The Sierra Nevada Corporation in the US has worked up a crowd-control ray gun called MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio), as part of a US navy research contract.

The non-lethal weapon is based on the microwave auditory effect (MAE) – creating a strong sound sensation in the human head by irradiating it with specifically selected microwave pulses of low energy. Short microwave pulses rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears but can’t be blocked out since the sound does not enter through the eardrums.

The device is aimed for military or crowd-control applications, using a reconfigurable antenna that steers the beam electronically, making it possible to flip from a broad to a narrow beam, or aim at multiple targets simultaneously.

NewScientistTech

Being in a steampunkish mood today, take a look at these alleged meteoric iron pistols, owned by fourth US President James Madison, which were supposedly forged from the iron of a fallen meteorite in Argentina.

Unfortunately testing by the ISIS neutron source labs in Oxfordshire, UK, have shown that the pistols don’t  originate from the meteorite at the Campo del Cielo crater in Argentina; the supposed source of the metals from which they were forged.  But they’re still fantastic pieces, we’ll just have to wait a little longer for real outerspace guns.

via BBC News

Altering brain chemistry is a hobby for many, but progress on brain-stimulation devices for treating depression has not yet been a successful venture. For those who don’t respond to antidepressant drugs, experiments with electronic implants and electromagnets have some way to go – IEEE Spectrum has a downbeat round-up of the latest experiments underway this year. In total, nine different technologies are now under investigation in at least 27 human trials.

Photo: St Jude Medical

The researchers interviewed seem in desperate need of treatment themselves:

Helen Mayberg, a neurologist at Emory University who invented the deep-brain stimulation technique that St. Jude is now testing, wonders if the companies’ troubles will haunt the next round of research. “You have to ask, where did they go wrong?” she says. “We may look back in 10, 15 years and say, we did what to the brain? But it’s a definite paradigm shift.”

Personally, the only thing that works for me is a cup of brown joy…

There may be some grinders out there who will want, in the privacy of their quarters, to lounge around on a droplet-shaped chair. But when you’re instructing minions from your bunker, there’s really no substitute for the Harkonnen Chair. designed by some dude called… what was it… HR Giger?

Only £25,000 for that feeling of total power. Via Gizmodo.

Glowsticks become sad pretty rapidly when after 15 minutes on the hardcore dancefloor they turn a murky yellow. But that’s about to change, with GlowPaint’s newest product – a non-toxic inexpensive light source that they claim lasts for 15 years.

The Litrospheres are not effected by heat or cold, and are 5,000-pound crush resistant. They can be injection molded or added to paint. The fill rate of Litroenergy micro particles in plastic injection molding material or paint is about 20%. The constant light gives off no U.V. rays, and can be designed to emit almost any color of light desired.

As TeaDream says, “this stuff needs to be tested for biocompatibility and safety then made into tattoo ink immediately. Seriously, give this all of year – if even – before someone has a glowing green racing stripe down the side of their junk.” Thanks for the heads up T!

via Ecoble

Is it just me, or does it seem like the future we’re heading towards is written by Stan Lee? After the marvels of snake like robots, German scientists have created a glass chip that spins silk by emulating a spider’s silk ducts.

Spiders’ silk ducts contain glands that process a gel of simple proteins into long fibres of protein. Different glands alter the chemistry of the gel in different ways, producing silk with different properties. The artificial duct is a glass chip shot through with tiny tubes that tries to mimic those processes. The team has not tested the artificial silk’s mechanical properties, but its grainy appearance suggests it does not yet rival the quality of the real thing. Refinements are underway with the goal of making industrial quantities of artificial silk.

Can’t be long now until some geeky lab technician wires a prototype up to some wristbands to impress the ladies.

The future? Make mine Marvel!

from New Scientist

There’s been a fair bit of media coverage of the construction of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, the computer that was designed in the late 1840s but never actually built until recently. Scientific American has a nice slideshow of images of the five ton monster which will be on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. from May 10, 2008 – a treat for all steampunk fans!

Below is the other completed version of the Difference Engine, at the Science Museum, London. Now that’s the way to get a computer working!

Scarab Body Arts, of Syracuse, NY have some great designs up on their website:

These are all (obviously) scarifications, but they also do brandings.  There is some truly awesome work – check the one out below by John Joyce (thru his BME pages).  There’s an interview with him on BMEzine here.

Jonathan Coulton is a singer/songwriter who releases his songs via the Creative Commons license – which as well as being very cool, allows great things like this World of Warcraft video to get made:

I’ll probably be some kind of scientist

Building inventions in my spacelab in space…

Thanks for the heads up Jon Mason!

