Bunker.jordan

princealigorna:

year-0f-the-kyle:

It never has.

This is a concept most of tumblr can’t wrap their head around.

"But we don’t hate you personally, but the system you represent."

Okay, SJWs, I will give you that. But there has to be a way for you to make your points, which may well be valid (the current system fucks everyone up, including those of us with the most privilege. It’s based on a competition-based ideal that actively tries to put different groups of humans against each other and dehumanizes everyone in the process, and it needs to go) without making it sound like you really do want to either impose your own wills on everyone else, or flat out murder them. Supremacism of any kind does not solve the root problems. It only makes you feel temporarily vindicated. It assuages broken egos, but it DOESN’T REALLY CHANGE A GODDAMN THING!

darkdecadence:

Lamborghini Aventador

lamborghini gotospace

lamborghini starshipcar

lamborghini prettysky

neophyte-redglare:

apparently theres a pain reliever called Skelaxin and im just

If you described a shark as a toothy torpedo covered in sandpaper, you wouldn't be too far off the mark. It's that rough sandpapery skin that gives sharks their highly efficient swimming abilities, and scientists finally understand why.

Read more...

Mercury’s ready for its close-up, Mr. MESSENGER! At an incredible 5 meters per pixel, the image above is one of the highest-resolution images of Mercury’s surface ever captured. It was acquired on March 15 with the MESSENGER spacecraft’s MDIS (Mercury Dual Imaging System) instrument and shows an 8.3-km (5.2-mile) -wide section of the planet’s north polar region, speckled with small craters and softly rolling hills.

And, with a new low-altitude mission ahead, there’ll be plenty more like this — and likely even better — in the months ahead. Read the rest of this article here.

Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Tagged: craters, high resolution, Mercury, Messenger, planet, solar system, space, surface

Khanjar Dagger

• Dated: 18th century
• Culture: Indian, Moghul
• Measurements: overall length 34.5 cm

The dagger features a curved, double-edged blade of fine Damascus steel, with central fuller near two bands engraved with foliage, two raisers at the forte.

The jade grip is chiselled with floral motifs, while the pommel is sculpted in the shape of a bud, pierced at the base, finely decorated with golden flowers featuring diamond and rubies at the petals.

The wooden scabbard comes with beige silk covering, while the entire surface is decorated with high-relieved embroideries enriched with hard stones.

Source: Copyright © 2014 Czerny’s International Auction House S.R.L.

Since we just learned that Star Wars: Episode VII started filming yesterday (it’s really happening!), it seems like a great time to look at another lightsaber build. Instructables user agent036 used plumbing parts for the hilt and took apart a toy lightsaber for the blade. Between a sink drain, a plumbing extension tube, some wire, and other odds and ends, he made a hilt that looks much more realistic than anything you see on toy store shelves. Before you dive into wiring, piece the hilt together is pretty straightforward:

The Pop-Up Drain, and the Extension tube. These two parts are magic. Just sticking the one on the other looks like a light saber. What I did was I removed the plastic and brass rings from the drain, and then wrapped a bunch of rubber bands around one end to build it up so I could squeeze the extension tube on and have it stay. There are lots of ways to do this, I just had a pile of rubber bands handy. You could use gaskets or taper or whatever. Now unscrew the bottom tube from the drain to make it easier to get into it.

Read more at Instructables.

Video from a capture space consisting of one Oculus Rift head-mounted display and three Kinect 3D cameras set up in an equilateral triangle, with each Kinect approximately 2m from the center point. The resulting 3D video data is merged with a virtual 3D model of an office environment.

More here.

Mass Effect’s Garrus Vakarian has a unique look, and even though Sarrah of Red Nebula Studios had never built armor before, it didn’t stop her from tackling the costume. She spent about seven months on the build, and it shows. Even BioWare said, “If you’ve ever wondered what Garrus might look like in real life, wonder no more. This cosplay is AMAZING!” It’s a good day when you get that kind of compliment from the makers of the video game you’re cosplaying a character from.

As she worked, Sarrah documented each portion of the build from the planning to the sculpting to making the armor. Since I talk a lot about armor, I’m highlighting the mask build for this cosplay. After she created the mask and painted it, she still had to build it out and add neck pieces. She had a spandex base and used “skin” made from cotton spandex to cover it and applied latex to the fabric:

After a lot of fussing around with different materials, I decided the best way to keep the neck nice and flexible, as well as breathable, was to make the skin out of cotton spandex as well. To get the effect of skin, I tried a few experiments. The most successful was the lower-right portion of the second picture. I sponged a couple of layers of latex directly onto the fabric, being careful to leave gaps in between where the spandex could retain its stretch properties. I then used acrylic paint to color the skin, again applied with a sponge.

