Scientists at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry imaged the growth of protein-studded mineral surfaces with unprecedented resolution and provided a glimpse into how living systems engineer key structural materials.
New funding for UALbany’s nanofabrication and measurement projects
U.S. Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand announced that both houses of Congress have passed the FY 2010 Omnibus Appropriations bill which includes $500,000 for the University at Albany's College of Nanoscience and Engineering.
European researchers provide minimal cell blueprint
A German-Spanish team of researchers has successfully provided the first comprehensive image of a minimal cell that triggers atypical pneumonia, Mycoplasma pneumoniae.
Singapore-French nanotechnology laboratory opens in Singapore
Just two months after the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) signed the Memorandum of Understanding in Paris with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Thales Group of Companies to set up a joint research laboratory, the three parties are meeting again in Singapore to inaugurate the CNRS-International-NTU-Thales Research Alliance (CINTRA) Laboratory at NTU.
National Institute of Standards and Technology invests up to $71 million in new manufacturing, infrastructure research and development
The new projects will include developing unmanned, hovering aircraft for bridge inspections, a high-speed sorting system for recycling aerospace metals, and nanomaterials for advanced batteries, among other projects.
Blade Runner Estate Upset Over the Google Nexus One’s Name [Cellphones]
Google's Nexus One has been interpreted by some press as a title inspired by the Nexus series of androids in the Blade Runner movie. Creator Philip K. Dick's daughter, Isa, says, "We were never consulted, no requests were made, and we didn't grant any sort of permissions." She is consulting her legal counsel over the matter. [NYT]
Canon DSLR Suffers 3,000-Foot Fall, Camera and Lens Still Work [Cameras]
A photographer strapped a Canon Rebel XT to his helmet while skydiving, but instead of capturing some great airborne shots, it fell off his helmet and plummeted 3,000 feet to the ground. Unbelievably, it survived.
According to a friend of the photographer:
Amazingly, the Rebel survived the fall and my friend is still using it to this very day. It has a crack in the plastic body and the kit lens is a little jerky when zooming, but functional. I'd like to know if there is a similar story or something close to this but I doubt. It might be a world record indeed (for the height of a camera drop which survived).
Photos show that the camera is remarkably intact—the viewfinder is still functional, both the camera body and lens are pretty much fine. Not that we recommend you heave your DSLR out of a low-flying plane, but it's nice to know that if you do, there's a chance it'll be just fine. [FredMiranda via Canon Rumors via Crunchgear]
The Original Chitty Bang Bang
Inspired by our mention of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang last month, our pal Gene Herman went through his collection of automobilia and scanned for us a 1967 Profile Publications article detailing the history of Count Louis Vorow Zborowski and the three aero-engined cars he built in the early 1920s
Is Your Pet Obese?
An ant can carry ten times its body weight, but have you ever seen an overweight ant? Just because an animal is strong does not mean its body can carry excess body weight. Just like humans, some animals – especially pets, are becoming increasingly overweight.
Before
Which Would You Do: Unfriend or Defriend?
The New Oxford American Dictionary just announced its 2009 Word of the Year as being 'unfriend.' This word beat many other words taken from technology, politics, the environment, and other categories and confirms social networking as a cultural force worth acknowledging. Unfriend has been found
Water water everywhere | Cosmic Variance
Northern New Mexico is an absolutely fabulous place to live. But, on occasion, I wish I had a teleporter handy. One of those occasions would be when the “Swell of the Century” hits the Hawaiian Islands, as it did last week. It turned out to be more like the “Swell of the Decade”, but apparently was nonetheless quite spectacular. Spectacular enough to hold the Eddie, a big-wave contest that can only be held in epic conditions.
There’s some good video here and here. Conditions were apparently squirrely, so most of the footage consists of fairly spectacular drops leading to gnarly wipeouts. Every now and then someone (often Kelly Slater [at left above]) emerges intact. Unless you’ve been out in overhead+ surf, I think it’s hard to fathom just how powerful these waves can be. You’ve bodysurfed three footers, and you think you have a clue. But you don’t. For a little perspective, here’s an excellent video from a (professional) surfer who wiped out at Jaws (on the north shore of Maui; it only fires on big days [like last week]). He survived (more-or-less).
While Hawaii was being slammed by water horizontally, we got a vertical contribution (in the form of a couple of feet of snow). It’s time to go dust off my snowboard.
Beautiful Lego in Hoth Photos Have Me in Total Awe [Lego]
These are not the biggerest of Lego spaceships nor an impossible balancing act. It's just Lego Star Wars perfectly photographed using a very clever, and deceitfully simple technique. This is how the expert Finnish photographer Avanaut did it:
In his own words:
There's been some questions about how I do the snowshots. I've given some verbal information about the technique, but I guess, a photograph about my setup is needed. So, I made the photos above and below (in the gallery) just for the occasion.
The setup is simple really: All I use is an old transparent CD storage box, some water and my trusty old A4 lightbox for lighting. For the bottom of the box I have a piece of gray Lego baseplate cut in form and hotglued on a piece of acrylic sheet to give it some weight. Legos float because of all the air trapped inside individual pieces.
