Fly tricks: Early science films
Source: New Scientist Vocabulary “(Percy Smith) made a gimcrack device made up of a see-saw and two old tin cans. The tin cans slowly filled up with water, and when it would reach the bottom, clunk! it fired the shutter of the camera. And using this extraordinary home-made piece of aparatus, Percy Smith made the […]
Goodbye to “one best way” solutions
Marvin Minsky of the MIT Media Lab and MIT AI Lab has a very pragmatic approach to robotic engineering and artificial intelligence based on systematic redundancy. “I’ve never seen any mechanical device that actually shows any thought about reliability,” he says (4:40) and goes on to explain his approach (from 4:45): “My theory is that […]
The switch
Hey, cool: What’s this? What does it do? What can you do with it? How does it work? What are its mechanical or physical properties? Created by Vancouver Film School student Zack Mathew through the VFS Digital Character Animation program. For a short interview with Zack, visit The man behind the switch Recommended by ebd35 […]
To make a beeline for something
When you’re going straight and fast towards a goal you make a beeline for it. And do bees make beelines, too? They sure do. This is no mean feat, but it’s vitally important, because like the geese they’re on a knife-edge energy budget. The straighter their beelines, the less energy they expend. Get a buzz […]
10 things you didn’t know about…
Mary Roach takes the cake with her TED presentation on “10 things you didn’t know about orgasm”. Did you know that paraplegics can have orgasms by stimulating parts of their body not typically connected with sexuality, just above their sense-deprived bodyparts? That embryos masturbate? Or that there is a woman who can have an orgasm […]
The language of bacteria
Yesterday at Morphosys we had an interesting discussion based on the TEDTalk by Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria “talk” to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks by recognizing “self” and “other”. I asked the course how she “hooks” her listeners, and they said one of her main […]
Jill Tarter: A young science in an old universe
Writing something on astronomy for Spotlight (dort Englischlernen). Ever since, as a child, I sat gazing at the August night sky on Drummond Island with those “10 to the 22” (=10 hoch 22) stars above me, I’ve always loved them. Isn’t it marvellous to think that what you see up there is history, fossilized astronomy, […]
