Single Title Player with Ad. Science & Unchained Dreams. Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Stephen Hawking Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those M.
Science investigates; religion interprets. Like this: Like Loading... Braille Interpreter by Hyung Jin Lim & Yanko Design. For The Blind Who Don’t Know Braille You are lucky my friend that you can read this post. Being sight-impaired is not a situation you want to be in. It gets even more complicated if you are blind and can’t even read Braille. Luckily there is some though process being invested in the Braille Interpreter, a single-finger glove that features a tactile sensor, a Bluetooth headphone and interpreting software.
The index finger portion of the glove hosts the said tactile sensor. Skim it over the Braille surface and it sends a feed to the main device housed on the back of the glove. Over here the feeds are interpreted and beamed to the headphone via Bluetooth as voice data. Skim-Interpret-Hear Voice; nifty enough solution for those who can’t cope with Braille. Designer: Hyung Jin Lim. Playing video games helps adults with lazy eye. Here are some words that few would have thought to put together: video game therapy. Yet, a pilot study by vision researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that playing video games can help improve the vision of adults with amblyopia, or lazy eye. The study found that participants experienced marked improvement in visual acuity and 3-D depth perception after spending just 40 hours playing off-the-shelf video games.
A UC Berkeley pilot study suggests that video games could help treat adults with amblyopia. “This study is the first to show that video game play is useful for improving blurred vision in adults with amblyopia,” said study lead author Dr. Roger Li, research optometrist at the School of Optometry and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. “I was very surprised by this finding; I didn’t expect to see this type of improvement.” The study is published in the August 2011 issue of the journal PLoS Biology and is freely available online. Edgar-Mitchell-La-Revelation - une vidéo News &Politics.
Heads-Up Display Contact Lenses Are One Step Closer After Passing Safety Tests. Creating The World's Strongest Artificial Muscles With Biomimicry :... Fast Company/Video screen capture Nature really knows how to get design right. When it comes to muscles, Mother Nature has come up with a brilliant structure. But could the structure be even stronger? Scientists from the NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas are coming up with a way to use carbon nanotubes as the material for muscles modeled after natural structures. Fast Company notes, "By observing the inner workings of an octopus's leg or an elephant's trunk, scientists have created muscles from carbon nanotubes that could one day power machines. " The resulting prototypes are as strong as steel but super light.
The designers note that these carbon nanotube fibers could be used in clothing for the elderly that can help weaker muscles do their tasks. We know, however, that there are still real issues with using carbon nanotubes in products without seriously thinking about and studying their consequences, and that includes clothing. S Gravity Probe B confirms two Einstein theories - StumbleUpon. Artist concept of Gravity Probe B orbiting the Earth to measure space-time, a four-dimensional description of the universe including height, width, length, and time. Stanford and NASA researchers have confirmed two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, concluding one of the space agency's longest-running projects. Known as Gravity Probe B, the experiment used four ultra-precise gyroscopes housed in a satellite to measure two aspects of Einstein's theory about gravity. The first is the geodetic effect, or the warping of space and time around a gravitational body.
The second is frame-dragging, which is the amount a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates. After 52 years of conceiving, building, testing and waiting, the science satellite has determined both effects with unprecedented precision by pointing at a single star, IM Pegasi, while in a polar orbit around Earth. The findings appear online in the journal Physical Review Letters. 0 Stumble. Web Publications. Yttrium [video] | @GrrlScientist | Science. This week's element is Yttrium, known by the atomic symbol, Y, and the atomic number 39. Originally, its atomic symbol was Yt, but sometime in the early 1920s, it was replaced by Y. This element gets its strange name from the village of Ytterby in Sweden, which is located near where this element was discovered. As you can see in the above image, Yttrium is similar to many other elemental metals; it is a silver-grey in colour. It also is soft, lustrous and highly crystalline.
