Like the answer to Paint the Earth, the answer to the first part of this question is pretty straightforward to look up.

But what if it weren’t? Can we figure out the answer from things we already know? Let’s look at a few ways of estimating it.

First of all, how … Read More → "Could a person walk the entire city of NY in their lifetime?"

Schrödinger’s cat is the poster child for quantum weirdness. Now it has been immortalised in a portrait created by one of the theory’s strangest consequences: quantum entanglement.

These images were generated using a cat stencil and entangled photons. The really spooky part is that the photons used to generate the image never interacted with the stencil, while the photons that illuminated the stencil were never … Read More → "Schrödinger’s cat caught on quantum film"

While London’s public transport network is getting more hi-tech by the minute, the city’s buses and trains aren’t as green as they could be — at least not yet. Transport for London (TfL) has already deployed 800 hybrid and a handful of all-electric buses on the capital’s streets, but keeping them charged isn’t easy when they’re miles from a depot. In a bid to keep them running … Read More → "London to start trialling wirelessly charged buses"

Fuji Xerox has been testing out a new Robot Printer in Tokyo that has built-in wheels, allowing it to travel around as it prints documents. Once users submit pages via a browser, the printer begins traveling to them in order to drop off the documents, using Roomba-like spatial detection to avoid obstacles along the way.
via Laughing Squid

< … Read More → "A robotic printer with wheels that can travel to people delivering their printed documents"

“They’re trying to do 20 years of research in 4 years,” says Michael Kahana in a tone that’s a mixture of excitement and disbelief. Kahana, director of the Computational Memory Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, is mulling over the tall order from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In the next four years, he and other researchers are charged … Read More → "DARPA project starts building human memory prosthetics"

This tutorial from Adafruit shows how to create a custom interactive drum set that lights up with sound. It uses a mic amp sensor that is connected to a miniature Arduino Gemma board to detect when the instrument is being hit by the sticks. Neopixels then illuminate into a range of colors creating a beautifully synced up music presentation.

< … Read More → "Gemma-powered neopixel sound reactive drums"

The voice in your head is a lie. What you hear when you open your mouth is distinctly less velvety than what everyone around hears—and it’s your skull that’s to blame. More specifically, it’s the way your skull vibrates.

Your voice emanates from from the lower portion … Read More → "Why your voice sounds different inside your head"

For a robot to be able to wash clothes, vacuum carpets or serve you cocktails on a Friday night, it needs to be loaded with the appropriate software and data. In the future, though, a robot will easily be able pull info they need to do those things (and more) from a single online service called Robo Brain. Researchers, roboticists and companies, for instance, will be able to download whatever skill they want and then … Read More → "Robo Brain teaches robots how to understand the world"

In a curious case of architecture imitating toys which imitate architecture, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has begun construction on the Lego House. Located in Lego’s hometown of Billund, Denmark, the building will resemble an oversized Lego structure and is expected to be completed in 2016.

The brick-laying ceremony included Lego matriarch Edith Kirk Kristiansen, who, along with other members of her family, laid ceremonial foundation stones which look like … Read More → "Bricks laid at BIG’s new Lego House"