Space-bound robots tend look like tanks and are about as flexible as the Tin Man after a rainstorm. Don’t get me wrong, the robots NASA sends to, say,  Mars are very very smart. But their forms present some limitations; namely, snail-paced research, lumbering motions and proneness to injury.

Just imagine then, if there was a robot that had the brains of Curiosity but … Read More → "NASA’s latest robot: a rolling tangle of rods that can take a beating"

MakerBot is the company behind one of the most popular 3D printers on the market. The printer is called the MakerBot Replicator 2 and it launched in September of 2012. Since that printer launched, we haven’t heard much in the way of new products from MakerBot.

The company has now announced that a new 3D desktop printer is coming this spring called … Read More → "MakerBot Replicator Mini 3D desktop printer lands this spring"

Brad Spencer creates extraordinary sculptures out of a most ordinary medium—bricks. His work ranges from free-standing sculptures to relief sculptures. Some of his most striking works feature figures that appear to be seamlessly part of brick walls.
via Laughing Squid

Continue reading</ … Read More → "Extraordinary brick sculptures by Brad Spencer"

In 1939, a Pennsylvania high school typing teacher named Julius Nelson wrote a book called Artyping, in which he outlined how to create detailed illustrations and graphics with a typewriter. Nelson’s illustrations range from detailed portraits to stick figures and ornate border designs, and today seem very much like the ASCII art that arose during the early era of … Read More → "The ASCII art of the 1930s"

Researchers from the University of Parma and the University of Pisa in Italy observed a colony of geladas at NaturZoo in Rheine, Germany. They collected over 5,900 bouts of yawning, noting the social context in which the yawns occurred and the behaviors associated with the yawns. Their results were published in the February 6 issue of Scientific Reports.

The gum-bearing yawn was most common … Read More → "Different yawns send different messages for gelada baboons"

Yeast aren’t the only microbes that help turn boring grapes into the delicious, seductive, complex, confusing, subtle, and totally splendiferous tonic known as wine. In addition to those well-known fermenters, a type of bacteria called Oenococcus oeni (for reasons that will be obvious to oenophiles) is responsible for some of the flavorings and secondary fermentation in … Read More → "Scientists figure out how microbes make good wine"

Cambridge science historian Simon Schaffer researched the history of quack science’s most iconic device, the perpetual motion machine. Cabinet magazine’s Christopher Turner recently interviewed Schaffer about one famed demonstration from 1721, and the, er, perpetual attraction of such devices to this day.
via Boing Boing

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In the far away Boötes constellation, there exists a massive planet known as tau Boötis b. It’s a world unlike anything that exists in our solar system. The closest comparison we have is Jupiter, but tau Boötis b is thought to weigh in at eight and a half times the mass of our solar system’s largest planet. Termed a “hot-Jupiter”, … Read More → "Water found on alien world unlike any in our solar system"

Take a rubber band and twist it. Keep twisting it until it starts to collapse onto itself and form larger loops—it’s something you can do with almost any strand-like structure. Now, scientists from the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson are taking advantage of this property in everyday materials such as fishing line and sewing thread and using it to make artificial muscles.

The scientists … Read More → "Artificial muscles made with fishing line"

Fdecomite has revisited his tessellated Escher cookie-cutters, with a new set of cutters and some new baking that he’s posted to the Boing Boing Flickr pool.
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