Bunker.jordan

Graphene is frankly just showing off at this point. Not content with breezing in and smashing records in solar efficiency, kicking the butt of lithium-ion batteries, being the strongest known material in the Universe, being 1,000 times more light-sensitive than any known camera sensor and a thousand other achievements, now this smug supermaterial is having a crack at audio. How’s it going? Well, with basically zero acoustic development, a graphene loudspeaker is already boasting a better frequency response curve than a set of Sennheiser MX-400s... Continue Reading World’s first graphene speaker already superior to Sennheiser MX400

Section: Music

Tags: Audio, Graphene, Sound, Speakers, UC Berkeley

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hatewizard:

I decided to look up reviews of this ant bait I got and found this

Sharing a binding

This is a clever book from the 18th century, printed in Oxford in 1756. It presents both the Old and New Testament, although the books are not bound together the regular way, behind one another. Instead, the binder opted to place them next to each other. This very rare binding technique is part of a family that includes the dos-à-dos (or “back to back”) binding, which I blogged about before (here). Having the two testaments bound this way allowed the reader to consult passages from both books at the same time. Indeed, the empty pages in the front and back are filled with notes, including in what looks like Greek and Hebrew. It appears this clever binding had a reader to match.

Pic: Manchester, Chetham’s Library (source).

A team of students and professors at Georgia's Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) recently unveiled a tiny house prototype cited as the future of urban living. Dubbed SCADpad, the home in question can fit into a standard-sized car parking space and is expected to cost around US$40,000 to produce. .. Continue Reading Could you live in a home the size of a parking space?

Section: Architecture

Tags: House, Mobile, Parking, Savannah College of Art and Design, Students

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• A new type of parking assistant - parking space measurement from Bosch

Scientists working in Brazil recently witnessed a heartbreaking scene involving a female marmoset who sustained a mortal head injury after accidentally falling from a tree. They then watched in amazement as her partner of three-and-a-half years climbed down to comfort her as she lay dying.

Read more...

Fitness landscapes are an effective way of showing how well organisms are doing at reproducing. Traditionally, however, these models are static snapshots of processes that often take millennia to unfold. Now, computational biologists have created a video that visualizes these adaptive landscapes over time.

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New images acquired by Cassini show a bright clump orbiting Saturn at the outermost edge of its outer ring. Astronomers say it could be a brand new moon in the process of being born.

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Tim Johnson over at the wonderful blog New Elementary has just published an interesting inside look at the development process of Peter Reid’s Classic Space Exo Suit Cuusoo set. Although the actual design of the suit has yet to be revealed, the logo for the new set has been announced. Reading Tim’s write-up of the extent to which fans have been involved in the development of this particular set has given me great hope that the outcome will live up to the fan community’s very high expectations. The fan involvement for this set reminds me a good deal of my time helping design the original Minecraft set, and it’s heartening to see another Cuusoo project take this route, instead of taking the project to Billund and developing it solely with official product designers, as has been the case with all of the other Cuusoo projects.
Combine the Exo Suit with the forthcoming Benny’s Spaceship Spaceship SPACESHIP set from the LEGO Movie, and it’s looking to be a very good year for Classic Space aficionados.

Read the original post on New Elementary in its entirety here.

the-dalm:

brainbubblegum:

legallyblained:

efflourescent:

why do you never see baby pigeons

#what if all pigeons are baby pigeons and there is one masterpigeon the size of a whale

This is too funny NOT to draw

pidgeons grow up very fast, they only stay as babies for a few months, and they’re in nests up in weird hard to reach places.

Dancing paleontologists, colourful graphics, and unashamed catchiness make Fossil Rock Anthem one of my favourite scientific parody songs. Even better, it's educational effectiveness is backed by research into the developing field of using music to engage students in learning science.

Read more...

Whee!

There's a quarter mile stretch of highway in the Netherlands that now features light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark road markings. It's a pilot project that, if proven effective, could dramatically reduce our need for streetlights.

Read more...

After Tyler posted an anti-frog build, A Plastic Infinity decided to show us Frogs are smarter than the average bot, with this amusing build:

While it was definitely the humour that caught my eye (not to mention the cute little frog), there are actually a lot of fantastic build techniques he’s used in the bot itself. From the brilliantly illegal shoulder joint connections, to the marvelous finger connection – this bot just fantastic.

The latest and greatest feature for 3D printers – besides being closed source, having no meaningful technical specs, and being on track towards pulling in $10 Million on a Kickstarter – is automated bed leveling. This amazingly useful feature makes sure your prints have proper adhesion to the bed, reduce print errors, and put even inexpensive printers into the realm of extremely expensive professional machines. Automated bed leveling has been extremely hard to implement in the past, but now [Scottbee] has it figured out with a working prototype on his Makerbot Replicator 2X.

