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We peek-a-boo.

The above image is an x-ray of an experimental space suit from 1968. This x-ray and others are on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum as part of "Suited for Space," a special exhibit about the history of astronaut outerwear. (via National Geographic)

"Porn Sex vs Real Sex: The Differences Explained With Food" is some extremely funny -- and sexually significant -- stuff, and has one of those absolutely perfect titles that require no explanation at all.

Porn Sex vs Real Sex: The Differences Explained With Food (via MeFi)

Давайте кратко поговорим на тему того, что же нового будет в метро в этом году, а также о самых ближайших планах.

Но сначала о том, что нам обещали в 2013 году: «Отрезок Калининско-Солнцевской линии от „Парка Победы“ до „Делового центра“, где в конце года откроется станция „Деловой центр“; участок Таганско-Кранопресненской линии — „Жулебино“, „Лермонтовский проспект“ и „Котельники“, а также участок Бутовской линии с двумя новыми станциями — „Битцевский парк“ и „Лесопарковая“. Всего будет введено шесть новых станций метрополитена и 14 км перегонных тоннелей». Еще обещали станцию Спартак, но ее уже официально перенесли на следующий год.

В целом программа, скорее всего, будет выполнена, но с некоторыми оговорками.

1. Участок от Парка Победы до Делового центра пускается немного в э... скажем, усеченном варианте. Будет открыт только один перегон, по которому будет ходить челнок. На ПП второй выход открыт не будет. Второй перегон и выход переносятся на следующий год. На мой взгляд, не такой уж сильно необходимый участок, чтобы так дробить пуски. Но в этом году надо выдать рекордные километры новых линий.

2. Про Выхино. Там немного печально, к сожалению. Во-первых, станцию Котельники планируется пустить к новому году, хотя, скорее всего, она уедет на 2014 год. Но это не самое страшное. Там гораздо серьезнее ситуация на перегоне Выхино—Лермонтовский проспект, где произошла крупная авария — прорыв плывуна в тоннель при строительстве межтоннельной сбойки. Также поплыл котлован ВОУ. А еще пошли трещины в домах. В общем, подрядчик там постарался. Хотя, скорее всего, хороши все: и проектировщики, и строители. Эта тема активно обсуждается на форуме, и вы можете наблюдать за развитием ситуации сами (начало тут, сообщение №2500 и далее).

А вот цитата оттуда же о том, что там произошло: «При вскрытии обделки вовнутрь ЛПТ произошло вываливание грунта общим объёмом приблизительно 150 кубов. В результате ППТ на участке 70 м был критически деформирован. Разбег колец относительно друг друга составил до 15 см при толщине кольца 27 см. Для исключения угрозы разрушения ППТ он был полностью забетонирован на участке длинной 70 метров.

В настоящий момент угрозы разрушения нет. На поверхности подготавливается котлован длинной 150 м и глубиной 17 м. Работы на неаварийных участках возобновлены, и, возможно, нас всех 1 сентября ждёт праздник».

На форуме есть фотографии, но они не очень внятные и без подписей.


Могу предположить, что это и есть забетонированный участок.

Пока неясно, как это отразится на пуске. Строители там нагнали кучу буровых, оборудования и прочей техники. Вдруг успеют к выборам сдать? Понятно, что с недоделками... Скоро узнаем.

3. Участок Бутовской линии. В целом все нормально. Зимой, правда, строители умудрились сломать щит — по слухам, оторвали ротор, сорвав болты его крепления, но это случилось метрах в 50 от демонтажной камеры. Я так понимаю, его просто выкопали чуть раньше.

