Nathan

Coffee cup warmer 3000

Thaigo Olson has finally finished building any DIY maniac's dream: A home-made nuclear reactor. Over two years and $3,500 (not bad, considering what it is), he bought parts off the web while poring over nuclear physics textbooks. Using websites dedicated to the creation of nuclear reactors just like his, he was able to get advice and precautions from fellow enthusiasts. He even got permission from the appropriate local authyority, who noted that the reactor barely had enough energy to warm a cup of coffee as it was, and was not liable to be the next Chernobyl. Competing the reactor only several months ago, he has now joined an elite group of the 20 or so people that have made reactors like his.

See the video demonstration here.

See the article here.

France takes a brave move

France has officially opened it's UFO files to the public. Based at a site called "CNET", 1,600 of over 100,000 pages have already been scanned. France is the first country to ever do this, and, as Popsci notes, the first country to have it's bandwidth exceeded in 24 hours. The link is very slow, and is in French, but you can follow it if you really want.

CNES

Or you can read the original Popsci.com article.

Some very...interesting news picks (Continued)

Terence Michael Dean, 37, was arrested in September in Cool, Calif., after a homeowner arrived from a weekend away and found that Dean had commandeered his house and set up various confusing rituals. Dean (who ran from the house clothed only in a sheet) had turned on all faucets, placed packages of meat in the sink and bathtub, built a shrine of Buddha on a bongo drum, left a trail of potting soil from a walkway to the drum, left three plant stands in the garage holding teddy bears, unearthed about 100 houseplants in the yard, and left a cup of water containing a piece of paper reading "I love Cherry." [Credit NotW Week of November 12th, 2006]

In August, about a dozen masked men lugged six 40-gallon trash bags full of sauce packets into the Taco Bell on South Western Avenue in Marion, Ind., leaving a note explaining that they had been accumulating them for a while and decided to give them back. They suspected they had 25,000 packets. (Taco Bell said it hands out about 6 billion a year.) [Credit NotW Week of October 29th, 2006]

In September, a youth sports association raffle in Weaverville, N.C., offered an Uzi submachine gun as a prize for a while, until the association responded to complaints and stopped it. [Credit NotW Week of October 29th, 2006]

The grave of Pol Pot (one of the 20th century's most prodigious mass murderers) near Anlong Veng, Cambodia, is revered by local villagers who believe his ghost protects them and also provides winning lottery numbers, according to an August International Herald Tribune report. In fact, the government is building a casino nearby to serve those who feel lucky. [Credit NotW Week of October 22nd, 2006]

Of the 25,000 children homeless in the streets of Kinshasa, Kenya, more than half are believed to be there because their parents have disowned them as suspected "witches," according to an August Los Angeles Times dispatch. Said one 10-year-old: "They say I ate my father. But I didn't." [Credit NotW Week of October 22nd, 2006]

Just after federal and local narcotics agents cut down and bundled for destruction massive quantities of marijuana plants at a site in California's Marin County in September, officials reported that, despite security, 1,200 of the plants had been stolen before they could be taken away. [Credit NotW Week of October 22nd, 2006]

Some very...interesting news picks

Not so fresh, but still interesting, from News of the Weird that just go to show how many crazy people there are in the world:

The New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services issued a warning in January to residents of the city of Ringwood that they should limit their intake of squirrel to no more than twice a week (children once a month). (A toxic waste dump is nearby.) [Credit NotW Week of February 18th, 2007]

At the December ceremony in Najaf, Iraq, in which U.S. commanders turned over control of the city, Iraqi commandos took the stage carrying frogs and a rabbit and soon were eating the animals raw in a show of feral manliness. As U.S. personnel looked on apprehensively, one Iraqi cut open the rabbit's belly, screamed, snatched its heart in his teeth, and passed the bloody carcass down the line, with each commando taking a bite. According to a Baltimore Sun dispatch, locals said that Saddam Hussein's special forces used to do similar things, but with snakes, dogs, cats and even wolves. [Credit NotW Week of January 21st. 2006]

Some British and German drivers have over-relied on their cars' satellite-navigation devices, according to a December Reuters dispatch, sometimes with tragic (or hilarious) results. A 53-year-old German man thought the device's instruction to turn "now" meant not at the next corner but right that second, and he crashed into a building. Another followed instructions but ignored a prominent "closed for construction" sign and plowed into a pile of sand. Said an exasperated German auto club spokesman, "It's not as if people are driving in a tank with only a small slit to see out." (In November, an ambulance in London went 400 miles to make a 20-minute trip, and in May another took 90 minutes to take a crash victim to a hospital 10 minutes away, both due to faulty "sat-nav" programming.) [Credit NotW Week of January 14th, 2007]

Sixty years after Indiana abolished gambling and wrecked the economy of the resort town of French Lick, the state brought it back, allowing casinos, but they had to be located on water and not the state's dry land. Developers of the French Lick Springs Resort thus spent $382 million on a plush "riverboat" casino on a manmade lake barely larger than the boat, and it opened in November. [Credit NotW Week of January 14th, 2007]

An unidentified man washing windows while tethered to security ropes at the 20th floor of the Fifth Third Bank building in downtown Nashville, Tenn., in November attracted attention when he remained motionless for about 30 minutes, but it turned out that he was just sound asleep. When fire rescue vehicles arrived, the noise awakened him, and he lowered himself to the street unharmed, according to a report in The Tennessean. [Credit NotW Week of January 7th, 2007]

National Public Radio reported in October that perhaps thousands of prison inmates are using cell phones (which are contraband in all correctional facilities) and that the problem has gotten so bad that Maryland state Sen. Ed DeGrange said he was sitting at his desk recently when an inmate called him on a cell phone with a list of general complaints. Also, a warden in Texas reported getting a call from the mother of an inmate, demanding that the warden do something to improve cell-phone reception in the prison so she can chat more easily with her son. [Credit NotW Week of January 7th, 2007]

The Havering town council in Romford, England, prepared a 300-page report in October, which was the result of a 12-month investigation, to find out who had heckled a speaker at a zoning meeting by making "baaa" noises. The authors said they had narrowed the list of suspects. [Credit NotW Week of November 5th, 2006 edition]


 

AI: Xerox my brain any day.

