Archive for April, 2008
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have become a staple of modern warfare, so it was only a matter of time before ground vehicles caught up. Although it looks like a stock racer crossed with a hatchback, the Guardium is actually Israel’s first (and the world’s second) autonomous ground attack vehicle.
The robot is designed to replace human soldiers for lengthy, tedious tasks such as patrolling, although a human operator can patch into the machine at any time. When on its own, the Guardium can navigate traffic, perform sentry work, identify targets and even engage targets. Personally, I don’t trust my toaster to get things done right, but I’m still not sure whether this marks an improvement on a jumpy 17 year old conscript with an assault rifle. John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org is quoted as saying:
A robot does what it’s told, and you’ll be able to get them to advance in ways it’s hard to get human soldiers to do. They don’t have fear, and they kill without compunction.
Now where have I heard that before?
Thanks, Brian!
April 30th, 2008
Alfredo Duran hit the news for the first and the last time recently, as the 40 year old shift worker died of heart failure exacerbated by his four-can-a-day Red Bull habit. This gave me pause to reflect upon my own energy drink habit, currently standing at a can of Relentless each workday - primarily because a can of Relentless is twice the size of a can of Red Bull and half the price. Now, unlike the unfortunate Alfredo, I don’t have an underlying heart condition, but the question remains - how much is too much? Luckily, the internet has an answer for everything, and I’ve discovered the joy of The Caffeine Database, hosted by Energy Fiend. Not only does this site list all the energy drinks you’ve heard of (and a lot you haven’t), the list can be ordered by caffeine content per item or per ml. Even better, there’s a neat gadget that’ll calculate your lethal dosage of tea, coffee, or any other caffeinated drink.
30 cans, huh? Let’s hope they don’t mean ‘in one year’!
April 28th, 2008
Reading the time just got easier thanks to this ingenious timepiece. Industrial designer Christiaan Postma used over 150 clockpieces to build a single clock whose hands spell out the hours throughout the day. I’m always on the lookout for novel ways of displaying the time (I’m a sucker for binary watches), and this is a fantastic clock to add to my wishlist.
Via Technabob
April 27th, 2008
Veteran quack-basher Prof. David Colquhoun reports on Westminster University’s crackerjack science degrees in er… pseudoscience. Yes, for just £3,145 (or £9,450 for you internationals), students can earn a Bachelor of Science in Complementary Therapies, including classes in herbal medicine, vibrational medicine and homeopathy. Does the course involve looking at the science behind these quack medical practices? Does it hell. Let’s look at one of the lecture slides:
Remember, this quasi-Jedi mumbo-jumbo isn’t just a single class or lecture - this is an entire science degree course at a British university. Your tax dollars at work, folks. To top it all off, Westminster University’s Vice Chancellor has repeatedly refused calls from the Times, the BBC and Prof. Colquhoun (a highly distinguished scientist himself) to answer this insult of a science degree. You can see all the gory details on David’s blog.
April 23rd, 2008
A long time back, a loyal reader (whose name is sadly lost in the mists of time) sent me a link to a bizarre sports drink that, like many others, promises you’ll train harder/faster/stronger/better, but unusually, claims to do this by rejigging your digestive system to mimic that of a big bug.
The makers of Hornet Juice Sports Drink claim it is based on the activities of the Giant Hornet, an endurance athlete amongst insects that can “fly 50 miles a day”. The makers of Hornet Juice believe this is down to the hornet’s diet of an amino acid mixture secreted by their larval. By recreating this mixture, they claim:
Hornet Juice activates the metabolism of fat for energy right from the start of your physical activity. This results in your glycogen being conserved, enabling you to maintain a steady pace to the very end.
Presumably because what’s good for an inch-long flying insect must also be good for a six-foot tall running human. And I guess reconfiguring your entire digestive system is a safe and advisable pastime, too. Ah, there’s nothing like a bit of cargo cult science to put a smile on your face. Seriously though, don’t they remember what happened to Timothy West in Tales of the Unexpected?! (anyone got a video link to this?)
April 22nd, 2008
I enjoy trawling through my statistics, much in the same way that Scrooge McDuck used to swim through his gold coins in those old cartoons. And the last time I visited the vault for a dip, I was thrilled to see SciencePunk.com has clocked up 10,000,000 hits so far this year. That’s four times as many as the whole of 2007! Sweet.
April 22nd, 2008
What do you do if you have a shed, a warm day, a propane cylinder and a manly thirst for a cool beer? Why, you perform the only manly solution - construct a jet powered beer cooler! Simon Jansen explains:
Not being built for playing rugby I have had to go with the shed. I may not know a rugby hoop from a cricket stick but I know my shed like the head of my hammer. A shed is a place where a kiwi bloke spends much of his time alone surrounded by his tools, current and past half finished projects and the collection of parts and material usually referred to by others (typically wives/girlfriends) as ‘that pile of junk’.
A session in the shed is typically an all day affair. Starting very early in the morning and going through until late at night when the light fades to the point that you can’t see and hit your thumb with a hammer a bloke will not leave his shed for anything (Hint: Empty paint cans can be very useful here). All supplies must be taken in at the start of the shed session. And the most essential of these supplies is beer.
But how to keep the beer cold?
From here Simon progresses to the only logical, manly, solution:
I knew from some long forgotten physics lecture that when a liquid expands into a gas it will draw heat from its surroundings. And I happened to have a source of a suitable liquid right in my shed in the form of a LPG cylinder (liquid petroleum gas). Obviously it would not do to evaporate vast quantities of a flammable gas into the closed confines of my garage. That would probably be dangerous. What I needed was a way to remove the dangerous gas. The solution was obvious. The gas is flammable so why not burn it. Burning the gas with a normal burner would not use up the gas fast enough to give me any serious cooling. What I needed was a way to use up a lot of fuel very, very quickly.
