Mini and micro-robots

''How to make a mini robot'' [source]

''Self-Assembling Minirobots Swim and Manipulate Objects'' [source]

'' The Ants: A Community of Microrobots'' [source]

'' Autonomous Jumping Microrobots'' [source]

'' Medical Micro-Robots Made As Small As Bacteria'' [source]

'' New technique for mass-producing microbots inspired by pop-up books and origami'' [source]

'' Self-assembling micro-robots created.
...
physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory have successfully created self-assembling micro-robots that are just 0.5mm (500 micron) in diameter. '' [source]

Fu-sion! Fu-sion! :)

''Low-Budget Fusion Reactor ... 
General Fusion's reactor design consists of 220 pistons that simultaneously ram a metal sphere. This creates a shock wave inside the sphere, so that plasma rings in the center create a fusion reaction.  '' [source]

'' Need a weekend project around the house? Mark Suppes, web developer by day, has built his own nuclear fusion reactor in a Brooklyn workspace. ... While all the components of Suppes' machine – including the deuterium gas – were acquired through legal channels, some of it is somewhat dangerous. His power supply provides 30,000 volts, and his reactor does put off a negligible amount of radiation as it smashes neutrons together.
Suppes' reactor does not generate any more power than he puts into it, and as such is not the golden fusion generator scientists hope will fuel the future with clean, cheap energy.'' [source]

''It’s amazing no one thought of it before: nuclear fusion from a levitating tire-sized magnet surrounded by 10-million-degree plasma. ...
a joint project between MIT and Columbia University  ... The MIT project offers a unique alternative to the two existing approaches to nuclear fusion that dominate the field. Tokamaks attempt to manipulate atoms by surrounding a central plasma-filled chamber with magnets. In an inertial fusion reactor, high-powered lasers bombard a fuel pellet in the center of the device to set a fusion reaction in motion.  ... '' [source]

BTW...
''On the ITER side of the fence, you'll have the largest and strongest magnets in the world: some 14 meters high; some as heavy as a fully-loaded Boeing 747; some 24 metres in diameter. A stone's throw away, on the CEA-Cadarache side, their microscopic counterpart: no more than 50 nanometres in size (50 billionth of a metre!). Magnets by the hundreds of millions packed into one single drop of water. ...  Magnet-producing bacteria are nothing new.  ... Genetically-modified MTB could be used for environmental clean-up or as intelligent contrasting agents in medical imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) ...'' [source]

Cold fusion - perhaps yes, perhaps no :(

''Fraud claims over E-Cat 'cold fusion' machine heating up...'' [source]

And even NASA now talks about "cold fusion"
''Cold Fusion: NASA Says Nothing Useful'' [source]

Great idea for a bbq!

''The Baja BBQ pack is a 100 percent recycled instant charcoal package with an integrated chimney. The paper-pulp package lights instantly and burns away in the grille, making barbequeing simple, clean and chemical free.'' [source]

Wanna program a bit... and make a game without sweating too much? ;)

Check out these nice and free environments:

 ''Scratch 1.4. Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.'' [source] 2D, very friendly to use for non-programmers

''Kodu. Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone.'' [source, download]

''Researchers Build Hard Drive of Future With Lasers... Typically, data is written to hard drives using magnetic fields. ... Heat has long been the enemy of this technique, because it distorts the fields. But with their paper, Ostler and crew have shown a way using heat that changes a material’s polarization without using magnetic fields, storing thousands of gigabytes of data in a single second. Basically, their laser blasts a 60-femtosecond pulse — that’s 60 quadrillionths of a second — onto a material made primarily of iron and gadolinium. ... The whole process, the paper claims, happens in less than 5 picoseconds, or 5 trillionths of a second. '' [source] A tera in 1 second sounds good enough... as long as they don't make another disk! :> Solid state should be the thing, disks are so XX century :D :D

Small digital camera

''This is the world's smallest digital camera, measuring just over one inch in all dimensions and weighing only half an ounce ... it uses a 2 MP image sensor that takes still images at 1600 x 1200 resolution and captures video at 30 fps at 640 x 480 resolution ... '' [source]

Piezoelectric Display

''Piezoelectric display works because of the ability of some materials to create some sort of an electric field when mechanical stress is applied to it. ... '' It could also be used backwards, to create materials that change their tactile properties [source and here].

Flux capacitor...? Fluxing!

''The Flux Capacitor: Graphic Designers Explain What Science Can't'' [source]

Sliceforms

What a nice idea for calculus in 3 dimensions! ''paper sliceform [ARE] models made from intersecting sets of parallel planes which slot together to generate interesting three-dimensional surfaces'' [book]

Possibly one could take a function of 2 variables, plot a few profiles, then create a sliceform out of it. [as done here]

Another nice example can be seen here.

Great list of dystopian/SCI-FI movies

A game to kill numbers!

''Prime Slaughter
A computer game for playful math-learning.
We have designed and developed Prime Slaughter, a computer game to play with abstract mathematical concepts, like factorization and primality.
The target group is composed of primary and early secondary school students.
Following the findings of a participatory design study about children interaction in museums, our game maps operational aspects of prime factorization onto a gameplay inspired by 2D action-adventure games, where primality and factorizaton are experienced in a visual and direct way.
The museum study also suggested to support learning by multiple play styles and goal-directed activities. ''
Authors: Andrea Valente and Emanuela Marchetti
[source]


[playable game here]

Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Roberto Capancioni for starting a stimulating discussion about prime numbers, that led to the development of Prime Slaughter; and Finn Nielsen for the valuable feedback and testing-time he volunteered during development.

