3D-printed Replacement Skulls
Wenn ich mir demnächst mal wieder den Kopf zerbreche, gibt’s Ersatz-Skulls aus dem 3D-Drucker.
The new OPM device is a cranial maxillo-facial (CMF) plate for skull reconstruction which can be used to replace up to 75% of the skull. Their device is made from PEKK (polyetherketoneketone), which has many of the desirable properties of the commonly used PEEK implant material — but it also has twice the compressive strength, making it an ideal material to replace any bone that counts user protection among its primary functions.
Oxford Performance Materials Now Able to 3D Print 75% New Skulls (via JWZ)
Klari Reis’ Petri Dish Paintings 2013
Klari Reis macht wieder Bakterien-Malerei in Petrischalen. 2009 hat sie das schonmal über ein ganzes Jahr lang durchgezogen, hier die 2013er Version.
Artist Klari Reis uses reflective epoxy polymer to depict microscopic images. The effect is hopeful, almost playful, belying the serious nature of the subject matter.
Supported by steel rods, the paintings sit at varying degrees of distance from the wall, evoking depth and motion. Working with biotech companies in San Francisco, Klari uses organic cellular imagery and natural reactionship with today’s biotechnological industry.
THE DAILY DISH 2013: A PETRI DISH PAINTING BY KLARI REIS TO BE POSTED EVERY DAY OF 2013.
Is Brian Cox on Acid?
Über die Stelle hab ich bei Charlie Brookers Weekly Wipe S01E05 am lautesten gelacht. Die kompletten Folgen gibt’s nach wie vor im YT-Channel von sn0otchie.
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Wonders of the Stoner System and the fucking Universe
Timothy Learys Neurocomics
Grade beim Recherchieren zu dem Posting über die Neuroscience-Comics gefunden: Timothy Leary hat 1979 ein Comic über seine Neuro-Arbeiten mitgeschrieben, gezeichnet wurde das Teil von Pete Von Sholly, außerdem war Leonardo DiCaprios Vater George daran beteiligt. Ich hab’ ‘nen kompletten Scan davon grade bei Flickr hochgeladen, ein paar Seiten daraus in HighRes nach dem Klick: Gib mir den Rest, Baby…
Neurocomic about the Science of Brains
Comiczeichner Matteo Farinella und Neurobiologin Hana Ross von der Uni London arbeiten derzeit an einem Comic über Gehirne namens „Neurocomics“. Ich weiß nicht, ob das wirklich gut wird, die Zeichnungen finde ich eher so achnaja und die Story (Typ wird in ein Gehirn gesogen, trifft da komische Leute und berühmte Wissenschaftler) erinnert doch stark an Logicomix, ohne in die Nähe von dessen vielschichtiger Narration zu kommen. Aber abwarten, vielleicht wird’s ja was.
Artist Matteo Farinella and neuroscientist Hana Ros of University College London collaborated to create a graphic novel called Neurocomic about a hapless character who is sucked into a human brain where he encounters bizarre creatures and famous neuroscientists. The objective is to introduce the neurochemical workings of the brain to a wider audience, so entertainment, storytelling and clever metaphors are just as important to the enterprise as the science
Neurocomic (via Mindhacks)
Guardian: Neurocomic takes readers on an adventure in the brain – video
Mars Mission Shield from Poo
Die Inspiration Mars Mission will schon im Jahr 2018 auf einem privat finanzierten einen Mann und eine Frau zum Mars und wieder zurück schicken, jetzt haben sie ihre Pläne bekannt gegeben, wie sie mit dem nicht so ganz trivialen Problem der GCR (Galactic Cosmic Rays) umgehen wollen. Mit Strahlungsschilden aus Kacke. Your Mars Mission is full of Shit, yay!
McCallum told New Scientist that solid and liquid human waste products would get put into bags and used as a radiation shield – as well as being dehydrated so that any water can be recycled for drinking. “Dehydrate them as much as possible, because we need to get the water back,” he said. “Those solid waste products get put into a bag, put right back against the wall.”
Food too, could be used as a shield, he said. “Food is going to be stored all around the walls of the spacecraft, because food is good radiation shielding,” he said. This wouldn’t be dangerous as the food would merely be blocking the radiation, it wouldn’t become a radioactive source.