4. Теперь грустные новости. Второго выхода Бауманской в ближайшей перспективе не будет. И теперь можно сказать, что официально отказались от станции Суворовская. Мол, бюджет ее строительства в 10 миллиардов рублей не оправдывает тот пассажиропоток, который на ней ожидается. И, видимо, сейчас будет консервация построенных выработок, а консервация вещь такая — очень затратная. Несколько лет в таком режиме — и стоимость мероприятий сравнится со стоимостью строительства. А станция там, на мой взгляд, очень важна для распределения пассажиропотоков и разгрузки соседних линий. Все остальные пересадки на Люблинке и так уже загружены более чем достаточно.

5. Северный участок Люблинки. Мне вот интересно, у кого-нибудь из окружения Собянина наберется смелости сказать ему, что пуска через год не будет? Я понимаю, выборы и все такое, но зачем обещать невыполнимое даже теоретически? Зачем заранее озвучивать нереальные сроки? В следующем году там можно, если сильно постараться, сдать только Петрушку, но зачем нам станция, с которой нельзя уехать? На остальных только-только начинают раскрывать подходные и выходить на трассу. На Фонвизинской, где в понедельник был мэр, журналистам снова озвучивается: через год тут будет станция. о___О!

В качестве заключения скажу, что несмотря на косяки у некоторых подрядчиков и на озвучивания невыполнимых сроков, темпы строительства метро в Москве действительно рекордные. Что не может не радовать.

This could all be yours, with your own pair of Microsoft AR glasses.

USPTO

Microsoft recently filed a patent for augmented reality (AR) glasses that would allow users to play multiplayer games in real space with each other, according to documents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (uncovered by NeoGAF). The patent covers not only the technology of the glasses, but also a system for player matching and information that the glasses would collect.

The filing includes patent art from the perspective of two boys wearing the glasses while sword-fighting in augmented reality over “Jane Smith (The Queen)” as the user decides between games including Dance, Tennis, and “search and find.” In the system Microsoft describes, users send voice invitations to play a game via the glasses, and then the glasses use eye-tracking, facial recognition, depth information, and “device information” like gyroscope or accelerometer readings to conduct the game.

A leak last summer suggested that AR glasses were part of the long-term trajectory of Microsoft’s upcoming console, the Xbox One. The leaked PowerPoint showed that the company intended to first launch the console, then a pay-TV service, then “Fortaleza” glasses that would not only work with the console over Wi-Fi but would present AR experiences in the real world as a mobile device via Xbox Live.

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An anonymous reader writes "Russians are going nuts over a new anti-piracy law that enables Roskomnadzor (the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) to 'blacklist' Internet resources before the issue of a court order. Indeed, 1700 websites have issued a blackout, just like U.S. firms did in protest at the Stop Online Piracy Act. The law, widely known as the Russian SOPA, has been slammed by some major tech firms from the country, including Yandex. Freedom of speech campaigners are worried it could be used for political censorship, while digital companies say it will slow down the development of Internet services in the country."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No idea where this Tennielesque back tattoo featuring Alice on a ladder confronting a higgeldy-piggeldy tower of books came from (do you know?) but it's magnelephant.

ink (via That Book Smell)

Wondering what West Virginia and Britain have in common? This. After hearing that a bill in WV would outlaw Google Glass for motorists in the state, a new report from Stuff suggests that the United Kingdom is considering something comparable. A Department for Transport spokesperson was quoted as saying the following:

"We are aware of the impending rollout of Google Glass and are in discussion with the Police to ensure that individuals do not use this technology while driving. It is important that drivers give their full attention to the road when they are behind the wheel and do not behave in a way that stops them from observing what is happening on the road."

He went on to affirm that a range of penalties already exist in order to punish drivers who aren't "paying proper attention to the road," and while a law has yet to be passed targetting Glass specifically, it certainly sounds as if that type of modification is on the table. Silver lining? North Korea has yet to issue a similarly depressing condemnation of the headset.

Filed under: Transportation, Wearables, Google

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Via: Cult of Android

Source: Stuff

Nope, this strange underwater thing isn't an inflatable tube man swallowed by the ocean, it is a pyrosome.