Yttrium is a rare earth metal that never occurs in its pure form in the wild. Even though it is a "rare earth metal", it is 400 times more common than silver on Earth. It also is quite common on the moon. This element shares many similarities with the lanthanides and is often found in association with them, and thus, is often grouped with them. Yttrium is used in a variety of items that you may come into contact with. Yttrium does have medical applications, especially in cancer treatment. Glow-in-the-dark mushroom rediscovered after 170 years | MNN - Mother Nature... It's something you would never expect to go missing, but one of the world's brightest glow-in-the-dark mushrooms has been rediscovered after an absence of more than 170 years, according to USA Today.
The bioluminescent shrooms had become a Brazilian legend of sorts. They were first spied in 1840 by an English botanist named George Gardner, who was alarmed after he saw some boys playing with a glowing object in the streets of Vila de Natividad, a village in the Goiás state in central Brazil. After that, no more sightings of the brightly glowing fungus had ever been reported. The mushroom was nearly forgotten until 2002, when Brazilian chemist Cassius Stevani came across Gardner's early reports. Then, in 2005, a breakthrough occurred. Izar and Fragaszy scooped up specimens and contacted Stevani, who later confirmed that the mushrooms were indeed Gardner's long lost species. One thing researchers are certain of, however, is that these mushrooms are poisonous.
Heads Up, Hoverboarders: Here Comes Quantum Levitation | Motherboard - StumbleUpon. Few motifs of science fiction cinema have been more appealing to us than the subtle defiance of gravity offered by futuristic hovercraft. So every once in a while we check in to see how humanity is progressing on that front, and whether the promise of hoverboards will be delivered by 2015 as evidenced in Back to the Future Part 2. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re definitely getting off the ground, so to speak. Get ready to hover your brain around the art of quantum levitation. That’s right, quantum. Because of its chemical properties, a superconductor (when brought to low enough temperatures using, say, liquid nitrogen) exhibits this effect, causing the energy from the magnet below to warp around the superconductive object in a way which “locks” it in space.
Even more impressive and ripe for practical transportation use: When the superconducting object is placed along a magnetic rail, it exhibits frictionless momentum. Connections: Controlled-kinect-new-tele-operated-cleaner-bot-picks-clutter from popsci.com. A new household servant robot made by the world's largest manufacturer of industrial 'bots can help people with disabilities or limited mobility move things around.
It's controlled via Kinect, with the robot aping the Kinect user's body gestures. Yaskawa Electric wants its SmartPal VII to live in the homes of elderly people, where it can assist with everyday clutter maintenance and a host of other tasks. It has a head-mounted 3-D camera and an infrared sensor, so it can navigate a room autonomously. It has gyro sensors so it can stay upright and orient itself, and its arms and touch-sensor-equipped hands make it safe for household use. The robot follows a Kinect user's hand movements, but it figures out on its own how to mimic them by moving its waist, wheels and arm. Check it out below, and see if you can find the creepy-looking cardboard grandma watching over the whole thing.
[DigInfo via IEEE Spectrum] Brian Skerry reveals ocean's glory -- and horror | Video on TED.com - StumbleUpon. Universal robotic gripper - StumbleUpon. Robert Barker/University Photography The human hand is an amazing machine that can pick up, move and place objects easily, but for a robot, this "gripping" mechanism is a vexing challenge. Opting for simple elegance, researchers from Cornell, the University of Chicago and iRobot Corp. have created a versatile gripper using everyday ground coffee and a latex party balloon, bypassing traditional designs based on the human hand and fingers. They call it a universal gripper, as it conforms to the object it's grabbing, rather than being designed for particular objects, said Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science. The research is a collaboration between the groups of Lipson, Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago, and Chris Jones at iRobot. It is published online Oct. 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
John Amend The robotic gripper conforms to the shape of the item it is lifting. Caltech scientists first to trap light and sound vibrations together in nano... PASADENA, Calif. —Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a nanoscale crystal device that, for the first time, allows scientists to confine both light and sound vibrations in the same tiny space. "This is a whole new concept," notes Oskar Painter, associate professor of applied physics at Caltech. Painter is the principal investigator on the paper describing the work, which was published this week in the online edition of the journal Nature. "People have known how to manipulate light, and they've known how to manipulate sound.
