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April 27 2012
Take a Trip Inside the Minds of Eccentric Inventors With Context-Free Patent Art
The new Tumblelog Context Free Patent Art confirms what we always thought: there is a lot of weird stuff lurking in archives of the patent office. And sometimes, you just don’t need/want an explanation.
Here are some of our favorites. Take your best guess at the context for these images—or at least some legitimate excuse/explanation—in the comments!
[via Context Free Patent Art]
April 09 2012
To Increase Your Tongue Agility, Play This Game
If you thought the Kinect was just for things like controlling flying quadrocopters and getting in touch with your inner Han Solo, get ready to stick your tongue out. That’s right, scientists in Japan have created a Kinect game for your tongue. You wiggle it around to shoot at circles.
You’re not running out of your house to buy the game right this second? Well, you probably weren’t the target audience anyway. Japanese researchers created the game to help in diagnosis and treatment of oral motor disorders. People who have trouble speaking or swallowing could play the game to train their tongues. For the rest of us, how about a game that teaches French kissing?
March 30 2012
The Craziest Would-Be Data Center/Fake Island Nation Adventure Story You’ll Ever Read
The Principality of Sealand and data haven?
Seven miles off the English coast and just 24 feet above the roiling waves of the North Sea is the Principality of Sealand. The nation’s total area amounts to just 120 x 50 feet, but its occupier and “ruler” since 1966, Major Paddy Royal Bates, has had outsized dreams for his former military platform out in the sea. Once, it was the home of HavenCo, that company that billed itself as a “data haven,” the Switzerland of data centers.
HavenCo was supposedly to be the home of businesses who didn’t want governments minding their business: porn, anonymous currencies, governments in exile. When Fox News reported that WikiLeaks was moving its servers to Sealand, it certainly seemed fitting but, alas, turned out to be just speculation. That led us to Ars Technica, where law professor James Grimmelmann has written what is probably the definitive history of Sealand and HavenCo, and it is a thrilling read. A few snippets from nation’s short history include a pirate radio broadcaster hurling Molotov cocktails, press wars over “marooned children,” and coup led by a former diamond dealer (possibly staged).
Grimmelmann has found a colorful cast of ...
March 06 2012
What’s That in Your Pocket? Is That a Speeeeeech……Jammmm…..
Who hasn’t suffered a fool who won’t shut up? Suffer no more—Japanese scientists have invented a portable SpeechJammer that they say can get someone to stop talking mid-sentence.
The device described in a paper on arXiv is nothin’ fancy. It’s basically a speaker and a mic that work together to exploit a neat psychological trick: if your speech is played back with a slight delay, it becomes really hard to keep talking. The SpeechJammer works with a delay of 0.2 seconds but anything up to 1.4 seconds (pdf) also works. Because your brain relies on auditory feedback when you speak, the slight, very unnatural delayed feedback screws with the cognitive process.
According to the authors, this technique also has the advantages of only affecting the speaker and afflicting no physical damage. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on non-word sounds, like yelling or humming. Sorry to get your hopes up, parents of screaming toddlers.
If you haven’t got a SpeechJammer handy, here’s a neat way to test this trick yourself:
Go to Gchat. Start a chat with this bot: echo@bot.talk.google.com. Try talking to yourself.Ahh weird! The echo bot—designed to test audio and visual quality for videochatting—does exactly what its name suggests it does. ...
March 01 2012
February 17 2012
Separated at the Cloning Lab: Vint Cerf and Sigmund Freud
One is a father of the Internet. The other is the father of psychoanalysis. They both rocked shiny-bald heads, classy three-piece gray suits, and full, lovingly manicured, white-gray beards. They were born nearly a century apart, but the similarities are simply too striking to overlook.
Clearly, Sigmund Freud and Vint Cerf were created in a cloning lab, in what may well have been an experiment run by the Nobel-bestowing Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to create super-smart scientists with a penchant for fine haberdashery. Is it not obvious to everyone upon looking at photographic evidence?
If you have any leads about other scientists, engineers, or doctors who were separated in the cloning lab, let us know in the comments, @DiscoverMag, or at azeeberg <at> discovermagazine <dot> com.
February 16 2012
Amidst Record-Breaking Cold, Hungarians Burn Bricks of Money To Keep Warm
As North America enjoys a startlingly balmy winter, Europe is in the midst of a cripplingly frigid cold snap, with snow in Rome that damaged the Colosseum and hundreds dead from the cold. In Hungary, charities are getting heating fuel from the government…in the form of piles of money.
The moolah—Hungarian forints—that people feed into their stoves is paper currency so tattered and worn that is has to be retired from circulation. To make it truly burnable, the authorities tatter it even more, in special factories where old forint bills are shredded and then pressed with fragments of wood into combustible bricks, by workers who must wear special clothes with no pockets.