The pyrosome is so rare that for most underwater divers it may as well be a unicorn. It has only been caught on film a few times.

This one, seen drifting through the water in the video below, was found by Michael Baron of Eagle hawk Dive off the coast of off the Tasman Peninsula in Tasmania, in 2011.

Of all of the strange creatures (and here, and here) in the ocean, the pyrosome is certainly one of the strangest.  

The long tube in the picture is one pyrosome, but is actually made of dozens of animals that reproduce by cloning, then weaving their tissues together to form one long tube.  

Pyrosomes start out as tiny transparent filter feeders that move through the water like an really slow-moving underwater jet ski. Pyrosomes are shaped like hollow tubes that are closed at the rear end. They suck water loaded with plankton through their open end and it passes through the body.

Tiny nodes line the inside walls of the tube, filtering our the plankton they use as food. You can see one bubbling in the video below. Then the animals squirt the water out behind them, the jets of water propelling them through the ocean.

They are even bioluminescent — they can flash a blue-green light can can be seen from several meters. And yes, they are as fluffy and delicate as they look.

The few divers who have actually touched them say they are as soft as a feather boa. Not that you should touch them, of course. You could either disturb them or discover you are actually touching the long tail of a venomous jellyfish.

In the second half of the video you see a similar creature called a salp which is closely related, but they are not bioluminescent. The salp moves by pumping water through its body in pulses, rather than continuously pushing it through as the pyrosomes do.

Check out the giant pyrosome and the salp in the video below:

SEE ALSO: Harrowing First-Hand Accounts From Shark Attack Survivors

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What's this? It's a life-size ear, bioengineered from cow and sheep tissue.

It may not look like something you'd want to have sticking out of your head.

Nevertheless, its geometry is closer to life than a previous effort at bioengineering an outer ear, its creators say.

In 1997, a team of surgeons from the Children's Hospital in Boston earned fame for engineering a small ear and implanting it in a mouse. One researcher, Harvard Medical School surgeon Joseph Vacanti, was involved in both efforts.

This time, the team created an adult-size ear and implanted it onto a rat. The point of the implantation is to check that the ear doesn't lose its shape after implantation and healing.

Although the latest ear clearly has some ways to go, its creators hope that one day, they'll be able to engineer outer ears for people who are born with deformed ears or who lose their ears in accidents, the BBC reports.

To grow the new ear, researchers created a titanium wire frame modeled after the human ear. They filled in the wire frame with collagen taken from cows. In the future, human replacement ears may use collagen taken from the patient, Thomas Cervantes, one of the researchers and a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the BBC. The researchers then seeded their scaffold with cartilage cells taken from sheep.

Cervantes and his colleagues published their work on July 31 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Find Us On Facebook — Business Insider: Science

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This is the first post in ReadWriteBody, an ongoing series where ReadWrite covers networked fitness and the quantified self.

I'm on a treadmill and I can't seem to get off of it.

That's a metaphor, actually. I am, as it happens, on a literal treadmill—a treadmill desk, part of the technological toolkit I've assembled for a four-month-long experiment on myself I'm conducting publicly, here on ReadWrite. I can hit "pause" and hop off anytime. But I don't want to.

The challenge: Using the plethora of apps, gadgets, and networked services that have sprung up to turn our bodies into nodes on the data net, can I drop 20-25 pounds and get in the best shape of my life?

I'm looking at a steady diet of metrics, a strict regimen of oversharing, and a disciplined approach to data capture.

Oh, and maybe some attention to workouts and nutrition.

Stuck At One Speed

Back to the treadmill. So far today, I've walked 10.82 miles on a LifeSpan TR800-DT5 treadmill desk. (LifeSpan lent ReadWrite this model for editorial review during the period of my experiment.)

That feeling of going nowhere is familiar: It sums up how I feel about my fitness progress over the past couple of years. In 2011, I wrote about using social networks and fitness apps to drop from a weight of 258 pounds to 175—a number I hadn't seen on a scale since my teens.

