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The origin and evolution of word order. Ball Camera Captures 360° Panoramas When Tossed into the Air. The ‘Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera‘ is an awesome new camera developed by a group of computer science researchers led by Jonas Pfeil. The camera is thrown into the air and captures an image at the highest point of flight – when it is hardly moving. The camera takes full spherical panoramas, requires no preparation and images are taken instantaneously. It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images. It uses 36 separate 2-megapixel mobile phone camera modules, which are mounted in an enclosure that’s padded with foam. The quality of the cameras obviously isn’t the best at this point, but the concept is pretty awesome. Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera [Jonas Pfeil] Thanks for the tip, @OcasoProtal! Design of a Perfect Black Absorber at Visible Frequencies Using Plasmonic Metamaterials - Hedayati - 2011 - Advanced Materials.

Ribald Tales of Entomology Limerick Contest: Honorable Mention #2 « Bug Girl’s Blog. It’s time for another reveal of a naughty winner in the contest! I’ll keep counting them down right up until the Entomological Society of America Meeting. As you may remember, the ESA is sponsoring a “clean” limerick contest. I take the position that the only good limerick is a bawdy limerick.

That’s just how I roll. The limerick packs laughs anatomicalInto space that is quite economicalBut the good ones I’ve seenSo seldom are cleanAnd the clean ones so seldom are comical. (Thanks to Pieter B. for that one!) This week’s winner follows a long distinguished tradition of insulting sexual poems and remarks. Act IV, Scene II of Titus AndronicusDemetrius: “Villain, what hast thou done?” “That’s what she said” is also a long established variation on the insult poem, although I haven’t found any evidence of that in Shakespeare. Without further ado: Honorable Mention: Best Genital Insult Hoist a tankard to our second winner! I’ll email you an official certificate later this month. The Planet Will House 10 Billion People, and We Can Feed Them All - Food. Within the next century, the world's population will likely swell to 9 or 10 billion. And according to new research, we can feed them all if we make some radical changes in the way we grow our food.

As the world's population approaches 7 billion, 1 billion of those people continue to go hungry. It's a huge problem around the word—from the deadly famine in Somalia to the dismal hunger statistics here in the United States. Meanwhile, annual increases in agricultural yields have begun to slow down, and our methods of cultivating crops continue to degrade land, water, biodiversity, and climate. It's not hard to imagine a dystopian future where huge chunks of the population will suffer from chronic hunger while our natural resources are depleted. But Nature magazine brings some good news to the age-old battle between civilization and Earth: It's not a zero-sum game. Scientists have figured out how we can feed a growing world that doesn't come at the expense of the planet. Core/Sheath Organic Nanocable Constructed with a Master–Slave Molecular Pair for Optically Switched Memories - Xu - 2011 - Advanced Materials.

The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram | Magazine. The perfect kilogram is getting lighter. Can science find a better measure? Photo: Christopher Griffith; kilogram models by Jim Zivic The official US kilogram — the physical prototype against which all weights in the United States are calibrated — cannot be touched by human hands except in rare circumstances. Sealed beneath a bell jar and locked behind three heavy doors in a laboratory 60 feet under the headquarters of the National Institute of Standards and Technology 20 miles outside Washington, DC, the shiny metal cylinder is, in many ways, better protected than the president.

“Everything is a potential contaminant,” says Patrick Abbott, a NIST physicist responsible for maintaining it. “There are hydrocarbons on people. The American prototype is one of some four dozen such national standards around the world, and each of those, in turn, is accountable to an even higher authority: a regal artifact called the international prototype kilogram. Atoms-to-microns model for small solute transport through sticky nanochannels. Antigen-Fixed Leukocytes Tolerize Th2 Responses in Mouse Models of Allergy. + Author Affiliations Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Stephen D. Miller or Dr. Paul J. Bryce, Department of Microbiology-Immunology, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, 303 E. Abstract Allergic diseases, including asthma and food allergies, are an increasing health concern.

Footnotes This work was supported by National Institutes of Health R01 Grants NS-026543 (to S.D.M.), NS-030871 (to S.D.M.), and AI-076456 (to P.J.B.) and the Food Allergy Initiative (to P.J.B.). A Buff New Twist on Carbon Nanotube Artificial Muscles. For years artificial muscles have promised to deliver a more flexible, more durable alternative to electric motors and hydraulic systems. These lab-made actuators are usually created by putting an electrical charge into a piece of polymer or into an aerogel sheet made from carbon nanotubes, causing those materials to expand and contract.

This motion could someday be used to power turbines, animate robots or move prosthetic limbs. In a new study published in the October 14 issue of Science, an international team of researchers describes how they’re taking carbon nanotube artificial muscles in a new direction. Scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas’ Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute have already demonstrated in the lab the ability of these muscle-like carbon nanotubes to flex even in extreme temperatures that would freeze or, on the other end of the spectrum, decompose electroactive polymer-based artificial muscles.

Images courtesy of the University of Texas at Dallas.