Earlier attempts at automated bed leveling used some sort of probe on the tool head to measure the build plate, calculate its flatness and orientation in space, and compensate for any tilt in software. [Scottbee]‘s solution to the problem took a different tack: instead of trying to compensate for any odd orientation of the build surface in software, he’s simply making the bed level with a series of springs and cam locks.

[Scottbee]‘s device levitates the build plate on three springs, and replaces the jack screws with three “gimballing pins” and pin locks. With the pin locks disengaged, the bed plate is pressed down with the printer’s nozzle. By moving the extruder across the build plate and locking the pins in place one by one, [Scottbee]‘s device defines the plane of the build plate along three points. This makes the build platform parallel to the extruder nozzle, and also has a nice benefit of setting the distance from the build platform to the nozzle precisely with incredible repeatability.

The mechanics of locking the three gimballing pins in place  only requires a single DC gear motor, driven by an extra fan output on the Makerbot’s electronics. It’s simple, and with a bit of rework, it looks like most of the device could also be 3D printed.

An awful lot of RepRaps and 3D printers out there already use three points to attach the build plate to a frame. With a little bit of effort, this same technique could be ported and made a bit more generic than the Makerbot-based build seen above. It’s amazingly simple, and we can’t wait to see this applied to a normal RepRap.

Thanks [Josh] for the tip.

Filed under: 3d Printer hacks

P++CB – paper based approach to making electronic circuits by Phillip Stearns.

P++CB is a paper based approach to making electronic circuits with an emphasis on education and modular design. The core concept is inspired by the paper circuit work of Peter Blasser and the modular approach to designing expressive and expandable creative systems used by Peter Edwards, all in the spirit of the super fun LittleBits project.

Learn more.

Bioengineer Manu Prakash is an innovator in STEM education. Earlier this year, we celebrated Prakash’s debut of his awesome paper microscope. Now, along with his graduate student George Korir, he has won first prize in the the Science, Play and Research Kit (SPARK) Competition with the development a hand-crank chemistry set for kids, from Wired.

Prakash hopes to kindle some of the same curiosity about chemistry (minus the actual combustion) with a new hand-crank operated chemistry set for kids. A prototype of the device just won the $50,000 first prize in a contest for inspiring science toys sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public…

The chemistry kit developed by Prakash and graduate student George Korir manages to be both cutting edge and retro at the same time. It uses microfluidic channels like those found in modern DNA chips and other molecular biology equipment to move chemicals around and mix them together. But it also uses punch cards like the ones used in 1950s era computers to control the experiments.

As you turn the hand crank, the punch card moves through the device, and the pattern of holes punched in the paper controls which chemicals mix with which, and when. Small chips with tiny fluid reservoirs can house up to 15 different chemicals. These could either be pre-loaded or filled by a teacher or parent with an eyedropper. “It’s purely mechanical,” Prakash said. “There’s no electronics, no battery.”

Read more.

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Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!

Researchers in Germany have developed a lightweight, high-strength material inspired by the framework structure of bones and wood and the shell structure of bees' honeycombs. Created using 3D laser polymer printing combined with a ceramic coating, the material is less dense than water but, relative to its size, boasts strength comparable to high-performance steel or aluminum... Continue Reading Microstructured materials as strong as steel yet less dense than water

Section: Science

Tags: Construction, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Lightweight, Materials

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The most prestigious award for journalism in the United States, the Pulitzer Prize, went this year to reporters who covered leaked documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. This award signals official recognition of the social good that grew out of Snowden's leaks.

Read more...

Stem cells are highly promising for the treatment of everything from HIV to leukemia to baldness. In many cases, however, a great number of them must be used in order have a noticeable effect, which makes treatments impractical or expensive. Now, scientists at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital have found that a smaller number of stem cells can still get the job done, if they're first hopped up on steroids. .. Continue Reading Scientists give stem cells a performance boost ... by putting them on steroids

Section: Medical

Tags: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Stem Cells, Treatment

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Horns are a handy cosplay accessory to have in your toolkit. They’re great for fantasy costumes you put together at the last minute and are a fit for a variety of costume situations such as the renaissance faire. If you don’t want to make horns from clay, which can be heavy, you can fashion them from cardboard and hot glue. DeviantArt user MonkeyNumber5 cut cardboard into strips, rolled them, and glued them together. Once they’re dry, you can paint them and attach them to a headband or ribbon.

See the entire tutorial at DeviantArt.

IEEE Spectrum has a post about a new discovery out of Stanford University.