On the other side, I wanted to make sure and put a lot of detail work into those scars he is so proud of! The technique is almost identical to the left side of his neck, except here I strategically added folds and wrinkles, securing them in place to the fabric underneath with little dots of hot glue. The paint job was also similar, latex and acrylic paint, but here I took care to accentuate the highlights and shadows to make his scars stand out.

Read about each part of the build over at Red Nebula Studios.

YouTube user, Mohammad Tiba, found this truly amazing ‘Bumblebee’ street performer, while in Ann Arbor, MI.

During an interview with Conan O’Brien, George R.R. Martin admits to writing his well-loved novels on a DOS machine using WordStar 4.0. via Rolling Stone:

When most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is far more hilarious: Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using Eighties word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview Tuesday night on Conan.

Read more.

It’s a relatively simple task to find evidence of helium by just looking at the sun; all you need is a prism, diffraction grating, and a web cam. DIY spectrometers have been around for ages, but most of them only produce a spectrum, not a full image complete with spectral data. Now it’s possible to take an image of an object, complete with that objects spectra using a DSLR, some lenses, a PVC pipe, and the same diffraction grating from your DIY interferometer.

The idea behind a hyperspectral imager is to gather the spectral data of each pixel of an image. The spectral data is then assembled into a 3D data cube, with two dimensions dedicated to the image, and the third dimension used to represent wavelength. There are a surprising number of applications for this technique, ranging from agriculture and medicine to some extremely creepy surveillance systems.

The authors of this paper (freakin’ huge PDF) used a piece of PVC pipe, three camera lenses, a diffraction grating, and a small paper aperture to construct their hyperspectral imager. Images are captured using a standard, multi exposure HDR method, assembling the raw data from the camera into a hyperspectral image with MATLAB.

There’s a ton of awesome info in the PDF, covering how the authors calibrated their system for different lighting conditions, interpreted the RGGB Bayer sensor in the camera, and a few examples of what kind of image can be constructed with this kind of data. That’s a recommended read, right there.

Thanks [Yannick] for the tip.

Filed under: digital cameras hacks

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Use your spare computing power to process radio astronomy data. Data collected by one of several radio telescopes (Parkes, GALEX, Pan-STARRS1, and WISE) is sent to your computer as a small data packet ready for processing. theSkyNet consists of two main projects: SourceFinder, which is searching for the sources of cosmic radio waves, and POGS, which is generating a multi-wavelength galaxy atlas for the nearby universe.

By having thousands of people donate their extra computing power, it is possible to simulate a single powerful machine capable of doing real and relevant scientific research. theSkyNet currently has over 20,000 members, with about 4,000 members donating their computing power at any given time. On average theSkyNet represents between 35 and 50 TFLOPS of processing power, the equivalent of a mid-level supercomputer. In the pipeline, theSkyNet aims to have participants help identify and catalogue radio wave sources in the sky.

Project owners + coordinators:
Pete Wheeler, theSkyNet developer
Dave Thilker, theSkyNet POGS team
Attila Popping, theSkyNet SourceFinder team

To learn more, visit: http://theskynet.org

To participate:
• download and run BOINC, then select Attach to Project and when prompted, enter http://pogs.theskynet.org/pogs/
• download and run SourceFinder installer 

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/_theskynet
• connect with facebook.com/theskynet.org

Dr. David Thilker (Johns Hopkins University) introduces what science theSkyNet POGS project is hoping to achieve.

theSkyNet POGS video from ICRAR on Vimeo.

RSscan and Materialise have teamed up to create RSPrint, a new joint venture that is capable of scanning human feet and 3D printing custom insoles that precisely fit the scanned human.  

RSscan “special “Footscan®” hardware and software for dynamic pressure measurements in science, topsport, clinical markets (orthotics, podology), leisure and much more”, while Materialise is a well-known commercial 3D print service. It’s an obvious partnership: RSscan produces the digital foot models and Materialise brings them to life. 

The process is straightforward: a human subject stands (barefoot, obviously) on the foot scanner and pressure sensors map the foot. Software interprets the map and produces a 3D model of insoles that complement the scanned foot. Materialise receives the 3D model and prints it for delivery. 

We’re interested in this because it brings 3D printing a bit closer to the dream of individually replicated clothing. We’re not 3D printing shoes here - but we are 3D printing part of a shoe, in fact the most important and personal part of the shoe. A natural extension of this capability would be to add on uppers and lowers of various styles and sizes that match the insole. Then we’d have true, personal shoe printing. 