Although I have heard faint stirrings along these lines, very few people have actually said much about artificial intelligence lately. I imagine that it has been swept away in many of the recent events, but I still find it interesting.

The concept may have come from a science fiction novel, but in my opinion, it might be best to try to literally copy the inner workings of the human brain into a mechanical form if we ever did make an attempt at true AI. While many facets of the brain may be redundant and useless, a machine with the brain's abilities and a nearly unlimited amount of computer processing power at it's disposal could, eventually, become a superhuman--human intelligence with the ability to think, converse, and calculate on a massive scale.

Now, I doubt that we would ever have a Hollywood-style machine takeover of the world. Most of the subjects of brain copying would likely be selected for morality and understanding of human politics, emotions, etc., and therefore would also probably be educated beforehand on their responsibilities as a  supercomputer, provided they retained their memory.

Imagine the possiblites of a machine (or person) like that. Many services that require occasional conversation, but are mostly "relevance" jobs, could be prime targets for the computer. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a program in which humans do basic labor that machines can't do, like sorting images into groups with pizza parlors and without them. It may be easy, boring, repetitive work, but it's something that even the most comprehensive electronic recognition systems would have trouble with.

Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell

                 

An amazing video showing what goes on in a white blood cell, which is seen in the beginning and end. This a shortened version from the original, which is worth watching, but does not contain anything other than extended versions of what you see here and labels. I find it interesting to parallel this to real life, especially during the part when the little motor proteins haul a big, bluish...blob up the outside of a tube. Cells sometimes seem to be made up of smaller cells.

Make sure to turn the volume up on the border of the video screen. It starts at around 15/100, and you can barely hear anything.

Solid hologram touchscreens

The SCH-W559 "Anycall" isn't any normal phone. It has no buttons. By using advanced concepts that are both innovative yet simple, the phone can actually simulate the feeling of you pressing a button on a touchscreen. Through a complex series of vibrations made by an electromagnetic field generated by a copper ring bouncing a magnet mounted to a spring. As a result, the phone can make sudden, jerky vibrations that may only last for a tiny fraction of a second, but can provide the resistance of a real button.

The phone initially senses the position of your touch using an ultrathin layer of conductive material. When you apply minimal force, the electric current is disrupted, and the phone can recognize where you touched. As you touch, the phone vibrates in such a way that while being nearly imperceptible, the vibration is a nearly perfect recreation of the feel and resistance that a button would normally provide.

LED Throwies

What are they? LED throwies are little self-powered packs that have an LED, a battery, and a magnet. Because of this, they are portable, easy to make, and look cool. Plus, they are a great, simple thing for me to try to make.

Able to be applied to any surface that regular magnets would stick to, the throwies can coat an entire building, as seen at some throwie rallies. Wiht other uses included, they can be a lot of fun to use, especially if you have more than one.

A manual telling you how to make them can be found here. LED Throwies are very simple to make. By taking a diffused LED and taping it to a battery with the prongs on either side, you already have the essential parts required to make the throwie. Now, all you have to do is tape the magnet to the side of the battery, and you're ready to go.

Plumbing problems

No matter how much technology we have had, no matter how advanced our electricity, heating, and other utilities were, for the longest time, water pressure has been a major limiting factor in the construction of skyscrapers and megastructures. Without making a new utility shelf every few floors on a building, water pumps for buildings would either have to be made unrealistically large, often underground because of that, or they would have tobe put in the ceilings, where they  would make sounds that would disturb the occupants.

Scientists at the University of Kentucky have the answer. Carbon nanotubes are created by rolling up and fusing the sides of an incredibly thin piece of graphite. This would have to be done by machine, though, because the tubes would be so small that 65 billion of them would be able to fit though a 1 square inch piece of paper.

Because of the nature of the tube, it offers much more capacity for far more radical water solutions:

1. The tube is so thin, it is almost entirely unaffected by gravity. This allows water to be pumped up in increments directly related to the consumption, with very few limitations. Scientists have even begun setting the mold for "smart" buildings that would detect behavior that would lead to water consumption, such as heading for a water fountain or entering a bathroom.

2. The tube's molecular bonds allow it to be incredibly strong when a high-pressure environment develops on the inside. This allows greater pressure to be applied to the pipes, despite the fact that very little pressure will be needed as it is.

3. The tube is incredibly smooth, and has barely any friction. This actually allows, in joint with number 2, water to flow at an unbelievable 3.3 feet per second, a speed nearly impossible in conventional piping.

Animals are people too.

Who said animals never get drunk? As the video tells you, this squirrel had evidently been feasting on pleasantly fermented pumpkins. The thing is, for a little guy like him, a little fermentations goes a loooooooong way.

                 

That's a pretty drunk gray thing.