From io9:

Residents of Polk County, Florida are getting their own book “red box.” With the mere swipe of a library card, the vending machine will expel the book of their choice.

Photo by Chris Kotsiopoulos, using many single shots layered into one. Via geekologie.

Via suspiciousminds’ photostream.

At about 10.30am on 17 January 1966, when Jesus Caceido heard a deafening explosion coming from the village of Palomares, the future mayor of the area had no idea he had just witnessed one of the Cold War’s most serious nuclear accidents – or that nearly half a century later, the 1,500 villagers would still be battling to have the ensuing contamination removed for good. After all, they live in Europe’s most radioactive village.

Today, 45 years after four nuclear bombs fell near the village when a US Air Force B-52 bomber and a refuelling aircraft collided in mid-air, tens of thousands of cubic metres of contaminated soil and an estimated – although never officially confirmed – half a kilogram of plutonium remain. And the radiation is getting potentially more dangerous, not less.

“As this type of plutonium decays, it is converted into another radioactive substance, americium, which is highly carcinogenic and can be released into the atmosphere,” says Igor Parra, a specialist for the Ecologistas en Accion pressure group for Palomares.

Via The Independent.

City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta. The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.

The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.

Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

“The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas,” said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.

Via disinfo.

From Inhabitat:

Paper batteries are not a new creation — many scientists are working on creating transistors out of the material — but CENIMAT has taken the concept a step further with a battery that gets its energy from water through hydrogen and oxygen electrolysis.

The battery can also absorb water vapors from the atmosphere. Apparently if the air has just 40 percent humidity, it is enough for the battery to recharge itself. The faculty’s scientists hope that the technology will benefit in the production of tablets, mobile phones and medical devices

Violet Blue reports its “it’s worth a look if you have the glasses“.

In the film Plastic Bag, the title character spends a lifetime (or more) on a quest for a creator not even aware of his existence. A stunning short by Ramin Bahrani, director of Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo, Plastic Bag is both a postmodern spiritual pilgrimage and an ecological fable.

Via Next Nature.

So you wanna be a superhero?

‘This spider dragline-silk is a product of transgenic research done by Dr. Randy Lewis at the university of Wyoming and Notre Dame and is produced by transgenic goats and more recently also by transgenic silkworms,’ the artist explained me. ‘This spider-silk is up to five times as strong as steel but still keeps the smooth properties of silk.’

The silk will be woven with special bulletproof vest techniques into a matrix that can be used for culturing human skin cells. Once the flexible bulletproof spider-silk matrix is done the dermatology department of Leiden university medical center (LUMC) will help Essaidi with the embedding process. Finally the skin will be tested at the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) with real bullets and be recorded with a high-speed camera.

No, they’re not upgrading the flesh of a lucky volunteer.. this is an art project!

Is the skin going to repair itself after the shock or will it manage to completely repel the bullet?

The organic skin, made for protection, will be displayed in a steel, sterile life-support frame. Protection needs to be protected.

It will be showing the yet unknown result of the test on the firing range. I am aiming for it to actually repel the bullet, if not the spider silk has the properties to enhance the skin regeneration process.

From We Make Money, Not Art | via Killing Denouement

We’re seriously entering into “chop my weak flesh off and give me that” territory here.

From IEEE Spectrum:

German researchers have built an anthropomorphic robot hand that can endure collisions with hard objects and even strikes from a hammer without breaking into pieces. [Video]

In designing the new hand system, researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), focused on robustness. They may have just built the toughest robot hand yet.

The DLR hand has the shape and size of a human hand, with five articulated fingers powered by a web of 38 tendons, each connected to an individual motor on the forearm.

The main capability that makes the DLR hand different from other robot hands is that it can control its stiffness. The motors can tension the tendons, allowing the hand to absorb violent shocks. In one test, the researchers hit the hand with a baseball bat—a 66 G impact. The hand survived.

The hand has a total of 19 degrees of freedom, or only one less than the real thing, and it can move the fingers independently to grasp varied objects. The fingers can exert a force of up to 30 newtons at the fingertips, which makes this hand also one of the strongest ever built.

