A century ago, the base of this table was a cart used in a French mine. Now, with a bit of alteration by Ducôté Design, it’s a handsome table.
via Neatorama

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Known as the “Elephant Man,” Merrick’s abnormal physical development led to work as a traveling curiosity and pokes and prods by puzzled doctors. Even after his death in 1890, Merrick’s unusual legacy lived on: his life became the topic of several books, an award-winning play, and a David Lynch movie.

And now, more than a century … Read More → "Using the Elephant Man’s skeleton to unlock medical mysteries"

Thomas Larson is looking to break into the camera phone attachment market and inspire a new generation of scientists with the Micro Phone Lens, an adhesive add-on lens that offers 15X optical magnification from a tiny footprint.

In a similar way to the Strap-on Macro Lens, the Micro Phone Lens trades off the performance of larger devices like the Read More → "Stick-on lens boosts smartphone camera magnification"

Memories are just about the most precious piece of intangible property that we have — they contain a person’s history, personality, and most deeply held beliefs — but there’s an inevitable decline in our ability to retain them as we age. That’s the problem being addressed by scientists at the Read More → "Age-related memory loss and the protein that may reverse it"

As the Chernobyl and Daiichi Fukushima nuclear disasters illustrated in unnerving clarity, mankind commands technology capable wreaking destruction we can’t clean up without putting people’s lives at risk. That’s why DARPA is hosting the DARPA Robotics Challenge, in hopes of jump starting development of tomorrow’s mechanical first responders.

Read More → "The obstacle course where DARPA will test a new breed of robot heroes"

In an interview with the BBC (which has canned making its own 3D content), Skype’s VP Mark Gillett says that the Microsoft VoIP service has been working on developing 3D calls. Don’t expect the capability to arrive soon, however, as Gillet soon added that it could be years before the tech gets to Skype users. “we’ve done work in the labs looking at the capability of 3D screens and 3D … Read More → "Skype is working on 3D video call capability, is held back by current technology’s limitations"

Data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) aboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 probe has shown that there is water locked in mineral grains on the surface on our satellite’s surface. Scientists had previously thought that the small amounts of moisture they could detect were all being generated by solar wind and other external factors, but the latest findings are strong evidence that the Moon contains large quantities of its own “magmatic water” from … Read More → "NASA discovers that the Moon is much wetter than we thought"

They may not be usable for music, but they can make fine lampshades. Leonardo Criolani made pendant lamps from cracked cymbals. The light through the crack looks a bit like lightning, don’t you think?
via Neatorama

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Most of us are happy to eat ice cream straight out of the container; even scooping it into a cone seems like too much of a hassle. But a restaurant in Spain called El Celler de Can Roca has come up with a novel way to serve the frozen treat—they bake it. Or, more specifically, they use a machine called the  … Read More → "A physics-defying appliance that bakes up hot ice cream"

The lab-made organ is known as a “mini-brain” for a reason. Researchers say that the brains — which they refer to as “cerebral organoids” — typically grew to no larger than 3 to 4 milimeters in diameter. But for the first nine weeks of development, the organoids “look very similar to the human embryo” and “display discrete regions that resemble different areas of the early developing human brain,” says … Read More → "Scientists grow miniature human brain in a lab"