Swedish-American inventor Henry Konrad Sandell designed this device, the Mills Violano Virtuoso. It’s like a mechanical player piano, but it plays a violin. He patented it in 1905 along with Henry S. Mills of the Mills Novelty Company, a firm that made a wide variety of coin operated machines. Later designs added a piano in order to make the music more enjoyable than a solo violin could manage. Here’s how the  … Read More → "Antique machine plays violin"

The Reverse Listening Device is a wearable device that reroutes sound from a person’s left side to their right ear and vice versa. The device is a conceptual object by British artist and designer Dominic Wilcox. He reports that it does indeed work and it’s “a very strange experience wearing it.” The device is on display at the Selfridges store in London for the next … Read More → "Reverse listening device swaps the sound coming to a person’s right and left sides"

FDNY officials are using a 60-facet algorithm to determine which department-inspected buildings pose the greatest fire threat, fast-tracking fire inspectors to the riskiest buildings. Structures that are old, vacant, or located in poor neighborhoods are generally at a higher risk, and thanks to the data-driven program, those structures will receive attention first. Prior to this, buildings were inspected essentially at random, with schools and libraries receiving extra attention.
via Read More → "New York City is using data mining to fight fires"

We’re not sure how we missed this one, but it definitely deserves a look. Professor of Mechtronics [Olaf Diegel’s] 3D printer must go to 12, because he’s printed these incredible electric guitar bodies. You probably won’t be making your own on your filament printer, however, because [Diegel] uses SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) to create the body out of nylon, then he dyes the resulting piece in … Read More → "3D printed guitar"

Cat whiskers are tremendously sensitive, so much so that cats can navigate around our glassware without sending anything crashing to the floor. It’s that sort of sensitivity that a team from the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to replicate to helprobots of the future. Ultra-sensitive fibers, made with carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles are designed to respond to pressure, helping future hardware navigate difficult and low-visibility environments. Team … Read More → "Scientists replicate kitty whiskers to help robots ‘feel’"

The still photos on this listing are amazing, but they really don’t do this property justice. Thankfully, the listing agent had a video made. It is amazing.
via Looney Listing

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… Read More → "Home in Oregon for sale … has its own railroad around the property"

TSA screened 638,705,790 passengers in 2013, and as we learned last year, if you look deeply within the possessions of that many people, you’re gonna find some weird stuff. Tons of weird stuff. Here’s a rundown of the craziest objects TSA found in 2013.
via Gizmodo</ … Read More → "All the crazy stuff people tried to bring on airplanes last year"

A team of international researchers has turned to stem cells in a quest to find an a more effective treatment for patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB). The new method being investigated involves using the patients’ own bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) to boost immune response and heal damaged tissue…

Currently in its preliminary stages, the study is designed to investigate the possibility that MSCs can help organs to regulate themselves and repair damaged or traumatized tissues. Specifically in this case, the stem cells migrate to the lung with TB bacteria … Read More → "Stem cells could offer alternative treatment for patients with resistant tuberculosis"

Working alongside collaborators at Harvard, MIT, USC, and a company called BioSensics, the Carnegie Mellon researchers decided to make the orthotic device from soft plastics and other non-rigid materials so that it was able to better reproduce the natural motions of an actual human foot and ankle.

Pneumatic artificial muscles—three in the … Read More → "Robotic super socks will aid rehabilitation"

In 2012, Clearpath Robotics decided to give away a customized Husky UGV to a worthy cause, and what could be more worthy than keeping us humans from getting blown up. The University of Coimbra in Portugal has taken its free Husky and turned it into an clever little autonomous mobile mine detector.

Huskies don’t come stock with the ability to detect mines. Or rather, they may be able to detect one … Read More → "Robot takes on landmine detection while humans stay very very far away"