Raise Crops on the Moon with Plant-Growing Jelly In dry areas like the desert, on mountain tops or on the moon it’s impossible to grow anything. Or is it? A rain in the desert sparks extreme plant growth from the moment the raindrops hit the ground. As long as the ground is irrigated and fertilized, plants will grow during the warm periods of the day. Conceived of by industrial design students Ruud van Reijmersdal, Tom Slijkhuis, Joppe Spaans and Jeroen Rood, this speculative project consists of a gel which serves as an ideal growing environment for food crops. Want to learn more about the inspiration and specifics for this project?
Future proof » Tim’s laptop service manuals Have you come to this webpage looking for Toshiba laptop service manuals? Please read this. Introduction In the same vein as in my driver guide, I’ve started finding laptop service manuals and hosting them on my site. They generally detail the exact list of parts in each model of laptop – often down to individual screws, if you happen to have lost some and need to know the exact size for a replacement – and describe the procedure for disassembling and reassembling the entire machine, including panels, RAM, wireless cards, keyboards and touchpads and LCD screens, all the way down to the motherboard itself. They’re difficult to find – you have to know where to look in their support site, or come up with the right Google search string, or beg and steal from someone you know in the industry. This page, and indeed my whole site, has no ads. Practical stuff Firstly, I do not claim ownership, authority or copyright of anything here on this page. Organisation Some of these files are quite large.
The Bottle of The Future is an Edible Blob Like in a microcosm, what if we could drink from a giant drop of water? The bottle of the future has the shape of a soft, hygienic, biodegradable and edible blob, where the liquid is kept together by a solution of brown algae and calcium chloride. Ooho is a project from the Spanish trio Skipping Rocks Lab that represents a brilliant solution to the major international issue of plastic bottle waste. Inspired by the consistency of an egg yolk and applying a method used in molecular gastronomy, Rodrigo García González, Pierre Paslier and Guillaume Couche made an edible gel that encase water via spherification. Designers explain: “We do this process with the water frozen and we do it with a double membrane.” Production costs? “It’s is very easy to make, that’s one of the things we’re trying to push forward. Are you ready to cook your own sphere of water? Source: Wired
The Turing Test First published Wed Apr 9, 2003; substantive revision Wed Jan 26, 2011 The phrase “The Turing Test” is most properly used to refer to a proposal made by Turing (1950) as a way of dealing with the question whether machines can think. According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion (442). However, if we consider the more precise—and somehow related—question whether a digital computer can do well in a certain kind of game that Turing describes (“The Imitation Game”), then—at least in Turing's eyes—we do have a question that admits of precise discussion. Moreover, as we shall see, Turing himself thought that it would not be too long before we did have digital computers that could “do well” in the Imitation Game. The phrase “The Turing Test” is sometimes used more generally to refer to some kinds of behavioural tests for the presence of mind, or thought, or intelligence in putatively minded entities. 1. 2.
