“The space shuttle Atlantis completed its final flight last month, bringing pride and bittersweet nostalgia to many Americans. But what about our beloved, symbolic astronaut? What will he do now that he’s out of the hero business?

Piggy-backing on the mixed emotions of the country about the end of NASA’s space shuttle program, photographer Neil DaCosta and art director Sara Phillips produced a darkly comic project by staging fictitious last moments of a distraught anonymous, unemployed astronaut.” via … Read More → "Astronaut suicide photos inspired by shuttle program’s end"

“Stanford University is now expanding computer science courses available online, for free, for any students who wish to join. It all began a few weeks ago with an introductory course on artificial intelligence (AI) taught by the award-winning professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Now, two new courses are available; the first, an Introduction to Databases taught by Professor Jennifer Widom; the second, Machine Learning with Professor Andrew Ng.” via GeekOSystem

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Cool Hunting interviews Lou Nasti, the mastermind behind many of the incredible animatronic displays in the windows of stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman. Lou is the owner of Mechanical Displays in Brooklyn and has been creating display robotics professionally for 30 years. via Cool Hunting

… Read More → "Take a peek inside an animatronic display workshop"

Google has adapted its existing Street View equipment to be effective in the vast Amazon terrain. They’ll photograph the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers of northwest Brazil in partnership with charity Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon (FAS). via BBC

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“It looks like Radio Shack is pretty serious about their new found commitment to their focus on the DIY, inventor, creator and geek demographics. [Ken Gracey], Parallax forum guru, put up a post on the Parallax stuff that will be sold at Radio Shack. Everything is priced, “below spousal approval level,” but no word on what those prices are.” via Hack a Day

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This is a pretty interesting article about a new book Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics, published August 8, that explores the nuances and effects of an expression we use often, but rarely think about. Wired.com spoke with author, Marianne LaFrance, an experimental psychologist at Yale University, about why we smile, how we do it, and the rise of the emoticon.

Continue … Read More → "The science of smiles"

“These animations shows the motion of ice in Antarctica as measured by satellite data from the Canadian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency and the European Space Agency, and processed by NASA-funded research from the University of California, Irvine. The background image from the Landsat satellite is progressively replaced by a map of ice velocity, which is color-coded on a logarithmic scale.” source: NASA via Wired Science</ … Read More → "NASA Releases Full Map of Antarctic Ice Flows"

“IBM is one of the biggest companies in high performance computing and supercomputers and has been a big force in the computer world for over 65 years. IBM announced today that with help from DARPA and four major universities the basic design of an experimental computer chip that emulates the human brain has been completed. IBM calls the chip a cognitive computing chip.” via Slash Gear

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… Read More → "New computer chip modeled on a living brain can learn and remember"

“A team of researchers from Harvard and Stanford University have come up with a new organic semiconductor that could potentially rival inorganic semiconductors, according to an article in the journal Nature Communications.

Up until now organic semiconductors have been very flexible, but at the same time too slow for things like displays. On the other hand inorganic semiconductors such as silicon are faster, but inflexible.” via SemiAccurate

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“Researchers at the University of Southampton used nano-structures to create millimeter-sized “monolithic glass space-variant polarization converters,” which ultimately changes the way light travels through and is stored in glass. These “whirlpools” of light data can be read like information stored in optical fibers — allowing for “more precise laser material processing, optical manipulation of atom-sized objects, ultra-high resolution imaging and potentially, table-top particle accelerators.” via Engadget

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