Ladies and gentlemen, you can – oh, sorry, I’ll start again.  Gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce you can now literally have sex with your computer.  Those noble innovators at Slashdong have taken the humble fleshlight device, and published detailed instructions on extactly how to control your favourite PC game with your penis.

The article gives instructions on hooking it up to some 3d sex game, but of course now that it’s loose on teh interwub, someone will get it operational for SecondLife.  And then World of Warcraft – imagine grinding your way through a few instances purely through pelvis power!

Altogether this is going to cost you about $100.  Oh, and your soul.

via Gizmodo

Medgadget has something that every lover of a certain genre of Japanese flick will enjoy: a  clip of a 20cm intestinal worm wriggling around before being unceremonially colonoscopied:

Thank the New England Journal of Medicine for the Gastrointestinal tract treat.

Fans of Ascaris lumbricoides (the worm in question) can find out more at Stanford University’s site, including the fascinating fact that the life cycle of the disease was finally discovered in Japan in 1922 when Shimesu Koino, a researcher, infected both a volunteer and himself, and then traced the progress of the disease.  Now that’s dedication.  There’s a lovely picture at the above link too, but it ain’t safe for work.  In fact, it ain’t safe for your sanity, so here’s a nicer one.

Er, sorry, got a bit carried away there.  But I get this weird feeling looking at the robot snake developed by the Carnegie Mellon University, which can wiggle its way inside a body and perform cardiac ablations:

It’s controlled by a joystick at the moment sure, but how long before someone tries to graft one (or four) on to their spinal column, huh?

Calming down now, Technology Review reports how

It has 102 degrees of freedom, three of which can be activated at once. This allows it to enter through a single point in the chest and wrap around the heart until it reaches the right spot to, say, remove problematic tissue.

This pic shows the CardioArm moving around inside the membrane encasing a pig’s heart (successful cardiovascular surgeries has been performed on nine pigs and two human cadavers, with live human trials due to start later in the year).  Ok.  Feeling better now.  But hang on, what else do the researchers say?

The team hopes to start testing the CardioArm in natural-orifice surgery–a technique where tissues are removed through existing openings in the body, such as the mouth, to avoid postoperative pain and reduce recovery time… and aim to have surgeons use CardioArms in unison, like “an octopus, with two or three tentacles” all entering through one incision and then branching out.

Watch out, webhead.

BLDGBLOG has the first part of a fascinating lecture on the mathematics of preservation and the future of urban ruins up today, with the second part due by the end of the week. It’s chock full of interesting stuff, including abandoned penitentiaries and musings on fossil cities.  Here’s a couple of neat images from google maps of the I95 and I695 interchange north of Baltimore:

This piece of planning by all accounts totally fails as a transport link – because of it’s inefficiency as a traffic conveyor, the merging on- and off-ramps were going to be rebuilt, reconnected, and otherwise altered. But it is is topologically unique, exhibiting non-trivial braiding. Geoff Manaugh goes on to develop the idea of stabilizing it as a ruin:

detached from the highway system and left alone, to be surrounded by new freeways…
It’d be a kind of modern-day Stonehenge, made from on-ramps, surrounded by wildflowers, with well-designed signs to explain its fine geometry. Loops of concrete in space.

Looking to a post-car world, it’s cool to imagine interchanges as abstract art that describe mathematical modelling  concepts in massive physical form.

Nice reading…

Slashdot has pointed up the latest caper of the German Chaos Computer Club – they reproduced a plastic foil with the fingerprint of German Secretary of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble in 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder — ready to glue to someone else’s finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint.

This is an amazing simple way to mainpulate biometrics – the step by step guide was produced in 2004.

Imagine a movement of Anonymous individuals loose in a city all with the fingerprints of a high ranking official…

Welcome to the Future.

All my life I wondered why The Thompson Twins existed.  Now I know.  To provide the soundtrack to this:

So what?  Well, there are no speakers.  The sound is coming from the high voltage arc!  User Timetec has a bunch of other demos up on Youtube.

Thanks for the heads up Castillo!

If you prefer a more traditional use of the Tesla Coil, check out this handy Cage of Death:

Physorg has an interesting, and somewhat moving article about the work of the Doe Network, whose volunteers use the internet to collate databases to resolve unidentified and missing persons cases in the US, Canada, Europe and Mexico.

The unnamed dead are everywhere – buried in unmarked graves, tagged in county morgues, dumped in rivers and under bridges, interred in potter’s fields and all manner of makeshift tombs. There are more than 40,000 unnamed bodies in the U.S., according to national law enforcement reports, and about 100,000 people formally listed as missing.

