flickering pictures

Information Week reports:

Despite her lifelike appearance and 32-23-33, anatomically correct measurements, Trung insists Aiko is not a sex doll. “I’m attached to it, but do I sleep with it? No.”

You heard it here first, folks.
Creepiness aside, Aiko can read, do math and recognize people, and responds to touch and voice commands. She can also […]

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Knowing that this story combines three of my favourite things — beer, Eastern philosophy and neat-o whatnot — a buddy of mine sent me some info about this most postworthy endeavour.

Lloyd Alter at Treehugger reports:

Fifty years ago the Heineken Beer company looked at reshaping its beer bottle to be useful as a building block. It […]

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Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius.
And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore.
From the Times of India:

The […]

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Space elevator: a proposed megastructure designed to transport material from a celestial body’s surface into space as a way of non-rocket spacelaunch.
Picture a super-strong ribbon thinner than a sheet of paper, one metre wide and long enough to wrap two and a half times around the world. Now picture it extending into space, the […]

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I love this sort of thing.
From Damn Interesting:

In 1891, Nikola Tesla gave a lecture for the members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York City, where he made a striking demonstration. In each hand he held a gas discharge tube, an early version of the modern fluorescent bulb. The tubes were not […]

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Researchers at UC Berkeley have diverted light around three-dimensional objects in a way that gives the impression they aren’t there — a lot like a Star Trek-style cloaking device, and that guy on the right.
Science is cool.
From the Guardian:

Researchers funded by the Pentagon have managed to make material that has the potential to bend light […]

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For the last little while, vacation time, jet lag and three weeks worth of e-mail/voice mail have joined their sinister forces to create a great sucking whirlpool of unproductiveness and exhaustion — one that pulled my desire to post down to the deepest darkest abysses of the undersea. As of today, I’ve returned home, […]

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Sorry for the spotty posing lately — it’s been a crazy busy time work-wise, but for some reason I just can’t stop grinning. I must like my job or something.
Now that you’re paying $60 to gas up your Civic, I thought you might like to know where a good chunk of your gas money […]

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Ever been in the awkward situation of bumping into an old acquaintance, only to realize that you’ve completely forgotten his or her name? Their name is on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t produce it for the life of you. The Boston Globe explains why:

[…] For the last several decades, scientists […]

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Well, sort of. From the International Herald Tribune:

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The report, released online […]

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