I wish I could say I held things there, but I haven't: My schedule changed, my discipline slipped, and I gained back 25 pounds.

At 200, I'm not in bad shape, but I'm keenly aware I could do better. That's part of the challenge, though: I'm already very active, and some cheese-related incidents aside, fairly strict in my diet. (Just ask my friends, whose photos of cronuts on Path are regularly greeted with my laconically judgmental comment, "Carbs.")

Tracked To Distraction

How does this relate to ReadWrite? As I noted in my first post on ReadWrite, the "entire world is becoming readable and writable"—and that includes our own bodies. Fitness trackers and apps have become part of our regular coverage. There's a new vogue for hardware startups on crowdfunding websites and, increasingly, conventional venture-capital sources, and many of them are fitness-related.

The smartphone is perhaps the ultimate fitness tracker, serving as a do-it-all GPS tracker, food logger, and digital personal trainer, thanks to an explosion of apps. And the quantified-self movement is seeking smarter ways to capture and make sense of all the data exhaust these gadgets and services are spewing.

(By the way, I recently ranted about how much I hate wrist-based devices. Despite my aversion, I'm currently wearing an EB Sync Burn to track calories, steps, and heart rate; I haven't found a less-intrusive alternative, and I wanted to be objective about testing devices that my readers might find useful, even if they aren't ultimately for me.)

Big Data Can Make Us All Smaller

As important as capturing data is, I've also found it vital to harness social networks. My Twitter followers and Facebook friends are used to hearing about everything from my daily calories burned to my gym soundtrack. MyFitnessPal, a food-tracking app I've used for years, is still a mainstay. I've added some newer apps, likeLift and GymPact, to reinforce my habits.

But what's changed since my last big fitness push has been the mass adoption of these services. Since 2011, for example, MyFitnessPal has quadrupled in size to 40 million users, while those same people have shrunk by a collective 100 million pounds, cofounder Mike Lee recently told me. His company is now trying to hire its first data scientist.

"We have a lot of data we can make meaning of," Lee said. "Obesity researchers are lucky to get a thousand people."

It may not be perfectly scientific, but we're running a lot of experiments on ourselves these days. MapMyFitness cofounder Kevin Callahan, whose company is currently running a series of online fitness challenges with running-shoes maker Brooks, is interested in whether "gamification"—adding game-like aspects to an activity like tracking fitness—will boost participation and deliver results for his users.

(Full disclosure: Callahan and I have a challenge on to see who can drop 20 pounds first. Follow me and Callahan on Twitter to track our progress through the hashtag #Lose20ByDec.)

"An Experiment Of One"

Ultimately, though, the body of research that matters most is always your own. That's a bit of wisdom I got from Steve Ledbetter, a San Francisco-based personal trainer and self-described "fitness nerd" who's better known as Coach Stevo.

"With quantified self, it's always going to be an experiment of one," says Ledbetter. "There's no other test case."

With the human body, there are so many variables to track—and too many to control for.

Some of Ledbetter's clients come in "with more gadgets than common sense."

"What I tell them is that what matters is the delta, the change, the trend," he says. "Only bad things happen quickly with the human body."

And so I carry on, one foot in front of the other on the treadmill. I've walked another two miles while drafting this post. What's the end goal of this experiment? The only aim I'm certain of is to learn something, and share it with you.

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Randall Munroe has finally finished Time, his 3,000+ frame slow-motion animation that began life as wordless, enigmatic single-panel XKCD installment. Since then, the panel has been slowly, slowly updating itself, running out its course over several months. Geekwagon has collected the whole series in an easy-to-control window, and the story, taken as a whole, is a beautiful and odd existentialist parable touching on the discovery of geographic knowledge; cultural first contacts; environmental disaster, friendship and ingenuity. (Thanks, @dexitroboper!)