Another key element in the DLR design is a spring mechanism connected to each tendon. These springs give the tendons, which are made from a super strong synthetic fiber called Dyneema, more elasticity, allowing the fingers to absorb and release energy, like our own hands do. This capability is key for achieving robustness and for mimicking the kinematic, dynamic, and force properties of the human hand.

During normal operation, the finger joints can turn at about 500 degrees per second. By tensioning the springs, and then releasing their energy to produce extra torque, the joint speed can reach 2000 degrees per second. This means that this robot hand can do something few others, if any, can: snap its fingers.

Keep reading..

UPDATE:

For the two people that hadn’t already seen this, I may as well wedge it in here.  How quickly we go from joke to near-future fact:

From New Scientist:

Light-sensitive plastic might be key to repairing damaged retinas. Creating neuro-prosthetic devices such as retinal implants is tricky because biological tissue doesn’t mix well with electronics. Metals and inorganic semiconductor materials can adversely affect the health or function of nerve cells, says Fabio Benfenati at the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan. And over time the body’s natural defences can be incredibly hostile and corrosive to such materials.

The emergence of flexible, organic semiconductor materials now offers an alternative. To test them, Benfenati and colleagues seeded nerve cells onto the surface of a light-sensitive semiconducting polymer similar to those used in some solar cells. The cells grew into extensive networks containing thousands of neurons. “We have proved that the materials are highly biocompatible,” says Benfenati.

What’s more, the presence of the cells did not interfere with the optical properties of the polymer. The team were able to use the neuron-coated polymer as an electrode in a light-driven electrolytic cell.

When short pulses of light were aimed at specific sections of the polymer, only local neurons fired, suggesting the material has the spatial selectivity needed for artificial retinas, says Benfenati.

“It’s very elegant science,” says Robert Greenberg, whose company Second Sight is close to receiving clinical approval for its retinal prosthesis. But Greenberg questions whether the electrical currents generated would be sufficient to stimulate nerve cells in the eye.

It’s still too early to tell, says Benfenati. But he thinks the new material is worth further study, because of another benefit. It can be tuned to respond only to specific wavelengths of light, raising the prospect of creating artificial colour vision, he says.

Interesting brain hack discovered by researchers, using smell to lock-in a memory during sleep.

WIRED has the story:

In the new study, volunteers played a Concentration-type game in which they had to remember the locations of pairs of cards. Meanwhile, a mask wafted a slightly unpleasant odor into the volunteers’ nostrils. Once the volunteers had mastered the game, some stayed awake while others took about a 40-minute nap. Researchers reactivated the memory in some volunteers by releasing the odor again. After the nappers woke up, the volunteers played a slightly different version of the card game and were tested to see how well they recalled the locations of the original cards.

Both sleeping and awake volunteers who didn’t have their memories jogged by the odor remembered about 60 percent of the pairs. When researchers triggered memory reactivation while volunteers were awake, recall of the correct locations dropped to about 41 percent. The researchers had expected that result. Previous studies have shown that replaying a memory while awake makes it vulnerable to interference from new material, such as from the second card game.

But the real surprise came when the team replayed memories in the sleeping volunteers and checked how that affected their waking performance. “With odor reactivation, they were almost perfect,” says coauthor Susanne Diekelmann, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck in Germany. Volunteers correctly picked out about 84 percent of the original card pairs when the memory replayed during a nap that consisted mostly of deep slow-wave sleep (volunteers were woken up before they entered rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep).

Brain scans also revealed that different areas of the brain were involved during memory replay depending on whether the volunteers were awake or asleep. While awake, replaying the memory triggered activity mostly in the right lateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in memory recall. But during sleep, memory replay was associated with strong activity in the hippocampus and parts of the cortex. The hippocampus is involved in memory formation, and memories are transferred from short-term memory in the hippocampus to long-term memory in the cortex. Reactivating memories during sleep may speed the transfer, Diekelmann says.

The researchers are now testing whether replaying memories during REM will also stabilize them. Brain activity during that sleep state is similar to that while awake, so the researchers suspect memories may become unstable during REM to allow for editing and reorganization.

hat-tip to Digitalyn

It’s funny, ’cause it’s true:

NuPathe Inc, announced earlier this month that their electronic patch for Migraine treatment, Zelrix, has been accepted by the FDA for approval.  If all goes well, the transdermal drug delivery system will be available as early as this summer in the US.