What I needed was a jet engine!
See the rest of the story here.
April 22nd, 2008
Leaping shampoo, otherwise known as the Kaye Effect, puzzled scientists for quite some time before a group of scientists in the Netherlands produced this cracking video.
April 21st, 2008
I’ve been keeping an eye on ‘real physics’ games for a while, but Magic Pen by Alejandro Guillen is the first that really scores on all levels of interactivity, design, and entertainment. The premise is simple enough - get the ball to the flag. To do this you’ll need to use you magic pen to draw ramps, weights and levers to engineer a solution. Although the level design is fairly simple, the fun is in seeing how convoluted a machine you can build.
April 18th, 2008
With some sadness I report that level-two.co.uk, a website showcasing the incredible urban explores of my good buddy snappel, has been retired. Snapps introduced me to the joys of being places you weren’t supposed to be a few years back, and with him I crept, crawled and climbed onto some of the best rooftops in Liverpool - not least the X building, the Beetham West Tower crane, Martins Bank, Heaps Rice Mill, Stanley Dock Clock Tower, the Prudential Buildings, Exchange Flags, and many, many more. We fled angry security guards, got caught a few times, and saw some beautiful sights.
Snappel himself is a titan of the urban exploration scene, notching up hundreds of sites across Europe, including cranes, abandoned hospitals and asylums, drains, factories, catacombs, a submarine, industrial sites, old theme parks, and more. And this is likely to increase, as he hasn’t hung up his boots yet. However, snapps feels that has outgrown the exploring community:
‘Urban Exploration’ is no good. With those two words alone, too many rules have already been laid down. When undertaken as a group effort, something that should be an escape from the dull, robotic community in which we live seems to, in fact, be just a smaller version of it. Rules and fears, insecurities and conflicts.
Snappel hasn’t ruled out opening Level Two again. You can see his website as it stands here, along with his thoughts on retiring it. If you’d like to see his explores, visit the UE forum 28DL. Snappel is a resourceful man whose spent years pushing his limits, so it’s exciting to think of what he’ll do next. Hopefully it’ll include pictures.
April 16th, 2008
Sometimes, writing something in 36-point Impact font just doesn’t convey they the seriousness of your correspondence. Wills, ancient curses, break-up letters - these things are best written in blood. Your own blood, specifically. And if you the kind of person to do that, you probably wouldn’t question why you need an absurdly complicated mechanical quill to write your letter. Sure, you could just drain a few drops into an inkpot, but isn’t needless suffering kind of the point with these things?
The Blood Pen was designed by Bob Partington of the Keystone Design Union. See here for details.
April 16th, 2008
The New Yorker currently features a fascinating article on the humble elevator. Often overlooked, these machines influence our lives in a surprising number of ways - from limiting the maximum height of a skyscraper (architect Adrian Smith estimates that a mile-high tower would need over two hundred quadruple-decker elevators) to making or breaking a building (The Bronx family court was effectively shut down by an ineffective lift system).
The story centres around Nicholas White, a man who spent 41 hours trapped in malfunctioned lift. From there, we see the science of transporting people vertically - from managing people’s innate fear of small spaces (since the early 90s, the “close door” button only exists to give an illusion of control: it doesn’t actually work) to figuring out the best strategy for moving hundreds of millions of passengers every day. Fascinating, geeky stuff (link).
Via Metafilter
April 15th, 2008
You’ve heard the old maxim “never bring a knife to a gunfight” - but why restrict yourself to one weapon when you can have three?
If Babelfish can be trusted for an accurate translation, Dolne manufactured this ‘Apache’ combined pistol from a patent filed in 1869. The authors of the webpage aren’t impressed with the Apache, citing a tiny blade and pistol calibre too small to inflict any meaningful damage - probably a good thing then that you can fold it into a knuckle-duster for a last ditch effort at not being killed. The Apache is truly a jack of all trades and master of none.
Via LittleGun
April 15th, 2008
Here’s a neat video of an attack helicopter that appears to have some top-secret anti-gravity technology - watch as it floats through the air with the blades motionless.
Is it a trick? A model? No - the camera operator has synced the frames-per-second of their camera to the rotational speed of the helicopter blades. The result is that every time the video camera captures a single frame, the blades are in the same position as the last frame. The effect is that the blades appear motionless.
Via The Cipher: Blog
April 14th, 2008
CScout Japan reports on the latest trend in Japan: zero calorie Placenta 10,000 jelly drink. Known as a FOSHU - food for a specific health use, Japanese women swear by its rejuvenating powers. The 10,000 refers to 10,000 milligrams of placenta per bottle - that’s a whopping 10g! CScout also recounts this delightful exchange with a Placenta 10,000 salesman:
Me: This has placenta in it?
Rep: Yes!
Me: From…
Rep: Pigs.
Me: Oh.
Rep: You know how placenta usually smells really bad?
Me: Mmm…I can guess.
Rep: Well, ours doesn’t have any smell at all!
Rather disappointingly, the drink is peach-flavoured - apparently the young female market isn’t willing to suffer the true bloody taste of raw placenta for their beauty. However, if this doesn’t meet your daily fix of placenta-craving, there’s also Placenta 400,000, boasting almost half a kilo of flesh per bottle. Tasty.
April 12th, 2008
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