We only heard about this money-is-fuel situation because of cold-snap reporting. But the truth is, Hungary does this every year! The program has been going on for years, churning through 200 billion forints a year, about 40-50 tons. A 1-kilo (or about 2-lb) brick consists of 1 million forints and, according to the spokesman in the video above, has properties similar to brown coal, or lignite, which is a common, low-quality fuel source. Lignite is young coal, which has an energy value of less than ...
A Caffeine-Tracking App…That Doesn’t Actually Track Your Caffeine?
Sorry to tell you this, US Navy, but in our opinion, you’ve been had. This new app you’ve funded, dubbed Caffeine Zone, is not the best way to schedule your caffeine intake so as to maximize awesome and minimize double vision and crazy manic behavior. Not by a long shot.
True, Caffeine Zone, developed by researchers at Penn State, does draw on studies that suggest that between 200 and 400 milligrams of caffeine in the blood is the sweet spot, the level at which that glorious productive high kicks in. Likewise, studies also say that having about 100 milligrams in the blood around bedtime puts you in the danger zone of insomnia. But when users type in when they plan to drink their caffeine, how much of it they’ll drink, and how fast they’ll drink it, the readout they get of their projected caffeine levels throughout the day sounds like a pretty basic chart that reflects how long caffeine hangs around in the average Joe, at least in this press release. It doesn’t take into account individuals’ metabolism, whether they’ve eaten recently, and all the other things that even the most dilletante-ish coffee addict can tell ...
February 13 2012
Lost in a Store? The Lightbulbs Can Beam You an Escape Route
HElloo0OO0! I will show you the way.
Imagine yourself in a department store. You’re lost—alone and stranded somewhere in hosiery. What will you do?! How will you ever find your way to the shoe department? Take a deep breath. Look around you. Are those LED light bulbs on the ceiling? Take out your smart phone, raise the camera so it can see the bulb, and pray that you’re right.
Yes! The LEDs are sending location information to your phone, which, via a newly developed indoor navigation app called ByteLight, provides you with detailed instructions: “Go the the end of the aisle. Turn left. Walk until you can see the escalators. Go up one floor. You are in footwear.” Weeping with relief, you accept ByteLight’s offer to give you detailed step-by-step directions to a pair of shoes that is on sale (in addition to providing navigational information to particular items or areas, it also beams you information about nearby deals).
Phew! Thank goodness for extremely accurate indoor navigation apps. We’d all be hopelessly wandering in cosmetics until the end of time without the life-saving information that can be beamed to our phones from the lightbulbs—not to mention we’d miss ...
February 07 2012
Black Box Bot Soaks Up Heat, Then Follows You Around and Keeps You Warm
When it gets cold out, staying warm usually means either cranking up the heat—and, thus, the heating bill—or piling on the sweaters and straying from the radiator’s immediate vicinity only when absolutely necessary. But your days of dashing between warm spots, or paying extra for the privilege of not, may soon be at an end. A new robot can keep you warm by saving up the heat you’ve already got until you need it.
HAGENT, as the robot is called, isn’t much to look at; it’s just a plain black cube with a couple barely visible wheels peeking out the bottom. But when HAGENT senses warmth—from an oven, a radiator, or any other heat source—it rolls over and soaks up the heat with its internal phase change material, stuff that turns liquid and stores energy when it’s heated up. Once the bot has its thermal fill, it makes its way to wherever you are and emits the stored heat. Its insides re-solidify in the process, so once it’s made your toes suitably toasty, it’s ready to do the whole thing again. In other words, it’s the automated answer to a housecat that soaks up sunlight, then curls up on your ...
February 06 2012
How to Turn a Cockroach into a Mobile, and Kind of Gross, Fuel Cell
Discoid cockroaches, used in this study, can be up to 3 inches long.
From the digestive system that demolishes glue and toothpaste comes the first living, breathing, digesting cyborg-insect power source. Researchers have created a fuel cell that needs only sugar from the cockroach’s hemolymph (basically the cockroach version of blood) and oxygen from the air to make electric energy. The cell’s power density, 55 microwatts per square centimeter at 0.2V, is also very small compared to lithium batteries, so cockroach power wouldn’t be used as a mass power source. But these cyborg cockroaches could take sensors where no human wants to go: nuclear disaster sites, enemy military camps, inside the neighborhood Dumpster.
LiveScience lays out how electrodes inserted into the cockroach’s abdomen hijack its biochemical machinery:
The fuel cell consists of two electrodes; at one electrode, two enzymes break down a sugar, trehalose, which the cockroach produces from its food. The first of the two enzymes, trehalase, breaks down the trehalose into glucose, then the second enzyme converts the glucose into another product and releases the electrons. The electrons travel to the second electrode, where another enzyme delivers the electrons to oxygen in ...
