Soft body robotics

No longer tin men, robots of the future will be morphing squid-like beasts! Thanks, Brian!

Add comment November 11th, 2009

Mystery life form filmed in US sewer

Water companies often send robotic cameras down sewers and surface water drains to inspect blockages or assess damage. This one found something weird. As surface water drains often empty directly into natural watercourses, sometimes aquatic life gets washed up the pipe by floods or tidal flow. Some have suggested these weird blobs are freshwater bryozoans, a coral-like colony animal. However, Timothy S. Wood, an expert on freshwater bryozoa and an officer with the International Bryozoology Association, had this to say:

Thanks for the video – I had not see it before. No, these are not bryozoans! They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting.

What do you think?

4 comments July 1st, 2009

Green Porno

Isabella Rossellini made a series of short videos for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival taking a bizarre and hilarious look at sex in the natural world.  Wonderfully, you can find all of these films on YouTube, so here’s earthworm sex and praying mantis sex to get you started.

If you liked this blend of humour and sex and natural history, you’ll probably go wild for Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson:

Dr Tatiana offers helpful advice on a full and satisfying sex life (for optimal reproduction purposes) to a wide range of clients, from insects to bacteria, birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, plants and fungi. Occasional comparisons and parallels are drawn between the sexual practices and ‘oddities’ of the clients and human sexual habits.

1 comment May 25th, 2009

How to be open-minded

YouTube user QualiaSoup made this insightful video on what it means to be open-minded.
Often I’ve told people: “Don’t be so open-minded that your brain falls out”.  This video is a far more helpful and nuanced description on why being open minded doesn’t mean believing in everything and anything.

Add comment April 5th, 2009

The Bizarre Blanket Octopus

The Blanket Octopus is found in the warm waters of Australia’s northern coast, and sure is weird:

1. It shows one of the highest degrees of sexual dimorphism in the animal kingdom: females can be 100 times larger and 40,000 times heavier than the males
2. Females are immune to the Portuguese Man O’ War, and will tear off the jellyfish’s tentacles to use as weapons
3. When threatened, these octopuses spread out their webbed tentacles like a cloak, giving the Blanket Octopus its name

Add comment March 25th, 2009

Surfing the Gravitational Waves

My pal Duncan Smith at Glasgow University made this tidy video about gravitational waves, a phenomena first predicted by Albert Einstein.

Add comment March 16th, 2009

Richard Wiseman, science ninja

Can Richard break a wooden beam without damaging the wine glasses it’s balanced on?

As Gordon Freeman illustrated previously, all scientists have mad crowbar skillz.

Add comment February 2nd, 2009

Dr DeLaurier’s Fantastic Flying Machines

Dr James DeLaurier is an inventor and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies.  This is his ‘Flapper’, the first ever human-carrying ornithopter.  DeLaurier also has the claim to the first ever microwave-powered aircraft, a small helicopter that drew power from a high-energy radio beam directed at it from underneath.

Add comment January 31st, 2009

Fireball seen over Gothenburg, Sweden (video)

After the incredible footage of a meteor lighting up Alberta, Canada, here’s another bolide captured on film. This meteor burned up in the atmosphere over Sweden, causing a small amount of panic.

1 comment January 19th, 2009

More surreal science comedy from DiscoverMC tv

Fleps Orre has let me know that the post docs at DiscoveryMC have another rather good video out.  I’m fairly sure that #2 is taken verbatim from from the infamous ‘atheist’s nightmare’ video.

1 comment December 26th, 2008

Phantom sea plant disappears when touched

On the heels of the invisible octopus is this magical creature.  Not a plant of course, but an animal, my best guess is a type of soft coral known as a Sea Pen. Some species glow bright green when touched, others retreat into their base by expelling water from their body, like this little chap.  This deflating trick helps to protect them from predators.

Add comment December 19th, 2008

World’s oldest computer resurrected after 2,000 years

It has no hard drive, no peripherals, and won’t run Windows Vista.  But that doesn’t mean that the Antikythera Mechanism is anything less than incredible.  The 2,000-year-old computer was discovered on an Ancient Greek shipwreck 100 years ago, and thanks to miracles of modern science (including X-ray and gamma radiographs used to probe its hidden mechanics), a working replica has been built.  The mechanism predicts the positions and phases of heavenly bodies such as the sun, moon, and planets, and was used for navigation.

Please let someone produce working replicas for sale!

Hat tip to James Randerson at the Guardian Science Blog

4 comments December 15th, 2008

The Science of Dice

Here’s a video of the inimitable ‘Colonel Louis Zocchi’ as he explains why most dice aren’t random, how to spot a dice cheat, and why his Game Science dice are better than all the rest.  Personally I think all science should be presented with this kind of salesman flair.  Wonderfully entertaining stuff.

Liked that?  Here’s part 2.

Hat tip to loquacious at Metafilter.

Add comment November 27th, 2008

Incredible footage of meteor over Edmonton, Canada

Last Thursday at around 17:30 local time, a large meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Canadian prairies, breaking up over central Alberta.  The dashboard camera of a police cruiser captured this incredible footage:

A news report with further pictures and footage can be seen here.

See also: footage of another metor burning up over Sweden (19/01/2009)

1 comment November 22nd, 2008

SciencePunk in the US – biometric art

Already well-known for its high-end burger joint, Madison Square Park in NYC is currently home to a nifty biometric art installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer entitled Pulse Park.  Two sculptures containing heart rate monitors transform the pulses of visitors into a light display created by two hundred theatrical spotlights.  The effect is pretty cool.

2 comments November 4th, 2008