Indeed, Painter points out, the interactions between sound and light in this device—dubbed an optomechanical crystal—can result in mechanical vibrations with frequencies as high as tens of gigahertz, or 10 billion cycles per second. "And all of this," he adds, "can be done on a silicon microchip. " Optomechanical crystals focus on the most basic units—or quanta—of light and sound. (Photo Credit: M.
Extraordinary lightning sprites discovered striking other planets, not just... By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 17:29 GMT, 22 November 2011 It was only a couple of decades ago scientists discovered the existence of upwards lightning or ‘sprites’ 30 to 55 miles above the surface of the Earth. And now researchers at Tel Aviv University have discovered 'sprites' are not a phenomenon specific to our planet. Jupiter and Saturn experience lightning storms with flashes 1,000 or more times more powerful than those on Earth, says researcher Daria Dubrovin. Extraordinary: This sprite, or upwards lightening, was created in a bottle after recreating the conditions of Jupiter As offshoots of electric discharges caused by lightning storms, sprites are a valuable window into the composition of our atmosphere.
Researchers are keen to know more about the possibility of lightning on other planets, explains Dubrovin, not only because it impacts the technological equipment used by space programs, but because it is another clue that could indicate the presence of extra-terrestrial life. Kilobots - tiny, collaborative robots - are leaving the nest (w/ video) (PhysOrg.com) -- The Kilobots are coming. Computer scientists and engineers at Harvard University have developed and licensed technology that will make it easy to test collective algorithms on hundreds, or even thousands, of tiny robots. Called Kilobots, the quarter-sized bug-like devices scuttle around on three toothpick-like legs, interacting and coordinating their own behavior as a team. A June 2011 Harvard Technical Report demonstrated a collective of 25 machines implementing swarming behaviors such as foraging, formation control, and synchronization.
Once up and running, the machines are fully autonomous, meaning there is no need for a human to control their actions. The communicative critters were created by members of the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group led by Radhika Nagpal, the Thomas D. "Plus," he adds, "tiny robots are really cool! " So, what can you do with a thousand tiny little bots? Explore further: Can robots have social intelligence? Scientists Develop World's Lightest Metal, 100x Lighter than Styrofoam... This, we assure you, is a real photograph. Researchers at the University of California Irvine have developed a material that is as strong as metal yet 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. The material is constructed from a micro-lattice of nickel phosphorous tubes that is 99.9% air. The tubes are hollow and have walls 1,000 times thinner than a human hair, yet they have the strength of metal with the added benefit of being ultra resistant to strain.
Researchers believe this new material could be used to make lightweight batteries that could eventually bring down the weight of green vehicles and increase their efficiency while using less material in the process. “Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture,” said William Carter, manager of the architected materials group at HRL. Robot Skin Can Feel Touch, Sense Chemicals, and Soak Up Solar Power | Fast... When you meet your robot overlord, it may be wearing super-intelligent skin designed by a Stanford researcher--a solar-powered, super-sensitive, chemical-sampling covering that makes your meatbag covering look pathetic.
Zhenan Bao is behind the advances, and the recent development centers on a stretchable solar cell system that can expand and shrink along two different axes, making it perfect for incorporation into artificial skin for robots, human prosthetic limbs, or even clothing. Bao's earlier successes with artificial skin have resulted in a highly flexible and durable material, which is part of a flexible organic-chemistry transistor, built on a thin polymer layer.
When the skin is subjected to pressure, the current flowing through the transistors is modified as tiny pyramid shapes molded into the polymer layer compress, resulting in a super-sensitive transducer that can apparently detect the pressure from a house-fly's feet. Caltechs Killer Idea: Artificial Leaves That Turn Sunlight Into Fuel - Derek... Physicists Offer Mundane Explanations for Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos |... Chronology of Events in Science, Mathematics, and Technology - StumbleUpon. A corny turn for biofuels from switchgrass. Michio Kaku | Professor of Theoretical Physics, CUNY | Big Think - StumbleUpon. More About Stem Cells by Explore Stem Cells (UK) Is there evidence of extraterrestrial life? Nope, says Obama administration. Psilocybin, the Drug in Magic Mushrooms, Lifts Mood and Increases...
Meet Asimo—The Most Advanced Humanoid Robot Weve Seen Yet | The Creators P...