Candy Mechanics is in the business of personalised chocolate, but the company’s latest service takes that idea one step further: chocolate people. Or rather, chocolate heads, known as Lolpops. All you need is a smartphone or tablet to film a 30-second, close-up video of someone’s mug from all angles (Candy Mechanics’ website talks you through the process). Upload that video, and fancy Autodesk software builds a 3D model … Read More → "Candy Mechanics turns heads into 3D chocolate lollipops"

The Holiday Plott3r is a Lego MindStorms-powered creation that cleverly uses Lego’s modular robotic platform to print Christmas cards in snowflake, holiday tree, and Santa designs. The Seshans’ festive creation seems to be working similar to a dot-matrix printer, using two markers to create the images dot by dot, which is pretty impressive given that it’s made out of, well, Lego. When the … Read More → "Two teens built this Lego robot to sign Christmas cards for them"

Guinness World Records’ most prolific record breaker Ashrita Furman and members of the Sri Chinmoy Centre celebrated what would have been meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy’s 85th birthday by attempting to break the record for Most candles on a birthday cake.

A staggering 72,585 candles were lit and remained burning for about 40 seconds, ensuring that the previous record went up in flames. </ … Read More → "Birthday cake with 72,585 burning candles"

Most of today’s commercially available drones have four rotors and more or less look the same (other than that one that’s foldable). So if you wanted to own a drone that had, say, five copters or a completely different design altogether, you’d probably have to make your own, which can be a really tedious process. If you don’t know where to start customizing your flying masterpiece, … Read More → "Design your dream drone with MIT’s program"

Eerbeek, a city in the eastern Netherlands, is known primarily for paper—it’s the largest paper manufacturer in the country. But now, a new pedestrian crossing has put the city on the map for urban innovation, too. It recently installed a glowing crosswalk that keeps pedestrians visible at night, according to CityLab.

Read More → "A glowing crosswalk debuts in the Netherlands"

You can already buy smart glasses for cycling, but they tend to have one big catch: the heads-up display partly obscures your view. That’s annoying at best, and risky at worst. Everysight thinks it can do better. It’s close to finishing development of Raptor, a set of augmented reality glasses that projects data on a transparent display on the lens. You’ll get navigation, speed, heart rate and other … Read More → "Smart cycling glasses show data without blocking your view"

There’s only so much palaeontologists can learn about prehistoric animals from fossilized bones, so on rare occasions when ancient soft tissues turn up, it’s worth taking note. Recent discoveries of preserved brains, cartilage and skin have provided some unique insights into how dinosaurs may have looked and sounded, and now a section of a dinosaur’s tail, complete with feathers, has been found trapped in a piece of … Read More → "Dinosaur tail, complete with feathers, found in amber"

A Japanese city is keeping track of elderly dementia sufferers by attaching barcodes containing personal information to their fingers and toes, officials say.

A company in Iruma, near Tokyo, has developed a tagging system for members of the public at risk of getting lost.

The 1cm (0.4in) square stickers hold an address, telephone number and … Read More → "Japan tracks dementia patients with QR codes attached to fingernails"

It’s not bad. In fact, this is a triumph: a Christmas song written entirely by an artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto. Yet it has that uncanny neural network je ne sais quoi in spades.
via Boing Boing

… Read More → "An AI wrote a Christmas song"

Pavlov’s conditioning experiments with dogs are one of the most well-known studies in scientific history, and now research from the University of Western Australia (UWA) has shown that plants can learn similar associations. Putting seedings into the bottom of a Y-shaped maze, the scientists conditioned the plants to associate light with the wind from a fan, and found that the majority of the plants learned to use the fan to … Read More → "Pavlov’s plants? Research suggests animal learning in veggies"