Festo CyberKite
Windmil of the future? The latest advancement in kite fighting? Kitesurfing robots? The Festo CyberKite deftly controls the graceful movements of a rather large kite with relative ease.
Biology
Biohacked bacteria possibly useful for landmine detection
Neat idea from students at the University of Edinburgh, who claim to have used Tom Knight’s BioBricks technology to produce a strain of bacteria that are bioluminescent in the presence of explosives or explosives residue. The notion is that liquid cultures of the bugs could be sprayed onto the ground in mined areas and would glow green wherever mines were to be found. I can think of lots of reasons why this might not work as well as one might hope, however, and because no technical details seem to be available, nor any peer-reviewed data, the news should probably be taken with a grain of salt. If anybody has any more info, please link us in the comments. [via Boing Boing]
The Bloop of Cthulhu?
This may be one of those situations where my love of a good story gets me in trouble with the more hard-minded scientific types among you, so please understand first that this is intended mostly in fun. Nonetheless, there are some intriguing facts here.
An Open-Source Approach To Better Prosthetics
An Open-Source Approach To Better Prosthetics @ NPR via Chr1s. Before Jonathan Kuniholm had a tour of duty in Iraq, he worked for Tackle Design, an industrial design, research and development firm. After that tour, he was missing part of his right arm — which he lost when his Marine patrol was ambushed near Haditha. […]
Compact cellphone microscope
This novel approach to cellphone microscopy from Dr. Aydogan Ozcan from the University of California, Los Angeles, foregoes bulky lenses and magnifies electronically.
The long zoom of cells
Still trying to get a grip on the relative size of say, an X chromosome and a ribosome? Then you might want to check out Cell Size and Scale, a neat visualizer of the scale of things from a coffee bean to a carbon atom made by the University of Utah.
Bacterial typography
Dutch designer Jelte Van Abbema recently won the €10,000 Rado Prize for promising young designers.