From the Press Release:

Zelrix is an active, single-use, transdermal sumatriptan patch in development for the treatment of migraine. Zelrix is designed to provide migraine patients fast onset and sustained relief through a tolerable, non-oral route of administration. Zelrix may provide an attractive treatment option for many migraine patients because it avoids the need for oral administration and does not depend upon gastrointestinal absorption. Many migraine patients delay or avoid treatment with oral migraine medications as a result of underlying nausea and fear of vomiting. In addition, the reduced gastric motility experienced during migraine may affect the efficacy of oral medications. Zelrix is powered by SmartRelief, NuPathe’s proprietary transdermal delivery technology. SmartRelief consists of a controlled delivery technology that uses a mild electrical current to actively transport medication through the skin using a process called iontophoresis.

Josh Bongard is one member of a growing field called evolutionary robotics. In short, it means that stronger, more useful, more adaptable robots should develop their skills one step at a time, like animals and humans, rather than being built ‘ready to go.’ Bongard has experimented with his very literal biomimetic approach to robot upbringing in a first-of-its-kind experiment sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Bongard demonstrated his theory in a sophisticated computer simulation where little beasts with different body plans move around in 3-dimensional space. The objective of these figures is for them to get to a light source in the simulation, upright, without tipping over.

During the experiment, Bongard conducts a variety of genetic algorithms that allow the beasts to develop different movements like slithering, shuffling, or walking, based on the beast’s body plan. Eventually, as the body parts are altered, the beasts are able to reach their goals and also to face other challenges, like resisting a force trying to tip them over.

After running 5,000 simulations, Bongard built a simple robot out of Lego Mindstorm kits, to show that a real ‘robot’ is capable of evolving. Though the Lego robot is four-legged, it starts out with a brace on its front and back legs.

Via InventorSpot.

From Wired:

Never mind the flying car. It’s all about slowed-rotor/compound, according to Carter Aviation Technologies. SR/C is what the Texas company considers the key to a practical, personal transportation aircraft. And from the looks of its new, second-generation aircraft, Carter might be on to something.

The company’s latest flight test aircraft is a proof-of-concept version of a four-seat autogyro capable of vertical takeoff and landing. Carter has been flight-testing the aircraft and earlier this month completed a 36 minute flight, its longest yet. In addition to the size, the new aircraft reduces pilot workload by using automated systems and computer controls similar to many new aircraft.

The only big factor missing in the lack of gravity:

It sounds crazy, but 233 days ago a team of six scientists entered a sealed simulator in Russia. Their mission? Recreate the conditions of a 520-day round trip to and from Mars, realistically cutoff from the rest of the world. Come February they’ll finally reach the Red Planet, but the hardest part of the journey will still be ahead.

The experiment, called Mars500, is going down in a windowless isolation chamber within the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, with a team composed of three Russians, a fellow from France, one from China, and an Italian-Colombian. Communication is delayed just as it would be if the team was traveling further and further away from Earth for real; email and video messaging are the prime ways to exchange words even though the simulator is surrounded by a team of researchers, unseen by those inside. The team eats the kind of meals you’d find on the International Space Station and typically only enjoys showers weekly.

Via dvice.

Via Science Daily:

A study from researchers in Germany showed that magnetic maneuvering of a modified capsule endoscope in the stomach of healthy volunteers under clinical conditions is safe, well-tolerated, and technically feasible. Maneuverability of the capsule within the stomach was excellent and visualization of the gastric mucosa, the inner lining of the stomach, was satisfactory in the majority of subjects. Apart from a single experiment performed with a supervising flexible gastroscope, this was the first study to use the system in the stomach of healthy subjects.

See also:

• Take your robot pill now

• Snake-like Robotic Pills

• Walkers swallow RFID pills for science

• Philips develops “intelligent pill”

• Italian Scientists Put Robot Spiders In Your Colon

A gorgeous chandelier created using transparent acrylic and florescent lightening, designed to pay homage to the chandeliers of the past.

Via mocoloco.