Some major advances in mimicking human facial expressions in the form of Jules, the disembodied head robot.
Some major advances in mimicking human facial expressions in the form of Jules, the disembodied head robot.
Ray gun debuts in Iraq.
Original Economist story here.
The opening chord of “Hard Day’s Night” has long been a topic of analysis. Recently, a Dalhousie math professor published what appears to be the final word on the subject, as written up in the Wired blog:
The secret sauce, as it turns out, includes five piano notes apparently played by producer George Martin.
It was already [...]
At UCLA, they’ve discovered that in a vacuum, peeling a roll of scotch tape causes x-ray emission:
Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll. That’s where electrons jumped from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape [...]
Researchers at Rice are trying to develop a beer that would fight cancer, heart disease, aging, and possibly crime. They’re trying to infuse the beer with consistently high amounts of resveratrol, the healthy chemical already found in red wine and pomegranates.
From New Scientist via Andrew Sullivan:
Neurobiologists have figured out how to make mice forget traumatic experiences:
For more than two decades, researchers have been studying the chemical–a protein called alpha-CaM kinase II–for its role in learning and memory consolidation.
[...]
He and his collaborators first put the mice in a chamber where the animals heard a tone, then followed up the tone with [...]
Santa Barbara company Carbon Sciences is working on developing alternative energy methods by recycling carbon dioxide. Basically, the idea is that you strip the carbon atoms off the CO2 and strip some hydrogen atoms off some H2O, and put the C’s and the H’s together to make hydrocarbons. As you might expect, any publicly available [...]
Noah’s banjo-brain-surgery video reminded me of one of the cooler psych 101 experiments, involving patients with a severed corpus callossum. We can cause “sham rage” with lesions in certain areas, and screw with people’s memory in others, but the most fun (and sometimes not horribly unethical!) thing we can do is split their fucking brain [...]
From BoingBoing:
Banjo player Eddie Adcock recently had brain surgery where surgeons installed deep brain stimulator electrodes to control a tremor in his right hand. Patients are sometimes kept awake during brain surgery to interact with the surgeon and help guide the procedure. In Adcock’s case, he played the banjo as the surgeon worked.
Oops.
On 19 September 2008, during powering tests of the main dipole circuit in Sector 3-4 of the LHC, a fault occurred in the electrical bus connection in the region between a dipole and a quadrupole, resulting in mechanical damage and release of helium from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel.
What’s a multi-billion dollar international [...]
The Discover blog says:
At 103 beats per minute, “Stayin’ Alive” just about matches the 100 chest compressions per minute recommended by the American Heart Association. A small study at the University of Illinois medical school found that doctors and medicals students practicing CPR while listening to the song gave an average of 109 compressions per [...]
Shear thinning came up in a conversation the other day. This is a property of many polymer solutions that decrease in viscosity with an applied shear force. You see this in ketchup: it’s really thick and tough to get started flowing out of the bottle, but once the flow starts, there is a high shear [...]
A new National Geographic documentary is coming out soon (sadly only in England) on animals in the womb. It seems like it’s part photography and part scanning/modeling, but still cool.
Ground-breaking photographic techniques, plus state-of-the-art graphics, 4-D scanning techniques and the most sophisticated natural history models ever, have all been used to provide an unparalleled glimpse into a [...]
A couple months ago, The Atlantic had a feature story titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? It’s about how the internet has changed how we read things. They cite a study:
They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source [...]
GE has apparently developed superhydrophobic metals:
GE has some ideas about how to use the materials. One possibility is in de-icing aircrafts. Ice buildup on engines due to condensation can be catastrophic. Right now, aircraft use heat to prevent ice, which requires power. De-icing on the ground, meanwhile, is done with de-icing fluids, which contain toxic [...]
Someone seems to bring this up to me at least once every few months, and this time it brought me back to read airplaneonatreadmill.com again. Of all the idiotic discussions on the internet about this topic, I am so happy that a smart person got ahold of this domain name and completely cleared the air. [...]