Category: technology

  • the world builds itself

    Self folding origami from Harvard University and M.I.T. and Self-Assembling 3D Shapes from Brown and Johns Hopkins Universities.

  • time to trade-in the flying monkeys

    MikroKopter – HexaKopter from Holger Buss.

  • Toast Gearbox

    by Amelia (a Cloud Farm experiment).

  • there i fixed it

    I’ve been around the DIY / hacking world for a while now, thought I knew the field, but this site is amazing.

  • Queue Reality Distortion Field!

    Apple giveth a new toy for dicking about with.

  • Dog Restrainer

    c. 1940 from LIFE Magazine’s ‘30 Dumb Inventions‘

  • Mobile Phone Radiation Used To Treat Alzheimer’s Disease (in mice)

    As links between mobile phone usage and brain tumours become more evident there is some good news, mobile phones may also enhance your memory and prevent the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Via LiveScience

  • Freeze-Wait-Reanimate

    Yesterday was the 43rd anniversary of the death and subsequent freezing of Dr. Bedford – the worlds first successful cryogenics patient (successful in the fact that he is still frozen and, unfortunately, also still dead). Quoting from the 1967 issue of Freeze-Wait-Reanimate, there may be some hope for reanimation in the distant future when reanimation techniques have…

  • Out-of-body Lung Repair

    Developed at the Toronto General Hospital. via

  • Big Dog (Human)

    Continuing in the theme of humans-imitating-technology, I present these two videos from Rory.  

  • A gift from Youtube

    via Scott (and at the risk of becoming a mirror of his blog), I pass on this goodness. Get the backstory here, or simply continue with your day happy in the knowledge that such things exist.

  • iPhone, the tool.

  • A change has come.

    I got this from Super Colossal but I’m so blown away by it I had to re-post. The robots.txt file for whitehouse.gov has changed. Yesterday it was: User-agent:     * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /search Disallow: /query.html Disallow: /omb/search Disallow: /omb/query.html Disallow: /expectmore/search Disallow: /expectmore/query.html Disallow: /results/search Disallow: /results/query.html Disallow: /earmarks/search Disallow: /earmarks/query.html Disallow: /help Disallow:…

  • Getting out of Quartz Composer

    Last time I looked Quartz Composer wouldn’t talk to anything, so I find this project from Jay pretty amazing. It’s using the open source Peggy LED board from Evil Mad Science and the Arduino (also open source). More videos here, and Jay is sharing his code here.

  • It’s a MacWorld

    By all accounts it’s been another stunning MacWorld despite the absence of Steve Jobs. The highlight for me was the announcement of ‘variable pricing’ for songs on the iTunes music store – simply amazing, what will they think of next? Still, not quite as amazing as last year: or the year before: thanks Rory

  • Steve for CTO?

    There is an absurd rumour floating around that Steve Jobs is going to be offered the soon-to-be-created position of Chief Technology Officer in Obama’s cabinet. As Dr. Macenstein points out, there are about 600,000 fat, Dorito-covered IT guys holed up in server closets across the country that are more qualified for the job. Clearly a stupid idea, will never…

  • Chicken Technology

    asimo is of course stabilised by chickens. (thanks to Scott)

  • asimo runs and brings you coffee

    Rory sent me this a while ago.

  • Chemical Party

    an EU teen initiative (music is “Der Fledermaus Can’t Get It” performed by Von Sudenfed).

  • A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, all the Ewoks died

    “Endor is a depopulated wasteland” and I’ve got to say that really makes my day. (Although I should mention the title for this post is a little misleading. Not all Ewoks were on Endor when the moon was destroyed and so it is conceivable that a small population of the fuzzy little fucks survived off-world. – regrettable, I know,…

  • Van de Graaff

    More High-Voltage science action. These Van de Graaff Generators were built by Robert J. Van de Graaff himself for MIT in the early 1930’s. Unlike the Tesla Coil, the Van de Graaff generator is an electrostatic machine which uses a moving belt to accumulate electrostatic voltages on a hollow metal sphere. The machines above were capable of producing 5,000,000 volts and were designed to accelerate…

  • Nazi Flying Saucers

    While walking on the wild high voltage side of science I came across this: a German Haunebu 2, on a test flight. Wow. Unbelievable. If it wasn’t for that authentic looking signature…

  • Death Ray

    I just fell down the rabbit hole that is Nikola Tesla; inventor of radio, AC current distribution, remote controlled vehicles, and the DEATH RAY (actually Tesla called it the “Peace Ray” but that didn’t catch on). There’s a bit of controversy about whether it actually existed, most sane people think not, most nut bags with an internet connection and…

  • another Radiohead remake

    If you’ve seen the Radiohead video for House of Cards you probably know it was ‘filmed’ using a collection of 3D laser scanners. What you may not know is that Radiohead have released the scan data and Processing code used to produce the video. What would anyone want with that? Well you could use it…

  • Electric Dream Car 123

    and it’s clad in bullet-proof half-inch plexi-glass. I’m speechless. Link.

  • E.A.T.

    I was googling E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology when I came across this collaboration for the Expo ’70 Pepsi Pavilion in Osaka, Japan. The outside of the building was covered by a water vapour cloud sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya. The dome shaped objects in the foreground are six-foot high moving sculptures by Robert…

  • Wallpaper for new iPhone owners

    from John Young.

  • Our Google Future

     

  • John Seely Brown

    John Seely Brown was Chief Scientist at Xerox for many years and the Director of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1990 – 2000. Some amazing stuff came out of PARC, including the Macintosh personal computer – John has something to say on that towards the end of this video. It’s a long video (almost…

  • Big Ideas (don’t get any)

    Simon sent me a link to this video. It’s by Glasgow School of Art graduate James Houston, set to the Radiohead tune Nude. The nostalgic tragedy of Radiohead seems to couple perfectly with the Sinclair ZX spectrum.

  • Airships are our future

    I’ve just been reading a post on we make money not art with an interesting comment on the “illusion of progress”. The post quotes architect Usman Haque and points out that the train from Portlaoise (Ireland) to Dublin took 51 minutes with steam engine in 1928, in 2006 it takes 55 minutes. 90 years, 4 minutes late.…