Interesting Things

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2008-08-13T21:56:00.000-05:00

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NOAA’s gallery of coral photography

2008-08-13T19:55:00.003-05:00

David sez, "NOAA has an amazing gallery of photos from their work studying coral reef ecosystems. Coral reefs are extremely imperiled all over the world due to climate change, overfishing and pollution. Boing Boing readers might want to see these before many of the reefs depicted are gone." Welcome to "The Coral Kingdom." (via Boing Boing)

Enchanting nudibrach glam-shots

2008-05-14T20:44:00.002-05:00

Marilyn sez, "David Doubilet is the Annie Leibowitz of the marine gastropod world. He took all but two photos in this amazingly beautiful gallery of nudibranchs to accompany a feature story on the same subject in the June Nat Geo magazine, online now." Link to article, Link to gallery) (Thanks, Marilyn!)(via Boing Boing

Fractal drawers

2008-05-13T20:25:00.003-05:00

Fractal 23, from New York's Takeshi Miyakawa Design, might just be the coolest chest of drawers I've ever seen. Link (via DVice) (via Boing Boing)

Niagara Falls's secret tunnel

2008-03-10T15:53:00.003-05:00

The Vanishing Point, a site dedicated to urban exploration and secrets of the built environment, has a page about the massive abandoned Tailrace tunnel at Niagara Falls. (The entire Vanishing Point site is mesmerizing, rich with great writing and fantastic photography.) Part of the decommissioned Toronto Power Co. hydroelectric plant, the tunnel is ten stories underground and only accessible through a hidden slit in the ceiling. From Vanishing Point:

Lying below a river that will relentlessly tear into the bedrock until all has been obliterated from Queenston to Erie, this tunnel thirty-three feet in diameter is imprinted into my being forever. A swirling army of red brick millions strong, the eye of a petrified hurricane leading us right into the centre of the stalled but fighting storm that is Niagara Falls. Standing in its back-blast, in a place far deeper and darker than any middling storm sewer, I breathed and drank from the fount of the universe and swam closer to its centre than I ever will again.

Link (via DIGG)(via Boing Boing)

Pencil sculptures that look like sea urchins

2008-02-04T10:26:00.001-06:00

Jennifer Maestre uses hundreds of pencils, cuts them into 1-inch sections, drills a hole in each section, sharpens them and then she sews all of them together to create these fantastic prickly and colourful pencil sculptures inspired by sea urchins. (via I.Z.Reloaded)

Pen-cap cutlery

2008-01-23T15:23:00.001-06:00

Din-Ink is a concept design for office cutlery by Andrea Cingoli, Paolo Emilio Bellisario, Cristian Cellini and Francesca Fontana for the DesignBoom Dining in 2015 contest. The idea is that the caps will be made from biodegradable starch and fit over your desk-pen. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) (via Boing Boing)

Chair made of melted ball of rope

2008-01-21T17:21:00.001-06:00

Tom Price's "Meltdown Chair" is made by heaping up a big cuddly pile of nylon rope, then melting an Eames-ish chair-shape into it. Don't miss the video of the hot former-on-nylon action.

This chair is created by heating and pressing a seat-shaped former into a ball of polypropylene rope. The rope begins to liquify as it comes into contact with the heated former and, as it cools, it sets in the shape of a seat creating a contrast in form and texture to the remaining rope. No additional material has been added to make the seat - it is all made from melted rope.

Link (via Geekologie) (via Boing Boing)

Tiny houses -- slideshow

2008-01-07T11:57:00.000-06:00

Wired has a lovely slideshow of tiny, perfect houses. Since I left Toronto in 1999 (where I had an illegal, 2,000 sqft warehouse space), I've lived in progressively smaller apartments and flats, and I've come to love it. I think the key is to be absolutely ruthless about getting rid of stuff that you don't need anymore -- for example, I've started to give most of my books to thrift-stores when I'm done with them, buying them as a used book on Amazon for a few pennies if I need them again.

Alas, most of these designer shoeboxes are premium items, super-expensive. But today's expensive bespoke prototypes are tomorrow's el-cheapo homebrew projects.

When prefabricated houses become small enough, high-tech enough and weird enough to allow for mounting on a cliffside or over a lake, they may have gone a step (or a splash) too far. The Single Hauz, from Poland, offers cantilevered space for one atop a cement pole, and looks like a cross between a billboard and a scene from the Myst series.

Link (via Boing Boing)

Fully Loaded chair made of shotgun shells

2007-10-11T10:12:00.000-05:00

The fully loaded chair, made from 450 .12 gauge shotgun shells has a "massaging texture" due to the protruding brass tips. Link (via Yanko Design) (via Boing Boing)

Plants form networks to communicate

2007-10-05T13:40:00.000-05:00

Researchers at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands have found that certain types of plants form underground networks of runners that they use for communication with neighboring plants of the same species. From Science Daily:

Recently [Josef] Stuefer and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate that clover plants warn each other via the network links if enemies are nearby. If one of the plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal. Once warned, the intact plants strengthen their chemical and mechanical resistance so that they are less attractive for advancing caterpillars.

Link (Via ComDig) (via Boing Boing)

Scientific study on why knots happen

2007-10-04T15:28:00.001-05:00

Danny says: Tangled telephone cords and electronic cables that come to resemble bird nests can frazzle even the most stoic person. Now researchers have unraveled the mystery behind how such knots form."

[Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego] and UCSD colleague Dorian Raymer ran a series of homespun experiments in which they dropped a string into a box and tumbled it for 10 seconds (one revolution per second). They repeated the string-dropping more than 3,000 times varying the length and stiffness of the string, box size and tumbling speed.

Digital photos and video of the tumbling strings revealed: Strings shorter than 1.5 feet (.46 meters) didn't form knots; the likelihood of knotting sharply increased as string length went from 1.5 feet to 5 feet (.46 meters to 1.5 meters); and beyond this length, knotting probability leveled off.

Their conclusion?

While there is no magical knot buster, Smith advised what all sailors, cowboys, electricians, sewers and knitters know: to avoid tangles, keep a cord or string tied in a coil so it can't move. Link (via Boing Boing)

The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss

2007-10-04T15:24:00.001-05:00

This Benthocodon jellyfish was spotted near undersea mountains. The photo is in a new book titled The Deep that features more than 200 photos of the insanely strange and beautiful denizen of our oceans. It was edited by Claire Nouvian, a French documentary filmmaker. Smithsonian has a feature on the book and a sampling of remarkable photos from it. From the Smithsonian article:

The more than 200 photographs—most taken by scientists from submersibles and ROVs, some shot for the book—show just how head-shakingly bizarre life can be. The scientists who discovered the creatures were apparently as amused as we are, giving them names such as gulper eel, droopy sea pen, squarenose helmetfish, ping-pong tree sponge, Gorgon's head and googly-eyed glass squid.

Nouvian herself made two dives in a submersible, to 3,200 feet. The first thing she noticed, she says, was that "it's very slow. You can tell that all their laws are different."

Link to Smithsonian article, Link to slideshow, Link to buy The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss (via Boing Boing)

Tiny new frog discovered

2007-10-04T12:21:00.001-05:00

Biologists from Delhi University discovered this darling frog that when fully grown is just 0.3937 inches or 10 mm. From Loren Coleman's post at Cryptomundo:

Delhi University Systematics Biologist S. D. Biju and his colleagues have found this new frog, India’s smallest land vertebrate, in the Western Ghats of Kerala, a mountainous region in the western portion of India. Link: http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/tiny-nightfrog/

The humid rainforests of the Western Ghats are the perfect habitat for these nocturnal frogs, which enjoy making mating calls from under leaf litter and among the roots of ferns during the monsoon months. (via Boing Boing)

Researchers develop a 360-degree holographic display - Engadget

2007-09-04T09:44:00.000-05:00

holographic display

Researchers at USC have taken another step towards that holiest of sci-fi dreams: the 3D holographic display. Using a spinning mirror covered with a "holographic diffuser," a special DVI implementation, and a high-speed projector, the team's device can project a three-dimensional image that can be viewed from 360 degrees -- regardless of the viewer's height and distance. That's impressive, but that spinning mirror looks pretty dangerous. Check a video of the system in action after the break. (via Engadget)

Spherical tree-house

2007-08-28T12:55:00.000-05:00

Cory Doctorow:
Free Spirit Spheres build lovely, spherical wooden treehouses that you enter via a suspension bridge. The photo-gallery documents the construction and installation of "Eryn," a five-windowed spherical tree-dwelling with an electric kitchen, sleeping area, and living area. Link (Thanks, MarkM!) (via Boing Boing)

Mini-telescope eye implant

2007-08-17T13:43:00.001-05:00

David Pescovitz: When implanted in the eye, mini-telescopes like this one could help aging individuals with macular degeneration, a disorder of the retina affecting more than 1.75 million people in the United States alone. The implant was a huge help for two thirds of more than 200 patients who participated in a recent clinical trial. The developers of the technology, VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, hope that FDA approval for the mini-scope is imminent. From Scientific American:

The implantable mini-scope... works with the eye's cornea like a telephoto system, rendering an enlarged retinal image designed to reduce the area of diminished vision. Once implanted, the device protrudes 0.1 to 0.5 millimeter beyond the surface of the pupil but does not touch the corneal endothelium, a layer of cells lining the back of the cornea.

This is not an easy fix, however, and surgeons are developing special techniques to properly and swiftly implant the device without damaging the eye. The device is a compound telescope system that consists of a glass cylinder that is 4.4 millimeters in length and 3.6 millimeters in diameter and houses wide-angle micro-optics. (via Boing Boing)

Inorganic life?

2007-08-14T17:51:00.001-05:00

David Pescovitz: New studies of dust that form lifelike structures suggest that extraterrestrial life may not be carbon-based at all. Researchers at the Russian Academy of Science, the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in German, and the University of Sydney observed particles of inorganic dust form helical structures and go through other "lifelike" changes. The experiments took place under simulated plasma conditions, representative of space and also the primordial Earth. These inorganic structures may have even led to the organic molecules of life that we're familiar with, and made from. From the Institute of Physics press release:

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? "These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says (V.N.) Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve".

Link to press release, Link to New Journal of Physics paper

(via Boing Boing)

Footbridge made from cardboard tubes

2007-07-30T10:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-25T09:29:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-24T09:16:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-23T17:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-12T15:48:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-12T12:54:00.001-05:00

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

2007-07-09T13:21:00.000-05:00

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)