Via Materialise

Not so long ago, self health monitoring was largely limited to weighing ourselves to see how a diet was going and sticking a thermometer under our tongue to see if we were getting sick. For everything else we went to the family doctor. That was in the past. Technology has put health and fitness monitoring firmly in consumers’ hands. Starting with pedometers in the 1980s and progressing to the myriad wearable fitness trackers flooding the market today. The grip has just tightened again with Cue – a device that allows users to run medical diagnostics from the comfort of their own home... Continue Reading Cue lets users perform medical diagnostics at home

Section: Health and Wellbeing

Tags: Android, Apps, Family, Fertility, Fitness, Health, Influenza, iOS, Women

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The chemical tree got a bit of a shake this week with scientists at IBM announcing the discovery of the first new class of polymer materials in decades. Discovered using a combination of lab experiments and computer modelling, the new plastics have properties that could potentially have a huge impact in manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and micro electronics... Continue Reading IBM discovers first new class of polymers in decades

Section: Science

Tags: IBM, Plastics, Polymer, Recyclable, Self-healing

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• Non-toxic, biodegradable plastic resin promises cleaner construction materials

If you see a group of scientists playing with a blob of Silly Putty, they might not be goofing off, they may be working on a technological breakthrough. That turned out to be the case with researchers at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering , who have developed a way to use an ingredient in Silly Putty to improve lithium-ion battery life between charges by three times the industry standard... Continue Reading Scientists use Silly Putty ingredient to improve batteries

Section: Electronics

Tags: Batteries, Lithium-ion, Nanotubes, University of California

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• Air Swimmers give a new meaning to 'flying fish'

Touch Bionics has unveiled the latest enhancements to its i-limb Ultra Revolution at OTWorld 2014 International Congress. Users can now set and assign different grips for different objects and configure the prosthetic hand via Android apps... Continue Reading Touch Bionics updates i-limb Ultra Revolution prosthetic hand

Section: Robotics

Tags: Bionic, Hand, Prosthesis, Prosthetics

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• RSLSteeper launches third version of its bebionic myoelectric hand
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Data collected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope over the past 20 years show Jupiter's Great Red Spot has been shrinking at an increasing rate to its current, and smallest, recorded size. The reduction is possibly due to the existence of eddies, that have been observed feeding into the planet-sized storm... Continue Reading Jupiter's Great Red Spot has shrunk to its smallest size yet

Section: Space

Tags: Hubble, Juno, Jupiter, NASA, Space telescope

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• Hubble Extreme Deep Field images the farthest reaches of the universe

After eight years of study of the second planet in our Solar System, ESA’s Venus Express orbiter is winding up its science program in anticipation of a plunge into the Venusian atmosphere sometime in the next two months... Continue Reading Venus Express prepares for plunge into atmosphere

Section: Space

Tags: ESA, Spacecraft, Unmanned, Venus

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In what could be a landmark moment in the history of science, physicists working at the Blackett Physics Laboratory in Imperial College London have designed an experiment to validate one of the most tantalizing hypotheses in quantum electrodynamics: the theory that matter could be created using nothing more than pure light. .. Continue Reading Groundbreaking experiment aims to create matter from light

Section: Science

Tags: Electrons, Energy, Fusion, Imperial College, Kinetic Energy, Laser, Matter, Max Planck Institute, Photon, Physics, Quantum, Universe, Vacuum

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• New photonic molecules are not unlike lightsabers

Scientists at Purdue University have come up with a way of growing corn in caves, but it doesn't involve some bizarre mating of maize and mushroom. Instead, they manipulated artificial light and temperature in such a way that the growth of the corn plants, while stunted, didn't significantly affect the seed yield. The finding could have a significant impact on the future of genetically modified crops by helping prevent genetically modified pollen escaping into the ecosystem. .. Continue Reading Purdue researchers pursue cave corn

Section: Science

Tags: Agriculture, Farming, Genetic engineering, Horticulture, Plants, Purdue University

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The 3D format has had something of a renaissance in recent years, but the technology still has some way to go before the potential of "real-life" multiperspective 3-D can be realized. The Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab is developing a new 3D video projection system that doesn't require glasses and provides different users different perspective angles of the same object. The team sees it not as a final answer, but as a transitional system that sits between current technologies and true holographic video... Continue Reading MIT develops glasses-free 3D projector as a "practical alternative to holographic video"

Section: Electronics

Tags: 3D, Display, Glasses, Holographic, MIT, Projectors, Video

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