flickering pictures

* = may not actually happen If someone told you that IBM and the U.S. government were building the world’s most powerful supercomputer — one that could perform a staggering 20 quadrillion calculations per second — what would you think its purpose was? If you guessed curing cancer, studying climate change or running Vista smoothly [...]

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A company called BioArts International has started selling clones of long-lost pets under the slogan “What if you could be best friends again?”, and wants your beloved Mr. Tinkles to be next. From the press release: BioArts International announced today that they have delivered the world’s first commercially cloned dog, a 10-week old Labrador named [...]

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This portable laser-generated bike lane is the neatest simple idea I’ve seen in a while. But is it for real, and is it for sale? From Yanko Design: Only a small fraction of streets have dedicated bike lanes, and with an installation cost of $5,000 – $50,000 per mile, we shouldn’t expect to find them [...]

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Researchers at McGill University in Montreal are hoping that mutant roundworms will help the West win its epic struggle with obesity. Led by researchers Patrick Narbonne and Richard Roy, the team discovered a genetic mutation that makes some C. elegans worms burn off fat extremely quickly, and are hoping to apply their new knowledge to [...]

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Strange Maps, a delightful little site that has quickly become one of my favourites, tells the story of the “Routefinder,” a dapper-looking set of wrist-mounted scrolls that provided step-by-step directions for British intercity travel in the roaring 20′s: The technology – a curious cross between the space age and the stone age – consisted of [...]

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The Los Angeles Times reports that peeling a strip of Scotch tape off the roll in a vacuum chamber releases enough energy to x-ray your finger. The process is called triboluminescence and apparently creates visible light, too — something you can try at home — though you likely haven’t noticed unless you’ve been taping things [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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About a million North Koreans died of starvation in the late 1990s, and the World Food Programme says 6 million more are on the brink. But just as the world is starting to think that Kim Jong-Il doesn’t care about his starving people, he comes up with new super-noodles designed to fight hunger. From the [...]

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