Spreaders lay down salt repeatedly during the icy season. Sometimes they may throw down more rock salt on areas that already carry far more than the optimum 15 grams per square meter; at other times, they may not drop enough. The Salt Institute says that roads departments could cut their salt requirements in half through careful controls.

Accurate, real-time measurement of the amount of residual salt on the pavement is vital to … Read More → "Road salt sensor for better highway safety, less environmental damage"

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — The Kentucky Senate passed a bill Tuesday that would count computer programming classes toward fulfilling foreign-language requirements in public schools.

The goal is to enhance programming skills, enabling more Kentucky students to land high-paying jobs in the growing computer industry, said Sen. David Givens, the bill’s sponsor.
via Courier Journal

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As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, Amit Sahai was fascinated by the strange notion of a “zero-knowledge” proof, a type of mathematical protocol for convincing someone that something is true without revealing any details of why it is true. As Sahai mulled over this counterintuitive concept, it led him to consider an even more daring notion: What if it were possible to mask the inner workings not just … Read More → "Cryptography breakthrough could make software uhackable"

Trust us, you might have watched the live stream free fall drop on YouTube in 2012, but you haven’t seen it from GoPro angles. Extreme can’t even describe this footage.
via DVICE

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… Read More → "Incredible GoPro views of Felix Baumgartner’s free fall from space"

Thymio robots are equipped with an array of programmable LEDs, and it’s very easy to get them to do simple behaviors, like driving around in trajectories that combine lines and curves. Mariane Brodier created all of the images shown here by pre-programming motions, cycling the LEDs through color changes, and then letting the robot go nuts in a dark room while pointing a camera at it with the shutter open for a … Read More → "Robot creates beautiful light paintings"

Composer Jonathan Berger wrote a recent essay in Nautilus about how tunes can “hijack our perception,” going into detail about some of the most confounding effects. Basically: clocks keep track of the objective end of things, but our brains and bodies can perceive time with an entirely different rhythm; a subjective take dictated by what Berger describes as “physiological metronomes.”

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Hot tip: never … Read More → "Why you should never listen to Ride of the Valkyries while driving"

Dr. Amin Azzam who teaches at the UCSF school of medicine, has created an elective for his fourth year students in which they are assigned to improve the most-used medical Wikipedia entries. Students are given Wikipedia orientation and taught how to be good participants in the project. This is especially relevant given the fact that Wikipedia is the most-used reference among doctors and medical students. The students prioritize the most-cited, most-visited entries, and they are working with wikipedians to have these entries translated into many other languages, as well as adapting it for the “simple … Read More → "Med school students assigned to improve most-used medical Wikipedia entries"

Yuri Suzuki, the designer that brought you cabs that create music from street noise and helped Disney turn your earlobe into a speaker, is launching a Kickstarter through his company Dentaku for a circuit board that turns anything and everything into a musical instrument. Calling Ototo a circuit board is selling it short; it’s actually a customizable synthesizer that can be played … Read More → "This $75 synthesizer will turn anything into an instrument"

New technologies are giving people with paralysis more independence than ever before. We’ve previously seen a computer controlled with a tongue and a wheelchair steered with facial muscles. The WinkyMote uses a similar approach: it allows a user to control an object by blinking.

Katia Vega, a doctoral student in computer science, developed it for a man affected by quadriplegia. It interacts with common devices for which one … Read More → "WinkyMote lets you change channels by blinking your eye"

The astronauts of the Apollo missions took 70mm Hasselblad cameras with them when they landed on the moon. The stunning pictures these cameras enabled them to take are carefully cataloged and available for all to see online, but you’ll have to look harder if you want to find one of the cameras themselves. Of 14 cameras sent to the moon between 1969 … Read More → "The only camera to come back from the moon will be auctioned in March"