How To Build An Orrery

An Orrery is a mechanical scale model of the solar system, where the positions of the planets are accurately portrayed over time.

As you can imagine, creating one is no trivial matter, so I think this guy is pretty damned clever!

Thanks to Project.ioni.st for the link.

Don't Try This At Home

A fairly amazing experiment involving a beer bottle, a blow torch and a microwave oven!

Thanks to Gizmodo for the link.

Double Vision

I saw a lot of this kind of thing when I did first year Psychology a couple of years ago, but it still amazes me.

Peter Agre

I just finished listening to The Science Show from two weekends ago.

It was a talk given by Peter Agre, a nobel laureate in Chemistry, who won the prize jointly with Rodderick MacKinnon in 2003.

His wonderful lecture is entitled "My Life in Science".

Definitely worth a listen, if only to hear him butcher Tom Lehrer's song about the Periodic Table :-).

For those who've not heard it before, here's the original, along with a nice little animation.



Keep an eye out for Silicon, at about 59 seconds in :-).

It's Official ... Sex Is Redundant

According to an article on This Is London, British scientists have come up with a mechanism for turning female bone marrow into sperm cells, via stem cell technology.

They say the same approach could be modified to create eggs from male bone marrow.

So, sometime in the future, there may be no need for the opposite sexes to get involved in all that hot, messy stuff :-).

One has to wonder, though, what bizarre physical and mental attributes the offspring of two men or two women would have.

There's the even weirder possibility of a particularly narcissistic person "mating" with themself ... the ultimate incest :-). Ick!

Thanks to Spluch.

Who'll Stop The Rain?

In this case, it won't be Creedence Clearwater Revival :-).

According to this article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's news site, a group of Chinese weather experts are running experiments aimed at reducing rainfall.

Apparently, they've previously had success with mild precipitation, but one has to wonder whether there's even the slightest chance that they have the capability to stop a serious downpour.

Germs!

This is a wonderful parody of the kind of health films they used to play in schools a few decades ago.

It appears to be a combination of actual footage from a number of them, but with a voice over that, while being in the same style, is just a little different to what you'd expect :-).

Thanks to Neatorama for the link.

There's Hope For Me Yet

According to this article in the Times, there seems to be some connection, within the brain, between appetite and memory.

In an attempt to suppress a man's hunger, doctors inserted electrodes into his hypothalamus, which is implicated in appetite regulation. To their astonishment, this caused him to recall events from thirty years ago, in sharp detail.

So, it looks like there may one day be a single treatment that can sort out both my rotundity and my appalling memory, simultaneously. I live in hope!

Microscopic Magic

UADDit has a nice page of amazing micrographs ... images taken through a microscope.

This one is a lateral cut through a piece of skin. The detail is amazing.

Edward Tufte On The iPhone

Edward Tufte, the guy who wrote the book ... well, quite a few, actually ... on the visual representation of information, has a couple of words to say about the iPhone.

There's an associated video but it's quite a large QuickTime movie, which will start to download immediately, so I haven't embedded it here. While it's well worth a look, if you do follow that link, wait a while before pressing the play button.

The crux of his message is that Apple got it mostly right, using the high resolution 160dpi screen to good effect and not filling it with "administrative clutter".

However, he does think that the widgets could have made better use of the resolution, rather than using very large fonts to display relatively little information.

I think that's probably directly related to the fact that they are widgets, but that's no real excuse.

Mwawhahaha

Damn Interesting has an interesting article on psychopaths, entitled The Unburdened Mind.

Like Ted Bundy here, they basically don't have that little voice in their heads that we term a "conscience".

Herr Freud would call it the "superego".

Quite a fascinating article.

Murray Gell-Mann TED Talk

I just watched this talk given by Murray Gell-Mann about beauty in physics at one of the Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences.

Quite interesting and not overly technical.

Bugger Caffeine, I Want This Stuff!

According to this article over at Wired, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ... pardon the septic spelling) have come up with a nasal spray called Orexin A that allows one to remain awake for extended periods with none of the usual detrimental side effects.

While I don't sleep a huge amount as it is, I'm sure this stuff also helps maintain alertness, which would definitely be welcome during those long sessions of hacking code ... or watching entire seasons of QI in a single sitting :-).

Just In Time For Bah Humbug Day ...

... comes a two hour conversation between four of the world's most well known atheists.

Here you can find, in various formats, a fireside chat between Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.


Thanks to Meta Filter for the link.