Mars trip to use astronaut poo as radiation shield (Danke Dominik!)
Bonustrack: Schönes und ziemlich ernüchterndes Posting auf Reddit zur kosmischen Strahlung auf Reddit: Despite being a huge space nerd for many years, I’ve gradually come round to monkeys in deep space being a Really Stupid Idea.
Problem #2 is the aforementioned SPEs [Solar Particle Event, Sonneneruptionen]. These are occasional events, and vary hugely in magnitude, but a medium-sized one can dump 2Sv in an hour. For the big ones, it’s an order of magnitude higher. With an acute dose of 2Sv, you don’t have a 11% chance of getting cancer, you have a 100% chance of bleeding out of every orifice by the end of the week. More, these things can arrive at Earth within 15 mins of leaving the Sun, which means that in a space colony no-one could venture more than 15, 30, 60 mins (depending on how far from the Sun you are) from the nearest shelter. On a Moon or Mars colony, you can of course travel as much as you want during the night, but if your rover breaks down 8 hours out you are In For It.
Marijuana from Space
Der ehemalige NASA-Wissenschaftler Dale J. Chamberlain hat früher Botanik-Systeme für die ISS und das Space Shuttle gebaut und Anbauverfahren für kommende Mond-Basen entwickelt. Jetzt wendet er dieses Wissen in seiner neuen „High Altitude School of Hydroponics“ (H.A.S.H.) für Homegrower in Colorado an. Kein Scheiß. Es gibt eintägige Seminare für Amateurgärtner sowie eine Master Class mit Abschluss für professionelle Dope-Bauern. Ich will da hin.
Chamberlain knows more about far-out farming than almost anyone. At the Kennedy Space Center in the early 1990s he studied horticulture for future lunar colonies. “I assisted in building a plant-growth chamber that is still on the space shuttle,” he says, explaining that low-gravity hydroponics left him uniquely prepared to handle Colorado’s new legal landscape. “[…]
“Will there be weed in space?” He inhales and holds it for a beat before answering. […] anyone who’s seen how astronauts go to the bathroom knows a bong in zero gravity could be very messy. Chamberlain is undaunted. “Anything can be engineered. I’m envisioning the filter in my mind now, you’d have to somehow strain the water from the air. It could be done, but there are better ways in space. They’d probably use a vaporator-type system or even edibles. The short answer to your question is: hemp in space!”
Meet the Former NASA Scientist Who’s Teaching Coloradans How to Grow Marijuana Legally (via Animal NY)
Brain 2 Brain-Interface in Rats: Check.
Youtube Direktbrains, via /.
Wissenschaftler haben die Hirne von zwei Ratten auf zwei unterschiedlichen Kontinenten miteinander kommunizieren lassen. Die eine Ratte („Encoder Rat“) in Südamerika haben sie so konditioniert, dass sie auf ein bestimmtes Signal hin einen bestimmten Schalter betätigt. Die Gehirnaktivitäten wurden aufgezeichnet und über ein Implantat per „intra-cortical microstimulation (ICMS)“ an das Hirn einer Ratte in den USA geschickt, die dann dieselben Schalter gedrückt hat, ohne vorher darauf trainiert zu werden. Ist das erste mal, dass man zwei Gehirne direkt miteinander kommunizieren lies.
The brains of two rats on different continents have been made to act in tandem. When the first, in Brazil, uses its whiskers to choose between two stimuli, an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United States. The US rat then usually makes the same choice on the same task.
Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that this system allows one rat to use the senses of another, incorporating information from its far-away partner into its own representation of the world. “It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg,” he says. “But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.”
Nature: Intercontinental mind-meld unites two rats
Scientific Report: A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information
BBC: One rat brain ‘talks’ to another using electronic link
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Spirograph
Die NASA hat aus denn Orbits des Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescopes eine Spirograph-artige Bewegungsstudie gebastelt. Toll, ich liebe Spirographs.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Its wide-eyed Large Area Telescope (LAT) sweeps across the entire sky every three hours, capturing the highest-energy form of light — gamma rays — from sources across the universe. […] Now a Fermi scientist has transformed LAT data of a famous pulsar into a mesmerizing movie that visually encapsulates the spacecraft’s complex motion.
