Breaking the Fourth Wall (Concept) Overview "The fourth wall" is an expression stemming from the world of theater. In most modern theater design, a room will consist of three physical walls, as well as a an imaginary fourth that serves to separate the world of the characters from that of the audience. In fiction, "breaking the fourth wall" often means having a character become aware of their fictional nature. This can range from a character advising the player to "Press X" in a tutorial (referring to a controller button that does not exist in the game) all the way to Psycho Mantis reading the player's memory card and mentioning the other games they've been playing. However, the most conventional violation of the fourth wall is when a character (or the game itself) openly acknowledges they are in a video game, or directly refers to the player. Examples Comical Effect Breaking the 4th wall in games is often used for a comical effect or to re-enforce the fictional natures of the game. Tutorials Story Events Character awareness
worlds-lightest-material-9999-percent-air from popsci.com A collaboration of researchers from HRL, CalTech, and UC Irvine have created the new world's lightest material--some 100 times lighter than styrofoam. It's even lighter than aerogel, one of our favorite ultralight materials. The material is a micro-lattice in structure, with the 0.01 percent of the material that's solid consisting of hollow tubes that are only 100 nanometers thick. The project was undertaken for, who else, DARPA, which says it could be used for products ranging from battery electrodes to energy damping in addition to insulation, the main use for prior lightweight champ aerogel.
Forgotten In Time: The Ancient Solfeggio Frequencies From: lightwithin.com/SomaEnergetics Photos by From: powerofharmony.tripod.com What Are The Ancient Solfeggio Frequencies? These original sound frequencies were apparently used in Ancient Gregorian Chants, such as the great hymn to St. John the Baptist, along with others that church authorities say were lost centuries ago. The Six Solfeggio Frequencies include: UT – 396 Hz – Liberating Guilt and Fear RE – 417 Hz – Undoing Situations and Facilitating Change MI – 528 Hz – Transformation and Miracles (DNA Repair) FA – 639 Hz – Connecting/Relationships SOL – 741 Hz – Awakening Intuition LA – 852 Hz – Returning to Spiritual Order For example, the third note, frequency 528, relates to the note MI on the scale and derives from the phrase "MI-ra gestorum" in Latin meaning "miracle." A Little History At the turn of the century the awareness of DNA entered the collective consciousness of the world. Carl Sagan writes that most of our genetic information (about 97%) is unused DNA. Repairing DNA
Entire Computer Built Into USB Thumb Drive Is that a USB key in your pocket or a dual-core computer? Norwegian company FXI Technologies showed off an amazing USB stick-sized portable computer prototype on Friday, Nov. 18. Code-named Cotton Candy because its 21 gram weight is the same as a bag of the confection, the tiny PC enables what its inventor calls "any-screen computing": the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android-powered operating system. Packed in its tiny body is a dual-core 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU (the same processor as in the Galaxy S II), 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out and even a microSD card slot for memory. The Cotton Candy has a USB 2.0 connector on one end and an HDMI jack on the other. The device can output up to 1080p so even a full HD screen can display the Candy's preloaded Android 2.3 operating system at its native resolution. When you plug the Cotton Candy into a Mac or PC, the Windows or OS X operating system recognizes it as a USB drive.
Superhydrophobic spray means no more washing clothes – among others | ZME Science Ross Technology Corp, a company that focuses on steel products has created a new product based on the spray known as NeverWet – which aside from being useful, is also pretty cool. Now, this might not seem particularly interesting, but it has a myriad of applications; it is built from nanoparticles and it is hydrophobic – not only that it stops water from wetting it, but it shoots water right of from the surface on which it was applied. Even if at first they wanted to apply this technology to steel, they quickly realized the enormous list of applications this can have, from shoes and clothes that wouldn’t require washing any more, to your phone that could become waterproof, or just on stuff that you don’t want bacteria to get on. This spray will be released as a commercial product next year. Check out this video to see exactly how it works. Spray an even coating on leather or fabric. Several neutrla people have tested the technology and report great results.
A bottle of wastewater could be powering your house by next year By mimicking the essential process that allows plants to produce energy, an MIT researcher has managed to create electricity out of water more efficiently than conventional solar cells, to the point where one and a half bottles of wastewater could power an entire house for a day. Plants, being extremely clever, somehow manage to use sunlight to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen. They combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to make sugar (which is what I would do, 'cause sugar is good stuff), but we humans have been trying to figure out for about a century how to skip the sugar step and just recombine that oxygen and hydrogen back into water to generate electricity. Daniel Nocera, a chemistry and engineering researcher at MIT, has come up with an artificial "leaf" that uses cobalt and phosphate to split water molecules using nothing but sunlight. Nocera has just teamed up with Tata Group to work towards commercializing this technology. Live Mint, via Fast Company
Italian Mathematician (Maybe, but Probably Not Really) Explains Away Dark Matter With Math An interesting piece in Universe Today over the weekend takes the dark matter out of the hunt for dark matter, but you're probably going to want to approach this one carefully--or as Universe Today says, "put on your skeptical goggles and set them to maximum." An Italian mathematician has done some creative number crunching and accounted for the force that holds galaxies together without the need for dark matter. It's a bold claim to make--and one that's going to get a good going-over from physicists. A quick dark matter primer, for those who might be rusty: basically, if one is to simply tally up the amount of mass in spiral galaxies like our own and then model their rotation, we get a very different picture than the one we can empirically observe. So, by deductive reasoning, modern physics has concluded that the rest of the mass holding galaxies together is invisible--it's dark matter. But the thing is, his math fits the models almost perfectly. [Universe Today]
New efficiency record advances spray-on solar cells Advancing solar technology is a trade-off between the efficiency of the cells themselves and the cost of producing and installing them. Quantum dot solar cells, which use nanoscale semiconductors to produce electricity, promise low-cost production and, because they can be sprayed or painted on, big benefits in terms of installation. In the efficiency stakes quantum cells don't score as well as silicon-based or CIGS solar cells, but a new efficiency record for colloidal quantum dot solar cells represents a big step towards narrowing the gap. Colloidal quantum dot solar cells To make quantum dot solar cells that can be sprayed or painted on, the tiny nanoscale semiconductors need to be dispersed evenly within another substance - this is known as a colloid. "We wrapped a single layer of atoms around each particle," explains Dr. New efficiency record The result is a colloidal quantum dot solar cell with a record efficiency of 6 percent.
Old Red Goes Green: Recycled Wall Brick Built to Save Water | Designs &... It might look like your typical old red clay house-building brick on one side, but turn it over and there is a shift that hints at a deeper design change – one that is eco-friendly but also expressive in a way that most walls or brick are not. Designed by Jin-young Yoon to be made from recycled plastic and decomposed leaves, this brick is green from the ground up (so to speak). More than just its composite materials, however, built-in grooves are designed to funnel water for gardening or even long-term underground storage. In a world where water is becoming the next hot-button resource destined to become scarce, it seems like a good time to start thinking about our most basic building materials and structures (such as bricks and walls) and see how they might shift to accommodate an ever-growing need for homes to have access to nature’s most vital resource.