the Tombaugh Regio “heart” feature.
Three days after New Horizons‘ flight through the Pluto system and the data is coming in fast and furious (albeit quite highly compressed!), giving scientists a virtual “toy box” of new findings to make about these distant worlds’ exotic nature. On Wednesday we got our first looks at Pluto’s 11,000-foot-high mountains, now informally named Norgay Montes (making them the first extraterrestrial features to be named after a Nepali) and on Thursday we saw the surface of Charon, where a mountain seems to have been sunk into a cavity of some sort. Today during another press conference from Johns Hopkins University NASA HQ in Washington, DC more of Pluto’s surface was revealed, along with some preliminary findings about its surprisingly-extensive atmosphere. These are some of the highlights…
Polygonal shapes in smooth frozen plains nicknamed “Sputnik Planum”
Pluto has strangely smooth frozen plains in its “heart”
Just northeast of the Norgay Montes, in the “heart of the heart” lie crater-free, smooth plains of frozen material – possibly carbon dioxide ice mixed with nitrogen and methane as well. Within this region informally named Sputnik Planum arge polygonal shapes are marked by long troughs, some of which contain deposits of darker material. What’s so interesting about this area is how young it must be to exhibit no craters – according to New Horizons geologist Jeff Moore, some of the surfaces could be “only a week old as far as we know!” How the region formed is still (like most of these new discoveries) a mystery. Read more here.
“There are active land-procreative processes operating into the current time.” – Jeff Moore, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team
Dark streaks on the ice within Sputnik Planum (NASA TV screenshot)
Dark streaks on Sputnik Planum’s ice
Some of the rises in Sputnik Planum show dark spots with streaks appearing to extend outwards from them. While speculative of course, the causes of these streaks could be either falling hydrocarbons from higher in the atmosphere that have deposited and been swept along by prevailing winds, or more intriguingly staining from active plumes of darker material issuing from below the frozen surface (like what Voyager 2 observed on Neptune’s moon Triton.) Without having seen plumes in action in New Horizons data (yet) it’s hard to determine for sure which scenario is the case.
New Horizons’ Alice instrument made detections of Pluto’s atmosphere up to 1,000 miles high
Pluto has a lot of atmosphere!
The New Horizons Atmospheres team saw data on Pluto’s atmosphere extending outward from the planet up to 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers), confirming that Pluto’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere is larger than it could ever be observed from Earth and relatively larger than our own atmosphere. It’s the first detection of Pluto’s atmosphere over 170 miles (270 km). What’s more, Pluto’s atmosphere shows little variation from limb to limb – while not completely “stagnant” it appears to be nearly identical on either side as observed when Pluto briefly passed in front of the Sun from the departing spacecraft’s point of view. Read more here.
New Horizons’ SWAP instrument measured ions streaming away from Pluto in a long tail
Pluto has a tail!
Neil deGrasse Tyson once joked “I love Pluto – it’s my favorite comet.” (That was a joke, wasn’t it Neil?) And while Pluto doesn’t have a million-mile-long tail like some of the more gregarious comets that have passed though the inner Solar System, it does have a dense cloud of cold ionized gas streaming out to 68,000 miles (109,000 km) behind it, the result of its nitrogen atmosphere being steadily stripped away by the solar wind. “This is just a first tantalizing look at Pluto’s plasma environment,” said co-investigator Fran Bagenal who leads the New Horizons Particles and Plasma team. Read more here.
And as an added treat (really kind of an appetizer) we got to see the first resolved image of Nix, another of Pluto’s four smaller moons:
LORRI image of the 25 mile (40 kilometers) wide Nix, captured on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 360,000 miles (590,000 km).
(Looks like it has a face doesn’t it? There’s that darn pareidolia for ya!)
The next news briefing on Pluto will take place on Friday, July 24 – looking forward to seeing what the team can come up with when given a whole week to pore over the data! (And I’m sure they could all use a few good nights’ sleep too.)
Watch today’s full news briefing below (and don’t miss the part where they answer my question about the streaks at 46:50!)
Want to experience polydactylightenment without surgery, mutagens, or psychotropics? There's an art installation for that:
The "Augmented Hand Series" (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald, 2013-2015) is a real-time, interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors' hands.
As one seven-year-old visitor succinctly puts it: "It's a box. You put your hand in it. You see your hand with an extra finger." More from the Augmented Hand Series site:
About twenty different transformations or scenes have been developed. Some of these perform structural edits to the hand's archetypal form; others endow the hand with new dimensions of plasticity; and others imbue the hand with a kind of autonomy, whose resulting behavior is a dynamic negotiation between visitor and algorithm.
...
The hand is a critical interface to the world, allowing the use of tools, the intimate sense of touch, and a vast range of communicative gestures. Yet we frequently take our hands for granted, thinking with them, or through them, but hardly ever about them. Our investigation takes a position of exploration and wonder. Can real-time alterations of the hand's appearance bring about a new perception of the body as a plastic, variable, unstable medium? Can such an interaction instill feelings of defamiliarization, prompt a heightened awareness of our own bodies, or incite a reexamination of our physical identities? Can we provoke simple wonder about the fact that we have any control at all over such a complex structure as the hand?
We know that the interrelations of hand, mind and identity are far from simple. Persons with alien hand syndrome, for example, have hands which move independently of their conscious will, as if they belonged to another person. By contrast, amputees suffering from phantom limb syndrome continue to feel their missing hand as if it were still there; their discomfort is sometimes relieved with a mirror box, which uses the virtual image of their intact hand to trick the mind and retrain the brain. Within this framework, the Augmented Hand Series can be understood as an instrument for probing or muddling embodied cognition, using a 'direct manipulation' interface and the suspension of disbelief to further problematize the mind-body problem. We see evidence of our instrument's powers in the actions of young visitors who, uncertain whether to believe their eyes, peek into the box to double-check what is (not) really happening to their hand.
Could I have been wrong about Dactyl Fractal Consciousness?
Instead of a physical transformation brought about through some sort of willful Lamarckian saltation, could the Dactyl Fractal manifest itself purely through the mediated experience of augmented reality -- the New Real? Might a polydactyl intelligence emerging from the digital Cloud rewrite the imaging sub-systems of our future cyborg eyes, to show us not such mundanity as dating profiles of random passersby or user ratings for Uber jitneys, but instead allow us to see a vision of our hands transcending their previous limits, free to wriggle with possibilities undreamt and undreamable? Would not such phantom phalanges be more tangible than the knuckled sticks of meat and bone we have been forced to grope with by the cruel contingencies of our ancestry, uniquely able as they will be to probe the contours of the infospace that will become our everything?
As we move our minds from the Old Real to the New Real and beyond to the Virtual, we might find the Dactyl Fractal waiting to greet us, ready to shake our multitude of hands forever.
They’re going on an adventure!
