WebUrbanist has an interesting gallery of time capsules old and new. The prize for most ambitious “expiration date” goes to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway–WU claims barley seed samples interred there may remain viable for as long as 20,000 years. For time capsule enthusiasts, the germane Wikimedia Commons Category also makes for interesting browsing. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
MIT Student Develops $3 Cutting-Edge Healing Device, Field Tested in Haiti @ Fast Company… No one really knows why, but for an open wound, simply applying suction dramatically speeds healing times. (The theory is that the negative pressure draws bacteria out, and encourages circulation.) But for almost everyone, that treatment is out of reach–simply because […]
Unlike the assorted electroluminescent liquor bottle labels I blogged about last year, it looks like you can, depending on where you live and your age, actually go out and buy one of these “message” bottles of Medea vodka that incorporates a scrolling LED marquee that will hold up to 6 user-programmed messages of 255 characters each. Great for attracting your kid’s attention to the liquor cabinet. Also make a thoughtful gift for the recovering alcoholic in your life, as you can program it to display some affirmations right there on the bottle.
In this video, Tan Le, president of Emotiv Systems, demos the company’s computer-controller that uses brainwaves, thoughts, to direct actions on a computer. Her test subject is renowned AI researcher Marvin Minsky. The real action starts at 10:35, and I have to admit, it was pretty thrilling to see Marvin rotate that cube with his […]
Mobile Manufacturing Unit — This corporate factory tours the country, setting up in cities for a few months at a time. As the population welcomes a new source of goods, jobs and manufacturing techniques, it is celebrated as an event. Self Replicating Street Stall — The street Genie can print any product you might think […]
“How does the product use our time?”… CastOven is a future microwave oven, which plays a You Tube movie clip to fit into your cooking time. Watching movies, playing video games, and browsing web pages are fun, but all of them require certain amount of time of us to spare. For example, one would hesitate […]
A study by Noah Fierer and co-workers at the University of Colorado at Boulder suggests that the mix of bacterial flora each of us leaves behind on, say, our computer keyboard or mouse, may be sufficiently unique to identify us:
“Each one of us leaves a unique trail of bugs behind as we travel through our daily lives,” said Fierer, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. “While this project is still in it’s preliminary stages, we think the technique could eventually become a valuable new item in the toolbox of forensic scientists.”
The study was published March 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors on the PNAS study included Christian Lauber and Nick Zhou of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, Daniel McDonald of CU-Boulder’s department of chemistry and biochemistry, Stanford University Postdoctoral Researcher Elizabeth Costello and CU-Boulder chemistry and biochemistry Assistant Professor Rob Knight.
Using powerful gene-sequencing techniques, the team swabbed bacterial DNA from individual keys on three personal computers and matched them up to bacteria on the fingertips of keyboard owners, comparing the results to swabs taken from other keyboards never touched by the subjects. The bacterial DNA from the keys matched much more closely to bacteria of keyboard owners than to bacterial samples taken from random fingertips and from other keyboards, Fierer said.
Here’s the abstract for Fierer’s paper at PNAS.
