Like the Grand Theft Auto RC missions come to life, this helicopter can grasp objects for transport. They don’t have to be a special size or shape, and it can lift them even if they are not centered. This is thanks to a load-balancing hand (originally developed as a prosthesis) that relies on flexible joints and a tendon-like closing mechanism. As you can see in the video, the light-weight chopper has an on-board camera so that the operator can see what is being picked up. This little guy has no problem lifting objects that are over one kilogram while remaining stable in the air.

Link and photo from hackaday.com.

See also:

• Parrot – an AR drone you can pilot from your iDevice
• MikroKopter – HexaKopter
• Lockheed Martin’s Samurai Monocopter
• Robotic Shotgun Autocopter
• Killer robots to get silent-running whisper mode

From Space Fellowship:

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured this view of the fires and smoke in three consecutive overpasses on NASA’s Terra satellite. The smooth gray-brown smoke hangs over the Russian landscape, completely obscuring the ground in places.

The fires along the southern edge of the smoke plume near the city of Razan, top image, are among the most intense. Outlined in red, a line of intense fires is generating a wall of smoke. The easternmost fire in the image is extreme enough that it produced a pyrocumulus cloud, a dense towering cloud formed when intense heat from a fire pushes air high into the atmosphere.

…

According to news reports, 520 fires were burning in western Russia on August 4. MODIS detected far fewer. It is likely that the remaining fires were hidden from the satellite’s view by the thick smoke and scattered clouds. High temperatures and severe drought dried vegetation throughout central Russia, creating hazardous fire conditions in July.

Full details here, high rez here.

OK, enough with the Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak disaster pr0n (at least for the moment).  After all, it’s not the only place with problems.  Singapore also has had an oil slick hitting it’s shore. Nigeria has had it’s habitat utterly trashed by years of blown-up pipelines and poorly maintained drilling platforms and pumping stations.

Who needs photos of Man vs Nature, when in Europe, Nature is ruining Man.

So revel in these amazing photos of the devastation left by the worst flooding there in decades, selected from the Boston Globe’s collection – marvel as we continue to watch the world be destroyed through the eyes of a photo journalist:

From the Guardian:

Delicate patterns in the sea breaking on Orange Beach, Alabama, more than 90 miles from the BP oil spill, cannot distract from the mess four to six inches deep on parts of the shore

Meanwhile, Mother Jones asks: “Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable?”

Via suspiciousminds’ photostream.

Devastating photo, taken from obrit by ISS resident Soichi Noguchi:

(higher rez photo here)

Part of the Future Obscura exhibition:

Simple and quietly mesmerizing, Zilvinas Kempinas‘ screen of “white noise” was one of the superstar of the shows. Seen from afar, the screen vibrates and sounds like the fragmented black and white pixels of an untuned video source. As they move forward, visitors realize that the screen is an opening into the wall stretched with horizontal lines of videotape vibrating in the currents of air created by fans. Unlike a magic trick which looses its spell as soon as the artifice behind it is revealed, White Noise gets more fascinating the closer you get to understanding it.

Via we-make-money-not-art.com.

Coming soon to a future near you:

From Worth 1000, via SingularityHub’s short-list of it’s ’cybergenics’ competition.

thanks to Dingo for the tip-off!

(click through for high resolution)

An arresting photo of the plume from the volcano currently erupting in Iceland. It’s uncertain how long it will continue and has plunged Europe into air traffic crisis.

From ~EvidencE~’s photostream.

Stare off into the distance, watch Heavenside appear….

Photo taken by Derek Olson, link via David Forbes.

From technabob.com.

Via scaryideas.com.

Students of Stockholm’s two most prestigious design schools have collaborated to produce these awe-inspiring, full-wearable shoes, 3D printed in polyamid.

Naim Josefi and Souzan Youssouf, of Beckmans & Konstfack respectively, designed and modelled the shoes for Selective Laser Sintering (the one with all the powder and the lasers) and produced five pairs for Naim’s “Melonia” collection, shown during Stockholm Fashion Show earlier this month.

The concept for the shoes call for further exploration in ever-developing rapid prototyping processes. The pair envisage a world in which we could produce and recycle such objects in a closed loop.

Via www.core77.com

(photo credit: Suzannah B. Troy)

Brilliant sign hack up in NYC.  More details from the NYPost:

TrustoCorp, a group of self-proclaimed urban artists, is adorning city poles in trendy neighborhoods like the East Village and Williamsburg with absurdist messages shaped like official street signs.

“Caution. God thinks you are stupid. Notice: Ignoring God is un-American,” warns one metal missive — complete with a hand firing a lightning bolt — attached below a Department of Transportation sign on East 10th Street near First Avenue.

Check out this Flickr pool for many more fine examples of their work.

When Tithi Kutchamuch learned that her dog died a month before she was able to return to her parents’ home, she realized that she wished she could have taken her pet with her everywhere. From there, she developed the idea of a secret friend: jewellery that was part of a pet animal that stayed at home. The jewellery acts as the connection when you are out and completes the sculpture when you are safely home again. Parrot Companion Parrot is the largest piece in the collection and the closest to life size, in order that the connection be made stronger.

Link and words via mocoloco.com.

HP has just unveiled an incredibly ambitious project to create a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE) composed of billions of super sensitive, cheap, and tough sensors. The project involves distributing these sensors throughout the world and using them to gather data that could be used to detect everything from infrastructure collapse to environmental pollutants to climate change and impending earthquakes. From there, the “Internet of Things” and smarter cities are right around the corner.

HP is currently developing its first sensor to be deployed, which is an accelerometer 1,000 times more sensitive than those used in the Wii or the iPhone – it’s capable of detecting motion and vibrations as subtle as a heartbeat. The company also has plans to use nanomaterials to create chemical and biological sensors that are 100 million times more sensitive than current models. Their overall goal is to use advances in sensitivity and nanotech to shrink the size of these devices so that they are small enough to clip onto a mobile telephone.

Once HP has created an array of sensors, the next step is distributing them and making sense of all the data they generate. That’s no easy task, granted that a network of one million sensors running 24 hours a day would create 20 petabytes of data in just six months. HP is taking all that number crunching to task however, and will be harnessing its in-house networking expertise, consulting, and data storage technologies for the project.

Link via inhabitat.com.

From nextnature.net.

If you love futuristic musical madness, then these bizarre charts and mathematically-transformed pieces of sheet music from artist Marco Fusinato will delight you. Think of them as the abstract underpinnings for a movie like Darren Aronofsky’s Pi.

Fusinato brings together avant garde music and art in his work, creating imagery that looks like the results of a mad scientist’s musings on how sound functions. In this series of drawings, called Mass Black Implosion, he’s transformed scores for avant garde works into suggestions for what he calls “free noise,” by changing the order of the notes and suggesting new relationships between them. Basically he’s suggested a way to make something abstract even more abstract. In the process, he’s created charts that are gorgeously strange.

Link via io9.com, which contains a gallery of more fantastic images.