PAIN’T JOB A police officer paused after being hit in the face with paint as officers advanced on Occupy protesters blocking an intersection during a May Day rally in Oakland, Calif., Tuesday. (Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images via The Wall Street Journal)
Not sure if paintballing cops will get the point across.
Despite the Dark, Giant Squid Eyes See All
The enormous eyes of giant and colossal squid may help them spot predatory sperm whales in their dim undersea habitat, a new study finds.
These mysterious squid are tough to spot and even tougher to study in their natural habitat. But squid that have been caught or observed have huge, basketball-size peepers — three times the diameter of another other animal, including behemoths of similar size, such as swordfish.
St. Pete Free Skool birthday/may day/picnic! I didn’t get to attend much of this, but what I saw was awesome. Jim Grinaker did a fantastic job putting it together, and there was a good turnout and an abundance of delicious food. Dell Holmes park is also worth noting, I had no idea it even existed - it’s fantastic.
Muscle tissue produced with a 3D printer.
San Diego startup Organovo has developed a bioprinting technique which allows it to create human tissue starting with any cell source. The printer deposits lines of cells closely together, where they are allowed to grow and interconnect until they form working muscle tissue.
Unlike other experimental approaches that utilize ink-jet printers to deposit cells, Organovo’s technology enables cells to interact with each other the way they do in the body. How? They are packed tightly together, sandwiched, if you will, and incubated. This prompts them to cleave to each other and interchange chemical signals. When printed, the cells are grouped together in a paste that helps them grow, migrate, and align themselves properly. In the case of muscle cells, the way they orient themselves in the same direction allow for contractions of the tissue.
The company hopes to one day build entire organs for transplants. Because tissue is able to be built from a patient’s own cells, the risk of rejection would be very low.
Gallium
The above picture is not an illusion, not a trick - it is Gallium. With a melting point of only slightly above room temperature (about 29 °C), it will easily melt in one’s hand. It could also be used for a great tea-time prank.
Gallium has atomic number 31, and although elemental gallium does not naturally occur, it can be found as the gallium(III) salt in certain ores. Elemental gallium is a soft, silvery, brittle metal at room temperature.
The major use compound in microwave circuitry and infrared tools is gallium arsenide. The element is almost exclusively used for semiconductors, but in more recent times it is being utilizes for alloys and fuel cells.
Would love to demonstrate phonons for a condensed matter physics class with this…
It turns out that wood, if worked correctly, can be the perfect material for a bicycle. We pulled together 11 wooden bikes; some are almost space-age, others are simply rough, but all are totally awesome.
Wooden Clockwork Fractal Computer
Blog by Brent Thorne documenting the development of his clockwork wooden computer designed to calculate and draw fractals:
I’ve been working on this for a while now. Its a wooden computer that computes continuous self-similar fractals. I’ll post the working model of a general computer implemented in gears as soon as I get some laser cutter time to complete the counter/comparator unit.
How the hell is this supposed to work?
I could tell you that it took years and years of research and development to create a theory of computation that could be implemented in wood, but alias it would be untrue. The idea was formed after only a few reductions and one night when I couldn’t get to sleep. You see, computers are much simpler than your teachers might of taught you in school. You don’t even need the Boolean logic primitives to create a computer. These so called primitives are merely symbolic.
The most primitive computer is comprised of only two parts and from these two parts we can create all others. Those two parts are memory and a comparator. Some may claim that any practical computer must also have input and output, but that just is memory, or registers, memory again, or an ALU, nope that’s a comparator.
We can further delineate memory into two types, read-only and read-write. We need the read-write type of memory to store temporary values for comparison. For example, read-write memory could be a toggle or counter. Read-only memory is convenient for storing tables or a program, however these two examples are symbolic and not necessary for computation. An example of read-only memory is pegs in a disc, where the presents of a peg represents a symbol.
The true heart of a computer is the comparator. A comparator simply compares two values. One of those two values was read from memory previously and the other value is read at the current position in memory.
Now that we have our fundamental blocks we can start creating all the other complications that are common to modern computers.You can find more information about the project at the blog here, including some videos of prototypes in action.
(via proofmathisbeautiful)
Love this!! There’s no excuse to not eat healthy :)These are American prices, this stuff (the fast food included) would not be that cheap here, but I’ll reblog this anyway.
They should do one for Subway.
For $8 you can get a footlong veggie sandwich, chip and a drinkFor $8 you can buy a lot of real, not-processed veggies and fruit, a loaf of bread, some pretzels and some fruit juice.
(via robertlovespi)
A few Major Telescopes
From left to right:
- James Webb Space Telescope (2018 launch)
- Hubble Space Telescope
- Kepler Space Telescope
- XMM Newton
- NASA Spitzer Space Telescope
(via itsfullofstars)
Sun ‘Tornado’
This enormous tornado erupting from the surface of the sun is big enough to swallow the Earth. In fact, it could swallow five Earths.