Pulsars are neutron stars, the crushed cores of massive suns that destroyed themselves when they ran out of fuel, collapsed and exploded. The blast simultaneously shattered the star and compressed its core into a body as small as a city yet more massive than the sun. One pulsar, called Vela, shines especially bright for Fermi. It spins 11 times a second and is the brightest persistent source of gamma rays the LAT sees.
Fermi’s Motion Produces a Study in Spirograph
Bonustrack: Ich hab’ vor einer Weile irgendwo ein paar alte Spirograph Packaging Bilder aufgegabelt, die gibt’s nach dem Klick.
Synesthetic Locked
Von Vimeo: „Synesthesia is the involuntary stimulation of the senses produced by a unexpected source. See sounds, feel colors, hear geometric figures, smell moments… But once you have experienced that kind of sense connections hardly you will be able to perceive something with no associations. You are synesthetic locked.“
Black Mirror just got real: LivesOn, AI-Mirror of yourself after Death
Great review from Haley Joel Osment : “I tweet dead people” liveson.org
— LivesOn (@_Liveson) February 22, 2013
Ihr erinnert Euch an die Black Mirror-Folge „Be Right Back“ letzte Woche? (Und ja, Review zu E02 kommt noch.) Nun, kurz danach schickte mir jemand den Link zu LivesOn und meinte, es wäre ein Viral für die Folge. Problem ist nur: Es ist kein Viral, sondern ernst gemeint.
LivesOn wird eine App, die einen digitalen Zwilling erstellt, der nach dem Tod das Online-Leben des Verstorbenen imitieren soll. Das Teil wird von der Agentur Lean Mean Fighting Machine in Zusammenarbeit mit Wissenschaftlern der Queen Mary Universität in London entwickelt. Die arbeiten da wohl schon eine Weile dran und sie wollten den Viraleffekt zur Black Mirror-Folge mitnehmen. Well played und: Creepy!
“We are at the very beginning of the build process,” Dave Bedwood, creative partner at Lean Mean Fighting Machine, said in an email. “This site is very much for people to sign up now, get a second twitter account, private to them, and just watch it learn and grow. As A.I advances, then maybe we will then get into it being able to copy syntax. When you die, if you’ve had this account for a long time, it may be able to keep tweeting as you.”
The Verge: You’ll tweet when you’re dead: LivesOn says digital ‘twin’ can mimic your online persona
Interview mit Moving Brands: The un-friend-dead
(Bild: Grim reaper via Shutterstock)
NASAs Google+Hangout in Space
Heute um 16:30h wird die NASA einen Google+Hangout in Space mit Astronauten der ISS veranstalten: „During the hangout, astronauts Kevin Ford, Chris Hadfield and Tom Marshburn will answer questions and provide insights about life aboard the station. Station crews conduct a variety of science experiments and perform station maintenance during their six-month stay on the outpost.“ Hier der Stream auf Youtube.
Quadrocopters juggling with a Stick
Youtube Direktpendulum, via Boing Boing
Zwei Quadrocopter jonglieren mit einem invertierten Pendel. Ich hab’ schon einiges an Quadrocopter-Videos gesehen und halte die Hälfte davon für schicke Augenwischerei, aber das hier beeindruckt mich sehr, hätte nicht gedacht, dass die schon so weit sind.
Robohub: Throwing and catching an inverted pendulum – with quadrocopters
Rain of Fire on the Sun
Youtube Direktfire, via MeFi
Die Nasa hat im Sommer letzten Jahres eine Sonneneruption gefilmt, die einen Plasmaregen auf der Sonnenoberfläche zur Folge hatte. Und eigentlich regnet es da kein Feuer, sondern das ist 100.000°C heißes, ionisiertes Gas, das sich auf Magnetfeldern entlang bewegt. Whoa!
Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.
On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun’s lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays — a phenomenon known as coronal rain.
Schöner Artikel dazu mit fantastischer Headline von Slate: All That Plasma Will Be Lost in Time, Like Tears in Rain
Russian Meteor-Footage cut like Movietrailer
Youtube Direktmeteor, via Seitvertreib
Russischer Meteor mit Inception-Soundtrack. Kann man machen…
