Science Round up…
I’m going to try to round up some Science listening or watching each week- Science Friday: Self-Replicating Robots / Science of Sexual Abuse & Stem Cell Spinal Cord Treatment / Science and Technology in the UK. The power chat with Sir David King was really great, you can conserve resources and grow economies it seems. Subscribe to the Podcast here. Eyes of Nye has Addiction and Antibiotics as the two episodes that came over my TV recorder. It would be great to get a non-Flash version of the eyesofnye site, RSS feeds and an easy way to link to the content on the site- there’s great stuff hidden in there. Link.
Might be neat to add this to an actual car PC…This custom mod gives your computer the personality of KITT, the computerized car from Knight Rider TV fame. It slides into a CD drive bay, and only has a single standard power connector. The project is a light display which imitates the dot in KITT’s hood. It looks like the scanning eye of the car’s computer that is so smart it has a personality and acts autonomously. Some people have said the computer shows more emotion and personality than the main actor, David Hasselhoff. 
MSNBC’s Gary Krakow got the DIY bug and made some holograms using the Litholo hologram kit. The article explains what holograms are, how they’re made and special “instant hologram film” used to make the home versions. Usually holograms require that there be no motion at all, but the home kit from Litholo gets around that and from what the article says, produces great results! 
I’m hoping a Maker out there might consider check this out (and take pictures)- this site offers a GUI, console and source versions of a tool to change the graphics in the navigation system in Acura/Hondas. The trick seems to be to know the special codes to display the BIN files in your nav system, pop out the DVD, make a new one, mod the files and then hit some codes to have the car take the new graphics. This also seems to open up a lot of other hacks and mods if you can change other things. 
One is a mechanical genius, the other is a platform game hacker. They decided to join forces and turn a racked car into a simulation. They connected the car’s pedals, steering, gearshaft, to the game platform. It’s on hydraulics to turn the car in curves, there’s a fan to increase the wind when the speed is going up, and they install a small engine to make the sounds. Even the gauges work! 
Very cool in car PC project- Aydiosmio writes “So, for the longest time, putting a PC in the place I spend about 2 hours every day has been a goal of mine. I finally got up the gusto to do it. My 01′ Malibu presents, the Car PC…” The project uses Media Engine on the touch screen that can control audio, video, DVD, FM, XM, and GPS (via Destinator). Nice work! 