First 3D-printed Skull implanted Almost one year ago we reported about the first full-face transplant using 3D-printed bones in Belgium. Now the first 3D-printed skull has been implanted on a 22 years old Dutch women, affected by a rare bone disease. The skull of the patient never stopped growing, so the surgeons at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, led by neurologist Dr. Bon Verweij, replaced her skull bone with a 3D-printed implant mede out of PEEK (polyetherketoneketone). It’s a thermoplastic, extremely strong and temperature resistant. And it’s almost transparent. “Implants used to be made by hand in the operating theatre using a sort of cement which was far from ideal. Source: Dutch NewsRelated Post: 3D Printing a New Face
BOINC: compute for science BOINC is a program that lets you donate your idle computer time to science projects like SETI@home, Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid, and many others. After installing BOINC on your computer, you can connect it to as many of these projects as you like. You may run this software on a computer only if you own the computer or have the permission of its owner. Tested on the current Ubuntu distribution; may work on others. After downloading BOINC you must install it: typically this means double-clicking on the file icon when the download is finished. System requirements · Release notes · Help · All versions · Version history · GPU computing
15 Awesome Chemistry GIFs You don’t need to watch Breaking Bad to know that chemistry is pretty awesome. Below, we explore our favorite 15 chemistry GIFs and the science behind them (when we could figure it out): Melting Metal With Magnets The Science: The copper wire has a significant amount of AC electricity running through it, causing it to act like a really strong electromagnet. In the metal slug, eddy currents form due to the magnetic field the copper wire is causing while the copper wire has high frequency AC flowing through it. Orange LED Light In Liquid Nitrogen The Science: When an LED is immersed in liquid nitrogen, the electrons lose a lot of thermal energy, even when the light isn’t turned on. Awesome Chemistry GIFs: Heating Mercury Thiocyanate Hydrogen Peroxide Catalyzed By Potassium Iodide
The Micro is a $200 3D printer that can make a teacup in an hour There are more than a couple of reasons why 3D printing hasn't truly hit critical mass, and the team at M3D thinks it's sidestepped them with The Micro, its $200 - $300 3D printer. The Micro is hitting Kickstarter today with the sole intention of becoming the first consumer 3D printer that's at once accessible, affordable and easy on the eyes. "The dream here is definitely that you take something and install it as fast as the fastest plug-and-play device that you've ever seen and you're focused on the end result," Michael Armani, M3D's CEO tells us. "You take the design, put it in the printer, it prints as quickly as possible. The Micro See all photos 9 Photos For example, we asked how long it would take from initial unboxing to having a spot of tea from the cup in the project's pitch video. But even then, ease-of-use doesn't particularly matter if one of 3D printing's biggest barriers to entry doesn't change: price. To keep costs down, Armani and his team reduced The Micro's volume.
The Micro is a 3D printer 'designed for everyone' M3D is making a bid to bring 3D printing to everyday consumers. Today the company is introducing the Micro, a product it claims to be the world’s "first truly consumer 3D printer." The Micro — now live (and already funded) on Kickstarter — was designed around three key principles: reliability, consistency, and accessibility. It features what M3D calls Micro Motion Technology, an auto-leveling and auto-calibration system that the company says will keep the Micro running optimally long into the future. But the hardware improvements don't stop there. One of the main obstacles between 3D printers and consumers has been clunky, unintuitive software. But none of this would have come together if the Micro's Kickstarter campaign had fallen short.
Will Synthetic Biology Evolve Into the Next Hot Field? Synthetic biology grew from a very old human desire to engineer living systems and make them do useful things for us. As genetic engineering of the 1970s has evolved into synthetic biology today, the technologies and economics for sequencing (reading) and synthesizing (writing) DNA have become optimized for large-scale DNA processing. This allows synthetic biologists to design and modify the genetics of living systems so that they produce a wide variety of materials for us that don’t occur in nature, such as drugs, biofuels, flavors, fragrances and more. The field is garnering the attention of entrepreneurs and investors -- here are some things you should know that help explain why. 1. Related: Entrepreneurs on the Moon, DNA Hacking and Real-Life Iron Man Gear 2. Despite the recent gradual slope, the exponential drop in DNA sequencing ushered in projects that would have been laughably ambitious just a few years earlier. 3. Related: This New Genetics Startup Wants to Make '100' the New '60'
Self-Assembling Nano Flowers Grown in Lab Jun 3, 2013 At a laboratory at Harvard University, scientists have grown complex self-assembling nano- and microstructures using a solution of chemicals and minerals. Some of the structures are smaller than the width of a human hair and have many potential uses in optics and engineering. Researchers have started with flowers, stems and vases as they were the easiest shape to start with. In an upcoming paper published in Science, lead scientist Wim Noorduin explains: “The emergence of complex nano- and microstructures is of fundamental interest, and the ability to program their form has practical ramifications in fields such as optics, catalysis, and electronics. [Slideshow from Science, Science via National Geographic] If you enjoyed this post, the Sifter highly recommends: