I think all of us have at some point been both interested and afraid of the idea of HAL 9000 in our computers, but Flickr user ts_looney actually made it happen, thanks to a creative Rainmeter skin that did most of the work for him. Best of all, it’s actually useful.
via Read More → "The Hal 9000 desktop"
Physicists have directly imaged Landau Levels — the quantum levels that determine electron behaviour in a strong magnetic field — for the first time since they were theoretically conceived of by Nobel prize winner Lev Landau in 1930.
Using scanning tunnelling spectroscopy, scientists at institutions including Warwick University and Tohoku University have revealed the internal ring-like structure of these Landau Levels at the surface of a semiconductor.
via < … Read More → "Scientists unveil first ever images of Landau Levels"
… Read More → "Scientists drink more coffee than anyone"On a list of the 15 heaviest coffee-drinking professions, mine only came in fourth. Scientists and lab technicians are at the top, drinking more coffee than writers, doctors, teachers, and everyone else.
via Neatorama
Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) opened up registration for the FANG Challenges, a set of three next-generation military vehicle design competitions that will kick off in January, and will put tools based on approaches borrowed from software development and chip design in the hands of teams of engineers and designers. In an effort to reinvent how such complex systems are designed and built, DARPA is preparing for the first real test of its … Read More → "DARPA launches first phase of “open source” vehicle design challenge"
While the Mars rover explores the Red Planet, a group of engineers submitted plans for a new out-of-this-world space mission: landing a boat on the Saturn moon Titan, which NASA, the European Space Agency, and Italian space agency ASI explored in depth over the last decade as part of the Cassini-Huygens mission.
Building on the successful 2005 landing of the Huygens probe on … Read More → "Floating a boat on Saturn’s moon Titan"
Honey bees are fascinating creatures. They live harmoniously in large communities, divided into different castes, with some of the worker bees heading out on daily expeditions to gather nectar and pollen from flowers. Already, a study has suggested that the efficient method in which bees visit those flowers could inspire the improvement of human endeavors such as the building of faster computer networks. Now, scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex hope to build a computer model of the honey bee’s brain, with the ultimate hope of using it to … Read More → "Scientists hope to put artificial bee brains in flying robots"
Two of the world’s greatest things, the Raspberry Pi and Beer, have come together in a project that is the definition of homebrew.
The aptly-named Beer Church group, part of the Chicago-based Pumping Station: One modding collective, have been using the $40 Linux board to help brew Irish Stout.
via Tech Republic
A group of MIT students decided to test the performance of different tinfoil beanies to see how various designs (the “classical,” “fez” and “centurion”) interacted with commonly used industrial radio applications. They found that all three designs actually amplified these mind control rays radio waves, suggesting that the tinfoil hat meme might be a false-flag operation engineered to trick the wily and suspicious into making it easier to beam messages into their skulls.
via Boing … Read More → "Tinfoil hats actually amplify mind-control beams"
Teaching coding is hot. Codecademy famously signed up New York’s mayor as a user (and recently roped in $10m of venture capital), and the popular online-teaching concern Khan Academy just launched a suite of programming lessons. Backlash followed: career programmers have scoffed at the idea of “coding as literacy,” while an academic study claimed that some people can code, and others simply can’t.
Bret Victor, a former interface designer for Apple, thinks they’re all wrong. In … Read More → "Dear everyone teaching programming: you’re doing it wrong"
Peering through binoculars can make an impossibly faraway object look close enough to touch, but with a trade-off: Any little jostle can knock a view out of frame. Most consumer binoculars have a built-in image-stabilization system that uses an accelerometer, a processor, and a small motor to compensate for user movements. But that system only offsets slight jolts, and the processing time required creates … Read More → "The world’s steadiest binoculars"