Curved creases

All kinds of printers!

''Stick POP Portable Printer Concept: Print Your Documents Anywhere, Anytime'' [source]
''handheld printer'' [source]

''15 Amazing Concept Printers'' [source]

Giant DNA Plush Dolls

[source]

Can Cold Fusion be real?

'' If low-temperature fusion does exist and can be perfected, power generation could be decentralized. Each home could heat itself and produce its own electricity, probably using a form of water as fuel. Even automobiles might be cold fusion powered.
...
Moreover, according to some experimental data, low-temperature fusion doesn't create significant hazardous radiation or radioactive waste.
...
[...] some highly qualified researchers disagree.
George Miley, who received the Edward Teller medal for innovative research in hot fusion and has edited Fusion Technology magazine for the American Nuclear Society for more than 15 years: "There's very strong evidence that low-energy nuclear reactions do occur. Numerous experiments have shown definitive results - as do my own."
...
In fact, despite the scandal, laboratories in at least eight countries are still spending millions on cold fusion research. During the past nine years this work has yielded a huge body of evidence, while remaining virtually unknown - because most academic journals adamantly refuse to publish papers on it.
'' [source]

''A well respected researcher is claiming that he has replicated some of the results that Andrea Rossi is getting from his e-cat cold fusion device. This could be an important development because it could verify Rossi’s claims and silence some of his many skeptics.
...
Dr. George H. Miley a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Tsingua University in Beijing. '' [source]

Space news

''Orbital Technologies' Space Hotel'' [source]
''Pentagon’s Secret Space Plane Could Be Astronauts’ Next Ride
The Air Force’s mysterious X-37B “space plane” is only on its second, eight-month-plus orbital mission, ostensibly conducting science experiments. But manufacturer Boeing has already drawn up plans for a major upgrade to the nimble, 29-foot-long robot — one that could more than double the vehicle’s size and make room for up to six astronauts.'' [source]

More info about X-37B [here]
The Boeing X-37 (also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle) is an American unmanned vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing (VTHL) spaceplane.

e-cat

''1 MW E-Cat Cold Fusion Device Test Successful
On October 28, 2011, Andrea Rossi demonstrated his 1 megawatt E-Cat system to his first customer, who had engineers/scientists on hand to test/validate its performance. Due to a glitch, it provided 479 kW of continuous power for 5.5 hours during the self-sustained mode.'' [source]

There were some issues, so it couldn't be run at full power in self-looped mode, but what it did do was plenty impressive.

It ran for 5.5 hours producing 479 kW, while in self-looped mode. That means no substantial external energy was required to make it run, because it kept itself running, even while producing an excess of nearly half a megawatt. Rossi explained the reasons for this in the presentation he gave, which I videotaped and will be posting later.

I hope I will be able to buy one soon ;)

Cold fusion: 1 megawatt unit on sale

''Andrea Rossi has announced that he has begun sales of what he calls 1 megawatt e-cat cold fusion units. The first was sold to the mysterious American buyer for whom he conducted the October 28, test in Bologna.'' [source]

''Andrea Rossi started the test of his 1 megawatt e-cat cold fusion device in Bologna today. The purpose of the test is to see if the low energy nuclear reaction device can generate a sustained reaction that can continuously make large amounts of heat. If it can it could theoretically be able to generate enough heat to run a steam engine to power a vehicle or an electric generator.''

See also here for more news and details.

Everybody had huge fangs in the old times... O_o

''SABER-TOOTHED SQUIRREL LIVED NEAR DINOSAURS'' [source]

Scientific name: Cronopio dentiacutus.

"The new fossils provide a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding the genealogy of early South American mammals, and how they fit in with those known from northern landmasses," Cifelli said.

Where (in the complex plane) are the solutions of an equation?

First of all: a polynomial of degree N has exactly N roots (in the complex plane) [ref]
Second: since for every root there is also its complex-conjugate [ref], we can only have some combinations...

Degree	Roots	Possible Combinations
1	1	Real Root
2	2	Real Roots, or 2 Complex Roots
3	3	Real Roots, or 1 Real and 2 Complex Roots
4	4	Real Roots, or 2 Real and 2 Complex Roots, or 4 Complex Roots
etc etc!

Eventually, complex numbers are defined like this.

Alan Turing is turning 100 next year!

[source]

Natsumi Hayashi – Tokyo’s Levitating Girl

[source]

Recent Human Evolution Detected

''Though ongoing human evolution is difficult to see, researchers believe they’ve found signs of rapid genetic changes among the recent residents of a small Canadian town.

Between 1800 and 1940, mothers in Ile aux Coudres, Quebec gave birth at steadily younger ages, with the average age of first maternity dropping from 26 to 22. Increased fertility, and thus larger families, could have been especially useful in the rural settlement’s early history.'' [source]

Boris Artzybasheff (25 May 1899 – 16 July 1965) was an American illustrator active in the United States, notable for his strongly worked and often surreal designs.
[wikipedia]