image: Michael De Volder and A. John Hart/University of Michigan/Materials Research Society
This gallery presents the best images from the Materials Research Society’s recent Science as Art competition. Each one depicts familiar objects made from materials with otherworldly properties—and they’re insanely small. This quiz will test how well you understand this tiny, alien world.
more at nanobliss
via roamin
India’s Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it. Now, well before any consensus on the technology’s readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question. (via)
The Internet -- A Private Eye's Best Friend For private investigator Steven Rambam, the Internet is his most valuable tool in helping to find missing persons, cheating husbands, and your competitor's dirty secrets.... "Anything you put on the Internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged, and out of your control before you know it," he told CNET News after the July 19 session. "The genie is out of the bottle. Data doesn't stay in one location. It migrates to hundreds of places."...."I used to pay the police $500 for a driver's license photo. Now I just have to go to MySpace," he said. "I can find your location without leaving my desk." (via)
also:
Dog dials 911 to save owner's life
Autonomic NanoTechnology Swarm (ANTS) (via)
The Savants of Napoleon's Egyptian Expedition
viddy:
Orson Welles on the Merv Griffin Show - 1985 (He died two hours after the taping of this interview.) (via)
18 covers of "Earache My Eye" (prev)
An Introduction to Early Musical Instruments (via)
People Who Do Noise - Trailer (via)
Ultravox - My Sex (1977) (classic)
The Girl in the window Three years ago the Plant City police found a girl lying in her roach-infested room, naked except for an overflowing diaper. The child was pale and skeletal, communicated only through grunts. She was almost seven years old. The authorities had discovered the rarest of creatures: a feral child, deprived of her humanity by a lack of nurturing. Audio, video and slideshow tell the strange, sad and ultimately hopeful story of Danielle. (via)
Is that keyboard toxic? Warning: Your keyboard could be a danger to you and the environment. Sound preposterous? Then consider this: Some keyboards contain nanosilver, which, because of its antimicrobial properties, is increasingly incorporated into everyday items even though studies have questioned its health and environmental safety.
Superbugs In August, 2000, Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, received a disturbing call from the hospital’s microbiology laboratory. At the time, Wetherbee was in charge of handling outbreaks of dangerous microbes in the hospital, and the laboratory had isolated a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae from a patient in an intensive-care unit. “It was literally resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had,” Wetherbee recalled recently. The microbe was sensitive only to a drug called colistin, which had been developed decades earlier and largely abandoned as a systemic treatment, because it can severely damage the kidneys. “So we had this report, and I looked at it and said to myself, ‘My God, this is an organism that basically we can’t treat.’ ”
Microsoft 'degrees of separation' study interpretation challenged "Researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances," a Washington Post article stated. However, one publication, eFluxMedia, suggested the study was "heavily misinterpreted" by the media.
Mother Earth Naked: A Modern Masterpiece Have you ever wondered what our world would look like stripped bare of all plants, soils, water and man-made structures? Well wonder no longer; images of the Earth as never seen before have been unveiled in what is the world’s biggest geological mapping project ever.
An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley: In Conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers. "Sustainable development"—that means very expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy or permaculture. They talk about agriculture, they get all weepy about it, but they won’t do anything for the family farms because family farms use pesticides and fertilizers, which is a terrible sin in the minds of these people. So they’re perfectly happy to see the old farms close down and build McMansions, as long as they’re green McMansions, of course, with maybe a little solar power so they can boast about how they are almost off the grid. This is just yuppie poseurism. It’s fashionable to be green, but it’s not at all fashionable to wonder about the actual working class and farming people and families that you’re dispossessing. This is a class war situation, and the artists are unfortunately not on the right side of the battle. If we would just honestly look at what function we’re serving in this economy, I’m afraid we would see that we’re basically shills for real estate developers. (via)
also:
Why Does RCMP Refer to Flesh Eating Murderer as “Badger”?
