Traditional photobooths are proven good-time machines. Striking poses for the rapid-fire quartet of pics takes a balance of strategy and spontaneity once you slip your bills in the slot. But what if the machine was set off by something else entirely? Thermobooth is a new model operated by intimacy—the shutter goes off when skin-to-skin contact is made.
via Gizmodo</ … Read More → "This photobooth is triggered by skin-to-skin contact"

Prosthetic legs have gotten smarter and smarter thanks to advanced sensors and lightweight motors, but this week they’re getting their biggest overhaul yet: the latest bionic leg can be controlled entirely by its wearer’s mind. Though the mind-controlled prosthetic leg has been in the works for four years now, the research team behind it has only today published the details of its development, which are … Read More → "See the world’s first mind-controlled prosthetic leg in action"

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit south-central Pakistan on Tuesday this week. Reports of hundreds of casualties highlight the awful scale of the tragedy, made more difficult for rescuers by the remote location of the quake, 270km north of Karachi.

One of the surprises waiting for people who arrived in the quake’s aftermath was a new island. Just offshore near the site of the earthquake, the island appears to be … Read More → "Large earthquake causes mud island to rise from the sea"

The conventional wisdom is that to print large, furniture-sized parts, we’ll need ever-larger printers, but the pair of MIT educated researchers have developed an ingenious software tool that enables humble desktop 3-D printers to create objects the size of desks.

Their project is called Hyperform, and the process transforms CAD models into a series of linear paths that are populated with a chain of virtual rings. Each link … Read More → "MIT whizzes create an amazing new 3-D printing technique"

During the Cold War, the CIA sent cats outfitted with electronic gear to eavesdrop on the enemy. This and other amazing stories in BB pal Tom Vanderbilt’s excellent Smithsonian feature “The CIA’s Most Highly-Trained Spies Weren’t Even Human.” Tom’s guide through this strange history was Bob Bailey who trained dolphins, chickens, and the aforementioned cats, all for the military.
via Boing Boing

Continue … Read More → "Spy animals of the Cold War"

Just when you thought ol’ Curiosity was digging in for the winter, the little discovery machine came up with a doozy: It discovered water in Martian soil. NASA scientists just published five papers in Science detailing the experiments that led to the discovery. That’s right. There’s water on Mars.
via Read More → "NASA’s Curiosity rover just found water in Martian soil"

Google Fiber has made gigabit Internet speeds seem tantalizingly within reach of so many Americans… unfortunately, it’s just not available to most of us.

But Internet service providers in various cities are promising gigabit fiber to the home with increasing frequency. Just this week, regional mobile ISP C Spire announced a competition to select a Mississippi community for gigabit service. Last week, an ISP in Chattanooga, Tennessee … Read More → "Want gigabit fiber home Internet? Move to one of these cities"

It’s a face only a paleontologist could love: scientists in China have discovered the ancient fossil of an armored, jawed fish that appears to be the oldest known specimen with the facial characteristics shared by modern vertebrates. More specifically, the bone structures of the fish’s cheeks and jaw give it the appearance of what we now recognize as a face.
… Read More → "Incredible fish fossil is the earliest known creature with a face"

Researchers Rachel Morrison and Diana Reiss of The City University in New York were doing a research project on the monkeys by recording their loud calls and “mobbing behavior” in response to seeing people they fear. But, when a supervisor whom the monkey disliked entered their enclosure, the researchers noticed that the monkeys went quiet.

It turns out that the tamarins weren’t exactly silent. … Read More → "Monkeys whisper when talking about someone they don’t like"

Designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, who teamed with British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor, the Ark Nova is touted as the world’s first inflatable concert hall. Kapoor is no stranger to inflatable structures, having created the Leviathan in Paris back in 2011. But that structure was designed to stay put inside the city’s Grand Palais, whereas  … Read More → "An inflatable concert hall inspired by… giant plums?"