Biofuels, once hailed as a planetary savior and alternative to oil and gas, have not quite fulfilled that destiny. Traditional, mass-produced biofuels from crops such as corn carry a litany of problems, including land use issues and questions of life cycle emissions. If we could generate usable fuels from more benign sources, it could go a long way toward solving a host of energy and environmental problems. A team at Stanford University reports today in Nature that they have a novel way to produce ethanol from carbon monoxide (CO) gas using a metal catalyst made of copper nanocrystals.

“We have discovered the first metal catalyst that can produce appreciable amounts of ethanol from carbon monoxide at room temperature and pressure—a notoriously difficult electrochemical reaction,” said senior study author and Stanford chemistry professor Matthew Kanan in a press release.

Copper is the only material known to electroreduce CO down to generate fuels, but it does so at extremely low efficiencies. Kanan’s group improved this with a nanocrystalline form of copper produced from copper oxide; this new material improves the efficiency of the reactions dramatically.

The researchers built a fuel cell, including a cathode made of the new copper nanocrystals, and suspended it in CO-saturated water; a small voltage applied across the fuel cell generates the resulting ethanol products. The Faraday efficiency using the oxide-derived material was 57 percent, meaning more than half of the current used went toward producing ethanol and acetate. Standard copper particles, meanwhile, produced hydrogen almost exclusively (Faraday efficiency of 96 percent) and very little ethanol.

Read more.

Will you be staying up all night to see the lunar eclipse? NASA will be providing live coverage so you can find out all the information about what is going on from some very informed sources!

The public will have the opportunity to view and learn more about the Tuesday, April 15 total lunar eclipse on NASA television, the agency’s website, and social media. Coverage begins at 2 a.m. EDT and will last about three hours. The eclipse’s peak, when the moon will enter the Earth’s full shadow or umbra, will occur at 3:45 a.m.

The United States will be in a prime orbital position and time of day to view the eclipse. Depending on local weather conditions, the public will get a spectacular view looking into the sky as the moon’s appearance will change from bright orange to blood red to dark brown and perhaps gray. The eclipse is a phenomenon that occurs when the Earth, moon and sun are in perfect alignment, blanketing the moon in the Earth’s shadow. The United States will not be able to witness a full lunar eclipse in its entirety again until 2019.

Leading up to the eclipse, NASA will host a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Monday, April 14 at 2 p.m. with astronomers from the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Various NASA researchers also will be available for media interviews. NASA Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and Instagram followers will be able to join the conversation and ask questions using the hashtag #eclipse.

The public will be able to tag and share their images of the eclipsed moon on Instagram and on the agency’s Flickr group at:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/nasalunareclipse

Lunar eclipse video resources are available at:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/2014TotalLunarEclipse.html

Live NASA TV coverage and commentary will begin at 1 a.m. To view the coverage and access eclipse streaming video, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

For more information on NASA’s eclipse activities, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/1kkfFXX

Read more and share your eclipse experiences in the comments!

A charming exercise in metaphorical thinking and symbolic representation.

Rodin believed that his art was about removing the stone not part of the sculpture to reveal the essence of his artistic vision. Perhaps this is what Catalan-born, London-based graphic designer Genis Carreras implicitly intended in chiseling away the proverbial philosopher’s stone to sculpt its minimalist essence. Many moons ago, I discovered with great delight Carreras’s series of geometric graphics explaining major movements in philosophy and now, with the help of Kickstarter, the project has come to new life in book form. Philographics: Big Ideas in Simple Shapes (public library) is a vibrant visual dictionary of philosophy, enlisting the telegraphic powers of design in distilling the essential principles of 95 schools of thought into visual metaphors and symbolic representation.

The skeptics (in the colloquial sense of the word, although its roots are, fittingly, philosophical) should remember that rather than an exercise in reckless reductionism seeking to dumb down some of humanity’s most complex ideas, the project is instead a playful and thoughtful celebration of symbolic and metaphorical thinking — that distinctly human faculty that is the hallmark of our imagination. Perhaps most importantly, these minimalist graphics are designed to tickle our curiosity and spark deeper interest in influential theories of human nature and human purpose that those of us not formally trained in philosophy may not have previously been inspired to explore.

Carreras writes:

The visuals [are] open to different interpretations, allowing the reader to draw their path to connect the idea behind each theory with its form. This plurality reflects all the different theories to see and understand the world that are compiled [in] this book.

The book aims to be the starting point of deeper discussion about these theories; it’s a trigger of conversation to bring philosophy back to our daily lives.

Philographics is absolutely delightful from cover to cover. Complement it with the history of philosophy in superhero comics and these 60-second animations of famous philosophy thought experiments.

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I wish that Hollywood would stop making watered-down renditions of Eighties classics, no matter how slick they are, and would instead focus on something new.
However, Marin Stipkovic‘s rendition of Robocop looks like a classic to me.