Footbridge made from cardboard tubes

Cory Doctorow: A new bridge made of cardboard tubes has been erected over the Gardon river in southern France by a Japanese architect named Shigeru Ban.

Built half a mile from the Pont du Gard -- a section of ancient Roman bridge classed as a UN World Heritage site -- Shigeru's cardboard-tube structure is strong enough to carry 20 people at a time.

Reaching over the water to a sandy islet mid-river, it opens to the public for six weeks starting on Monday, before it is dismantled for the rainy season...

Weighing 7.5 tonnes, the bridge is made from 281 cardboard tubes, each 11.5 centimetres (four inches) across and 11.9 millimetres thick. The steps are recycled paper and plastic and the foundations wooden boxes packed with sand.

Link (Thanks, Leo!) (via Boing Boing)

Wireless power explained in Science News

David Pescovitz: Last month, MIT researchers made headlines by demonstrating a system of wireless power. They were able to generate a field of energy in coil that lit a bulb a few meters away. Impressively, forty percent of the energy released by the coil actually reached the lightbulb when it was placed two meters away. The researchers called their invention "WiTricity." Trumpets sounded. Patent applications were filed. The current issue of Science News explains MIT's feat in lay terms while also putting it in historical context.

From the article:
In the early 1900s, long before the power grid made electricity widely available, electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla devised a grand scheme to transfer large amounts of power over long distances from a tower 20 stories tall, to be built on Long Island in New York. To this day, historians puzzle over how Tesla's system was supposed to work, or whether it could have worked at all, says Bernard Carlson, a historian of science at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who is writing a biography of the great engineer. "We can't even begin to understand what he was doing with this power stuff," Carlson says.

The project died when Tesla's financial backers pulled the plug, possibly because Tesla seemed unclear as to how to bill customers receiving wireless power. Ironically, Tesla also invented the alternating current (AC) system of power production, transmission, and distribution that would become the standard for the modern grid.

But electromagnetic radiation can indeed carry energy through air or empty space and over large distances.

Link to Science News (via Boing Boing)

Giant rice paddy art

Cory Doctorow:
Pink Tentacle describes the practice of growing giant rice-paddy illustrations "by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety." There's a fantastic gallery of these illustrations, ranging from "36 Views of Mount Fuji" to various demons, gods and traditional illustrations, as well as the Mona Lisa. Link (Thanks, Karen!) (via Boing Boing)

Fly larvae shelled in bling

David Pescovitz: Caddis fly larvae usually form manufacturing sheaths by spinning silk with sand, minerals, plant particles, and bits of bone they find in their aquatic environments. French artist Hubert Duprat collects the larvae, carefully strips their shells, and then puts them in aquaria filled with stuff like pearls, rubies, gold, and diamonds. The larvae make new coverings out of these materials.



From Cabinet: Duprat traces his work with the caddis fly larvae back to pioneering nineteenth-century entomologists such as François-Jules Pictet and Jean-Henri Fabre, who both conducted experiments in which structure-building insects were given alternative, non-indigenous materials. Seen within the context of the artist’s work—a practice that has often addressed aspects of mimesis in the realms of both nature and facture through his conceptual sculptural activities—the caddis fly larvae project is an example of Duprat’s ongoing interest in productive collisions between organic forms and technologized materials.

Link (via Boing Boing)

Colored sand unmixes when jostled

Mark Frauenfelder: DougO says: "Are these sand grains violating the second law of thermodynamics? Certainly not, but the explanation is nonetheless interesting, including reference to "a 'beard' of positively charged grains [that] had formed immediately under the lip of the platform..." Explained in Physics News Update #832.

An experiment at Rutgers shows how two populations of sand grains mixed together and held in a hopper will, when shaken out into a beaker, spontaneously segregate themselves, all because of static electrical interactions. This phenomenon, the opposite of mixing, might have practical uses in the powder industry.

In the recent report, the two types of sand grains (“art sand”), one colored blue and the other red, are mechanically alike but acquire slightly different charg. Through a process not well understood, the grains lose some electrons owing to their jostling motion (“tribocharging”) in the hopper, and become positively charged. Link (via Boing Boing)

Building made from water walls

David Pescovitz: MIT researchers are designing a "Digital Water Pavillion" for next year's Expo Zaragoza in Spain. The walls of the structure are sheets of water sprayed from suspended pipes. Software-controlled valves enable the valves to be opened and closed with high accuracy to create gaps at very specific locations, forming something like liquid pixels. According to a press release, the liquid surfaces can then become "a one-bit-deep digital display that continuously scrolls downward." From the MIT News Office:

"To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water," explains Carlo Ratti, head of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory...

The facade of the water pavilion will be like a very large display, with text, letters, and interactive patterns. "You could throw a ball at the wall, and then see an open circle drop down to meet it precisely where and when its trajectory intersected the water surface. And, with suitable programming, touching the water surface at any point can propagate patterns horizontally, along the wall, to other locations," Mitchell explains.

Equipped with suitable sensors, Water Walls can detect the approach of people and, "like the Red Sea for Moses, open up to allow passage through at any point," said (William J. Mitchell, head of MIT's Design Laboratory and former Dean of Architecture at MIT). "This provocatively subverts the fundamental architectural conception of an opening as something, like a door, found at a fixed location."

Link to MIT News Link to concept video on YouTube (via Boing Boing)

Origins of common symbols

David Pescovitz: Neatorama posted the origins of several common symbols, reprinted from a book titled Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.

Exclamation Point Origin: Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters. The mark comes from the Latin word io, meaning "exclamation of joy." Written vertically, with the i above the o, it forms the exclamation point we use today.

Link (via Boing Boing)

Bionic fingers

David Pescovitz: This prosthetic finger is completely mechanical, no batteries or electronics whatsoever. Inventor Dan Didrick previously made horror masks before inventing the X-Finger. According to a Wired News article, one in 150 people have lost a digit. From Wired News:

...Each digit incorporates a simple mechanism which, when pushed by the surviving part of the wearer's finger, curls a set of artificial phalanges...

The X-Finger, which currently costs thousands of dollars per digit, might seem expensive to prospective buyers...

"We only receive a fraction of the overall costs ourselves," Didrick said. "Also, many people would be surprised to learn that a cosmetic silicone artificial finger, offering only passive function, with no mechanical structure, can cost $5,500 from an anaplastologist."

The finger, however, is only the beginning. Didrick is already working on an entire hand articulated in similar fashion using the wrist, and has been approached to craft toes using the same principle. Link (via Boing Boing)