Pacemakers and other electronic implants are a pain to keep running — patients need surgery to replace batteries, and body-powered generators aren’t currently strong enough to charge these devices. They may be far more practical in the future, though, as American and Chinese researchers have developed a piezoelectric power plant that could charge an implant all by itself. The prototype machine generates electricity through the movement of nanoribbons that are tiny enough … Read More → "Tiny power plant can charge a pacemaker through heartbeats"

Each of Mapes’ pieces are constructed from what he describes as “biographical DNA,” the little pieces of physical information he pieces together to create a finished portrait. Typically, this is a fairly simple process with Mapes gathering his photos, bits of hair, and handwriting samples from his living subject’s home and then organizing them into a portrait using test tubes, little baggies or pushpins. With the Dutch Masters series, he had to be … Read More → "Portraits made of test tubes and pushpins"

Last week at the Army Aviation Symposium, in Arlington, Va., a U.S. Army officer announced that the Army is looking to slim down its personnel numbers and adopt more robots over the coming years. The biggest surprise, though, is the scale of the downsizing the Army might aim for.

At the current rate, the Army is expected to shrink from 540,000 people down to 420,000 by 2019. But at last … Read More → "U.S. Army considers replacing thousands of soldiers with robots"

Back in 2012, Tim Vincent-Smith inherited a pair of unserviceable upright pianos. He took these to bits, and using “nose to tail carpentry,” used their every morsel to build a staircase and mezzanine in box-shaped room. The deconstruction process was an education into the craft, skill, complexity and ingenuity of piano manufacture, and the end result was a gorgeous piece that enriched the life of Vincent-Smith’s client, a cellist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.</ … Read More → "Mezzanine and stairs made out of dismembered pianos"

It turns out that people like hanging out in public more than they used to, and those who most like hanging out are people using their phones. On the steps of the Met, “loiterers” — those present in at least two consecutive film samples, inhabiting the same area for 15 seconds or more — constituted 7 percent of the total (that is to say, the other 93 percent were just passing through). That was a 57 percent increase from 30 … Read More → "Being on a smartphone makes you more likely to use public spaces—kinda"

Little Golden Books have been a staple of childhood since they were introduced in 1942, and part of the charm is how little they’ve changed. “The Little Red Hen” is still toting the same old shovel and planting her wheat. An exhibit at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, Calif., is taking a more updated approach to the classic children’s literature series.

The “ … Read More → "If ‘Doctor Who,’ ‘Breaking Bad’ were Little Golden Books"

Wouldn’t it be cool if birds left visible trails behind them, like jets tracing the sky with smoke? That’s exactly the effect of Rhode Island School of Design professor Dennis Hlynsky achieves in his mesmerizing videos posted today at This Is Colossal.

The concept is simple: set up a stationary camera and shoot some birds flying … Read More → "The flight paths of birds create elegant drawings in the sky"

In her most recent paper, published in the latest issue of Dreaming, Gackenbach and her colleagues further solidified a key earlier finding: that so-called “hardcore” gamers were more likely than their peers to experience lucid dreams. Gackenbach first reached that conclusion in 2006, after noting that gamers and lucid dreamers both displayed traits like intense focus and … Read More → "Dreamcasters: how video games alter our subconscious"

Transparent screens just aren’t very practical these days — bigger models are frequently expensive and bulky, while smaller heads-up displays tend to have very narrow viewing angles. However, MIT may have solved all those problems at once with its prototype nanoparticle display. The device creates color images on a glass surface simply by ‘tuning’ a silver nanoparticle coating until it lets only certain light wavelengths pass through. The technique is both … Read More → "MIT’s new transparent screen may lead to cheap heads-up displays"

Cyclists can adorn themselves from head to toe in flashing lights, but it’s still possible that pedestrians and drivers won’t see them until it’s too late. It’s a problem the Blaze Laserlight hopes to solve by projecting an early warning signal 16 to 20 feet ahead of a cyclist, so that others on the road will know they’re coming in advance—and have time to react.
via < … Read More → "This laser bike light is like a bat signal for cyclists"