February 03 2012
Tweet Us Not Into Temptaton. OK, Just This Once.
Oh! Oh God, I spent the last 8 hours on Facebook!!
When you text thousands of people seven times a day for a week, and ask them whether they have felt temptation recently, what do you get? A giant database of thousands of tiny vices and people’s own admissions—some true, some likely edited for the sake of vanity—of whether they caved.
According to researchers who recently performed just such a study, people’s biggest willpower failures related to checking things like Twitter or email. People were more able to control sexual urges or the desire to spend money than they were the desire to check social media (though we note that it may take two people contemporaneously caving for certain sexual urges to be considered indulged). Though the paper isn’t available online yet for us to check on this, the researchers told The Guardian that the number of times people were tempted by cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol was surprisingly low, and that the desire to check social media was much more frequently reported. The fact that media temptation came up so frequently, and was so often indulged, may be because unlike smoking, drinking, or spending gobs ...
“Here, Listen to My Underpants”: The Robot Psychics of India
As technology marches ever onward, robots have taken on more and more of life’s necessary jobs: heavy lifting, precise mechanical manipulations, and, of course, predicting the future.
Peppering the fairs and festivals of India, striking in their boldly colored if battered armor, are a fleet of robots that are part fortune cookie, part street-corner psychic. These bots wait in perpetual readiness to dispense their pre-programmed wisdom, and for only 5 rupees or so, the robot’s handler will allow you to plug a pair of headphones into its metallic underpants and listen as it tells your fortune.
The fortune-telling robots come in a range of shapes and sizes to best suit your fortune-telling needs (there is, in fact, a Flickr pool devoted to the various specimens). One of our favorite designs is the mod/retro combination of a smattering of LED lights and an analog clock, for those mortals bogged down in the worldly concerns of time (below).
The robots’ wisdom, apparently, comes on prerecorded tapes, audio fortune cookies that foresee the future in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Telgu. Not having heard the tapes ourselves—and not having any languages in common with the robots—we ...
January 25 2012
To Thwart Hackers, New Security Software Makes Hacking Tedious
Mykonos’s motto is two-fold.
When you think of protecting a website from hackers, the first thing that comes to mind is probably blocking them out. But what if you just let them on a wild-goose chase, feeding them nuggets of false information and leading them down dead-ends until they get fed up and go do something else?
That’s the strategy behind Mykonos Software‘s security program, which takes a “step right in, let me fetch you a cup of tea and bore you to tears” approach to protection. The tool identifies individuals who are running common searches for security weaknesses on a site, logs their information, and continues to play them for suckers by dribbling out a breadcrumb trail that appears to yield passwords and other tasty vulnerabilities, but ultimately leads nowhere. CEO David Koretz explained to Tom Simonite at Tech Review the various ways in which the software plays with attackers:
A scan that might usually take five hours could take 30, Koretz says. Other tactics include offering up dummy password files, which can help track an attacker when he or she tries to use them. “We’ll let them break the encryption and present a false login ...
January 04 2012
Microsoft Patents a Way to Tell You Where Not To Go
Anyone who’s journeyed on foot through a strange city can confirm that there’s a lot maps don’t show. For instance, whether it would be a really bad idea to wander through certain neighborhoods with an expensive camera around your neck. Or whether there’s a low-lying neighborhood that will be about 3 degrees cooler than it is everywhere else. Those kinds of things.
Though you won’t find that variety of information on Google Maps’ walking directions, you might soon see it on Bing Maps. Microsoft has just received a patent on a method for incorporating information like violent crime statistics into walking directions, so users could choose a specific rate of crime that they are personally comfortable with when planning a route (bike gangs, OK, murders, no). Other layers of information, like temperature measurements or falling-apart sidewalks, could also make appearances.
A tool like that will have plenty of users, though you know people are going to be disgruntled when their favorite neighborhoods get slapped with a D for dangerous (prepare yourself for an Internet freakout, Microsoft). What we’re really looking forward to, though, is a layer that routes you past all the grocery stores with free ...
January 03 2012
The Suit That Makes You Feel 75 Years Old
And reeeach for the shredded wheat…
Pregnancy suit, meet age suit. Just as scientists in Japan made a suit full of balloons, warm water, and accelerometers to give men a sense of what pregnancy feels like, scientists at MIT have put together a suit that simulates being in one’s mid-70s. But it’s a little easier to see the applications with this one. By 2030, 20% of the American population will be over the age of 65, and if you think these folks are going to willingly weather a world designed by and for hyperactive 26-year-old yoga enthusiasts, well, you’ve got another think coming. By putting on this suit, architects, store designers, and other professionals preoccupied the how people interact with the physical world with can get a sense of old age is like, and design accordingly.