The premise of the Doe Network is simple. If the correct information – dental records, DNA, police reports, photographs – is properly entered into the right databases, many of the unidentified can be matched with the missing. Law enforcement agencies and medical examiners offices simply don’t have the time or manpower. Using the Internet and other tools, volunteers can do the job.

Using distributed networks of volunteers to trawl databases may seem a bit low tech to Grinders, but I find the dedication to the cause rather touching.  Next year the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS) is planned to go live to the general public, with the goal of having medical examiners and law enforcement agencies around the country constantly update information on both sites, which may make some of the work easier.

But I don’t think I could go as far as one of the Doe volunteers, Todd Matthews:

The case of an unidentified black female with a gunshot wound to the skull, found next to highway ramp in Campbell County, Tenn., in 1998 is close to Matthews’ heart.  Sally, he named her, after a Campbell County police officer entrusted him with her skull in 2001.
The police didn’t have the time or means to pay for a clay reconstruction, and so – with the approval of the local coroner – Matthews took the skull to a Doe Network forensic artist.  A picture of the reconstructed head was placed on the Network site.  The skull sat on Matthews’ desk for over a year, and even Lori [Matthews' wife], who was at first so horrified she couldn’t look at it, grew fond of Sally.  She remains unidentified.

Personally, I’m really enthused about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN getting switched on, but that enthusiasm isn’t shared by Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner, who have filed a lawsuit claiming that the device could create particles that would destroy the Earth, such as “killer strangelets“; or that a micro black hole might be generated, which would suck the planet in to a parallel universe.

The lawsuit’s claims are “complete nonsense”, James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN, told New Scientist, adding the quote of the week:

What we want to do is get this machine up and running.  We’ll show people that the world is not going to disappear.

NS also explains a bit about these theoretical risks:

Strangelets are hypothetical blobs of matter containing “strange” quarks, as well as the usual “up” and “down” types that make up ordinary matter.  If a strangelet were stable and negatively charged, it might begin eating the nuclei of ordinary matter, converting them into strange matter. Eventually the menacing chain reaction could assimilate our entire planet and everyone on it.

A 2003 safety review for the LHC found “no basis for any conceivable threat”. It acknowledged that there’s a small chance the accelerator could create short-lived, mini black holes or exotic “magnetic monopoles” that destroy protons in ordinary atoms. But it concluded that neither scenario could lead to disaster.

EurekAlert has a report on the early stages of a promising new way forward in inducing suspended animation – using hydrogen sulfide, the stinky gas that can kill workers who encounter it in sewers.

“When adminstered to mice in small, controlled doses, within minutes it produces what appears to be totally reversible metabolic suppression,” says Warren Zapol, MD, Chief of Anesthesia and Critical Care at Massachusetts General Hospital and senior author of the study from the April 2008 issue of the journal Anesthesiology.  “This is as close to instant suspended animation as you can get, and the preservation of cardiac contraction, blood pressure and organ perfusion is remarkable.”

In all the mice, metabolic measurements such as consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide dropped in as little as 10 minutes after they began inhaling hydrogen sulfide, remained low as long as the gas was administered, and returned to normal within 30 minutes of the resumption of a normal air supply.  The animals’ heart rate dropped nearly 50 percent during hydrogen sulfide adminstration, but there was no significant change in blood pressure or the strength of the heart beat.  While respiration rate also decreased, there were no changes in blood oxygen levels, suggesting that vital organs were not at risk of oxygen starvation.

Apart from the obvious benefits of suspended animation for interstellar travel, or those long Sunday afternoons, the state could also be induced in victims of serious accidents en route to hospital to prevent them expiring – but there’s a way to go yet:

“It could be that inhaled hydrogen sulfide will only be useful in small animals and we’ll need to use intravenous drugs that can deliver hydrogen sulfide to vital organs to prevent lung toxicity in larger animals” Zapol added.

Nihon Uni has developed a t-shirt made from ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene fiber, which is equal to the aramid fiber which is used in body armor.  The material apparently provides superior protection from slashing attacks, but the mesh fabric can be punctured by a sharp point.  Aside from rendering blades useless, the material is also completely machine washable and lightweight.

It will be released in Japan in June in both a T-shirt and long sleeve form. Prices for the long sleeve will be from $220, and the short-sleeved version from $190.

via Engadget

This is a location in Turkmenistan called “The Door to Hell”, near a town called Darvaza.

Most sites (including Fogonazos) date it to the 1970s, when it was created by geologists who found an underground cavern filled with gas – and they ignited it. Oh dear. Since then, it’s been burning for 35 years.  Some sites date it to the 50s.

Google Map

via EnglishRussia