FBI takes library computers without a warrant
On the brains of the assassins of Presidents
Fairy Tale Geometry: Unfolding Buckminster Fuller's Tetrascroll (more) (via)
Meeting with a Remarkable Man: A Talk with Robert Anton Wilson (2003 interview)
When Computers Meld With Our Minds (brief Vernor Vinge interview)
Defining Female Chauvinism (Rethinking feminism, as it is. I'm no expert, but I think she nails it.) (via)
Queen's Guitarist Publishes Astrophysics Thesis The founder of the legendary rock band Queen has completed his doctoral thesis in astrophysics after taking a 30-year break to play some guitar.
MIT students on quest to build $12 computer (no, not $120) (via)
Saturday Night Lost Long-time SNL set builders Stiegelbauer Associates had the treasure trove of pop-Americana that’s been stashed away for years in Building 280, literally jackhammered to bits last month. (Bummer. Did they even try to find a way to preserve it?) (via)
The Mystery of the Bloodied Room A woman is found lying dead on her bed in a house with walls covered in blood. However, she doesn't have a mark on her and neither she, nor the bed, have any blood on them. The cause of her death is still unknown.
My buddy's art car Alan Evil makes the papers. (more art cars)
viddy:
Britain seen from above A new BBC series makes use of satellite technology to create stunning images of Britain from above. Can't wait to see this. They even track phone chatter. (via)
Anthropologist explores heavy metal in Asia, South America and the Middle East
Magnetic stripe card spoofer (using an iPod!)
Bob Godfrey Documentary A short but delightful BBC special (in two parts) about British animation legend Bob Godfrey.
Life is a chair of bullies - Soupy Sales (prev)
Study Says Carbon Nanotubes as Dangerous as AsbestosInhaling carbon nanotubes could be as harmful as breathing in asbestos, and its use should be regulated lest it lead to the same cancer and breathing problems that prompted a ban on the use of asbestos as insulation in buildings, according a new study posted online today by Nature Nanotechnology.
Big challenge for the nanotech community if this bears out.
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As homes foreclose in U.S., squatters move in Squatting is on the rise across the United States as foreclosures surge, eviction notices mount and homes go unsold for months, complicating the worst U.S. housing slump in a quarter century and forcing real-estate brokers to enlist the help of law enforcement and courts to sell empty houses.
In some regions, squatting is taking on new twists to include real-estate scams in which thieves "rent out" abandoned homes they don't own. Others involve "professional squatters" who move from one abandoned home to another posing as tenants who seek cash from banks as a condition to leave the premises -- a process known by real-estate brokers as "cash for key."
We have to be careful with how we define the term squatter. There are many possible interpretations, some not so good in the eyes of society at large. The cases cited in this article paint squatting strictly as a willful criminal act, while there are many cases where people revitalize abandoned and decaying areas or are so destitute that they just need a place to stay.
Years back, I squatted in London for a while and found that I was helped and encouraged from many quarters, including the local government and even the police. It was decent cold-water council flat in Southwark. A bit of roughing it at first, but after a short while, we had a nice little crib going. We were a small improvement on a largely abandoned and decaying neighborhood.
via Squatter City
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The freedom to say 'no'Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Controversial new research suggests: They just aren't interested.
So, in other words, instead of pushing for more women to go into the hard sciences, why not ask them what they would prefer to do?
One thing I found interesting about the study was the evidence showing that a majority of the women preferred to work with people while the men preferred to work with things. A cliché, perhaps, but there seems to be a some truth to this if you buy into this research.
via Arts & Letters Daily
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The List: The Worst Place to be a Terrorist
This reminds me of a moment in Robert Littell's 2002 novel, The Company (p. 707):"I stumbled across an Israeli report describing how the Russians dealt with a hostage situation," he said. "Three Soviet diplomats were kidnapped in Beirut by a Hezbollah commando. The KGB didn't sit on their hands, agonizing over what they could do about it. They abducted the relative of a Hezbollah leader and sent his body back with his testicles stuffed in his mouth and a note nailed-- nailed, for Christ's sake-- to his chest warning that the Hezbollah leaders and their sons would suffer the same fate if the three Soviets weren't freed. Within hours the three diplomats were released unharmed a few blocks from the Soviet embassy."
But hey, we're America, we don't work that way... right?
I don't necessarily condone this type of activity, but I can safely say that there were no more abductions of Soviet citizens in Lebanon after that exchange. Only Americans and Britons that were held suffering for many years.
I'm conflicted on this.
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