Anything I want to shoot is then easily mounted on the baseplate and inserted inside the CD box.
Photographing "snow" in this scale is difficult, and to amp up the challenge I wanted it to fly around. The answer was not to use faster shutterspeed but to slow the snow down.
I had a wacky idea to submerge everything in water, it slows down everything that moves. The water also causes light to reflect from solid surfaces in a way that sometimes helps hiding the miniature scale. This is an old concept I've been toying with for ages. For the snow I use ground plaster of Paris—reacted, not unused gypsum powder! It is a passive material that doesn't stick to anything.
Lighting is done with the lightbox freehand as you can see from the photo below.
I shoot a lot of frames because the "snow" is impossible to control exactly. And then some Photoshopping is in order, but not always, sometimes none is needed.
Simply amazing. Check the rest of his awesome work in his Flickr page. [Avanaut in Flickr and Lego on Hoth]
Official Bing App Hits the iPhone [Bing]
Microsoft's search engine Bing, despite its similarities to Arby's, is pretty great—and now it's come to the App Store to invade iPhones and iPods Touch.
The app features some of the hallmarks of Bing, like the endless image search, image of the day and voice control. Some key features:
* Daily image from Bing.com
* Easy to access voice search
* Tips and tricks on the home page
* "Locate Me" functionality
* Ability to add pushpins and save locations
* Show multiple locations on a single map
This app joins similar apps already available for WinMo, BlackBerry and Sidekick (though not Android: Wonder why!) and is available now, for free, here (link opens iTunes). [Bing]
Borders and Kobo Team Up to Develop a New Reader [Readers]
Borders is teaming up with a company called Kobo and making some grand plans. They apparently intend on developing a new ebook reader, a new ebook service, and having all the content be "device neutral." Pretty big task there, fallas.
The Kobo service is already live and will apparently allow downloading of "content to the most popular smartphones, including the Apple iPhone, Research in Motion BlackBerry, Palm Pre and Google Android devices."
Everything sounds quite lovely, right down to the point of Borders and Kobo wanting to make everything an open platform, but I'm just curious to see what sort of device the partnership will produce and when we'll actually see it on the market. [NY Times]
MSFC Procurement Doesn’t Understand what "Open Source" Means
NASA Solicitation: Open Source Software to Support Projects at MSFC
"Arcata Associates Inc. plans to issue a Sole Source Request for Quote (RFQ) for Open Source Software to be used at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC)."
Huge Steel Pipes Being Turned Into Offices [Architecture]
When it was time to design new offices for a steel pipe factory, a clever guy decided to use the factory's product as a major part of the new additions. Puns about pipe dream designs aside, it looks pretty good.
Designed by Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects for T. Bailey, these offices will integrate giant steel pipes, the type used for wind turbines. The pipes aren't just for looks though, because they'll also serve to control how air flows through the building, reducing cooling costs in the process.
I rather like this design and its post-Apocalyptic-looking mock ups, because it'll fit perfectly with the industrial surroundings of the factory. Let's just hope it really gets built. [Deezeen]
Unbelievable Hubble Shot Captures the Biggest "Star Nursery" Nearby [Space]
This absolutely gorgeous shot is the most detailed ever taken of what HubbleSite describes as the "largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood." Get ready to pick your jaw up off your lap.
In the words of experts who understand more about this stuff than "OMG so pretty!":
The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus. Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are over 100 times more massive than our Sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years.
This shot (full, massive size can be found here) were taken between October 20th and 27th of this year by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The blue lights are from the hottest, biggest stars, while the green is oxygen and the red is hydrogen. Whoa, you guys. Whoa. Check out this thread on Reddit for some desktop-wallpaper-scaled versions of the shot. [HubbleSite]
Google Street View Captures Guy Getting Ready To Do Something Disgusting on a DC Street [Google Street View]
It's hard to tell exactly what this guy is about to do, but he appears to be squatting (more or less) with his pants around his ankles on a DC street.
View 519 H St NE in a larger map
Maybe he is about to take a dump, maybe his lady's husband arrived home early and he escaped out a window. Who knows—but the whole thing strikes me as kind of sad. Either way, the other pedestrians don't seem to notice what's going on. Not Google though—you can bet they are all over it. [DCist Thanks Avi!]
First Video of the Google Nexus One [Nexus One]
So this is a pretty short and inexpertly framed video, but it is the very first one we've seen of the Nexus One in action. If you want to see that flashy Android 2.1 boot sequence, read on.
You can also see the packaging here, but it could just be the packaging meant for developers—Google's done that in the past—and not the final design. Apparently the guys that took this video are going to take more, so we'll update when they do. [The Nexus One via Engadget]
Bolden Meets With Obama on Wednesday
Keith's note: Charles Bolden is scheduled to meet with President Obama at the White House in the oval office on Wednesday at 3:05 pm EST. The topic for discussion is the Augustine Commission's findings and their "non-recommendation recommendations".
The fact that White House is doing this before the holidays all but assures that the details will be out in the next week or so - one way or another.
So ... what do you think the President will decide?