And what does old age feel like? According the folks at MIT’s Age Lab, where the suit was developed, like having giant rubber bands keeping your limbs from fully extending, braces that make your arms stiff, a helmet that makes your spine curve uncomfortably, and glasses that make small print hard to read, among other impairments. Just ...
December 27 2011
Hacktivists: Doin’ It For the Lulz Since 1903
Marconi and assistants erecting a radio antenna.
They call themselves hacktivists. Or they say they’re doing it just for the lulz: Some hackers take over sites, swipe users’ information, and then post their exploits online just to make the point that hey, you losers aren’t as safe as you thought you were. Better fix that gaping hole in your electronic chain link fence.
It may seem like the kind of public embarrassment only possible in the networked age (at least, Sony probably remembers the era of the Walkman a lot more fondly than this last mortifying year of being hacked again and again), but as Paul Marks writes in New Scientist, it ain’t necessarily so. Just ask Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless telegraph.
In 1903, Marconi’s assistants in London were prepping for a big demo of their wireless telegraph (aka long-range radio), just like any tech businessmen in the history of technology—setting up the brass lantern projector, getting the telegraph up and running, letting the crowd get nice and excited, you know, the whole shebang. Then, while they’re waiting for their test message to come in from the boss, who’s camped out ...
December 14 2011
Got Wrinkles? Smear on the Hottest New Fashion Toxin…Snake Venom!
Worried about wrinkles, laugh lines, or crow’s-feet adding years to your wizened countenance? Worry no longer, friend—now you can apply synthetic viper venom to your face… for a price. The product, called Syn-Ake, contains a peptide that mimics the effects of Waglerin-1, a toxin found in the venom of the temple pit viper. It works by temporarily paralyzing facial muscles, binding to receptors (called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors) on the muscles and preventing them from being stimulated and contracting. This has the effect of reducing certain small wrinkles in the short term, according to the sole available study on Syn-Ake, performed by the company that markets it, Switzerland-based Pentapharm. And now, according to the Daily Mail, you can buy a tiny bottle of it for only $60 to gingerly bless your wrinkly visage.
It’s the same basic principle as Botox, except that Botox usually involves injection, lasts longer, and is generally more invasive. Both products work by incapacitating a few of the muscles you use to smile, frown, and laugh, which after years of use and tightening create wrinkles by drawing your skin together into folds the way drapes gather along a ...
December 06 2011
Woolly Mammoth Cloned Within Five Years? We’ll Believe It When We Ride It
Japan’s Kyodo News reports that Russian and Japanese scientists will start a project early next year to clone the woolly mammoth. The researchers also confirmed that a well-preserved mammoth thigh bone found in August contains remarkably well-preserved marrow cells.
The team, including researchers from a Siberian mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University, plan to extract an undamaged nucleus from the extinct animal’s bone marrow and insert it into the egg of an African elephant, a related animal; if all goes well the elephant could then give birth to a baby mammoth. The team has worked toward cloning the beast for more than a decade but until August, hadn’t found a sufficiently intact source of mammoth DNA (although they did create a copy of mammoth hemoglobin).
What could possibly go wrong? Assuming scientists can extract an undamaged nuclei from tissue that’s been frozen for more than 10,000 years, they then need to successfully insert it into an African elephant’s egg. This won’t be simple, considering that even procuring elephant ova is a challenge, said Japanese researcher Akira Iritani. And the cloning success rate for (non-extinct) animals like cattle is only 30 percent. The cloning technique Iritani plans to ...
November 30 2011
The App That Looks Both Ways for You
The average city street these days sports quite a number of people gazing down into their phones as they walk, unable to tear their eyes from a text or email, or gabbing away to their second cousin while checking their manicure. If you are among those who prefer to walk upright, watching for oncoming semis, you may have noticed that these people don’t look at walk signals to tell when to cross; instead, they wait until their peripheral vision picks up a phoneless pedestrian making a move for it. I am frequently in that pedestrian, and am not above making occasional false starts to watch people jerk like fish on a line. Sorry, folks.
But! A day is coming when these phone addicts may no longer need to watch you from the corner of their eyes to gauge when it’s safe to cross. Scientists at Dartmouth and University of Bologna have built an app that will alert these pedestrians when collision with an oncoming vehicle is imminent with a helpful series of vibrations and chirrups.
The app, called WalkSafe, uses the phone’s built-in camera to watch traffic and apply vision learning algorithms to identify car-like objects, going on to identify the ...
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